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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.'"
Just a play from the classic Apple playbook: Any feature that our competitor has that we don't is something customers don't want or need--until we do have it, and then it's awesome.
Actually, in all fairness, it's a play from pretty much everyone's playbook. I mean what do you expect him to say, "Well, the truth is we're jealous"?
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
BULL SHIT
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.
"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.
This is because you price it out of reach for your average customers and only those willing to pay your ridiculous fees for it purchase it....
I would absolutely pay for a Gig connection to my home if it had a sane price tag!
How about the price?
in rotterdam you can get 200 mbit for 30 euro's, 600 mbit for 37 euro's and 1Gbit for a few hundred euro's more...
I love to have 1Gbit, but I guess 600mbit is okay for now, well hell I would be happy if I could get 200 mbit at all...
It's just how much people are willing to pay for it. I think it still costs far too much....
They (currently) have a point. Slashdot crowd aside perhaps, most normal users don't actively need or use more download bandwidth than required for a few incoming video streams, say 10 megabits assuming 2 megabits or so per stream. Yes, there are bandwidth heavy consumer applications -- e.g. remote backup services. Most people currently don't use them, or stress their existing bandwidth for that matter...
Of course, if you build it the applicaitions will eventually come. NOBODY will ever need more than 512K of RAM. Right? Right?
If I had an option for GigaBit, I'd take it - but only if it was priced correctly and was free of onerous TOS. There is most certainly a demand for fast, free (as in speech) Internet connections - and a willingness to pay for them, but not $$stupid$$ amounts and not with a zillion strings attached.
I love how the cable cos were advertising things like "your speed is X which means you could download Y whole movies in Z time" but if you actually USE the bandwidth, they cap you... and maybe even send you sharing violation notices or whatever... and they tell you you can't "run any kind of server"
I pay several hundred dollars a month for a dedicated physical server at a commercial datacenter hosting a number of VPS instances for my web hosting needs... the right "business level" connectivity for my home might tempt me, but not with all the strings that local ISPs seem to have. (also, I don't have N+1 Power redundancy at home, so maybe it's not really such a good idea) /meh //but I want GigabitInternet ///just not enough to be willing to move for it
The Digital Sorceress
" The article goes on to quote her: '...residential customers have thus far shown little interest in TWC's top internet tiers"
Ya. Cause you charge too damn much for it. You priced it out of reach of most people. It's not that there isn't demand for it.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
There are two factors involved in a customer's decision. That which they get, and the price at which they get it. What's going on here is that most customers are not willing to shell out $50-$70 for Time Warner's top tiers, as the extra speed doesn't justify the cost over the lower tiers. On the surface, this would seem to back up Time Warner's assertion that customers don't want faster speeds for the most part. The analysis is missing one important factor, however: Time Warner has no real competition in most markets. As a result, they get to set the prices to dictate customer demand, not the other way around. To maximize their profit, Time Warner has chosen a price point at which most people will want to purchase the tier they're willing to provide minimizing the amount of investment in their infrastructure they would have to provide to support more people at higher tiers.
In a more competitive environment, other ISPs would compete by offering lower prices and faster tiers. Then we would see whether customers chose to pay less for the same speeds or get a faster internet for the same price.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
"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.'"
Translation: "We have a near monopoly and don't want to spend the money to do the upgrade because we don't have to"
I pay for 50Mb/s access and my ISP offers 100Mb/s. Why don't I pick 100Mb/s? Because it costs $200/month versus the $80/month I'm already paying. Huge diminishing returns. The expensive bit is running the cable to my house. After any arguments against offering the fastest possible speed for a reasonable price are pretty weak.
i don't see google committing the $100 or $140 BILLION its estimated to cost to roll out fiber nationwide
when google announces a plan to sell bonds at 7% or whatever the prevailing rate is to build out a nationwide gigabit or higher to the home network call me
because TWC is right. most people don't care to pay more $$$ for the higher speeds. i have time warner 20/1 service for $50 a month. i would like a faster upload but don't want to pay for it. FIOS is coming in a few months to where i like for $70 for 15/5 and i don't plan on switching
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 they're going to say this.
Invest millions or billions into infrastructure? Why would they want to do something like that when they can just sit back and milk profits on what they have now?
The thing is, there IS a call for this kind of connection. But not when:
A: They want to charge $200 for a 50 megabit connections as-is.
B: They're capping data either way.
C: They're forcing you to pay even MORE by bundling their TV and phone service in. Look at the prices for their bundles. Now try to find the prices for the stand-alone internet.
D: Their customer and technical service is, even at it's most kindly-description, shit-tastic.
With the kind of pricing scheme they have now, they'd want $500-600/month MINIMUM for gig service.
At that kind of price point, yeah. There's no demand. Nobody's stupid enough to pay that.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
...a huge thanks to Time Warner for blowing up JJ's Restaurant on the Plaza in down town Kansas City, KS. Fuck you ass holes! Next time make sure you don't pick shyster, low dollar contractors, with no digging permits that don't know what they are doing!
This is coming from a cable company. Their primary product is television. If ever there was an industry stuck in the dark ages it's television.
"We're in the business of delivering what consumers want..." - That is laughable to say the least. What they are really in the business of is extracting every last dime from consumers that they can get away with. Cable companies are in a semi-monopoly position and the service shows it. As better entertainment options continue to surface, cable cutting continues.
Google is the Steam Engine, Time Warner is the horse and buggy. TW is stubbornly clinging to yesterday's cash cow while Google continues to explore the future.
If I had the option of gigabit internet in my neighborhood I would jump on it in an instant. So would many other people I suspect.
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.
