| Why the high prices? I don't understand the justification of the high prices other than they feel they can get away with it. What resources are being used up faster internet speeds? Other than electrons and photons flying around, what else is there?
Higher hard drive capacity actually requires more "physical" space so there are resources used up to get that space. Does comcast have to pay someone also for the bandwidth they use. |
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patcat88
join:2002-04-05
Jamaica, NY
kudos:1 | said by ossito16:I don't understand the justification of the high prices other than they feel they can get away with it. What resources are being used up faster internet speeds? Other than electrons and photons flying around, what else is there? There are backbone costs (1 gigabit card, 10 gigabit card, SONET cards....). But they are minimal since residential users don't use 100% of their supposed speed, and if they do, you get the termination letters. The different prices for different speeds is similar to CPUs. The reason you can overclock CPUs is because Intel sells CPUs at different price points to make more money. They could just sell 1 or 2 speeds, but more money is made by making really low speed CPUs and really high speed CPUs, and the high speed ones are much more profitable. Manufacturing costs are the same for each BTW. |
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 espaethDigital PlumberPremium,MVM
join:2001-04-21
Minneapolis, MN
kudos:2
 ·Clear Wireless
| reply to ossito16
said by ossito16:I don't understand the justification of the high prices other than they feel they can get away with it. What resources are being used up faster internet speeds? Other than electrons and photons flying around, what else is there? A typical cable plant has 750MHz - 1000MHz of frequency spectrum to work with, and that is shared between video and data services.
Per the DOCSIS spec, upstream is restricted to the 5-42Mhz frequency range. Downstream capacity is added in 38mbps chunks consuming 6MHz of frequency each. Current DOCSIS 3.0 implementations are limited to 4 channel muxing, so max capacity downstream today is 152mbps.
The limits of the physical plant are what make the opportunity cost of the bandwidth high. |
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