Comcast/etc....

[Bradley Miller]

>Imagine cable companies offering digital cable channels and faster
broadband at competitive prices. ;-)

Herein lies the rub for all these types of things.  Bandwidth costs money.
 Right now I have 10+ PC's all on my DSL for my home office.  I pay a
higher premium for my DSL service (but not as expensive as SWBell would
charge) to have my service.   At most, my wife might be surfing while I am
working and perhaps down the road my son will be online also.  Big deal.
Are the cable companies really that worried about that type of traffic . .
. probably not in all honesty.   It's when we all start to decided to snag
the latest MP3's, movie trailers or whatever from the net that things get a
little hairy for bandwidth.   

How would you deal with it from a business perspective?   Each month you
get ?? cable channels or dish channels and you probably don't watch more
than one at a time . . . yet you pay for the option of doing that.
Unfortunately bandwidth isn't fixed quite like that . . . but what if it
was?   What if they metered your speed.  You want more speed, you pay more.
  Do you think $40/month is reasonable for the typical bandwidth a home
could suck down?   Now picture something as simple as a subdivision in
terms of bandwidth.  Look at any typical MRTG graph and you'll see exactly
why companies have to look at what they're doing.  Do you put in enough
bandwidth everywhere to handle that crush?   How many ISP's have made money
by having a 1:1 dial up ratio? 

Personally, I think they should have metered bandwidth with pricepoints for
different levels of data connections.  I'm not saying have a
"20gig/$50/month" limit, more like a window for download speeds.  If you
have one PC, do you need more than 400K/sec?   A tiered pricing structure
would give people the best of both worlds.

What about metered pricing though?  Every other commodity is priced that
way.  We buy a gallon of gas, get water based on so many thousand gallons
and electriciy is by the kilowatt/hour.   Why not bandwidth?   Would your
download habits change?  If the price was right I could see a minimum
connect charge (say $15/month) and then a $??/gig transfer fee.  Will
people yell?  Yes -- they are to used to the "give me all I can get"
mentality.  The Internet "metality" is free, but somewhere along the line
someone forgot to mention that the infrastructure has to be paid for
somehow.   We'd all love a 6 lane highway from KC to St. Louis, but once we
realize who's paying for it . . . 

The new 3G wireless phones are on the brink of coming out -- but how do you
price them?  Do you think they're honestly going to let someone tie a cell
and bandwidth to be "Mr. MP3 Jukebox" for 1/2 the country?   

-- Bradley Miller