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ISP Trying Free (But Limited) Home Broadband Plan
adeelarshad82 writes "Earlier today FreedomPop, a telecom company headquartered in Los Angeles, announced its plans to launch a very low cost home broadband plan for extremely low-intensity users, with 1GB monthly for free. Clearly this is much lower than an average U.S. home broadband usage, which is between 24 and 28 gigs per month. The 1GB of free Internet is basically a teaser; the company aims to disrupt the cable and DSL business with its 10GB for $10 plan which is extendable by paying $5 for each additional GB beyond 10."
Remember when everybody was screaming about bandwidth caps and the need for government to regulate them out of existence?
This is why that regulation was a bad idea.
1GB/free and 10GB/$10 is highly disruptive to the major cable cartel. It is also extraordinarily beneficial for low income or student subscribers. This is innovation. We need more competition, not more regulations treating the symptoms of the lack of competition in most markets.
My grandma could use it to check mails.
Hopefully the home ISP market won't follow the cyclic model of the cell phone industry. With cell phone data, first you paid by the kB, then they introduced unlimited data plans, then they capped the limits and you paid by the GB, now they're going back to unlimited data plans. I'd prefer the home ISPs to not do that. They've always been unlimited (within reason) so I'd wouldn't like to see some small company changing the model for the industry.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
Interesting to see the average usage at 24Gb to 28Gb. When our local cable company was trying to bring in a 30Gb monthly cap, their argument was that 95% of their users went through 2Gb a month or less, effectively subsidizing heavier users. Total bollocks argument of course, but that's another story. The age demographic tends to skew high here and a lot of people only use their Internet connection for email. even here at work, people will reach for the Yellow Pages book before using Google. Those people would be a good target for this sort of service.
Unless you only use 5 gig... Not everyone spends all day downloading movies or playing games.
And one of my remote workers gets through 4Gb to 5Gb per month and she has the privilege of paying $56.99 per month for that. Just because this pricing doesn't work for you, doesn't mean it's a bad deal for everyone.
Back in the day 600 megs a month was what you got with the standard ADSL account (which cost NZ$200 per month) and you paid extra for any overage.
There was a cheaper plan that gave you only 126Kb/s but was unlimited.
You'd want to be careful about auto-updates of software, though. Adding a new (to you) computer with a pre -SP3 fresh reinstall of winodws XP (something resonable to happen for people in this market) would eat up stubstantial bandwidth as it downloaded updates.
How is $10 for 10GB plus $5/GB after that a good deal? A 24GB average user is going to end up paying $80/month.
This sounds extensively like the cable company plans where they want to cap right below the level where someone trying to replace their $150/month cable subscription with $10/month netflix streaming would be.
If they're implementing cap-excess fees, they should also enable the user to hard-limit his internet access when the cap is reached, with a manual bypass when the user wishes to "accept the charges".
My ISP (Rogers, up here in Canada) offers soft-cap notifications in your browser when the cap reaches 75% and 100%, but these notifications would never be seen if I, for example, were to Netflix my Gbs into oblivion.
Why XP is EOL!
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Get a license to practice law in CA, because the shit's about to hit the fan with bandwidth abusers with a refusal to pay. Ingeniously profitable!
Paying $5 for 1 GB of usage is a good deal, idiot.
Paying $50 for 1 GB of usage (which is what some people are doing now) is a bad deal. It's like paying to take your anorexic girlfriend to the world's most expensive all you can eat seafood buffet.
That's why you can get computers like this for next to nothing on craigslist. People who want $10 per month internet typically don't buy their computers from the Apple Store or Alienware.
Currently she pays $12/month for a 128KB/s cable connection. Basically email, a little bit of web browsing, and audio-only skype.
I've seen background processes that take up more than that a month.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
All of my grandparents combined use 100MB/mo between their respective ISPs. Email, maybe a few recipes, not much else.
Let's do some basic math.
Right now, they pay around $45/mo for cable each
Under this plan, they pays $0/mo.
Seems like a good plan to me. It's not marketed to every Internet user ever, just certain low-use demographics like the elderly.
My cellphone provider gives me unlimited internet bandwidth for $10, if I ever bother to activate it. (Using wifi has been fine so far.) These guys are way more expensive than that.
