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Limbo | reply to espaeth
Re: He said, she said said by espaeth:Normally if you were operating a service where your demand exceeded your annual planline growth budget, you would correct for it by increasing prices to boost revenue to facilitate the additional growth. The problem in the broadband market is that the price increase will tend to drive customers away, specifically your low-use budget-conscious users who provide the balance to keep the high-use customers from toppling the system. Think so? If you're a utility with the same issue there are no price increases without the PSC/PUC approving those plans and that's after significant scrutiny. Does the PSC/PUC have to approve cable broadband price increases? Not that I'm aware of. They have the freedom to do it without nearly as many restrictions as a utility aside from some anemic local franchise boards that are often too uneducated to make reasonable decisions. It may drive customers away, but if they're customers like in many parts of the country, there aren't any reasonable alternatives. They swallow the increase and move on. If a utility can't make their case to the PSC, they cut costs internally to compensate since they don't have the ability to just hike rates on a whim. Haven't seen much evidence that ISPs are doing that aside from outsourcing tech support to India.
said by espaeth: As a bonus, any obvious solution to the problem (be it throttling, ejecting the high-use customers as "abusers", or usage-based billing) is an automatic PR nightmare, largely because sites like these have more of an interest in finding ways to point fingers instead of giving an honest investigation into the situation. I don't recall many cases on DSLReports where there have been major uproars (aside from a few individuals who got booted and threw a fit--which is not representative of the collective DSLReports audience) over customers getting booted for severe abuse of bandwidth. The uproar is over booting customers without telling them what amount of bandwidth will get them booted. Comcast got reamed for it early on but they've made some pretty good strides toward balancing equitable internet use with customer expectations.
Further, many members here have stated they don't have serious concerns about throttling perpetually high-bandwidth users during peak periods to keep things equitable for all their customers. But throttling implemented improperly results in useless tech upgrades. What good is DOCSIS 3.0 if your ISP throttles you to 2Mb/s all the time?
This is about people who know many ISPs are shoveling sh!t when it comes to bandwidth, upgrades, and costs and ISP execs are getting upset because it's threatening their bloated salaries and stock options and pissing off their investors. They're apparently forgetting what their customer base provides them.
It's also been said in many threads on many occasions that something more reasonable on caps would be better accepted. TWC's proposal was ridiculous and many people here and in the general public know that.
I think "sites like these" would provide a more honest investigation if the industry would share their firm numbers proving that the problem the claim exists actually does. Of course they always cite trade secrets or competetive advantage for sitting on that information. Only an idiot is going to blindly accept what a profit-motivated company tells them without evidence to back it up. Paid think tanks and firms who produce "research" to support whatever their client specifies ain't gonna do it.
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Tradition: Just because you've always done it that way doesn't mean it's not incredibly stupid. --despair.com |
