6Mbps DSL for $45 > Great Deal -- Beats $100 for same thing from SBC

reply to ronpin

Re: Great Deal -- Beats $100 for same thing from SBC

Yep, typically SBC has offered thier service $10 cheaper than others.
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Shoot Straight, Fly Crooked

reply to reelbigfish

said by reelbigfish:

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SBC's current price promos end Feb. 2nd, so I bet you will see some great deals on that day from SBC.

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Just be mindful SBC has been known in the past to oversell their network. You might want to check usage during peak hours, otherwise you might end up with empty bandwidth promises.

reply to gaforces
I would say that SBC might me able to sell at or lower than these offers that DSLExtreme and Sonic.net, most likely between the two, but SBC won't give you static IP's, which falls in line with thier pricing. So for a residential, dynamic IP account, you might be able to get 6Mbps/608kbps for $50-$55, which is not a bad deal considering it is faster than most cable companies offer.

Yep, I'm guessing $55-60 for their expert+ also. And I bet the expert plus static will be $120 or more. UGH. And if my 1.5/256/static remains $80/mo while people are getting 4x the bandwidth for $60/mo, that will irritate me enough to make me leave SBC. Charging for static service is one thing, but gouging the customer is another. I'm already reluctantly paying $80/mo for 1.5/256 with static IPs, but that would be a slap in the face

I'm betting there will be a static discount too. I'm not a reseller but I can make assumptions based on the pricing that the resellers have been offering. SBC appears to give resellers different pricing for static and dynamic connections and thus far all of the deep discounts have only been for dynamic IP (although you can in general get a static IP from a reseller much cheaper than SBCIS).

But in the case of DSLExtreme's 6000/608 plan, the static and dynamic pricing is the same. Since they're reselling static IP cheaper, they may have a plan in mind for their own ISP also.

If we have to hedge bets, I'm gonna guess $45 from SBC, to compete with Cable's 45.95.

-- Rob
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\\ROB - a part of the SCB local network

reply to SRFireside

said by SRFireside:

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Just be mindful SBC has been known in the past to oversell their network. You might want to check usage during peak hours, otherwise you might end up with empty bandwidth promises.

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Re: Great Deal -- Beats $100 for same thing from S

said by Nightfall:

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I don't think I have met a broadband provider that doesn't oversell. Henceforth, the mixed reviews on EVERY broadband provider.

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That is some really good marks. Very few peaks.

reply to DaneJasper
Since you are into posting usage figures, I'm very curious about what kind of impact you're expecting to see from customers who go for your 6mbps deal. I've said many times that quadroupling available bandwidth should not come close to doubling the traffic that one consumes. However, these 6mbps circuits give a lot of potential for some serious bandwidth suckage!

For instance, when I had 4000/384, the total amount of I transferred isn't much different from what I transfer with 1500/128. I just did the same operations faster. But there will be people that just download everything in site because they can. And, it would only take 24 people downloading at full speed (~5mbps) to max out one of those 120Mbps OC-3, as opposed to the 92 (~1.3mbps) that it takes now. Can you afford to upgrade more rapidly to meet 6mbps demands (if they are actually much greater), even with what's seemingly a much lower margin?

Just very curious to hear what you think, since not too long ago you posted in a thread about "buying 6 mbps of transit" ( »Why is 1.5-6/384 service so darn expensive ) Have transit costs gotten cheaper to make such a deal work out better now? Sorry to ask so many questions, I just am very interested to find out what's triggered the sudden "generosity" and price drops from broadband providers in general. Thanks!
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\\ROB - a part of the SCB local network

reply to Sarick
There are providers out there you make sure they have bandwidth to spare, that's for sure. I worked at two local ISP's who did that. One made sure they had enough bandwidth so that even if all their customers (residential and business) blasted the max their would still only be 75% saturation of total available bandwidth. The other had it at about 50% saturation. The big boys are probably the ones who will likely oversell their bandwidth in certain areas. Like Nightfall said it's better to check the ISP in question on how they handle your area. SBC at one time only had 3 T3's to handle ALL of their customers in the Austin area.

reply to djrobx
It's a combination of two items. The first is that, as you point out, most folks don't consume more just because they have more. They get done faster whatever they were planning to do, but generally consume a fraction more bandwidth.

The average DSL customer on our network today uses about 1% of the bandwidth of their link. If this were to double with 6.0Mbps customers, that would still be a small amount of bandwidth.

The other factor is that inbound bandwidth has gotten really cheap to pick up at big transit facilities. Through our interconnections at various facilities in the Bay Area, we can get inbound megabits for silly cheap prices. Of course, we've still got to have an appropriately sized ATM uplink, and keep that from filling up, so there's some management to be done there.

Also note that SBC-ASI ATM OC-3 circuits are limited to 6000 PVCs - but with 6000 typical DSL customers on the link, we're finding that the bandwidth of the OC-3 (which should be 155Mbps, but is really 120Mbps after all the ATM overhead) generally gets utilized at less than 75%, even at peak!

The combination of these factors along with introductory promotional loop pricing from SBC-ASI is allowing us to get down to these new prices.

Hope that helps!

-Dane