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US Broadband ISPs Expect Price Cuts
prostoalex writes "US broadband providers are trying to avoid the price wars, but the cost of DSL and cable hookups is still headed down with major promotions from players like Comcast and Yahoo/SBC. Currently there are 22 million US subscribers, 2 million of which subscribed during the past three months. It looks like the prices for broadband Internet are headed towards $20-30/month range, although most operators prefer to lock you into a yearly contract or provide special price for the first several months only."
I get 1500/128 service from SBC now for $29/mo with no price increase later. It's only specced for 768 down, but apparently they simply let the modem connect at its highest speed. Futhermore, they gave us an ADSL modem/router with both ethernet and wireless (and power line) routing built in.
I would like higher upload, but that's where the kicker is. Most people don't need it, and they can sell hosting services (ie, sell the upload and download seperately - double your money)
I imagine that it'll continue to drop as equipment becomes standard and they don't need to keep buying new equipment. Startup costs for the infrastructure and advertising are what caused the initial high prices. Now that the infrastructure is in place, you'll see more advertising about lower prices and better deals.
-Adam
I have dial-up at home, and the reason is that I don't want to sign a 1 year contract. I want to connect to the net with linux, but cannot as I am using netzero.
I contacted them to find out if they will support linux soon and here is their response.
NetZero is involved in a partnership with ThinkNIC to offer a Linux version of the NetZero software on the ThinkNIC machine. Currently, we do not have a downloadable version available for Linux, but please check back on our Web site at http://www.netzero.com for updates.
If you lost your job today, don't despair. You may die tomorrow anyway.
a) Uninstall the obvious comcast crap b) run regedit, remove *ANYTHING* that says comcast c) run ad-aware. Of course even after removing all their crap, I still have the bloody Comcast logo for IE... AND they won't even give you a news server (despite having at least one on the west coast) they instead give you 1gig of traffic OUTSIDE their network for free.... strikes me as a bit dopey, esp for a company so huge, keep the traffic in the network (like cox does) and give us our newsgroups.
Same here, Time warner wants you to sign up for a package that includes 4 premiums like hbo, showtime, starz, etc. It costs around 120/mo with the Roadrunner service. Without the package the price is only 5 bucks a month less, no premium channels at all. This stuff is a total racket, TWC is profiting heavily. The In-Demand services are also very spotty, hard to get a movie started during peak hours. This should cost no more than 80 bucks a month maximum, for cable and internet. It is a total rip off, totally. I make sure to use all 45k/sec of my upstream traffic on a pretty constant basis so I can feel like I am getting my money's worth.
music lover since 1969
Competition from another cable company, if not Verizon, would be nice.
Competition in the telco/broadband industry would be nice no matter where it is. Even then, everything is not always rosey. For example, I have a choice between an overpriced cable company or Bell South ADSL. Bell South charges less, but you get less speed, crappy customer service, more outages, etc. Two choices and they are both overpriced for what I get? No, give me some real competition.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
Agreed. My cable modem through Comcast is up ~15%, just like the regular cable fees. If there was an alternative source (I just checked Verizon DSL, no dice), I'd consider switching to DirecTV/DSL, but for now they have me by the happy sacks.
Oh for pervasive wireless...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Ah, Optimum Online. I remember when my family got it, (5-10 years ago) - the price (30 if you had cable, I think) seemed high, but it stayed stable for a long time. Additional computers were discounted at $20, too. I came back from a year or two at University (3-5 years after first getting OOL), and found out it had shot up 10 bucks, despite their business massively increasing. A year later, it's up another 5 or 10. Not only that, but they took away the discount on extra computers. It went from $50 from two computers, to $50 for each. Last summer, we had 3 computers on which we wanted 'net access, so we had to shell out a major cash investment on a wireless hub and two wireless cards. Considering that it would have cost 300 dollars to have the extra 2 computers on for just the summer alone, it had to be done.
I don't get it - aren't monopolies/price fixing illegal?
