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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GraceZ who wrote (933)	10/3/2000 1:03:11 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

Graciella, Bella, Over the weekend I met with a partner of mine in Connecticut who is using HDSL on a managed network service. He's paying for QoS on his business access line, in other words. He showed me a link to a server in Ohio that had training videos on it for his staff, and I could hardly believe the quality I was experiencing. Super. Several months ago, a similar test using ISDN came up yukky pooh. When things come up yuk, you don't use them. Whey they are super, you use them all the time, to the point that they become self-accelerating phenomena. And when they are yuk, they likewise tend to reduce demand, which keeps overall traffic levels low. Save VoD for the Interactive STB channel, don't put it on the internet access link. That's another way to achieve the same end right? And then charge extra for it. Good for stockholders, if the strategy works. Never good for end users, though. As opposed to making it available on the regualar cable modem downlink. These guys know what they are doing. This is the psychology behind the throughput caps and tiered approaches now being enforced. Make it painful enough (either by allowing sluggishness to be experienced, or by increasing the fees charged for faster speeds <yes, there is more to it, I know>), and the situation will govern itself down to levels where capacity doesn't have to be added. Heck, if bandwidth is near free, why hold it back... when, by holding it back you discourage its use in the first place? Then again, maybe bandwidth isn't all that free, after all? Or, maybe some operators are just afraid that if they experiment with something that by their standards is radically new, that it will be successful and they will go through a free fall experience and not know how to deal with it? FAC

To: GraceZ who wrote (933)	10/3/2000 1:26:27 AM
From: ftth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

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.

To: GraceZ who wrote (933)	10/3/2000 8:44:05 PM
From: MikeM54321	Respond to of 46821

"Maybe they are waiting for the real deal or maybe the demand in the residential market just ain't there yet. What are they waiting for ......Christmas?" Grace- Well you just hit the nail on the head. CM and DSL are going to be around for a very long time. That's about all the SPs can upgrade to for customers who have a hard time paying more than $20/month for anything beyond dial-up. $40/month is already reaching the ceiling. -MikeM(From Florida)