Local joke of a cable co has a 20GB cap on their crappy 3Mb connection! While
Verizon's DSL is same speed, same price, and no cap that I've hit with over 250GB of
traffic per month. While I get pretty consistent 300KB/sec downloads there are
times/days where it crawls which likely has more to do with Verizon's laxadasial
style of maintaining the in-town infrastructure. Of course we're in the mountains of
eastern WA (literally on the ID border) and just 45mi to far to be covered by QWest
or Comcast, hell we can't even get natural gas because the pipeline stops 5mi across
town at the ID border.
Some of my customers live outside Newport and are forced to either go satellite or
dial-up which is hell doing service calls that require downloading! PUD (the power
co) is testing FiOS like service utilizing dark fiber from their SCADA network, hope
it gets to us soon! There is also a project to employ a long-range WIFI like setup to
the remote areas outside town but I don't have much hope for that since it's likely
geared towards wide-area coverage not high-bandwidth.
My 1st thought when I heard Comcast was offering faster speeds, well after "sigh, I
miss my 8Mb connect in NJ", was "What, so customers can hit the cap faster?". :)
Funny quote from the linked article:
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/cable-tries-keep-command-crucial/story.aspx?guid={DA7E726D-A8AD-41E6-A051-4D2C5B5FC33D}
'"We have an enhancement to our network called DOCSIS 3.0 that doesn't even flip the
dollar needle that people have historically associated with cable upgrades," said
Cox's Clement.'
Funny, IMHO truth is it's the GATEWAY bandwidth stupid, not "last mile" clogged
nodes, that cost providers so much money they want to punish the "fat man at the
buffet" and end net neutrality! Meanwhile gateway bandwidth pricing has to be
dropping given: 1. amount of dark fiber, 2. demand for bandwidth from more
households, 3. revenue from those households. I still remember the panties-in-a-bunch
comments on ISP lists 10 years ago about "how can customers be given 1.5~3Mb connects
for $40 that cost $1500+?", but it obviously was doable. Seems a good analogy to
bandwidth is HDD capacity, what would happen to the market if when density/capacity
increased from MB to GB and the vendors still wanted to keep on charging the same $/MB?
Don't even get me started on other business models like cell phone co's where they
monetize everything like ring tone installs, getting pics off your phone, and SMS/MMS
despite no or lower costs than digital voice to provide? It should be charged from
your minutes based on how much network time it takes. Never mind the 1st two services
can be accomplished via USB cable if they did not cripple the phone's firmware
(Verizon, GUILTY!).
</rant off!>
Greg Sevart wrote:
I think that's the point--get people that use more b/w to switch to business
class services.
I think it's working. I have a residential 15/1 connection from Time Warner
that I'm about to switch to biz-class 15/2, and a 6/768 business-class ADSL
subscription. The ADSL runs a couple servers and is my backup connection. My
biggest reason for switching the cable over too is because my node is
congested, and I may only get 5mbit during peak hours. Their biz-class
services have prioritization, so I should see 15/2 pretty solid.
I fully expect other providers to start implementing caps as well. Time
Warner is experimenting with a 30GB(!) cap in a few trial areas--another
reason I just want to switch to biz-class and be done with it.
