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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.