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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.
Well I just left Comcast... $50/month wasn't justifiable
You might just be on to something. Anyone see the WSJ article last week about digital cable having horrible churn rates? Apparently 300 stations (15 different HBO channels alone, starting the same movie 15 minutes apart!) isn't enough to justify the extra $15 or so.
We experienced the Cox digital TV story when it first came out. We immediately signed up - sounded great (I hate to confess, but the music stations sounded pretty cool, like the Techno station. We live in a large market with not a single techno station - but hey, a half-dozen country FM stations!)
By the time you had the digital TV converter box, high-speed Internet, telephone service, and the digital package (off the promo price), our bill was $220/month! Interestingly, if you do research on cable provider revenue requirements, $225 is sort of a milestone for them to get out of you each month. So we dropped the digital and went back to basic. Just never watched all those channels.
So per the $50/month cable Internet, isn't it interesting that they're tossing in 3Mbps while jacking up these rates. Sounds just like the digital TV game: we'll throw a ton of stations/bandwidth you can't use at you and charge you more.
And why not? With an overall cap, 3 Mbps really doesn't make much of a difference in http, smtp, etc. over 1 Mbps. Yes, the occasional FTP download will be speedy, but you're capped from grabbing Redhat ISOs and other large downloads frequently.
In all, it's not much of a bargin. Prediction: watch the churn grow while DSL and other rate-shaped services steal the service (with a lower tiered price).
*scoove*