 mobOn the next level..Premium
join:2000-10-07 | Dearest Time Warner I again ask you to offer the same deal as Google Fiber. See how fast your take up rate is, then get back to us. |
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 BF69Premium
join:2004-07-28
Camden, TN | True I have 30 Mbps internet from Charter. I could get 100 Mbps but I'm not paying $110 a month for it. Even if it was only $10 more than what I was paying now I wouldn't do it. What am I going to do on 100 Mbps let alone 1 Gbps?
What do people actually want. Well some would like faster upload. I'm fine with the 4Mbps upload I currently get but I do understand why many would like to see more symmetrical service.
How about no caps? Which I get TWC doesn't have. Once again I have never gone over the caps but seriously they have been around 250-300 GB for 4 years now on most ISPs. So if they insist on keeping them then time up them and not just by 50 GB.
Oh here's another one how about letting have access to stuff like WatchESPN without having to have cable. yeah know that's more's ESPN fault but if all these companies were to tell ESPN to go f--k itself unless they can offer it to internet only customers ESPN would capitulate. Same thing with HBOGo.
HBO says it doesn't want to make the cable companies mad or deal with billing or hosting. Fine let the ISPs handle it. If Charter can bill me for HBO they can bill me for HBOGo stand alone. Let Charter get a cut of the money like they do with regular HBO. Win-win for all. |
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Reviews:
 ·Frontier Communi..
| reply to mob
Dearest Mob Most consumers will not pay $70/mo for broadband service, regardless of how fast or slow it is. $70/mo in my neck of the woods buys you a 30mbit/s connection, which is not bad at all IMHO, yet the overwhelming majority of people still opt for the 5mbit/s tier. Hell, the 10mbit/s tier is only $5/mo more than the 5mbit/s tier, yet it sees significantly reduced uptake. Uptake of the 30mbit/s and 50mbit/s tiers is exceedingly uncommon, and the handful of people I know who have them got them through special promotions or bundles. Nobody called up and bought it out of the blue at full sticker price.
Make a case for why $70/mo provides enough value to John Q. Public to justify an extra $30/mo over a standard connection. That's $360/yr, which is real money to most people. Hell, I'm a geek with 13 years in Information Technology, and I'm too budget conscious to pay for such speeds. |
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 IowaCowboyWant to go back to IowaPremium
join:2010-10-16
Springfield, MA | 1 Gbps is overkill 50/10 is more than enough for residential use. The only users who need 1 Gbps are businesses and web servers. |
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 gaforcesUnited We Stand, Divided We Fall
join:2002-04-07
Santa Cruz, CA | Growth Pick the plums first, then when they are gorged from all the money, pick the cherries, discarding anything that doesn't agree with the tummy er automatic wallet filler.
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Let them eat FIBER! |
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 LinklistPremium
join:2002-03-03
Longport, NJ
kudos:5 | reply to IowaCowboy
Re: 1 Gbps is overkill said by IowaCowboy:50/10 is more than enough for residential use. The only users who need 1 Gbps are businesses and web servers.
For most households, I agree with that. There may be some exceptions, where the household has 4 or more members using internet extensively. An example of those could be both parents working from home either as entrepreneurs or home office for a company requiring extensive downloads & especially uploads and a couple teenagers watching videos non-stop. But for the average home of 1 single parent with 1 or 2 kids, the std tier offered by Comcast for example of 20/4.5 is more than enough. Why would they upgrade from a $50/mo bill to even $70/mo for much faster speeds. It just wouldn't be needed with current online applications available.
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I will be perfectly happy if the budget cuts specified in the Budget Control Act go into effect. 3 cheers for the sequester. Take the money from the drunken federal spenders. |
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iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Golden, CO
kudos:2 Reviews:
·Verizon Online DSL
 ·RoadRunner Cable
·Comcast
| reply to IowaCowboy
For many folks, anything above 3 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up is overkill. This hasn't stopped anyone from offering something faster as a marketing edge.
In today's environment, an incumbent ISP is leaving money on the table if it has more than a handful of users on its highest tier. If there are twenty users on 100/5, there's a good chance that one of them would be willing to pay more for an even faster connection.
