Recently, we’ve seen a number of high-speed broadband developments that are worth a second look.
According to online reports, some Cablevision customers have been surprised to learn that they’ll pay one-time fees to connect to the cable company’s much-discussed 101 Mbps Internet access service. The fee isn’t mentioned in the press release announcing the service – and it’s a whopper, $300.
Cablevision customers will pay a $300 activation fee for the new tier of service. They also will be charged a one-time “professional installation fee” of $34.95. These fees are in addition to the $99.95 per month service charge.
Observes Karl Bode at Broadbandreports.com, such fees are “certainly one way of managing the added bandwidth demand of such a service.”
Over at Ars Technica, Nate Anderson is also thinking about the demands that very high-speed services place on carriers’ networks, and he warns consumers to consider Internet speed claims carefully. He discusses bandwidth constraints such as shared architecture, number of users and equipment limitations for services including cable, DSL and Verizon FiOS and concludes, “When Cablevision in the US offers 101 Mbps to customers but a DOCSIS 3.0 connection tops out at under 160 Mbps – well, it’s clear that customers won’t get anything like 101 Mbps during peak times.”
I made some of the same points here recently. We believe in high speed connections, and indeed pioneered them. Speeds will continue to rise as consumers demand them. No cable company would be offering anything like 50 Mbps or even 100 Mbps service had it not been for Verizon FiOS pushing the competition. But we also think it’s important to look beyond speed claims to understand what’s involved in delivering these speeds to consumers.
Finally, I see Nate at Ars Technica weighing in on DSL Extreme’s deal to buy fiber service from Verizon and sell a 50 Mbps service for $99. While this is lower than the price for the same service from Verizon in some places, it is more expensive than our price in others. We’ll see how this goes.
It seems to me that what all this means is that the world of high-speed broadband is developing very quickly with some new development every week.
Right now, we think the best thing for most customers is that we improve the upload speeds. Today more and more customers are shooting their own video and sending it around the net. Even grandparents are looking for those faster upload times so that they can take advantage of great real-time video chats with the grandkids across the country.
Upload speeds are almost always overlooked in the latest speed claims from cable. Two-way high-speed Internet is more important than ever, and it’s a development that we’ll be hearing more about in the future.