I had the option of upgrading to Time Warner's new top tier of 50Gbit download speed and passed. Of course, they wanted an additional $50/month for the upgrade, so roughly a total of $100/month for the service.
At that price it wasn't worth it. If the upgrade were more reasonably priced, I would consider it.
What does Google's 1 gbps service in KC cost? $70 / month? I'd pay that $70 and throw all cable executives' and their offspring to the wolves in about ... well, there I did it while you were reading.
I'm a residential and business customer of theirs. I have 10x1Mbps at my apartment for around $30/mo. At my business I have 7x0.75Mbps for $69/mo. A business 10x2Mbps is $270. That's why there's no demand for gigabit. It would be like $10,000/mo at their ridiculous prices and I really don't need it at my house.
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.
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"!
Given their current pricing model, they'd be happy to offer gigabit internet, but not at prices that consumers want to pay. They might offer it for $500 a month, for example, which would fit nicely in with their habit of charging suburban mom and dad $200 a month for internet, cable, two email addresses and a DVR.
All it takes however is one competitor to offer it for under $200 in a city that people recognize the name of, and they'll start changing their tune. Then it's both a proven business model and a threat.
Technically, there's nothing wrong with this. The goal of capitalism is to get paid as much as possible. I don't think this is an argument against capitalism, just that we should probably not have capitalism by itself, but instead rein it in with a cultural or social consensus that "do no evil" is more important than this quarter's earnings.
Who would want gigabit speeds when it just means you'll hit your bandwidth cap sooner; you'll get a six strikes warning; there's a lack of 1080p content to stream because the media companies that own the ISPs (or vice versa) will fight tooth and nail to hold onto old distribution means, etc etc.?
Yup, no point in amazing, fast internet.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
As a Comcast subscriber - and let me be neutral, currently, my cap is 'deactivated', though I don't know how long that will last - I am not interested in gigabit Internets so long as shit ISPs continue to offer transfer caps. Busting my cap one day into a month versus halfway through a month makes little difference to me; either way, I'm still skirting the laughable' terms' of service.
"Well we don't offer it, and no one buys it from us...so there's no demand." Obviously not a Chief Financial Officer that has ever had a course in marketing, because that about sounds like what she is saying.
Granted, they do sort of offer it. Under Business accounts which makes it more expensive than it really should be. And given the "Quality" of service they already don't deliver, I can't imagine why nobody is falling all over themselves to purchase a highly over-priced package.
Anybody can WANT Gig Internet. Lots of people likely WANT it. But there are too few areas where it is even available, not because nobody wants it but because it is not available.
Not surprised that TW isn't taking the plunge on this. In fact, I'm rather glad they're not. I can't imagine that they would do it any better than anything else they do.
Yes, Time Warner's top-tier 50Mbps is priced beyond the reach of most customers. At $100/month, it's a luxury.
But there's another issue. Right now, the biggest reason to get big bandwidth at home is to support multiple users with diverse interests. There are a lot of potential uses where the upstream bandwidth just isn't there to justify a fatter pipe. Netflix may have a content-delivery network to support higher speeds... but TWC hasn't signed on for it. For most people who work from home, their employer doesn't have enough bandwidth to make a bigger pipe useful. If your employer has only a 45Mbps connection shared by all business needs, you're going to saturate any remaining bandwidth with a 50Mbps connection at home; why would you need gigabit to work from home? In that scenario, 50Mbps is only useful so the kids can Netflix without crimping your VPN speeds... And to get the higher return-path speeds that come with it.
Netflix and its rivals don't come close to using 50Mbps bandwidth per stream. They usually stream closer to 3Mbps. If they offered hire quality streams, or if there was a lot of 4K-resolution content out there, there'd be more demand.
The uses for ultra wideband bandwidth will come, but they're not here yet for most people... And especially not at those prices.
Why pay their outrageous top-tier prices for it?
DNS servers disappear (1 IP address apart, so no real redundancy when we get one of the frequent outages); commonly cannot connect to regular addresses (like /.); poor security on POP and SMTP; ...
; generated by /sbin/dhclient-script
search socal.rr.com
nameserver 209.18.47.61
nameserver 209.18.47.62
Maybe if they offered a decent product, and cut back on the excessive cost of cable and Internet, I'd be more likely to get a faster service.
These idiots charge outrageous prices then are surprised when few folks select those plans?
It is almost like they want to slow down progress of residential broadband speeds to save themselves upgrade costs. That can't possibly be it can it?
This is almost a slap in the face to the consumer. If Time Warner is anything like Charter Cable - it's no wonder people don't pay for the highest tier..... $200 installation/activation fee then $130/mo for 100mbps down. On top of that, in the last few months months the only other tier 30mbps has increased in cost from $30/mo to $50/mo. Last month we got a letter in the mail from Charter saying: "We're increasing your bill another $5/mo, thanks for being a customer!" I'd have Verizon FIOS if I could.
Remember that the 5Mbps I pay you $40/mo for is "up to" 5Mbps. And my neighborhood is so congested I'm usually lucky to get 200Kbps. I can't remember *ever* hitting my 5Mbps limit. Maybe once, on a Tuesday at 10:30AM.
If I pay you $200/mo for "up to" 50Mbps, why should I expect to get more than 200Kbps anyway? That's still "up to" 50Mbps. It's not like you're going to tear up the streets and upgrade your infrastructure here just to deliver more bandwidth to my house.
Of course I haven't upgraded -- the risk/reward ratio isn't there.
I am a Time Warner customer (not by choice). I hereby demand gigabit Internet at prices competitive with Google's fiber networks and those of the rest of the developed world.
