said by moneyman12 :I think anon anon math may be off, but he's on the right track. All the math you guys are doing is as if the charged price is pure profit. There is a cost to providing internet. Say the break even point is $25. so every $30 customer is making charter $5 and every $50 customer in making charter $25.
This assumes that the underlying philosophy of U.S. business is cost-based pricing; but I see more evidence that the underlying business philosophy is a monopolistic: "Charge what the traffic will bear".
Back when I first was hooked on
anime (Japanese animation), I was mystified by the fact that VHS tapes with English dubbed voice overs were ~$5 cheaper than the same show with English subtitles. Surely the only difference in production costs were the extra cost of the English voice actors, so the dubs should cost more, not less.
And assuming a "break even point" of $25 must mean that my current ISP will be going belly-up this year; they seem to think that they can turn a profit on an Internet charge of just $19.98 per month. Yet they are deploying FTTP in Sebastopol, California, and will start further deployment in San Francisco "RSN".