On 2003.04.01 08:48 Dustin Puryear wrote: > > I read an interesting article in Network Magazine that discussed something > along these lines. Essentially, the guy was saying that people that > demanded free (or close to free) anywhere access to the Internet needed to > face reality. Someone has to pay for the bandwidth. >
Reality is something you can't escape. $40/month for fast browsing is not selling, despite the billboards, TV adds, monopoly protection and all that jazz. I'd love to see a graph of cable modem uptake with advert campains and policy changes superimposed on it. Here's a breif history of my experience with Cox: 1. Cable guy installs @home modem and puts a T in the line for whenever I get a cable ready TV. He thinks I'm wierd for only wanting cable. 2. About a year later, the inlaws give me the bigest TV I've ever seen. A few weeks later, I bum a length of cable from an installer who's pulling the cable from my neighbor who never paid his bills. I'm shocked to see that nothing at all is blocked, but don't bother to watch it anyway. My wife discovers and loves some kind of animal channel. 3. Six months later, two big dudes knock on the door and ask if I'm watching cable TV. I say that I am. They get angry and tell me that I'm stealing $160/moth worth of calble service. I tell them I have no idea, produce my contract and tell them the story of the T and the install. The contract is unimormative, so they tell me that I'll need to pay $12/month for "basic" cable if I want to plug the TV to it. My wife and I decide that $12 is worth it because we will get the discovery channel. 4. I get Telocity as a trial. Yeah, I've got both cable and DSL, it's sick. 5. Cox removes everything from basic cable but the Catholic and Shopping Networks. We kill our basic service. 6. Restrictions start to crop up on Cox, but I don't notice. Calls for help with poor DNS are met with encouragements to use DHCP, clueless. I learn to use LSU DNS. 7. I move and I'm forced to take a new modem which has blocked ports and upload crimps. An extra $15/month is extracted from me to keep my fixed IP. 8. The lunchbox thing. I ignore it and my service keeps working just fine. Everyone who uses the luchbox loses all service. The lunchbox is win32 only, so I could not use it if I were dumb enough to want to. 9. I learn to run my own DNS. 10. I lose my job. 11. Cox decides to shift the remaining fixed IP people to "comercial" service, the cheapest of which is sub DSL and costs $75/month. I tell them to stick it and go to dial up. 12. Two months later, my mom is sick of not being able to call and gives me Cable for Christmas. 13. Here I sit listening to talk about banning NAT, VPN, SSH and all other useful services so that cable is even less atractive. Details may be missing or out of order. Anyway you slice it, it's all been downhill.