As far as overkill goes, could I do all of my work over a 3/768 DSL connection? Yeah...I've done it over 1.5/384 DSL. Doesn't mean it's pleasant. I've gone from 8/2 to 50/15 service from 2008 to 2012 and I had a use for 50/15 (and could have used more speed, but I wasn't going to pay $85 more for only 5 Mbps extra up). Whether 50/15 is overkill isn't as relevant as whether I'm willing to pay the price that they were charging ($115) for that connection. I was.
As a new entrant into a market (e.g. GFiber), you price yourself differently.TWC doesn't have to compete if they don't want to...but their lack of competition is mainly because they'd have to lower prices on high-end tiers, something that would cost them more money than attrition to GFiber at the moment. Now they can't come out and say this, but that's why they aren't lowering prices and amping up speeds. The needs of the mass populace for gigabit speeds has nothing to do with it. |
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 trparkyApple... YUMPremium,MVM
join:2000-05-24
Cleveland, OH
kudos:2
·Time Warner Cable
| reply to Linklist
In a business setting, those people should get business class Internet connections.
Even with two people, and at one time, three people in my house, we never even came close to maxing out the 50 Mbps downstream channel that we had. And that was with heavy downloading and use of NetFlix.
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Tom
Boycott AT&T uVerse! | Tom's Android Blog | AOKP (The Android Open Kang Project) |
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 banditws6Shrinking Time and DistancePremium
join:2001-08-18
Frisco, TX
·RoadRunner Cable
| reply to Crookshanks
Re: Dearest Mob I'm with you on this one. Out here, $70 only gets me 20/2 with TWC. Since we now get 15/1 for $50, the $70 tier is really a lousy deal. And it's all uphill from there...
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"The counsel of fools is all the more dangerous the more of them there are." -Ólafr Höskuldsson |
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| TWC The people who demand 1gx1g only want it for the novelty to say they have it.
Though I find it kind of funny:
Karl Bode - TIMEWARNERCABLE IS A TERRIBLE COMPANY FOR NOT OFFERING THESE SPEEDS WE DEMAND IT BLAH BLAH BLAH.
DSLReports users - You know, they're kind of right, most people won't pay for it.
I guarantee you the vast majority of people do not want, nor need, or want to pay for anything other than the barest bones of service. The people demanding this service are a select few who just want to torrent more and what not. I can't fathom 1Gx1G right now.
My 30x5 is plenty for me. Hell, most servers won't even output at those speeds. The only consistent use for those speeds I can see are servers and people who torrent/file share. |
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| reply to BF69
Re: True Think about the way ESPN and HBO structure their deals. The watch anywhere apps are paid for by the fees paid by the cable companies (who negotiated that into their contracts). It's a mutual benefit to both ESPN and the cable provider to not allow the network to allow direct access. The cable companies would be ticked off if you could bypass them and would likely affect their relationships (and bottom lines). What irks me is that the cable companies are starting to charge "sports tier fees" on top of everything yet I can't watch my RSNs on my phone, iPad or laptop outside my house. YES Network actually charges a separate fee for that privilege yet ESPN has that essentially written into their contract. It's time the industry realized people are just not watching the way our grandparents did and most people have lives outside the house.
As for the speed issue, it will never change until there is true competition. Why invest if there's no return. Everyone here has it right that consumers won't pay ridiculously and unjustifiably high prices for gigabit speeds but if they did offer it at reasonable price and lower the price on their slower tiers, I guarantee you many customers will sign up for faster speeds.
Someone else said it best, "We'll tell you what speeds you want!" |
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Reviews:
·Frontier Communi..
| reply to banditws6
Re: Dearest Mob There will be a market for faster upload speeds as "the cloud" takes off, but barring the next killer app I think we're fast approaching the "Who cares?" point with download speeds. In your instance I would think about paying the $20 for the extra upload, though I'd probably conclude that $20 for 1mbit/s isn't worth it.
I have a 8/2 business class connection for $60/mo with a static IP, could get higher (download) speeds with a residential grade connection, but no static IP, and the business accounts are prioritized over residential ones. I've yet to see less than my promised speed during peak hours or at any other time, something many residential customers can't claim.
Business account pricing seems more realistic IMHO, at least if you desire a decent enough contention ratio to achieve your promised speed without worrying about peak hour slowdowns. I'd rather have 100% of a slower connection 24/7 than some fraction of my faster connection from 8pm to 1am.... |
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 gatorkramNeed for SpeedPremium
join:2002-07-22
Winterville, NC
kudos:2 | Missing the point Most of you seem to be missing the point.
