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.'"
That's my take on it as well. You can kill the demand for any product by pricing it high enough.
Most of these providers are run by folks with the old time telephone company mind set: if it's more than tip and ring, charge for it. The less it's like tip and ring, the more you charge for it. To them, that much bandwidth must be for business use, so charge'em business rates.
In the 90s, GTE was thinking about offering the ability to check your account and pay your bill online. They had the ability but were stumped about how much to charge the customer to do so. They were thinking about charging the customer $8.95 a month for the privilege of checking and paying for their account online. They finally dropped the idea as their studies showed no interest in accessing accounts online for that price. It never occurred to them to offer it as a benefit of being a GTE customer.
Most of those folks are still running the industry in that manner: everything not basic should be offered as a premier option.
You must be the change you wish to see in the world - Ghandi
As a Kansas Citian, I will say that that she is dead wrong. I already told AT&T that if they can't compete, they won't have me as a customer when Google comes to my area next year. What there isn't a market for is paying $400/month for less than gigabit speeds.
I recently (last year) filed a complaint (ref#12-C000422224-1) with the FCC about Google Fiber's "no server hosting allowed of any kind" terms of service. With those kinds of EVIL ToS, you just won't see the kind of innovation and utilization of gigabit fiber service that is possible and that would cause a great increase in demand. Somehow, even though I got the local vocal U.S. Navy Information Warefare Officer who posts here (Dave Shroeder) to publicly call my 53 page anti-google manifesto 'good' and agree with it's core network neutrality argument, I have been pretty much completely ignored by both Google and the FCC. Hell, there was even an AC leak from a google all hands meeting that said Google's CEO was "really annoyed with the no server hosting clause" and "repeatedly needled" the CFO about it, who said there was "no intent to enforce, except against crazy datacenter style abuse". Personally I think that's all bullshit part of a conspiracy to deny residental citizen's the ability to compete with google and other established player's servers and services... Finally a couple weeks ago on valentine's day, 2 days after pinging the FCC again, and 1 day after being pinged by another asshole google recruiter (williamwest@google.com), the FCC finally escalated my complaint. Time will tell...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3106555&cid=41288357
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3156485&cid=41530745
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3156485&cid=41516877
http://cloudsession.com/dawg/downloads/misc/kag-draft-2k121007.pdf
Well, I have 1,000Mbps in my area; the fastest internet service in the US. See this news article published in 2010 about EPBfi.
All 100,000 customers have EPB power (this is the local electric power company in Chattanooga, TN, USA). Because of EPB's electric smartgrid, they also provide fiber to 100% of their coverage area. This means that every home/business/apartment has access to Gbit Internet and TV/phone.
The slowest speed they currently offer is 50Mbps (for $57.99 per month), the fastest is 1000Mbps($299.99). I am on 100Mbps because it is only $12 more per month than 50Mbps.
Oh, and there are no max bandwidth/transfer caps. You can do 1000Mbps all day long...EPBfi has the upstream bandwidth.
I was on Comcast for 8 years. I telecommute most days; Comcast would go down for hours at a time for no apparent reason. When I would phone Comcast to report the outages, the customer service rep would say that they are upgrading the services in my area. The service person would say it as if that was the script on their screen as why the internet went down for 2 hours at 11am and again at 4pm. It got so bad over the course of a year, that I had to purchase a Sprint broadband card/account to continue to get work done as I came to just expect outages. I could not tell a client that I was having internet connectivity issues when I am doing remote-based network consulting.) ;)
After switching to EPBfi 2 years ago, I haven't had a SINGLE service-affecting outage. They appear to have built their Internet infrastructure as solidly as they build their power distribution network.
Feel free to read more here: https://epbfi.com/internet/
Oh, BTW, I don't own stock in EPB or work for them....I am a customer that likes to pay for internet that works reliably.
Here is a news article published in 2012 about Chattanooga's upgrade of all customers from 30Mbps to 50Mbps.
It is interesting how none of the big media giants want to provide the additional speed/reliability; I guess if you can feed your customers sewage and tell them it's honey...and the customers believe it, more money goes in your pocket.
Sig Return: 204 No Content