Report: Broadband Too Expensive For Many

An anonymous submitter writes "This AP article, citing a study from the U.S. Commerce Department, reports that "Almost all U.S. families live in areas where a high-speed Internet connection is available, but many see no compelling reason to pay extra for it." The article mentions a survey that found that "more than 70 percent of dial-up users cited cost as the main reason they aren't upgrading to faster access."" It's much like digital cable - the cable networks ratch up the price for...music channels? But broadband is a chicken - egg problem. You won't get people signing up until they see a reason, and you won't get compelling reasons until more people have signed up.

Re:Broadband cost

[scott1853]

I don't know about DSL, but Time Warner and Adelphia both offer cable modem service for the first 3 months at $20/month.

Not really that expensive...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you spend any decent amount of time online, you really cannot tie up your phone line. This gives you two options: a second phone line or an internet connection that doesn't require a (second) phone line.

Say you get a second phone line. Add the $~15-$20 for the second line to what you're paying for your ISP and you're approaching the $41.95/month that I'm paying for Earthlink (piggybacking on top of Time Warner's cable).

Not a hard choice here in Houston.

Business usage

[briancnorton]

The difference is that a lot of people have broadband access from work, and dont want to go home to cruise the internet they spent all day searching. They may get access, but only to the point where they can get on and do what they want, be it find movie showtimes or check email. There is no compelling reason to have broadband at home if you have it at work. I was on 28.8 service until cable became the cheaper option. (last year)

Re:Chicken and egg my ass

[NDPTAL85]

The telcos are actually losing money right now. If they had loads of money they wouldn't be laying off thousands of workers.

Secondary phone line costs

[DeadBugs]

Many people pay for a second phone line for their dial-up access. When you explain to them that they can get broadband for the same price as the cost of Dial-up and the cost of their second phone line they don't see the cost as an obstacle.

Plus you get the added benefit of a fast connection and the ability to share that connection among multiple computers.

Re:The real problem

[amlutias]

I think the out will be wireless. Consider this plan. A large web provider provides 802.11b points of access all across San Francisco, and offers to sign up people for $20/month. Like someone who really needs to expand their broadband offerings (AOL or MSN, maybe). Shower the consumer with those stupid install CDs and free 802.11b cards. That quickly becomes an easy game for whoever will play.

you clearly know absolutely nothing about 802.11. first, only 3 channels out of 11 (in the US) do not overlap, which means the others are essentially useless. Each user of the shared medium degrades the connections of the others. Any APs operating within range of each other on the same channel similarly degrade performance. Couple that with 2.4ghz's basically shitty penetration characteristics (for something like this, anyway), and it quickly becomes obvious that 802.11 would simply not do what you describe.

Not only that, 802.11b cards are still around $60 retail, at the cheapest, and wouldn't work for reliable access anyway. You'd need some sort of reliable, outdoors friendly non-mobile CPE. Also note that apartment building owners are required in many states to allow you to install satellite tv antennae, but those protections do not usually include simple data transit devices.

Wireless connections for high speed internet don't scale at all.

Re:Broadband cost

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if this is a problem in other markets, but one thing that really bothered me about Digital Cable-specific channels was the piss-poor picture quality! Artifacts abound. Most stations had a picture that was worse than an analog station (which the digital converter just passes through).

Getting Hooked up - Horrific long story

[NetGyver]

Had I known it was so hard getting hooked up on Adelphia powerlink cable modem service, i'd have second guessed getting it myself, I probably wouldn't have gotten it period.

A grunt came to my house and runs a conditioned cable from my cable splitter to the surfboard modem and checks the lights and says "okay, your hooked up. and leaves.

Well I couldn't use the damn thing. No instructions, nothing. So I called Adalphia and after a 2 hour wait, i finally got a real live person to help me get this modem working on my PC.
She asked me if if the modem came with any RJ45 or USB cable...so i run to check the box the modem was in, I had a usb cable, but no RJ45. Like hell i'm using USB for my cable modem so I hung up and ran out and got a rj45 cable.

Came back, called Adelphia, another hour and 45 min wait, then i got another real live person.

So she walked me though hooking it up, and it worked. Only took me the better part of a day to get the cable laid, rj45 cable, tech support waiting, and actually setting it up.

Thay make this shit sound so easy, HA! yeah right.

I also have a personal pc and a laptop alongside the family pc. I orginially hooked up the cable modem to the family pc. I wanted access from all the computers in my house. So being a newbie to broadband i tried plugging the cable modem into each of my computers, and it wouldn't work on any of them, only on the family pc, which i first set it up on.

So I called Adelphia up again. Waited 2 hours and 10 min. then I got a real live person again. I asked how could i share the cable modem to all the pc's in my house. He told me that Adelphia doesn't support sharing to multiple computers. But he asked me if i had a hub. I said yes. (I had a hub for networking at the time) He said some of them allow you to plug the cable modem directly into it. So he said i should give it a try, and we ended the conversation.

I plugged the cable modem in the hub, but no luck. So i did some research on the net with my 56k Since adelphia was no help.

Found out about routers, so i got myself one. Read the instuctions, and hooked all my PC's into it and the cable modem into the WAN side. Nothing, nothing worked.