Based on TW's record, this is sort of like GM saying "There's no consumer demand for 500mpg cars" or Intel saying "There's no consumer demand for 50GHz 512-core processors". There may be no apparent demand because Time Warner still can't pull off 10mbps with any reliability.
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
That's as explicit an acknowledgement that google fiber is. Let them deny it in this way as much as they want. They may as well have said the 640k is enough for anyone, line. Please, let them continue the road to denial and obsolescence, as they have been clearly panicking.
They called me almost a year ago and asked me if I wanted 40mbit cable and they would offer it for the introductory rate of $120/month for 6 months (IIRC). I said no. I _would_ pay an arm and leg for more bandwidth, but not from Comcast. I am in the process of cancelling my current account now just because of their new copyright system. I would have been contractually obligated to stay if I had accepted their offer of more bandwidth.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
From what I've seen, most people use wireless connections for their computers (even some desktops..ugh), tablets, etc. Best case scenario is that the games console is wired, if they are gamers. The max speed of wireless "n" gear is easily below gigabit, and the bandwidth is shared between all users. The fact that people don't *quite* need gigabit yet shouldn't put these ISPs off upgrading their services. Gigabit is maybe overkill for now, but in a couple of years it will be the standard at the high end. They should be working their asses off upgrading the hardware in residential areas to anticipate this. Speccing the home routers for at least 300Mbit of WAN I/O. Instead they are hoping that things will not improve. If all ISPs don't do anything, then it will indeed not improve. It's good that we have Google, which will do something, and will show the ISPs what happens if they don't all play retarded. I.e. all other ISPs will look like retards (sorry about the choice of words, but I can't think of a better way to say it)
I spend over $50 per month for what is considered the standard offering...15M down, 1M up. I could spend $50 more to get 50/5, but it really isn't worth it. So, yeah, what she says is probably correct - "We're in the business of delivering what consumers want". Translation: Not too many people are willing to pay twice as much for our fastest offering. ...but at least it isn't capped
The bottom line is that, for the average user, how many simultaneous netflix streams do you need to be able to watch? I have 6 mbit service and as long as browsing is smooth, and netflix/hulu/whatever streams OK, I could care less if it's rated at 6 mbit, 15 mbit, or 500 mbit. It works for the current use case, so why pay any more? When streaming media is affordable (without pirating it) that requires more than 3-5 mbit to watch, maybe consumers will start to see the benefit of faster services.
What they said... "Time Warner Cable: No Consumer Demand For Gigabit Internet"
What they meant... "Time Warner Cable: No Consumer Demand For Gigabit Internet at the prices we would be willing to sell it for."
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
The higher tiers on Internet service have an appalling cost. You can get lots of bandwidth on FIOS or on Comcast here in Richmond, but you're looking at hundreds of dollars a month. Never mind that the FIOS infrastructure, at least, can handle hundreds of megabits per customer, they're going to continue to charge for bandwidth like it's going out of style.
Plus, even with the decent connection at work, I've run into lots of network congestion issues that keep you from using that bandwidth - literally the only times I've ever been able to saturate our downstream Internet connection is using Bittorrent to pull down Linux ISOs. Everything else is choked off, and we've only got a 20/7 connection.
Now, one of the things about the Google Fiber services is that it's all DHCP right now. There's restrictions on running servers in the service agreement, so there's perilously little you could do to saturate that link (short of Bittorrent to other people on your network), but what it does do is remove a major chokepoint for neighborhood-level networking.
However, there are good things. Offsite backups become retarded-simple, since you are now limited by the streaming capacity of your hard drives. Since you're guaranteed to have a top-notch connection to Youtube, HD videos should play much more reliably. Video conferencing. High speed VPNs to the Amazon VPC infrastructure. The list goes on.
Why can't I mod "-1 Idiot"?
Because your service sucks? Nothing annoyed me more than TWC's pathetic excuse for cablemodem service. Second only to Optimum Online. While Verizon's customer service sucks something nasty, their FiOS service, in my opinion, is unmatched. But if they offered a gigabit service I'd hop on it like a college kid to free beer.
People in other countries are bragging about paying as much or less for much faster internet.
Have we shown little interest in the top tiers TWC is offering? Yes... because they're even more expensive and really not that much faster.
Part of the issue is that cable internet really doesn't give you fixed bandwidth. It's shared. Which means even if you only are supposed to get X bandwidth, one often gets more during off peak hours. And during peak hours you typically get less. If you pay more for the better service, you generally don't ACTUALLY get significantly different bandwidth. You get a little more during peak hours and about the same bandwidth during off peak hours. For the bump in price, it's just not worth it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
"A very small fraction of our customer base ultimately choose those options."
Translation: Very small fraction of their customer base has excessive amounts of money laying around to throw at TWC's overpriced and capped services.
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 >+
Yep, gigabit to the home would be cool, and I would score massive geek points, but in terms of an individual user, what use would it be? A big pipe makes a lot of sense when you're aggregating traffic from a bunch of different sites, but a normal residential customer (torrents aside) is going to be pulling most of their bandwidth from a small number of sites at any one time. Of course, this is for the near term, and I would expect that we are a pretty long way from putting a 2 way gigabit connection to use.
On the other hand, I expect that TWC already has plenty of experience in delivering one way multi-gigabit bandwidth- digital television.
"A very small fraction of our customer base" ultimately choose those options.'"
Statement decoded...
Simply because a small fraction of our customer base are the one per-centers who can afford it.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
...they will come.
There are a lot of cool services that I could see users wanting which require gigabit speeds but don't know they want until they see someone else using them. It is pretty much the "chicken or the egg" syndrome. Until they build it, no provider will deploy services that require it and no provider will deploy gigabit speeds until there are services that need it. I figured we will end up with gigabit Internet connections as providers move more toward end-to-end Ethernet based infrastructure. It is just a matter of time at this point.