The main regional ISP in my area (Canada) just ran a TV spot about how the throughput is unlimited on all their plans.
Hopefully they will cut you off if you accidentally go over :P
On a rainy weekend, with a bunch of Netflix, Gamecenter and music streaming and some other downloads, we can easily hit 50 GB in a day.
Karma: Can only be portioned out by the Cosmos.
Which, as someone who's using that network from Sprint's software/hardware SUCK BALLS! It's almost as slow as dialup much of the time. Freedompop is also charging $89 for the WiMAX modem. No thank you...
Think of me when you shave your legs...
Wow... that's really high, I did 30GB in February and I work from home, use a softphone/voip and often do video conferencing with my coworkers.
Does the average home user download 5-6 720p movies a month?
yeah, but these customers will take their money from the regular ISP's who may be forced to raise prices on their remaining customers, idiot
the light users subsidize the heavier ones. take away the revenue from the light users and you need to raise prices. ISP's make very little PROFIT after ALL BILLS ARE PAID
So how do I check how much bandwidth I used last month?
It would be nice as a failover for when my primary ISP goes down.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
This looks more like a plan to hose poor people.
$1/GB? That is way too pricy for broadband internet. It would be a godsend for mobile pricing but not broadband. I guess people who barely use the internet might save money but a lot of us get our digital entertainment/media almost solely through the internet these days. Hell, if I bought a game off Steam, it would cost me $4 after the cost of the game. If I spent $20 on a game, that would be a 25% increase in price. This all assumes I use less than 10GB a month. I wouldn't be surprised if my household hits over 200GB a month.
Customers who use the internet in more sophisticated ways, for example to cut their TV cable and stream; to use bittorrent; to game, and so forth will not benefit from this pricing plan.
We're left with less informed and poorer customers as the target demographic. The problem here is that most people and especially those in the target demographic don't realize how many bits that javascript game is transferring. They don't realize Mom's facebook page links to 3 gigs of pictures. This will inevitably result in a large percentage of their customers going far over the cap and getting hit with an unpayable bill.
I would like to think this company will simply cut off internet service at cap but a much, much more likely scenario is debt collectors harassing poor people for anything they can get.
This is evil from start to finish.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
My household has 4 internet users - Main bandwidth usage in our house: netflix, pandora, youtube, pbskids app every single month for the last 2 years we have used over 200 GB. The large majority of that is streaming.
Sorry, but today, a single game update can be anything from a few hundred MB to a few GB, and lets not even start on YouTube, Netflix and streaming traffic.
Can't wait for a ISP trying slow but unlimited cap internet. I'm pretty sure the customers will throw their money at them.
It does not work like this. The provider will charge as much as it can, and deliver as little as it can get away with. Price has little to do with costs. Cost is a limiting factor not a price definer.
What's that? (a Google search don't give much info). If it can prevent me from reaching my data caps, I'm VERY interested.
You guys don't live in Canada. I would kill for that.
I entertained the idea of getting this as a backup internet connection for the home, but they way they auto-charge for blocks of data and the reports of the inconsistencies in data tracking has me shying away. I'm looking for a prepaid data option that lets one buy the allowance upfront, doesn't expire, won't auto-charge for additional data, and either has an ethernet interface or has driver support in FreeBSD 8.3 (pfSense 2.1) since it'll be used as a failover WAN connection.
The only option I've found so far is Internet On The Go from TruConnect & WallyWorld. The down side is they're only selling the MiFi 2200 which requires one to compile a modified driver on FreeBSD and I just don't have the time. On top of that it's on Sprint's slow EV-DO network; the speed could be ok as a backup connection.
eBook readers hardly use any bandwidth. Even a very large book is only a few megabytes.
It's like paying to take your anorexic girlfriend to the world's most expensive all you can eat seafood buffet.
On the other hand, if she's bulimic, there's a good chance she could really eat your money's worth... :p
You are ridiculously shortsighted.
I'd love to see a comparative economic analysis of the value of those things delivered over the net versus their historical equivalent and the value of anything new offered as a result of Internet based tech. It seems to me that the price the consumer is asked to pay for bandwidth is going up, even though the cost to the provider remains the same of shrinks. After all, most consumers don't exercise control over the advertising that piggybacks on the content they request, and it's the flash-crap, embedded ads, surveys and cross-site scripting that account for the ten-fold increase in page size that's occurred as a result of Adobe and Macromedia's success peddling their products to advertizers.
