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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: [funsec] Not so fast, broadband providers tell big users (fwd)
On Tue, 13 Mar 2007, Todd Vierling wrote: Critical mass is approaching. There's only so long that North American consumers can be held back from bandwidth-hogging applications and downloads while parts of the world have long since upgraded to 10Mbit/s bidirectional (and beyond) consumer-grade access speeds. There is the "advertised speed" and then the "*" fine print conditions. Providers in some countries have high advertised speeds, but low usage caps, fair use policies, low actual speeds to different destinations, expensive measured telephone usage charges (i.e. dialup) and various other things which aren't always included in the comparisons. The advertised speeds vary widely around the world in different markets. The actual average consumer speeds are more interesting. Nevertheless, the US is still behind. If many of US consumers were already buying the biggest pipe and were willing to pay even more for even higher speeds; would we be having this discussion? Or is the reality that US consumers are buying lower priced services even when bigger services are available. Several US Providers are very happy to sell 1Gbps and even 10Gbps to anyone in major (i.e. NFL/top 30) cities, but not at $14.95/month. 45Mbps symetrical is readily available from most COs in the US, but again not at $14.95/month. I don't know of any US provider who wants to turn away profitable business. The question is how to make it profitable.
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