RR User
@rr.com
| reply to nukscull
Re: Time Warner = stupid
Well the cable companies here in the US are saying it's closer to $100, but it's somehow being done in many other countries for much less.
Sure if you, Joe the consumer go out to the store to buy a modem, it will easily cost you $50 for that modem, because you have to pay retail mark up. TW however, does not and I'm sure they get a reasonable discount since they can easily order a very large volume of modems at any given time. Things always cost much less in volume, so who's going to save more? Joe purchasing 1 modem, or TW ordering > 100,000?
I'm not asking for TW to drop everything they are doing and deploy DOCSIS 3.0 to 100% of their footprint in one month. I understand network upgrades take time and that it could take years for TW to deploy DOCSIS 3 across most of their network. All I'm say is they could at least get started.
I sure wouldn't build a next generation network tomorrow, and then 10 years down the line when customer demand outpaces my network capacity simply throw up my arms and say "I give up" and tell everyone to slash their usage or pay fines because I'm to cheap to give a damn about upgrading the network. That's just irresponsible.
I have no problem with TW making a profit, but how much is too much? They already have a 2700% profit margin on their RR service, and that's with the current flat rate model. Are they aiming for 5000%? How do you feel about paying 27 or even 50X more for your internet service than it's really worth? Maybe a few years from now we can look forward to paying $200-300 a month, just for our internet usage which actually only costs a few dollars a month to deliver, and by then it wouldn't even cost that much since bandwidth costs continue to drop. We've now entered the era of never ending price increases and profit margins.
I have no problems paying $40-50 a month like I do now, and TW's financial data shows that the cost of keeping their network online is in decline, not increasing as they claim. I don't know what kind of BS they are trying to feed us, but I know the truth.
I would support metered billing as long as it was fair. And by that I mean charging $30 a month for say a 10 Mbps pipe, and then bill all usage at 5 cents per GB. No caps, no limits, just bill usage starting with the first gigabyte at 5 cents a gig. That way, grandma would likely only pay $30.05, while Joe across the street may watch Netflix movies all month, and end up paying $40. That's how metered billing is suppose to work. Everyone pays for their fair share of network resources. If such a system existed, then all you would simply do is offer a few different baseline packages, where the only difference is the speed at which you connect and everyone pays the same, reasonable per GB rate for their bandwidth use. |