And for those who say there will never be a need for it... I was told the same thing about upgrading from 4MB of DRAM to 12MB less than 20 years ago. And that 170MB hard drive will never fill up.
The less you talk, the more people hear you say.
It wasn't that long ago that dial-up companies were dismissing ISDN/ADSL/Cable in the same manner. Is it a good idea to dismiss a far superior product? I think it's a good way for your product to become obsolete. The only reason Time Warner might get away with it are that these sort of things are controlled by local license agreements with governments in most areas. Google may not have the desire to fight that battle.
No consumer demand == over half a million ponied up by residents in a ~100k pop midwestern town as a downpayment on gigabit FTTP. There's no install date. There are RFPs that went out, and hopefully someone will be selected and we'll get fibre and I can tell comcast where to stick their cable.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
We don't want speed (it's already quite fast), we want higher monthly consummation limits.
by Irene Esteves logic, no one wants a Bugatti either, if they did they would just go out and buy one.
What TW is actually saying is that there is no consumer demand for gigabit internet at the price they want to charge for it. And, since cable companies are effective monopolies in the communities they serve, that means there is no consumer demand, because nobody else can step in to provide it.
Clearly the entire computer manufacturing sector must be incorrect in making Gigabit LAN pretty much standard for the last 5 years or so. Clearly there is no demand for gigabit internet when everyone has a gigabit lan already running.
Or it could be they want to charge 150$ a month for the service or the fact that it is only available in one city block of one city, and only for those of odd numbered postal address that might be holding consumers back.
It's the price of your top tiers that customers don't have an interest in. 40$ is lowest tier for me. That is your rock bottom option, lol. I would love to get faster access but it just isn't worth paying for. A year ago i plotted a graph to show the sketchy ping time that their techs say is acceptable: http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y104/tibman/cruft/ping_times.png
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
I don't even have to go to TWC's website to know that the reason nobody's selecting that option is ``extortionate pricing'.
You wouldn't believe what I have to pay for a fracking third-party IDSL line because AT&T doesn't want to offer me a simple DSL line with a fixed IP address and no port filtering. To be fair to that 3rd-party: AT&T wanted to charge us $700/month PLUS per-minute usage charges for the same service and the 3rd-party provider is significantly less even though it's higher than most people are able to get for higher speeds. (It must cost AT&T a fortune to keep that port filtering turned off). I can only imagine what they'd want for a Gigabit connection.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Yeah - Motorola called it "Iridium"...
Motorola invested $6BN in starting the service, after bankruptcy it sold all it's assets for $25M.
Google is subsidising the 1Gb/sec service at levels no company hoping to turn a profit on the venture would ever do... There's a reason they picked a small town to host this "showcase" ISP service.
Ken
As some one who has preregistered for Google Fiber, I'm curious as to why they just upped my internet connection speed at no cost if they don't feel that consumers want faster internet. And yes, I do pay for TWCs top tier internet service.
One big factor in my decision to switch is Google's offer of 1 TB cloud storage, which TWC can't match. Comparable cost for both services, but I get (much) faster internet and free backup and storage, plus Google's throwing in a Nexus 7 tablet made the decision easy for me.
Not real throughput and certainly not *guaranteed* throughput.
I've had business class customers subscribe to the top tier of Comcast's service (100 down, some double-digit amount up) and throughput never met that even running Comcast's own (likely biased) speed test.
My understanding of this is that when you buy a higher speed tier, you get that tier provisioned on your modem but after that, you're competing with any number of people on your broadcast domain and ultimately on your node for upstream capacity.
Comcast may provision your *modem* to a higher speed, but it doesn't really make much difference if the node's upstream has limited headroom.
If TWC offered 1 Gpbs speeds and fiber to my house I would gladly use {insert any ISP name} for less than or equal to $100 per month (my budget for Internet).
Instead, I use another cable provider called SureWest and I pay $80 for 30 down/5 up. TWC keeps sending me these come back offers, offering $200 gift cards/Visa cards, which go promptly go into the trash.
BTW, Google Fiber is just around the corner. Is that why Slashdot Ads keep offering the Google Fiber?
I've been tallying votes for "who would switch to Google" as it's near many of us at work (some are in fiberhoods already). Of the 90 friends/employees I've polled 98% have responded with Google Fiber. So yeah, TWC is crying like a baby in private. If price and service/speeds were equal, I would rather use SureWest, Google, then TWC.
Funny I tried to upgrade to TWCs top tier internet through their account portal. When I went to upgrade, it said I was not an internet customer. Even though I've had the 20Mbit option for a few years now. After getting frustrated I gave up. Why haven't I called? Because I absolutely LOATHE talking to TWC on the phone. Someday I might, but not yet. Also, their higher tiers are stupid expensive.
I live in Springfield, VT and the local telephone company, VTel, started offering Gb fiber to the home for $29.95/month. I guarantee you I pickup the phone first chance I got to find out about it. It tool almost 2 years to get it. In the end I believe it was false advertising. I only get 550Mb down and 650Mb up but it was better then the 12 Mb down and 2 Mb up for the same price.
Except for the fact that I don't think that $65/month for 35Mbps is that bad of an option.
For Google Fiber, it's just $70 for a GIGABIT connection - that's up/down, and no caps on data use.
I'm not sure who is paying just $65/month for 35Mbps because I pay slightly more than that for around 10Mbps from Comcast.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Some people do more with their Internet than just stream media. I don't download gigantic files that often, but when I do, it would be nice to be able to wait as short as possible for it.