GL
also, inspect the processes running via task manager. look each and every one of them up (some may not be removed by uninstall or be nicely called 'comcast.exe' after all, if it is spyware it sure won't be).
if they are dodgy 'end process', delete the file this process name correspondeds to (spyware often installs to the windows/system directory and gives itself serious sounding names). it is good to clean the registry but this is a nightmare, but check start up to make sure nothing scans and reinstalls on startup. once you have done these manual steps i recommend, as another poster did, to run an spy/adware uninstaller, but just to clean off the edges these manual steps have done.
failing that... backup all documents and settings and do a format/reinstall, it will take 3 hours if you have all the disks and 3 hours is not a lot if you care about it.
karma karma karma karma karma chameleon, you come and go, you come and go.
It's probably higher because the population density is higher and in particular the density of internet users is higher, thus lowering the cost per home to wire them up (less km of wire). It's interesting to note that there's more % internet users in the US though, so maybe the density is not the whole story.
South Korea
Area (sq km): 98,190
Population: 48,289,037 (July 2003 est.)
Internet Users: 25.6 million (2002)
[source]
USA
Area (sq km): 9,158,960
Population: 290,342,554 (July 2003 est.)
Internet Users: 165.75 million (2002)
[source]
Some math.
South Korea
% Internet Users: 53.0%
people per sq km: 491.79
Internet users per sq km: 261
USA
% Internet Users: 57.088%
people per sq km: 31.70
Internet users per sq km: 18.097
I also have business-class cable at my home... costs about 80$ per month (the install was a very-painful and unnecessary 250$). It's great... I get about 3mb down, and around 256kb up, so it's still asymmetric.
Still, the tech support is MUCH better than the residential service (not that I ever call... calling tech support is a sign of weakness), and you get priority for bandwidth on the node, etc.
I like it... reliable, fast, no upstream port filtering, and they don't care if you run servers. I'll never go back to residential service if I can help it.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
They beat on that tired, dead horse that "Cable-modem service can be as fast for downloads as several megabits per second, though the speed can suffer if several users in one neighborhood log on at once."
Um, nope. The cable providers make allowance for that. That's so worn out. ALL the DSL providers trot that dead horse out in every DSL v. Cable discussion.
I had SBC DSL and it was absolute SHIT, plus they screwed me everytime someone down in billing farted..
I dropped them and got RoadRunner.
They penalize me an extra $5 a month because I have internet only, I don't have cable-TV.
With the penalty and tax, I pay $54 a month for bad ass speed.
I can download the latest distro at the rate of about 25 minutes per 700mb ISO..
That's plenty fast for me. And all my neighbors are on RR too. No problem...
I will stick with RR, SBC can go to hell..
From what I hear, these days many so-called T1 connections in urban offices are SHDSL or HSDSL or wtfever it's called. Obviously choosy people can get precisely what they want, but this shit is cheaper, because of the lower hardware cost. Obviously there are numerous differences but most people are primarily interested in the throughput. And, it's a whole hell of a lot cheaper than any of the prior offerings.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The A in ADSL stands for asymmetric.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I'm an Australian who just moved from living in the USA to living in Seoul. In the US i was paying about $45 a month for RoadRunner. Performance was pretty good at around 3Mbps.
Here in Seoul I've got KT-ntopia which is a fiber-to-the-building 100BaseT-ethernet-to-your-apartment technology. I regularly get 30-50Mbps (yes, 3-5 megaBYTES a second). Unlimited use, and it costs me about $35 a month. Ntopia isn't available to older apartments, but there you can get VDSL (similar speed) or 5Mbps ADSL.
Population density definitely has something to do with it, but not everything. I can't think of any reason you couldn't offer the same service for the same price in a city like NYC. Similar population density and similar type of housing, and I'm sure most of the population nice and close enough to the exchange for VDSL to work.
" They're both overpriced for what you get? "
Absolutely.
There have been articles in the computer press lately discussing that in Japan 20Mb/s download is the norm for approximately $20-30 a month, and Korea features 26Mb/s for the same price.
We get 1.5 and we're supposed to be *grateful*?
Your comparison with T1's is faulty for a couple of reasons:
1) The cost of T1's is artifically high because of the way the local loop is priced. Its a huge profit center, and the phone company has always positioned it as a way to subsidize residential service.
2) T1's have SLA's. Your DSL or Cable line does not.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I tried to google appropriate keywords to find the article that was passed around at work a few years ago as a cautionary tale, but it eludes me. Anyone?
Mencken had it right. So glad that's old news.
