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cork1958
Cork
Premium Member
join:2000-02-26

cork1958 to KingKuei6

Premium Member

to KingKuei6

Re: It's not that bad...

said by KingKuei6:

I'm paying $78/month for Comcast's DOCSIS 3 tier from which I get 22mbps/5mbps on non-PowerBoosted state (30/10 when PB is active), which I don't think is necessarily unreasonable given the capabilities that the speed provides for.
Personally,
Paying $78 for ANY internet speed is stupid!! Granted, I know if you want to go faster, you pay more, but if you're so greedy you have to start paying THAT much for internet, that's beyond my reasoning capabilities!
KingKuei6
join:2002-11-18
Union City, CA

KingKuei6

Member

And no offense, but you basically fit into the average population of a provider's subscriber base. If your sense of reasonable price is say $30/month, then that's what the providers have to target. If that means providing 3.0mbps max, then that's what you'll get. There are others who are paying $100-$130 for even faster connections. Verizon DSL meets your needs; fine. Perhaps you don't have any uses for a faster pipe, but others do. That doesn't make us greedy, it just means that we have applications or content that require it, such as 3-way video conferencing, large batch uploads, VOIP, etc.

Let's face it though. You can go get 56k dial up for $5 a month. It takes you to the same Internet, right? Why not just pay for that instead of whatever you're paying now: $13, $20, $30+ for DSL? But obviously webpages are no longer just static lines of text with cheesy clip art graphics. Now it's rich content with images and videos and ads. So you needed a faster pipe, because waiting 78 seconds for the NYTimes to load on 56k is painful when it might take just a few seconds on a faster connection. Waiting 1 hour to download a program like Adobe Acrobat is probably not an experience worth having on 56k. So you see, at some point content will necessitate the need for a bigger pipe. The hope is that BEFORE that happens, those faster pipes will have already made it to the average consumer at a price point that they average consumer is willing to pay.

But my point was that the service providers are EXPECTED to provide this service, but the marginal revenue generated from lower cost services, means that they need wide user adoption in order to recoup and offset the massive costs of infrastructure development. But content is moving far quicker than infrastructure at this point, and I was simply trying to drive in the issue of sustainability of the current business model. At some point, something major is going to have to change if we're to keep up.