Ah yes, but why, after a pile of telecommunications companies went bankrupt laying thousands of miles of buried fibre-optics cables are we still talking about dial-up connections? What *does* it cost to deliver high speed? For that matter, I think copper/fibre is pass�. It should be possible to use wireless and it ought to be dirt cheap. When Mediaone delivered cable-modem service in our area they thought they'd be doing well if they got a 3% penetration. One of their techs told me that in fact they were achieving 17% and higher depending on the town they were operating in. I know there has been a big improvement in the speed of connections over the last few years but we're not exactly using 110 baud modems anymore are we? Should I expect to pay $100k for a shiny 2.8 gig P4 computer? Ah the good old days, not!
-Alex P.S. What we're seeing here is a consolidation of providers who can get away with high prices because they are monopolies. Verizon hasn't exactly pushed DSL and most of the companies that depended on them to provide the lines were driven out of business. These guys really aren't competing. I saw a discussion on the Libranet mailing list recently where some Canadians were relating the cost of DSL and cable-modem in their areas. They were paying about 1/3 of what we pay. ----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Greater NH Linux User Group" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, January 22, 2003 7:00 PM Subject: Re: Email hosting (was: ATTBI/Comcast rant) On Wed, 22 Jan 2003, at 5:18pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I'm not willing to pay increasingly large monthly fees for progressively > poor service. It continues to amaze me how short people's memories are. It was not long ago at all that an Internet feed of the speed you get from a cable ISP would cost you thousands of dollars per month. Not that I am in any way defending the AT&T/Comcast monopoly; I just don't understand how anyone can see a 3000% price reduction in the space of five years and wonder why service suffers. Did "cheap, reliable, fast Internet access" get added to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" when I wasn't looking? :-) I'm still stuck on a rather undependable 28 kilobit dialup. Nothing better is available where I live. I would *love* the chance to complain about how bad my Verizon or Comcast Internet service is. And I know I'm not alone on this list in that. -- Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do | | not represent the views or policy of any other person or organization. | | All information is provided without warranty of any kind. | _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
