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Hidden Fees Discovered For "Free" Windows 7 Upgrade
An anonymous reader writes 'Thousands of recent computer purchasers who are expecting to receive free upgrades to Windows 7 when it is released on October 22 may be surprised to learn that some big computer makers are quietly tacking on hefty processing fees as high as $17 to mail out those disks to some buyers.' How about they process $0 to click a link and download a file?
I don't get in today's age of informed individuals how people still think digital distribution is "free". Maybe your personal site is dirt cheap, but larger companies that use a ton of bandwidth pay a fortune for that bandwidth and the management and guarantees that go along with it. I work for a small company that doesn't have a large website and we do nothing like digital dist, but our bandwidth still costs over $2m per year. I agree downloads vs sending disks would be cheaper, but saying it would be free is just plain ignorant.
I recently purchased an Acer laptop (hey, it was cheap and I'm just using it for surfing). Since I didn't choose overnight shipping, it was free. I may not get the DVD for a week or so. But, I'm not in a hurry either. I think this really depends on the shipping you choose and the manufacturer you buy from.
See here for costs on the current generation network:
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/2111-cbc-pricing-by-bt-wholesale-holding-back-uk-broadband.html
At absolute best (which no ISP ever manages to achieve), it costs them 52p per gigabyte of data, so around £1.56 to allow you to download Windows 7. Realistically, if you check somewhere like PlusNet their out of allowance charges are £1.74 per 2gb of data, so around £2.61 to download Windows 7 for an end user at retail.
Oh and er, a 1st class stamp in the UK costs only 36p, envelopes cost next to nothing in bulk, so around 40p so far, call it 50p once you've printed the labels and posted and that's ignoring Royal Mail's bulk discounts and such.
21cn costs are here, but this isn't rolled out to most of the UK:
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/2111-cbc-pricing-by-bt-wholesale-holding-back-uk-broadband.html
However, it's still well over the 36p price.
The reason you don't know the first thing about bandwidth costs is because you probably use consumer ADSL or similar and don't actually use that much bandwidth. If you do then you're likely being subsidised as that's how many ISPs work, low end users don't use anywhere near their bandwidth limits so are paying to subsidise other users.
Still, at the end of the day my point stands, it's much cheaper to just post the discs first class than it is to setup an infrastructure (which costs on top of the bandwidth costs) for downloading. The above of course is just the costs for the consumer also, chances are you'll have your own bandwidth charges on top at the server side. If you provide a download then, the consumer may be paying 3 to 5 times as much as if you post it and charge them for the stamp and envelope etc.
Really? I'm a student in Canada and I got my CD key for Windows 7 for $0 from the Microsoft Academic Alliance (MSAA).