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

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (20058)	3/7/2007 9:54:39 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Respond to of 46821

Broadband in Argentina now only 50x slower than Japan By Fernando Cassia in Argentina: Tuesday 08 June 2004 [ An interesting metric for tracking progress, eh? ] Service targets the filthy rich theinquirer.net THE LOCALS DOWN here in Buenos Aires were a bit surprised last month to find every street corner, bridge and empty wall in the city covered with adverts from cable modem ISP Fibertel - owned by CATV firm Cablevision - announcing with big fanfare a two megabit cable modem service. This recent move makes Argentina's speedier residential broadband option "only" 50 times slower than the 100Mbit services available in countries like Japan or Sweden, or "just" 22.5 times slower compared to the very popular "YahooBB" service in the "Land of the Rising Sun", which runs at 45Mbit and if my translator didn't mess up, costs less than $40 a month. The adverts for the 2Mbit cable modem include the slogan "from now on, when they talk to you about maximum speed, you will know what they're talking about", a clear reference to ADSL providers, currently limited by the telcos to half and one-fourth of this speed, depending on your location. ADSL vs Cable Last December I reported the move by one of the two local telcos, Telecom Argentina, controlled by Telecom Italia and Argentine family-owned Grupo "W", when it began offering 1Mb ADSL service to residential telephone customers. That service is not only expensive but also limited with a meager 128Kbps upstream speed. So far, the spaniards at Telefonica, the telco serving the southern half of the country (and the southern half of the Buenos Aires metropolitan area -which is home of over 11 million people) have not followed Telecom Argentina's move, so the company is still giving consumers 512Kbps as their fastest offering -again, with a miserable 128Kbps upstream. Two megabits... if you can afford it After seeing so many adverts, I decided to check the pricing of this highly publicised offer. I expected it to be priced low enough to steal 1Mb ADSL subscribers. Boy I was wrong. It turns out that this two megabit cable modem service costs about the same as contracting two 1Mb ADSL lines (with the plus that you have as a bonus two phone lines for voice use, and on cable modem you don't). For downloads at two megabits you get your upstream speed limited to a measly 256K, when one would expect a more reasonable 384 to 640K, and a dynamic IP address. Ready your wallet, as this premium cable modem service will drain $509 pesos + 21% VAT per month from your bank account, which translates to $616 pesos or $207 US dollars/month (112 £ GBP for readers in Blighty). There is also an installation charge of $108.90 pesos ($36.73 USD, or 19 GBP). Who can afford to spend two thousand four hundred eighty four dollars ($2484) per year on broadband?. Not everyone down here, and not this writer, that's for sure. If you manage to maneuver across the firm's Mozilla-hostile, flash-infested site, you can find the details on this cable modem service here, and availability at your location can be checked over there. It should be noted that for much less money, one can often contract a symmetric dedicated IP connection aimed at business that works at 1Mb both ways, from business oriented data carriers like this. Exactly on which planet the cable modem marketers live remains a mystery. µ ------