Slashdot Mirror
Cable Companies Reject Tiered Pricing Model
The Lynxpro submits this Investor's Business Daily article carried on Yahoo!, writing "It details how the Cable Companies are resisting a pricing this competition with DSL providers by resisting tiered pricing models. The article highlights how Time Warner Cable and Comcast are both bringing access speeds back to 3Mbps without any price increases. What the article fails to mention is that is the very speed rate @Home offered before going into bankruptcy. The cable companies formerly partnered with @Home reduced access speeds when they resumed their own services in the wake of the @Home implosion." I wonder if (low-speed) Internet access will ever be just another basic-cable feature.
That's a pretty good idea.
Make basic cable come with a username/password and leave support at that. No tech support, no customer service, just a low speed (100k down, 30k up or something) thing for users of whatever cable service. If you want tech/CS/more speed, you'll pay the premium!
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Right when cable came to my neighborhood about 4 year ago, there wasn't an upstream cap (or a tv cable block, either:). No one else on my node had @home, so it was the de-facto way to send & receive files between my roommates computers (why we just didn't use the local network is beyond me).
Later on when I worked for @Home/AT&T Broadband, I almost got my access shut off because I'd uploaded 3 gigs of mp3s to my girlfriend's iMac. But since I worked there, they let it slide.
I think the fastest connection we ever observed installing those modems was 8mbps.
Cable modems can go 10Mb/sec upstream and downstream. The capping is artificial, but does reflect real concerns about bandwidth management on a large shared network - obviously they can't give everyone 10Mb up and down.
Actually, the rate for downstream is more in the general area of 54Mbps per television channel sacrificed for internettraffic. Unfortunately the upstream is more limited; the cable networks were designed to broadcast, and even when they did conceive interactivity, the amount of bandwidth (in terms of Mhz ranges) set aside for the return-channel was rather limited; and there's obviously a limit to how many times you can 'split up' a neighborhood in 'subnets' that have a separate head-end each.
The whole 'cable is shared bandwidth' is somewhat of a thing of the past given that pretty much every one is using (euro)DOCSIS these days, which actually does TDMA - but the availability of upstream bandwidth can still be a bottleneck.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Better would be to focus on the slowdown of American broadband. When it was first rolled out there were no caps whatsoever and it was generally allowed to run at the speed that the equipment could handle. So the average DSL user ran over 3mbit in some cases if they had good lines. Uncapped both directions.
Then came the abusers and greed of the communications companies and today you see the extreme chokehold on the broadband today. SBC's base package for DSL is 384/128k dn/up compared to Verizon's 768k-1.544M/128k and the cable companies provide service comparable to Verizon.
New trends are starting to take hold in some areas with Verizon Wireless rolling out EvDO 3G which can run upwards of 2.3M and Verizon Landline (Seperate companies) is testing 2M+ speeds in certain (Lucky) markets with future plans to turn up the dial on broadband.
While those trends are nice to see you still have many who still have dialup due to cost and some worse off areas still cannot get a better connection than 26600kbps!
Interestingly people have pointed out monopolies. There is basically 1 telepone company in South Korea. Korean Telecom and a handfull of offshots after other companies were allowed to spring up but I'd say 90% of that country is serviced by KT and TMK there is only one cable company there. So it's questionable if more competition really is the answer (Korea may regulate, the us de-regulates)
I'm not sure what goes on in Japan but I would suspect nearly the same situation there also but you'll have to understand both countries until very recently had complete conglomerates (Sp?) of many things from electronics to communications systems. Now there is free market competition but not in the manner of how the US Govt mandated AT&T split up those companies were just forced to allow competition to "try" to work their way into a established system. Which probably will work becuase the exec's of those companies realize given choice people will pick the better company that provides them value.