Time Warner Makes Feeble Attempt to Counter Google Fiber Buzz → Re: Time-Warner for the Win!

Which has no bearing whatsoever on the original statement that "few people are willing to pay $70/mo for internet service".

And, it's actually $25/mo, for 12 months, then "free". I put quote marks around "free" because I'm sure Google is data-mining the hell out of these connections (likely the $70/mo tier too) like they do with their other "free" products.

You sound like a politician by submitting a statement and then focusing on one line of your statement:

"Call him a shill if it makes you feel better about yourself, but the reality of the situation is that many consumers will not pay $70/mo for an internet connection. There's a reason why relatively slow but cheap DSL bundles remain popular. There's a reason why Time Warner offers a 1.5/384 product for $20/mo in my market. They don't advertise it, it goes around via word-of-mouth, or comes from retentions, but it's been available for as long as I can remember."

In you Statement you do say that "that many customers will not pay $70/mo for an internet connection" but then you go on to comapare (whether you wanted to or not) Googles highest tier with Time Warners lowest tier. Which cannot be done, you would need an apples to apples comparison of lowest tier to lowest tier ($20/mo 1.5Mbps to $25/mo 5Mbps).

And anyone who heard Google was getting "into" the ISP business even if only temporarily and DIDNT think that they would be mining all of your data regardless of the price of their service has never paid ANY attention to google in the first place.

Legally, I dont think google can datamine your personal connection, as it could be considered illegal wiretapping, and they would probably not take that risk. Now, the websites you choose to visit can have a script running that datamines you, but your ISP cannot legally monitor your web activites. They need a court order to do so, and they only keep very limited logs outside of that because of the prohibitive cost of storing thousands of things about each customer. Most ISPs just maintain a log of what modem has what IP, and whos account that modem is linked too, and they only store those for a few weeks to a few months at a time because those little points of data for 10000 customers, all with dynamic IPs, yea, that gets a bit huge.

Your critique of my post would have more impact if you proof-read it for spelling and grammatical errors.

No comparison between Google's product and any other product was intended. The statement was "many consumers will not pay $70/mo for an internet connection", which is true, regardless of who the provider of that connection is.

Google's "free" tier may attract some converts, and it's certainly nice of them to offer it, but it really has nothing at all to do with my statement about $70/mo connections. The people willing to pay for the higher DOCSIS/FIOS tiers are in the minority, and I suspect the people willing to buy the $70/mo Google product are as well.

Bash Time Warner all you want, personally I hate them for many reasons, but the truth is that their standard speed tiers are more than ample for the overwhelming majority of internet connections. Realistically, anything >6mbit/s or so is gravy for most people, and the higher end (25mbit/s, 50, 100, etc) tiers are mostly just marketing ploys.

Yeah I missed that one when I fixed the others, and another one as well but I do not want to take all of your fun by pointing it out!

I worked for a smaller FTTH ISP and I agree with the belief that the majority of users stick with the lower end of the speed spectrum. On our end it was mostly because of the cost, but with talking to the customers themselves, even if we were to lower the cost they would still stick with around the 10Mb range at the most.

On another note, I think what would be more beneficial on the Google impact to the industry would be less of the speed increase and more of a price decrease. I would rather keep the 10Mb or so service I have for a lower cost then get a higher speed at a higher cost (but still relatively cheap in comparison to other providers). Now that is for my typical household usage, if I needed more speed I would order it, but that is my two cents.

Umm, they read your e-mails.....It's not that much data at all:

DATETIME - 8 bytes
IPADDRESS - 16 bytes (actually only 4 for IPV4, but why not future proof it for IPV6)
CUSTOMERNO - indeterminate, call it 8 bytes to make the total a round number of 32, though an efficient table design could get away with a 4 byte value, since that would allow for >4 billion references to a customer table.

In reality IP addresses don't change that often, but let's say they change once a day, for ten million customers:

10,000,000 x 32 = 305.17 megabytes

That's nothing in this day and age. A terabyte would give you nearly ten years worth of logging, and likely more than that, since I'm being conservative with my numbers here.

