 SSidlovOther Things On My MindPremium
join:2000-03-03
Pompton Lakes, NJ
 ·Optimum Online
| Just applying SMS profitability to ISP Everyone is looking to get something as profitable as SMS text plans on an ISP. Even if it is a very low cost of a few dollars to upgrade per customer, when you have millions of them, it becomes (as they say) 'real money' when added up. So, the companies are looking for an acceptable scapegoat to create a new revenue stream, such as 'heavy users' or P2P. There's no plans for 'light users' since that would/could mean a loss of revenue per household. The meager competition that some ISPs have has been holding the billing prices down for years now without increases. Systems such as CV are very successful with 75% of homes passed using the services. Income is static. (Though in CV's case they dropped $5 of the $15 discount (only if you signed up for the discount, that is.) that they used to give to customers with all three services.) How do you generate more income when your general customer base is not growing anymore and competition light as it is, prevents you from increasing the pricing for existing services? Upgrade your systems more (in a bad ecomomy) and allow them to pay for additional service levels - risky and without a guarantee of 'take-up' or rework the existing billing to make more money?
CV has announced that they are almost complete with their Docsis 3 upgrade at a cost of $300 mill. They also rolled out free wi-fi for their customers at the same time. Since they CAN NOT put their wifi in Manhattan (not their service area), for the most part this is to support the commuters who will mostly find the wifi at their bus/train stations and along the route to NYC and their kids who will use the local shops/community zones that are covered by the service (hopefully saving the parents money on cell phone data plans). Most malls now have free wifi too. Hopefully, for CV this extra service may keep some people from switching to FIOS as it rolls out in the CV footprint, and may in time be a revenue stream, too for non-CV customers.
Metered Internet and computer usage billing isn't new, it's OLD. VERY OLD. When I was in college (70's) I had metered computer time based on the computer class I was taking. We used punch cards and teletypes back then Someone remembered that back in the days of 1200-2400 baud BBS systems like the Source and the original CompUserve (the original system that ran on PDP-10s), that people used to have accounts and pay upwards of $5,000 a year to connect at $25.95 an hour during peak times. That was back in the mid 80's-early 90's, and would be like paying (off the top of my head), $20,000 a year after adjusting for inflation today.
There used to be truism: The Internet (or Compuserve) was only 'fast/responsive' when Monday Night Football or StarTrek was on TV.
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