Chattanooga has fiber through https://www.epbfi.com/ From their website, 50/50 is $57.99, 100/100 is $69.99 up to 1G/1G @ $299.99. I think they they ran fiber on the power poles throughout the city. I don't know how they got around the monopolies, but I'm happy to see that they did. Though they're not cheap, the certainly demolish the incumbents' offerings on the mid to high end. My hope is that neighboring towns will feel the pressure of competition and we'll finally get to where we should have been 10-15 years ago.
So the CEO opens their mouth and shows a lack of understanding basic economics. You can't discuss demand without discussing price (and in this case data caps). "Look see. No one interested in our $500/month Gigabit Ethernet that isn't even advertised online! There is no demand!"
Of course we show little interest in their higher tier offerings. The price for basic broadband from them is already outrageous. If it were in line with the rest of the world that has to contend with competition, you better believe we'd be looking at higher tiers.
Obviously Time Warner is not taking porn into consideration here.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
But I'm already paying $75 for 24/2. I'd hate to think what gigabit with any usable amount of upstream would cost here - which is why I don't actually want it, and wouldn't buy it i they had it. It'd cost $1000/month.
Waiting for porn? Ain't nobody got time for dat! The problem is usually that the servers themselves don't support a high streaming rate; having a huge pipe to deliver a trickle from the server doesn't really buy you much. Unless you're simultaneously downloading from several different sites, you're usually not going to use all that bandwidth anyway.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
For the last 5 years, I've had 100 Mbps up & down for 275 SEK/mon. (current eq. 43 USD)
This sounds eerily similar to a line from "Who Killed the Electric Car." It was spoken by a Ford executive and was along the lines of " ... and we found that we were making the cars that people want." In other words we don't need to do anything different. That was before foreign car manufacturers started eating Ford's lunch because they were actually making the cars that people wanted.
To draw out the car analogy to something that makes me sick to the pit of my stomach, imagine, if you will, that your town had to choose a car manufacturer. Once the choice was made, you had the choice to buy that manufacturer's car - or not. No other choice. What would happen to quality vs. price?
Fortunately for us there is choice and auto manufacturers have to meet market demands or face loss of market share or government bailout. Unfortunately for us, we do not have much choice when it comes to cable service.
Time-Warner's about to be caught off guard and fall behind the industry, as the decade progresses. It's absolutely silly to claim that with the growth of online video, people aren't also increasingly interested in better upload/download speed. Also, I've been a Time-Warner customer since the 90's, and I haven't gotten anything from TW in my mail about service tiers. I only discovered they offered different level of services when I Googled a couple weeks ago. Why did I Google? 'cause I was wondering why my upload speed was insanely slow. I'm sure other customers are more aware of the service tiers TW offers, but if I wasn't informed, then how many others are clueless too? I'd be willing to bet that the lack of people signing up for their top tier, is less due to demand and more due to ignorance. When I say ignorance, I'm talkin' about two things -- not knowing there are options, and not understanding the options (some consumers just don't understand how much 1GB really is, etc).
Your first second was good. You should have followed it up with "They make most of their money off charging both customers and advertisers for programming, therefore they have no financial incentive to provide you with a service that would allow you to download an unlimited amount of unrestricted content for free!"
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
""We're in the business of delivering what consumers want"
I guess they want increasing monthly bills and data caps.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The only reason Time Warner Cable does not see many customers requesting gigabit ethernet connections is because it is too cost prohibitive. If you called BrightHouse (Time Warner Cable) and asked them for pricing on 1000 megabit internet connections, it is on the order of thousands of dollars per month. No normal residential customer is going to be able to afford such ridiculous pricing schemes. If they offered gigabit speeds at an affordable (less than 1000 dollars per month), I'm *sure* a large portion of their customer base would be ordering it. The reality is that they can't do it because the infrastructure isn't there to do it. It has nothing to do with the argument of their customers don't want it.
There's no demand for what people don't know exists. Tivo was a great example - amazing product, people who have it love it, but Tivo couldn't explain why it was good so they had lots of problems. Now most people who have DVR can't imagine living without it. 5-10 years ago, there was no demand for it - Tivo had to create the market and the demand.
rooooar
Time Warner Cable can't sell upgraded speed in most neighborhoods because they seldom can actually provide it.
I have TWC (available at a discount due to where I live currently), rated for 20Mb/s service. At 4am, it is about as good as advertised: 14Mb/s. At 8pm, it is 3xxKb/s (notice that is Kb/s) ... old DSL level download speeds. Many of the other X number of neighbors on the same chunk of cable are obviously in contention for the same chunk of over-allocated bandwidth.
Why pay for upgraded service when their infrastructure can only support it in the wee hours of the morning?
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
I'm a TWC customer, as the other local offerings are, frankly, terrible. They boil down to ATT DSL, which I had for a couple years before getting completely fed up with their speeds and their customer service. The only other option really is Clear(wire), and that was a fun year-long experiment in "how can I position this router in the window just right to get 3 out of 5 bars of internet?" Terrible idea, but probably fine for people who don't game online. TWC has been reliable and speedy, but I only got the price I have because of promotions. So, what does TWC offer at the TOP TIER? From their website:
Download speeds up to 50Mbps
Upload speeds up to 5Mbps
Modem with Free Home WiFi*
TWC WiFi Hotspots
Free Internet Security and Parental Controls software
30 email accounts
all for a cool price of ... $75 - more than my cell phone bill. It rivals the combined price of electricity and water in my home. Of course, without the "Free Home WiFi" upsell, the WiFi hotspots (wth?), fluffy security addons, and 30 goddamn e-mail accounts?!?!, I would expect it to cost a lot less. No one, no one, needs 30 e-mail accounts, not through their ISP. And, if you have 30, you're probably sharing them with other people, and it sounds like a business line might be better suited to your needs anyways.
