re:<<but, I hate to tell you this, I can't even convince some people I know that are heavy Internet users to upgrade from 56k to a cable modem
From an end-consumer point of view, I guess "heavy" is relative...someone that uses some basic text chat forum a la SI, 12 hours a day, would be a heavy user in some people's mind, but in such a case a person would be hard pressed to justify the expense of a cable modem considering SI is equally slow no matter what you use. Probably AOL falls into this same category(?)
Large and frequent downloads of documents, music, "photos" are about the only justifiable reason for a high speed connection today. If the usage of these fall into the entertainment category rather than work-related, even those downloads take some justifying...$500 a year is a pretty steep price to pay just to get a hard disk full of junk.
Some day, when daily use of some more mainstream high bandwidth and/or low latency "stuff" begins to appear--then the demand will pick up and broaden out. The "low hanging fruit" users have (for the most part) already gotten their higher speed connection (or will have something available in the next 6 months or so). After this, there's a huge void in reaching the next set of "fruit." Is lower price alone enough? Lower price may have the opposite effect on shared networks that exist today.
Regarding the cost in that earlier FTTH article there was the following quote:
"Says Beyer: “We charge $18.50 for basic cable, and our competitor, Mediacom, charges $33.50 for a similar service. We also charge just $5 more for high-speed data on a separate line.”
I have a hard time believing they need to undercut it by this much to attract subscribers. Maybe their tech support and service reliability is really poor or non-existent at the moment, and they need some extra perks (i.e. much lower cost) to retain subs. |
