The Looming Bandwidth Apocalypse > Ability or willingness?

reply to james

Re: Ability or willingness?

You know, the problem I see is that I don't understand why more bandwidth now costs so much more than more bandwidth cost going from dial-up to DSL? Or in home networking, or heck - lan networking.

At home, 5 years ago I was paying ~$40 for a 5 port 10/100 switch. Now I can pay the same (or less) for a 5 port gigabit switch. Now, I understand the scale + cost is higher, but if I was spending $10k on a 48 port switch 5 years ago and I'm going to upgrade and pay (and amortize again over 5 years) $10k I can't imagine that I'm not going to get a similar bump from 100Mbit to 1Gbit...

So how does the bandwidth cost more? I mean, all along the way - of course if you're going to AT&T and they haven't and won't do similar upgrades, they will charge more...

As far as I can tell, it's just that upgrades that had been made right along when we were using modems up through cable/dsl now the companies don't want to do the next round of upgrades at the same cost (actually less real cost due to inflation).
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Opera 9.23(Build 8808); Windows XP Pro SP2;Athlon 64 X2 4600+; 2.5GB PC3200 DDR; 1M/128k DSL; NOD32(Version 2.5.25); Outpost Pro 3;Proxomitron 4.5j Grypen 5/23/07(Opera mod),GPG ID:0x0A1C6EE3

I've always believed the answer to that question (what ever it is) is the only real connectivity problem we have in the country.