Unfortunately, even if most customers did want faster Internet, I think what the CFO really was saying was "We don't have enough customers willing to pay out the ass for fast speeds, so we won't offer them." There's a big difference between "no demand for fast and affordable speeds" and "no demand for fast and overpriced speeds" - we have some areas in my city with fiber options from ATT and VZW, and the people I know who have them are happy to pay the price because the speeds are so damn awesome. But, you go to the average subscriber and ask them if they'd like to pay $100/mo (more?) for way faster speeds and they'd probably tell you that their e-mail works just fine as it is and that the Firefox doesn't need to be upgraded. Why budge on offering Good Things to your customers when you're just focused on maintaing a pool of profits from already overpriced connections to people who don't use them near their full potential?
This is the problem with corporations, selling you a shitty product at a high price because of lack of competition. Microsoft would be selling their products for $40 if linux had the same quality software. Had TWC service and their speed never reached 20mbps and funny thing after 3 or 4pm the speed drops to 1mbps and below. Same issue with dsl. With FIOS i get none of that garbage plus no cap. Fios speed is constant and actually higher than whats advertised. Same with hospitals charging whatever the fuck they want to.
In the article Trusting Telcos With Internet Is Like Trusting Fox With Henhouse, Rick writes
The take-home from this is that telcos have a conflict of interest, while hydro companies have underused poles in your neighbourhood.
davecb@spamcop.net
That would be a welcome change. Here's a question however... who would pay for any additional cable that needed to be laid, or if it needed to be upgraded (for example to fiber optic cable)? I have no idea how this works, but you seem to, so I'm asking (if you don't mind).
We've also heard that consumers in 1910 don't really want electricity. Also, in 1890 they don't want flush toilets, and in 1860 the railroads don't interest them. We checked in 1215 while we were at it, and consumers said they don't need black pepper or the Magna Carta.
... specifically. Instead, I want a very competitive environment that gives quality services at reasonable prices so that the market can make realistic decisions about what it really wants, instead of having the decision of what people want being made in corporate executive conference rooms.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Google is subsidising the 1Gb/sec service at levels no company hoping to turn a profit on the venture would ever do... There's a reason they picked a small town to host this "showcase" ISP service.
Interesting book: Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy by William Janeway. Short version of the thesis: Nothing truly technologically innovative was ever rolled out with a rational profit motive in mind, because anything truly innovative cannot rationally be predicted from what came before. Railroads, electricity, telephony, wireless telephony, the American interstate highway system, and the Internet were all built by irrational investments (driven by government) and economic bubbles amid great waste and inefficiency.
Compare this to markets that have sufficient (at least 6 providers) competition.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This sounds like the job shortage that corporations have trained their bought and paid for congress critters with ... "there are not enough people willing to do this work for chicken feed wages". This is all still about corporations gouging people on price, one way or another, and congress doing nothing about the lack of competitive markets for so many things in the USA.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I can tell Irene why she sees no consumer demand for her "high end" offering: it's only PRICED as a high end offering. I "upgraded" my residential service through them (to the tune of $100/month) and didn't see a single change in my up or down speeds. It's basically a scam. Yeah, you have to be able to provide what you're currently offering before trying to offer the next generation.
They will come.
As a time Warner customer I call bull SH*t i would order this in a split second if it was offered.
Myself and many other TWC customers can't stream 1080p off Youtube reliable, even on their '50mbps' tier. If you're in one of the areas that is exclusively served by TWC, file and FCC complaint about it. We need to turn up the heat on these companies and they'll finally buckle and give us what we want.
I'd love 100mbit internet. I'd love frelling *10* mbit internet. But not from Time Warner (if they even existed in my area, which they don't), and not from either of the two providers in my area, for their current price. As hundreds of people have already said in this thread, it's pretty laughable. Duh, nobody wants to buy your overpriced crap if they have a choice, and if you give them a choice between somewhat overpriced crap, and hypothetically-faster-if-you're-lucky crap that's priced out of the price range of all but the ludicrously rich (or corporations), nobody is going to choose the latter.
Now, granted, I'll also admit, given the choice between paying a reasonable amount for 10mbit, slightly more for 100mbit, or slightly more than that for 1000mbit, I'd probably go for the hundred. I'm sure people would go for the thousand, too, though, if all three were in the price range an average consumer could legitimately afford to spend on connectivity.
I have TWC (because it is them or nothing). I could buy a higher tier but there is this little issue beyond the price. They do not guarantee that you will get higher speeds. Just that they will be available to you. Since I live kinda in the boonies (on a main road hence why I can even get cable internet) I will never see any speeds higher than what I get. So why should I go from paying $55 a month to something more for the exact same service as I am getting today. If they would guarantee that you got the speeds that you actually paid for I take bets there would be more demand for their higher tiers. I would consider paying more if I could get faster than what I get today all the time. In short as everyone has said this is just an lame excuse. They won't make guarantees because they are afraid of being held to them and losing money. They won't offer more competitive pricing because why compete when you are a local monopoly? In the end it will take Google or other players coming in to force them to change. The only other option is local municipalities trying to compete but TWC and the other cable/telephone companies are lobbying so hard many areas and states have laws that prevent that if they offer service to 1 house in an entire zip code.