Another note: For the LIFE of me i couldn't understand why the cable modem only worked on the family PC and not my personal and laptop.

So I called adelphia yet *again* and after waiting for nearly 2 and a half hours I got a real live person again. I told them about my confusion about the cable modem not working on any of my pc's except for the one i hooked it up to. She said:

"Our service is designed to work with any computer." to which i said "if that's the case, then why doesn't it work on my laptop or my other PC?" She didn't have an answer.

She had me running though oddball config files in the windows system directory but nothing worked and i spent well over an hour on that call alone.

At this point it's been days since i had the modem and couldn't use it. Tech support was a freakin JOKE and i'm paying for something i can't use the way i want.

So I called a tech friend, he didn't have broadband but he suggested a very importiant thing. MAC ADDRESS. This made total sense to me, the cable modem latches itself to the mac address of your network card. THATS WHY the modem didn't work on my other PC's when i hooked them up to it.

I checked the router box and sure enough I found a MAC address for the WAN side of the router.

Called up adelphia agian...and waited for 1 hour and 30 min. Then I got a real live person. Told them i got a new network card. (bullshit i know, but they cold-sholdered me about sharing the cable modem) So the guy took the mac address i fed him like a good boy and my router worked!

I can use the cable modem on ALL of my PC's now. My quest was completed in the span of nearly a week after I got the conditioned cable installed.

--

They adervised their cable modem service like it was the easist thing in the world to hook up, you get a "kit" to which you can do it yourself easily.
You know what i got? I got a modem and a conditioned cable..._that_was_it_.

Adelphia has the shittist tech support I ever encountered and hidious call-wait times. They didn't follow through on suppling me a driver CD which the modem was supposed to come with (not like i need it but hey i'm paying for it), it didn't come with instructions, nor a RJ-45 cable. And it was _not_ easy for a general non-geek like me to setup like they claimed.

What did i get. Faster webpage load times, and faster software update downloads, occasional web radio and movie trailers. Hardly worth the cost of the cable modem OR the fustration of setting it up.

Broadband providers need to step-up their support and mean what they say in their advertising before they can even think about getting more users.

But in the end, i felt like I *EARNED* it =) So i'm keeping it. Hopefully something decent will come along that will really put the speed to good use.

Re:That's why Europe is ahead

[zdzichu]

In my case it's significantly cheaper to pay $30/month for unmetered cable internet access,

For me it's 35$/month for unlimited 115,2 kbit connection :-/. But it's real 115,2 kbit - my MRTGs [eu.org].

Other option is (where I use Internet now, during academic year) 15$/month for 128kbit link, with in reality is 2mbit link shared with 80 other persons :-((.

Both of them have hardly outside-poland connectivity. Yep, I live in Poland, in Internet third world.

Good quality 512kbit link starts at 250$/month. Not whole Europe is ahead US in broadband access.

Canadians pay less.

[Inoshiro]

The average broadband cost in Canada is 35$ CDN, or about 20$ US a month. Everyone has it, except for people who can't have broadband due to being out of service ranges.

There are lite (sic) packages which go for 20-25$/month, and provide up to 7k/s down (twice an average 56k for a little more than the 20$ separate line might cost), regular packages hovering around 35-40$, special introduction schemes, etc! The only problem is that there aren't any "pay more for more" high-end packages around. My ISP only offers one, which is about 140$ US a month for 300k/s down, 80k/s up.

A lot of places do meter the access a bit, but mainly in provinces other than the one I'm in.

And the result of all this? Much, much higher adoption rates than in the US. Plus, Canadians have been enjoying broadband since late 1996, so we've had a bit of a head-start in terms of mindshare.

Sure everyone could ahve broadband! Not.

[Shadow99_1]

"Almost all U.S. families live in areas where a high-speed Internet connection is available, but many see no compelling reason to pay extra for it."

Sure that's a nice thing to say, but it's not true... In my area (North Western PA) less than 10% of the area is currently capable of getting any good form of broadband (sure satellite is possible, but sat sucks so I'm not including it). Cable & DSL are almost non-existant... Verizon owns all the phonelines & care only about college business & broadband is done by cablevision (which is part of aol-time warner) who don't care about broadband at al... Adelphia is also in certain limited areas (mostly a chunk of the city of Erie the biggest city within 100 miles in any direction), but they are tiny locally...

I'd sell my mother for broadband, but no ones offering... I've tried to buy a T1 & no one would install one... Verizon won't even support ISDN over the local CO... I've looked into WISP's & other wireless sources (since wired conenctiosn are owned by 3 companies in total that I already mentioned), but none exist & unless we can get something higher than a modem here it's not ever coming... Eventually I found someone who would specifically run a T1 conenction, but they would charge $2000 to run the line & then $800 a month... I was seriously considering it even though it's slower than the versions of DSL offered by Verizon (where you can get it) & is hugely more expensive...

I'm not the only one either, with PS2's & Xbox's (as well as Gamecube's eventually) being able to go online (but only really with broadband) the local market demand is increasing... But no one bothers to care if we'd buy it or not...