All this apologetic conversation about what people need. What about what people want? We as consumers don't need a lot of what we buy, but we buy it because we want it.
I myself, want the highest speeds I can get. Do I need it? No, but I sure as hell want it.
I could go on and on, and post about all types of things people spend money on, but it wouldn't make my post any more clear.
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What the heck is a GatorKram? »www.gatorkram.com |
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| When .5% of the population wants something, it may not be worthwhile for a company to offer it to just them.
Remember you and your friends make up a tiny fraction of a fraction of cable users. |
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| Availability will create demand and services Right now, no, there isn't lots of demand for that speed, but, if it were widely available, it would prompt the creation of services that can use it, and those services would create the demand.
For example, we really haven't begun to tap into what a truly networked home can do. How about a smart thermostat that gets weather forecasts from the NWS, and, if it looks like there's going to be very cold weather, automatically activates heating elements wrapped around pipes to keep them from freezing. Or how about a tablet-like device in the kitchen that constantly pulls pricing data from supermarkets and tells you when and where your often-purchased groceries are on sale. And, although streaming video is nothing new, perhaps someone with an elderly family member living alone might want a continuous stream from their house--a low-res one when no one is in front of the camera, but one that ups the bitrate when someone comes into view. And, speaking of remote locations, people might want to access local newscasts from places where important events are taking place. And while that's possible in some places and often at low bitrates, if you kick that up to an HD broadcast onto a 55' TV, now you're talking more bandwidth. Then, while mom is watching that, dad is in another room, watching a movie, one kid of doing video chat with a friend, another is surfing the Web, and, in the background, the DVR is pulling down two HD movies that the family plans to let the kids watch in the car on an upcoming road trip.
The point is, all of these services require bandwidth, some of them more bandwidth than others. And while many people still use their broadband connections for Web surfing, that's changing, and it will keep changing.
And no, people don't want service that's priced insanely high, but saying that this means demand isn't there is ridiculous. That'd be like me opening the only pizza place in town and then saying that there's no demand for extra-large deluxe pizzas, never mind the fact that I'm charging $50 for them. |
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rebus9
join:2002-03-26
Tampa Bay Reviews:
 ·Verizon FiOS
·Bright House
| reply to IowaCowboy
Re: 1 Gbps is overkill said by IowaCowboy:50/10 is more than enough for residential use. The only users who need 1 Gbps are businesses and web servers. So you speak for everyone?
There are plenty of us who strongly disagree with you.
I graph my home usage and track 95th percentile. My usage is significantly higher at home than most of the business locations my $DAYJOB manages. (all of which are monitored with Solarwinds NPM) |
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| reply to Fleeced
Re: Missing the point 100% of customers would notice an improvement with 1Gb/s. It's not like TW Standard is 500Mb/s symmetrical: download is far from instantaneous, and upload crawls. |
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| reply to ISurfTooMuch
Re: Availability will create demand and services Hate to burst your bubble, but nothing you listed requires a gigabit symmetrical connection. Standard would handle most of that fine.
Higher speeds are going to be more required as more and more TV moves to the internet, downloading and possibly streaming games becomes more common. Those are your high bandwidth elements that normal people would use on a daily basis. The only one of those that might be soon is the TV over the internet using higher quality streams. Gaming downloads are common, but not gaming streaming (Dunno if that ever will).
Even high res TV streams wont' require anything near a gigabit data connection. 100mbit would handle 5 or 6 tvs with ease. |
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| Wow Look at all the naive and short sighted people standing up for cable companies. How pathetic.
The history of technology shows us time and time again, that short sighted people stand around surmising that the technology they have today is all anyone will ever need.
You all say that today, there is no need for 1gbps. And that shows how ignorant you are. Of course there is no need, because nearly NO ONE has that kind of speed available.
You don't develop some technology for something that doesn't even exist.
You can rest assured that once 1gbps IS available to the masses, there will be services that will take advantage following right along.
Most of you come off as cable company shills, and it wouldn't surprise me one bit, frankly. |
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| I'm not being short sighted. There could very well be a need for a gigabit symmetrical connection. Unless there is a huge upset and change in technology, I don't see the the need for gigabit in the next 10 years.
The technology exists for high speed bandwidth. Netflix sending data to a cache server is one need. A consumer does not have that need right now. There is nothing even remotely close to having that need. Normal users have trouble filling current bandwidth issues right now. Servers aren't even really offering data out at those speeds yet. |
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