Google probably puts more effort into publicizing their tiny Kansas City gigabit Internet project than actually doing it. Sonic.net, on the other hand, is quietly deploying gigabit fiber to the home in Northern California. Sonic says it costs them about $500 per house they pass to install fiber; if they sell to 1 in 3 houses, which is what they're getting, it's $1500 per house. Sonic charges $70 per month for a gigabit connection. It's only available in a few places, though - Sebastapol, CA and parts of the Sunset District in San Francisco. Elsewhere, they offer 20Mb/s down for $40/month, over lines leased from AT&T.
Sonic has no data caps. Their CEO says that their upstream bandwidth is not a significant cost, and they don't need to throttle their users.
No, running the cable to your house is not the "expensive bit" - it is a big up-front cost, which is amortized over the life of the service. Actually providing the service, running the head-end units, the data centers, etc. is the expensive part. Trenching coax to your basement isn't the most "expensive bit."
I'm a cost accountant in my professional life and there is lots of data available that you should consider. While the ISP may recoup the cost over the life of the service it is extremely expensive to deploy copper/fiber. The specifics vary but wiring up a subdivision has costs that easily run into the tens of thousands of dollars. When Verizon did their FiOS rollout they spent something like $23 billion to hook up 19 million homes. Their cost is claimed to be around around $1410 per home. Per Verizon about $760 of that cost was getting the fiber to the house and about $650 was the routers and other gear needed to run the service. Bear in mind as well that Verizon already has the easements, poles and infrastructure needed to make a rollout like this happen. But the actual costs are effectively higher because Verizon only has about 4 million FiOS customers so that $23 billion results in a cost around $6000 per customer, more than half of which in physically getting the wire to the customer. So yeah, "trenching coax" actually is the most expensive part.
Most of the costs for these services are up front fixed costs. Operating a gigabit network doesn't cost appreciably more than a 100mbps network once installed. So once the investment is made the only question really is how long is their breakeven horizon. At $200/month, the ISP would break even in 30 months on a $6000 hookup. At $100/month it would take 60 months. It is just a profit calculation. They offer tiered service because some people are willing to pay more than others. Clearly the hockey stick on willingness to pay is somewhere below $200 for internet service for many people.
You won't pay $200 for 100Mb/sec service, would you pay $200/mo for 1 Gb/sec service?
No, I probably wouldn't because it is a luxury, not a necessity. I could afford it I suppose and I'd think about it, but the ROI simply isn't there to justify the expense. If they get it down to $100 per month I'd probably get it.
I happen to be in Kansas City, and I'm patiently waiting for google fiber to be available in my neighborhood.
I actually did lower my service from Turbo (up to 2/20 Mbps) to standard (up to 1/15 Mbps) because there was little difference between the two during prime-time congestion. I certainly won't bother to add $30 to my $55 monthly internet-only bill just to have up to 50 Mbps service that still has the same lag and over-subscribed node bandwidth problems that my current service has.
"We actually do care about what Google is doing, but we cannot say this in public because our stock price would be affected by this." There's a reason why there's talk of busting up Google's empire, folks, and that reason is because Google is doing everything that you're not supposed to do and winning anyway.
The Plaza is in Kansas City, Mo, not Ks. Also, it's south of what anyone not in a suburb calls downtown.
I can't believe them. Seriously do they even listen to themselves when they are talking? Of course customers aren't interested in the highest tiers, mainly because they're still limited in many cases and they are ridiculously expensive compared to anywhere else in the world!
Meh.
I once had a supervisor deny my request for a 1200 baud modem because, "Nobody can read the text faster than 300 baud". Built it and they will come.
I'd just like the service they do provide (a decent 20MBit) to stay up and maintain low latency. I have experienced numerous periods where service just goes away, and even more where packet loss climbs drastically or the latency goes through the roof. I don't care about gigabit speeds as much as I care about reliability. Deliver the latter and I'll think about paying for the former.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Notice how all their tiers say "up to"? From Time Warners own page:
Ultimate (up to 50Mbps) $74.99/mo. For 12 Months
Extreme (up to 30Mbps) $64.99/mo. For 12 Months
Turbo (up to 20Mbps) $54.99/mo. For 12 Months
Standard (up to 15Mbps) $44.99/mo. For 12 Months
Basic (up to 3Mbps) $29.99/mo. For 12 Months
Lite (up to 1Mbps) $19.99/mo. For 12 Months
As of 2011, the population estimate was 463,202 with a metro area of 2.1 million.
Myself and many other TWC customers can't stream 1080p off Youtube reliable, even on their '50mbps' tier. If you're in one of the areas that is exclusively served by TWC, file and FCC complaint about it. We need to turn up the heat on these companies and they'll finally buckle and give us what we want.
That's good to know. Now I know that I'm not missing anything by staying on their lowest tier.
You are comparing a town of "The population was 7,379 at the 2010 census" with a city of "a metro area of 2.1 million".
With the Playstation 4 enabling and promoting all manners of live game streaming and conferencing, I'd bet real money that many customers are going to simultaneously hit their caps and demand faster service. (If the PlayStation 4 takes off, that is.)
No, you half-witted monkey, the reason we aren't paying for it is because it is not affordable and the quality of service at present is questionable. What we need is Papa John's, Little Caesar's, Pizza Hut, Domino's, and another thousand like minded entities to diversify the market. Once it's cheap who would not spend a little extra for the speed increase? For example, if the large drink is only moderately more expensive than the small, you always get the: "For an extra 50 cents you can get 128 ounces, wanna upgrade?" They don't care about innovating as much as they do about making money. Give me last year's best for less. That's how technology works.
There has always been a lot of profit in false scarcity.
"No one wants digital music players" when they had one model available, the 64 MB Sony Network Walkman which forced you to convert your MP3s to ATRAC. All that for a cool 700 bucks!
So I went to see if I could get faster uploads on TWC, and on their wideband Internet tier they offer a 100mbps level... But only if you're in Kansas City. What does that mean?
