| reply to Rick
Re: Comcasts position on this sounds pretty clear to me said by Rick:And, these speeds would cost us thousands per month if we had to buy these pipes ourselves. Yes, Rick, you are 100% correct on this. But please do realize that, at least in the context of this post, you are only correct in a world where Comcast is the only choice. Of course there are other situations...
However... if you live in an area in the US where you can get ILEC DSL (and Covad still before they get bought out - if they do) you have that kind of connectivity without thousand-dollar pipes; if you live in Japan, South Korea, if you can get Verizon's FTTH... there's no need for thousand-dollar pipes.
Point being, if an ISP sells 6/384 or 20/20 or 50/50 or 100/100 or whatever, that's what's being sold. If a person wants to use it, they use it. That's why they buy it. You either understand that or you don't. If you choose to not use the full capacity of that connection, you're simply not using the full capacity of your connection. You're not subsidizing anyone. An individual should be more than welcome to use the full capacity of the service they have purchased. Yet, however, statistically speaking, 95% of the subscribers choose not to, and that is perfectly fine. The price gets adjusted down, and the bandwidth gets oversold. You're not subsidizing anyone. The primary obligation of the ISP is to deliver that which they advertise. That's not 20/20 .20% of the time. It's 20/20. If the ISP sees that 95% of the subscribers don't use the full capacity, they can go ahead and "overbook", or whatever. If that ratio changes, it's entirely logical that they have an obligation to upgrade to support the new ratio.
There are plenty of situations where you don't need to purchase a thousand-dollar internet connection in order to simply be able to not worry about bandwidth, where you can download and upload terabytes of information and not get cut off -- at residential prices, no less. You buy it, you get to use it. Then again, in those places where this is not the case, you would need to purchase a thousand-dollar internet connection. Many places in Europe, and Eastern Europe, for instance, bill by the byte or megabyte or whatever... so you're only limited by how much money you have (which is the same thing as a thousand-dollar pipe w/o the SLA).
If Comcast is your only choice, then you're stuck with purchasing a thousand-dollar internet connection -- yes, that is 100% true. |