That isn't going to happen, for better or worse. There are fixed costs a provider has to absorb that will not decrease simply because technology allows for faster transmission speeds. Outside plant maintenance doesn't cost less when you can push more bits across the infrastructure. Your employees won't accept lower salaries as the transmission technology matures. Insurance costs don't decrease, nor do property taxes, or pole rental fees. I could go on all day, but you get the point.

Companies that can offer a Triple Play have incentive to offer a slower "lite" tier as a loss leader of sorts, since you've got other services with them to help pay for the aforementioned expenses, and it doesn't cost them much at all to give you the internet connection. That's not much of a consolation prize though, is it?

Hmmmmm...I kind of agree with you there, but I still think it could be done. BUT that would depend on what reasonable or "inexpensive" is defined as...Do you go for a lower price and get quantity vs. quality (aka WalMart) or do you go with higher price with higher quality and hope you get enough customers. It would also depend on what your acceptable ROI would be. And you cant forget the Shareholders!

I currently pay $40 + applicable taxes and fees (the taxes that AT&T doesn't want to pay) for a 3-6Mbps speeds. Whereas at my old company we charged 29.95 for 5Mbps FTTH connection (which I am sure people here would think is still to high). I am not looking for a company to give me 10Mbps for the low low price of 19.95! But I do know that upgrades on the networks are getting cheaper, optics are coming down, switch prices are coming down, and you can amortize the hardware anyways and do the magic tax shuffle that all large corporations can do at the drop of a hat!

I think I have gone off on a separate tangent on the topic, but I think prices can come down, and Google coming in and forcing the price down of the higher end service should have the other prices come down as well. Probably a pipe dream, but here is to hoping!

They only read your Emails if your dumb enough to use their email service, and at that, even that is currently illegal in the USA. Your email are considered private until they are 180 days old, or unopened, or in the face of any government agent or official.

Im sure its more than 305MB/day if it were logged, and hardware to do so isnt free, thus, why ISPs probably have smaller HDDs and just simply log the most recent few. Keep in mind, those logs would likely show general chatter between the CMTS and the modem as well, and then anything else they are set up to log. We all know corporations are excellent at wasting money by inefficiencies.

Okay, but they are out there. Here is an excerpt from my latest bill:

quote:

---

Fusion Broadband Information - STI-00xxxxx-0 0.00 0.00
Data $19.97 Voice $19.98

---

And a speedtest:

If you are a simple internet user who doesn't do much to care about privacy, or is a gamer, you probably don't even give a damn about whether google is data mining you or not.

But meh, Western Culture is all about 'privacy' and 'human rights' when they clearly aren't even respected by their peers.

Saying that people are not willing to pay 70/mo is about the same thing as arguing that "I am always right, and my ears are plugged, la-la-la-la I CAN'T hear you say it isn't".

Also, it's not that people are not willing to pay 70/mo, it's because they can't afford 70/month.

There's a huge difference between not wanting a high speed internet for 70/month over not being able to afford a high speed internet for 70/month.

Also, there is a lie within the low cost scope of ISPs.

Nobody said that buying a cheap internet to use would remain cheap.
The ISPs would continuously abuse their customers so long as they remain with them if they so like.

That's where bandwidth cost, modem rental cost, etc. comes into play...

For time Warner cable you have lite, basic, standard, turbo, extreme and ultimate

Speeds range from half a meg upload to 50+ upload....

So, standard which is a download of 10 and upload 1 cost alone nearly 54USD... want 20 up and 2 down well then your looking at 75USD approx...

And dont forget the modem lease fee of 3.95 to help pay to expand and update their networks... but publically they admitted to stock holders cost for network upgrades and such have dropped over the last three years or so...

And realistically I used to get alot of senior citizen calls at twc who couldnt live with internet speeds less than 10 down...

Realistically google is offering alot for less...

It's sad when time Warner cable was trying to bribe and i do mean bribe employee's to report any gossip about google fiber to them for money and electronic equipment 'rewards'.

twc has the most notorius internet service...

I mean 3.95 modem lease fee's and the modems arent even new!!!

We were told in a training that 'only' signature home accounts get new equipment all other consumer accounts the equipment was 2nd hand...

thats how the company values your business and people love them for it... scary.