What, me worry?
Americans have no idea of how nice they have it. Despite the huge drawback of government and citizens resorting to violence at the drop of a hat, or the lack of a sane health care system, the USA are still a nice place to live, with many really nice people. Police abuse? Last week here in Mexico a bunch of policemen raped a girl and murdered her boyfriend. Evil Obama with his drone war targeting american citizens? Here in Mexico the army and security forces are responsible for at least 2,000 of innocent civilian deaths. Evil government taxes? Just wait until an organized gang of tugs replaces the government demanding their own taxes, err, protection. The strong government designed under liberal principles that served the majority of citizens coupled with its geographic position is what made USA a world power. All the people that decries that they pay taxes to uncle Sam while enjoying the benefits of western civilization will find thousands of people around the world willing to trade places with them.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
I currently get two megabits. I'd be happy with 100Mb. Hell I'd be happy with 25Mb symmetrical.
I'd rather have 10GbE LAN that isn't prohibitively expensive before I get Internet faster than 100Mbps.
it seems to me that noone buys their top tiers because they charge more than google's gigabit fiber for 1/300th of the speed... no shit sherlock, noone is going to pay that kind of price.
As a comcast customer who pays ridiculous amounts of money for their triple play that is supposed to save me money,if you offered me even 100mbps at a reasonable price I would have no qualms about paying. But even considering that, as long as i have no data cap activated, i will just deal with it because it isn't cost effective as a student to pay for more speed. I settle for leaving my computer on when doing back ups or using my server. The gigabit line that connects it to the web has become very addicting in terms of speed.
TWC is wrong. That is all.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
They don't want to give it to customers, and if they did they'd have a mandatory First Child and Soul clause for each subscriber.
I'd gladly pay for Cox's top tier (50Mb), rather than their mid tier (18Mb), if only they would raise the upload speed. The difference between their top tier and their lower tier upload speed is only 1Mb.
The problem is that Gigabit Internet (or 1000 Gbps) is not in low demand due to demand, but the market pricing it out of reach of consumers.
We could deliver 1000 Gbps WIRELESS in all major cities for under $10 a month total cost (including marketing, obscene executive salaries and bonuses, excessive profit ratios, etc. that TWC "demands") if we let the FCC move forward with their plans. Within 10 miles of each college or university, as well.
But TWC wants to charge a premium for this, while people in China, South Korea, Vietnam, most of the EU, and even Canada pay MUCH MUCH LESS for it.
There's your problem. They want to charge (and when you add in their service charges and fees and get beyond their 3 month teaser rates, this is the price) HUNDREDS of dollars a month for something that should cost $10-$20 a month.
At $10 to $20 a month, demand exists. Basic demand/supply curve. They've priced it too high.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The problem with TW and gigabyte service is how to charge. Currently they want to charge by gigabyte and speed. This is their problem,
Here is another experience.
My son lived in what you would call backwards Riga Latvia. It is a beautiful city, with a great university. For his apartment he had 8 megabyte Download speed as standard, along with VOIP, and TV by fibre. If I recall, it was costing him about $30/mo. His Cell phone charges were around $10/mo.
If TW or others open up to supply gigabyte speed, they would have to price it reasonably, and that would mean that DSL or 1 megabit (not megabyte) would have to go for a tenth of the charges they can exert today.
So who is living in lah-lah land. It is the TW executives who want to bs the public.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Anyone who hasn't seen the Bill Moyers interview with Susan Crawford needs to watch it. It's available on YouTube: http://youtube.com/watch?v=4xI847vQTto Great insight.
Google's Kansas City project is mostly hype. They only have 300 homes connected as of November 2012. Only 7000 people per-registered for the service. Also, you're not allowed to run servers, so having big uplink bandwidth isn't helpful.
Verizon has several million FIOS customers, but they're winding down deployment of that offering.
Down here in eastern Texas, my only option is Suddenlink. I pay $85 a month for 30 mb/s download and 2 mb/s upload with a 200 gig cap. Sure, I could upgrade to the next tier up (another $20 a month and 100 mb/s download, 5 mb/s upload), but they won't raise my bandwidth cap at all to match the increased speed. But they would be happy to charge me an extra $10 for every 50 gigs I exceed my current cap. It's a combination of their higher tier services costing too much for people to care to upgrade, bandwidth caps that don't scale with the increased speed and a miserable upload comparison.
Outside of a community of techies, I'll bet they're absolutely right that there's no demand for it. I have Verizon FiOS right now, and pay $75 for basic TV and 25Mbps internet. I could upgrade to 50Mbps for maybe $10 a month more, but I just don't see why. I do stream a lot of Netflix, rent TV shows from iTunes, and watch MLB.tv during the summer. I've even been known to DL the occasional multi-GB torrent. I'm sure that puts me in the top 10% of bandwidth users in the USA, if not the top 1%. The extra $10/mo would not be an issue. But... why? I just don't see that it would be useful or even noticeable.
I get the whole "640k should be enough for anyone" argument here, but I don't see it coming imminently. What REALISTIC application is there for Gigabit internet for the average consumer that would drive a telco to install it at the present?
-Ted http://www.freemathhelp.com/
Most ISPs in the consumer/small buisness sapce uses the term "up to", DSL ISPs have the vaugarities of phone lines and sometimes congestion on the exchange backhault while cable ISPs can have congestion on the local cable segment and cellular providers have congestion on the airwaves. Congestion on the backbone is also a potential issue though that is easier to keep under control (the more users you aggregate the more stable your overall usage becomes).
Still with some ISPs the higher tiers make a real difference while others are so congested that they don't.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register