Slashdot Mirror
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
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!
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'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
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