Slashdot Mirror
Time Warner Cable: No Consumer Demand For Gigabit Internet
Freshly Exhumed writes "Chris Welch at The Verge tells us: 'Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference moments ago, Time Warner Cable's Chief Financial Officer Irene Esteves seemed dismissive of the impact Google Fiber is having on consumers. "We're in the business of delivering what consumers want, and to stay a little ahead of what we think they will want," she said when asked about the breakneck internet speeds delivered by Google's young Kansas City network. "We just don't see the need of delivering that to consumers."' The article goes on to quote her: '...residential customers have thus far shown little interest in TWC's top internet tiers. "A very small fraction of our customer base" ultimately choose those options.'"
The article goes on to quote her: '...residential customers have thus far shown little interest in TWC's top internet tiers. "A very small fraction of our customer base" ultimately choose those options.'"
Um, yeah - that's because it's waaaaaaaay overpriced.
If it was capped at 10GB per month, I wouldn't see a need either tbh. Thank Christ I live in a country where capping is unheard of. That's what actual free markets do for you.
"We just don't see the need of delivering that to consumers."
That is the core problem. Thanks to TWC for stating it so well.
When they price a service out of reach of the average consumer, of course few will take it. The same will be done if they ever offer ala carte TV. You will be given a "cable connection" for a base fee and then each channel will be a certain amount more. Of course, the way it will be priced, you will quickly top the bill for regular, bundled cable TV if you add even a handful of channels. Then, when few people take them up on this "deal", they will declare that there is no demand for it and kill the project.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Of course TWC customers don't need that much bandwidth. Right now the amount of bandwidth they'll give you is generally not enough to stream HD video reliably. This would be a problem for many people, but since their customers all subscribe to cable it clearly doesn't affect them. Streaming 1080p video to multiple devices simultaneously over the internet would kill their core business. Bias is expected.
Right - if your gigabit connection is capped at something like 30GB, then you could only back up a quarter of your TB HD every month, and provided your remote backup site has the bandwidth so that TWC's connection is the limiter, it should take you far less than an hour to do it. Why would you pay $100+ a month when you could get greater capacity AND higher average throughput from mailing TB HDDs through the USPS?
Hah, captcha was "clipped"!
Time Warner is doing a variation on it though. What the guy really said was:
"We offer high-bandwidth service in some markets, but people don't subscribe to it"
What he's not expanding on, is the reason why they don't subscribe. Is it because people don't want it, or is it because they've made is so damn expensive that people don't see value in it compared to the lower-bandwidth service?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
It's not that.
It's that if they offered gigabit Internet, then they'd have to upgrade all that other stuff to handle the bandwidth. That's why they put caps on, that's why they overcharge. It's because they can make tons of money now for the shareholders.
They're a US utility. They don't upgrade. They wait until it falls apart and then they replace as little as possible.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I've filed this next to -
"I think there is a world market for about five computers. ... No one else, he said, would ever need machines of their own, or would be able to afford to buy them" - Thomas Watson - IBM
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home." - Ken Olsen - Digital Equipment Corp
"640K ought to be enough for anybody" - Some guy...
Place nail here >+
Because they didn't build out thier physical plant for every household to subscribe to that level of service - they scaled their network for lower bandwidth.
And is being offered below the cost of providing the service (subsidised) - that is not a sustainable business model for a for-profit company.
Offering a service people want is a no-brainer, offering a service people want but are unwilling to pay for is a non-starter. Motorola learned this with their "Iridium" Satellite phone service...
Ken
Yes, but that's likely to always be true and meanwhile it's 10 years and you haven't done any meaningful upgrades. I'm not sure if it's still true, but as of when Qwest was bought by CenturyLink, there were parts of Seattle with 1.5mbps as the maximum connection speed and no plans to do anything about it. Even in my neighborhood the speeds had increased from 4mbps to a whopping 7mbps as the fastest option in a decade.
If you keep putting these things off, it just stifles innovation.
Alternate translation: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Cable Company."
I am officially gone from
I think it's more a matter of price:
TWC top tier cost - 50 Mbps @ $80/mo (introductory price!)
Google Fiber - 1 Gbps @ $70/mo
Now, which one would any reasonable person want?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Maybe if the prices were lower people would start streaming HD more from Netflix and Hulu instead of buying expensive cable packages!
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
Mod parents up. Gee, no one wants a ride in space either, if it costs the GDP of a small country.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
I don't think it's the capping that is the only issue, but rather the pricing. It's hard to justify 100+ bucks for top tier service. We used to pay 20-30 bucks for 5, 7, or 10 Mb. In my area, bumping the 'stock' 10Mbps to 18 is $60. Going higher than that gets exorbitant.
If there was competition, this would no doubt change, but they have a virtual monopoly around here.
Bullshit its because we have ZERO competition in a good chunk of the USA. If we had actual free markets, not this backdoor bribery, cherry picking duopoly horseshit we have now I have NO doubt that we'd have faster speeds and at competitive prices, but because they know they have most customers by the short hairs the money that would be spent on infrastructure goes to bonuses. After all what are you gonna do, go dialup? Go DSL which at least here in the south is several times WORSE (average 3-4Mbps in my area with lows as bad as 700Kbps) than the 8Mbps-20Mbps the average cableco offers?
My city has grown by over a third in the last decade and its a college town to boot...know how many new lines have been laid? ZERO. They know AT&T ain't gonna lay shit for new DSL around here so they just gouge their existing customers and keep the money. it really distorts the whole area because you can have two apt buildings side by side and one will be three times as much and have a waiting list while the other is never more than half full, why? Because you can get high speed at the first one, all you get across the street is the shitty local WISP.
The worst part is if a city gets tired of the bullshit and decides to lay their own lines they can look forward to spending the next decade in court, can't be having competition now can we? I've never been one of those "the free market can fix anything" types but what we have now is so far from a free market it ain't even funny so frankly anything that opened up the country to competition would be good in my book.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
agree, i want gigabit, but i am not willing to sell my kidneys for it. make it reasonable like google is, and i would snap it up....
You're wrong in all directions you go.
The demand for fast service is huge, and the US is a third world country because the telco model is to depreciate their asset investment as long as is possible, so as to maximize profits.
The US used to be a leader, and now, it's fallen mightily because it's all about shareholder return and buying off government regulation whilst monopolizing as much as possible.
Your "timing" BS is crack. 10G hardware is not the problem. Capital investment in a bought-off monopolistic era is the problem. The cure is to harrass the monopolists into acting like real capitalists.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I don't think it's the capping that is the only issue, but rather the pricing.
I don't think there is any real question here, it most definitely is the pricing. If you tacked a zero on the end of everyone's current speed and charged the same price, I strongly doubt most users would be bumping themselves down to a slower data plan.
Taxes aren't evil, they're civilization. Generousity is also a virtue, and often civilized, too. When generous people aren't available, taxes are necessary to keep civilization. Soon, you'll see the feedback loop.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
People see the name Kansas and they imagine some farm village with two traffic lights.
It's just their total ignorance and complete unwillingness to remedy that ignorance.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"but they have a virtual monopoly around here."
I envy you... where I live, in Los Angeles, they have an *actual* monopoly on high speed service.
Can I get Verizon here? No. (Not in a Verizon area.)
Can I get AT&T U-Verse service here? No. (Not available in my area.)
Can I get any other cable company service? No. (Local monopoly.)
It's TWC or nothing.
For the record I'm not "demanding" their top tiers because their pricing is ridiculous, not because I don't want it.