price creep continues - BellSouth → Don't kid yourselves if you don't think...

Broadband prices will not be rising across the board.

They have been artificially low far to long, especially in light of many users gluttony. (always on equaling full blast 24/4...NOT)

Your kidding right? Always on is meaningless unless your downloading data. My computer was always on all day. But all it ever did was check email every 15 minutes. Thats nothing.

Prices were NOT artifically low, prices were fair. Now the companies want to gauge us like all the other industries. THey want HIGH return on investement in a field where the return is moderate to low.

Internet companies should remain internet comapnies, not try to return cash like other industries.

Forget DSL. Im back down to ISDN 64K at $12/month/. Thats good enough for me. Ill do my massive downloads from work. It sucks, but im not playing this money game. $40 a month is about double what most people were already paying for internet service, dont forget that. so its not a $5 increase, its a $25 increase for new recruits.

said by dnoyeB:

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Your kidding right? Always on is meaningless unless your downloading data. My computer was always on all day. But all it ever did was check email every 15 minutes. Thats nothing.

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I can understand, and appreciate your viewpoint on this, but always on is beneficial for some people above and beyond this. If you want to make a service available on the 'net, you pretty much have to have an always on static IP connection. I have Linux on my home machine and can telnet (actually ssh) into it to do work on it from work or other places on the Internet. This wouldn't be possible without an always-on connection (incidentally, I'm currently doing this with a static IP on an ISDN dial-up that nails up the connection, not broadband)

said by dnoyeB:

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Prices were NOT artifically low, prices were fair. Now the companies want to gauge us like all the other industries. THey want HIGH return on investement in a field where the return is moderate to low.

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Actually, I would agree that prices were too low given the nature of the plans offered (and before Abe Froman and rmarynowski jump all over my case, I'll remind them that I never asked for low prices, I just asked for a level playing field .

Jeff

I'll repeat yet again: $40/month is a price point chosen to attract a certain percentage of consumers. If you raise the price beyond that, it matters not how much capacity you provide (it could be 100M Ethernet-to-the-curb), you won't attract more market share than a certain amount (perhaps 40% of households).

AOL, Earthlink and all the independent ISPs have demonstrated already how much market penetration you can achieve with a $20/month price point. It's not much different from what the cable companies have demonstrated for 20 years with their typical $20/month basic-cable tier of service.

Therefore I say it's stupid to assume $40/month is artificially low. It's not enough to pay an ILEC, a DSL wholesaler, an ISP, and the tax authorities each a slice of the pie. But you can't raise the price by a lot and still get a customer base. The price is the price is the price. Ya gotta find a way to make money at that level, or whatever it reaches as inflation eats away the value of the dollar. The current trend toward $50 is attributable to two causes: raw inflation and loss of competition.

It won't go much higher than that.

One other point to refute: power users hogging resources. Doesn't happen once you've got a large enough customer base. Six years ago I was hawking T1 circuits to corporate users. If I landed a sale, I could count on traffic utilization on my backbone almost immediately going up by about a megabyte. The only early-adopters of costly T1 circuits were those who really needed the bandwidth. Nowadays, average utilization of a T1 is much lower. As the market grows, people tend to buy more capacity than they need. Other examples: those 750-hour AOL accounts; those 1000-minute cell-phone contracts. But I digress.