The dynamics of internet use and business costs seem weighted in favor of content providers, the supply side. The end user is asked to pay more and more, most of it to subsidize bandwidth the average user never uses. (Up until recently no one had ever heard of caps on "Unlimited" bandwidth). We're asked to be responsible for the geometric increase in bandwidth use, primarily for the benefit of advertizers and video consumption. What if I don't want my Internet connection to become what my TV used to be? Why should I subsidize the build out of high speed connections so Comcast, Time Warner and the like can pump my brain full of industrial waste?
Before the internet became common, all you needed to receive TV and Radio was a device, and if you wanted print media, you purchased a book or a periodical. News junkies subscribed. Direct mail was expensive and ineffective.
Now you need a computer and you pay for broadcast bandwidth. Everything has a price except periodicals )most of which ran to the cliff's edge like jihadists convinced they'd die if they didn't commit suicide first). Now you pay for video because televsion is worthless given the dilution and interruption of broadcast advertising. Advertising over the net has become ubiquitous and cheap, though no one can convince me it's any more effective than bulk mail, notwithstanding that fact it's more environmentally sound. Also, Internet use has nearly killed off the U.S. Post Office, and it's indirectly responsible for the concentration of ownership in the recording industry.
Interactivity has definitely changed the landscape. I don't have to leave my house to shop, and you can play with your neighbor without leaving the house, meeting up or worrying about washing your clothes afterward. But it's not without eventual cost. The shopping part may be a benefit, unless except to those in rural areas which are both starved for bandwidth AND your universal postal service cost is escalating because of so-called competition from UPS and FedEx, which aren't required to keep prices the same for those who live in the boonies, like the USPS is.
I could go on, but I'd be curious where the Internet-chair economists on Slashdot weigh in on this.... (I think).
Someone said that 30% of all Internet customers use 1 GB or less per month. But I'm sure that was made up, because when you ask the people on the tech web site, they all use more than that.
Learn to love Alaska
XP hasn't reached the end of it's support lifecycle yet, it's still in extended support for another 13 months.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
"ISP's make very little PROFIT after ALL BILLS ARE PAID"
I call BS. They still make lots of money even after paying multi-million dollar salaries to their executives and dividends to shareholders.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
http://ipduh.com/ip/whois/as/?AS8708
According to RIPE, a Romanian ISP
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
So.. $10 for 10GB.. (or $1/GB).
Then its $5/GB after that?
So the second 10GB would cost $50??? 5 times as much? That seems.. insane..
Whats to stop me from getting two devices/accounts, and then paying 2X $10 for the same 20GB?
(could either load balance, or use one up until 10GB then switch to the other....)
Not just old OSes. It is quite normal for OSX updates to be in excess of 1Gb a piece.
The elderly often live isolated and confusing lives and would profit from Skype Google Calendar and other specialized apps. It's not the cost of the Tablet or computer, but the repeating monthly charges that is the stopper. We make an app which can operate without any button pushes on the part of Grandma. It shows family pictures, medication reminders and has a way of keeping in touch by telephone, all without any input from Grandma. Several other features require that Grandma is able and willing to press a button, playing videos of the new baby for example, but we are working on that button press. Skype needs a click to receive a call, and another to end it. Well done FreedomPop (and Mom too)
Adblocking usually works by not even requesting the ads to be blocked. The advertisements have to be referenced by an URL in the HTML of the main page which you've requested. Your adblocker software has a blacklist of sites which are not to be used since they are primarily used to serve ads or tracking gifs or such; so your adblocking add-on stops your browser from even requesting those subportions of the page which consist of those ads. That particular type of ad-blocking would actually decrease your bandwidth usage.
.
There is a different type of ad-suppression which requests and receives the advert components but just does not display them to you; that type of mechanism would waste bandwidth.
Which is why I mentioned people who don't play games or watch videos on the internet :P
Sky used to offer 2mbps broadband for free in the UK. It may have been only to their TV customers though.
I didn't bother, I was already on a 20mbps cable link anyway. I did consider it for Sky's movie download service though - it used p2p tech for distribution and I didn't want them flooding my main connection's upload.
No idea whether they still offer that or not.