My Comcast bill just came in, informing me that my rate has been increased by 33%, from $45 USD to $60. And they billed me for the increase retroactively to October. Thanks Comcast!
The enclosed letter said they had to "adjust" my rate to be able to provide me internet over my cable connection. Hmm, so what do I have right now?
I would switch to DSL now but all the offers are cheap for the first year only, then jumping to 50+ dollars a month, while I am locked in for 2 years. Locked in with half the outbound of my current Comcast connection (which is 256 now, the one thing Comcast actually changed/improved since this all was run by @Home 4 years ago).
WTF, this is NOT getting better. From my point of view, it is getting markedly worse. BTW, I am in the SF Bay area.
Dude, sorry, but you are way off.
Most T's sold do *not* have "dedicated" bandwidth. Two other models are more common; either you get a T line that doesn't have a guaranteed throughput, or you get one that does, but you get charged for your average transfer at a certain percentile.
Yes, you *can* get a dedicated bandwidth T, but few people do, outside of the service providers themselves.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
For two years I had SBC DSL and had no problem, everything was great, good speed, same ip for over a year solid then suddenly I started getting outages, every night, between 6-10pm.
I did everything I knew to fix the problem but it always came back, almost like clockwork at the same time and ended at roughly the same time every night. When things were working the speed and stability was as I'd come to expect, when it wasn't I was basically cut off. I even let my pc sit and ping a server (one of my work servers) while I was out for town for a weekend and it still happened, so I was convinced it wasn't anything I was doing.
Eventually I called SBC and they "fixed" the problem (their explanation "Your phone line has degraded.") by halving my UL/DL speeds from UL 1.5M to 750k etc.
Everything was fine, then a couple of months later, the problem is back. Same problem, same answer, cut my UL/DL in half again to 380k. At this point I start looking for alternative services, alas none are available, and other DSL providers were out they'd be using the same crap lines/equipment that was causing the problem...
Few more months, it's baaaaack...
Suddenly I'm playing $55/month for 128k down with insufferable packet loss (i.e. no meaningful online gaming) and no recourse. Eventually my local cable company finally wired my block and now I'm back to 1.5m so the story has a happy ending for me. Not so happy an ending for SBC as they were nailed in a class action for these very problems, slower than advertised speeds, frequent interruptions, barely functioning Usenet servers...
Read about it here.
As I'd already switched to another provider I was only due $20, but those who were still on SBC could get up to $100 in, get this, credit from SBC for DSL service! If you were so fed up with SBC that you wanted to cancel your service before the one year contract was up that $100 might go a long way toward your cancellation fee.
Given all this frustration I'll never recommend SBC to anyone.
Plus, their phone CSRs have a neverending litany of "We don't have supervisors", "I am the supervisor", or "There is no other tier of technical support available". Great tip to get to someone who knows what their doing in a tech phone tree: Lie just like they do. An (somewhat embelished) example:
CSR: "What version of Windows are you running?"
ME: "Three".
CSR: "Three?"
ME: Yeah, three.
CSR: There's no such thing as Windows 3.
ME: Yeah, there is, I'm looking at it. It's on an old 486 laptop. I've got Trumpet Winsock running and a PPOE client I wrote that used to work fine, but now just lets me connect and ping servers on my local subnet, but ever time I start up a web browser I get a password dialogue and no matter what I type it comes back with some Redback Aggregation Router configuration thingee about "Do I want to commit these changes and reset " or something like that.
CSR: Uh, let me put you on hold for a minute.
That's how you find the supervisor...
-dameron
In a word, No.
That's the one thing I hate about DSL. You *must* have a landline in order to get/use it. So in my case, I pay $25/month for a landline plus $30/month for SBC/Yahoo! DSL which works out to $55/month. At that price, you might as well stick to your cable since it's probably MUCH faster.
Well, 12 terabytes seems to be an upper bound per archive.org's FAQ:
How large is the Archive?
The Internet Archive Wayback Machine contains over 300 terabytes of data and is currently growing at a rate of 12 terabytes per month. This eclipses the amount of text contained in the world's largest libraries, including the Library of Congress. If you tried to place the entire contents of the archive onto floppy disks (we don't recommend this!) and laid them end to end, it would stretch from New York, past Los Angeles, and halfway to Hawaii.