This is why I think cable companies SHOULD move to a la carte programming options. If they can show a cable network that only 2% of their customer base is willing to pay $2.50 per month to subscribe to their channel, then maybe the price should come down a little.

As all of this shakes out, I don't believe the cable companies will be the big losers. After all, they own the physical wires that will be used to deliver content to the customer. In whatever form that is, the cable companies will be in a position to monetize that position. What is more likely is that a good two thirds of cable networks will out and out disappear, and no one will care. Broadcast medium is still effective for some kinds of content, so networks showing current event programming, news, live events, and the handful of TV programs that garner millions of simultaneous viewers will still broadcast over traditional mediums. If they want to survive, cable networks should stop burdening themselves with trying to fill time with reruns and infomercials and focus on producing good original content they can sell to the likes of Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, and local cable companies for video on demand delivery.

You gave me a idea. TWC and Comcast could make an effort to provide reliable Internet connection speeds and cable TV service at reasonable prices, honor their contractual and regulatory obligations, and improve customer support. It's just crazy enough to work!

This is a very simple situation. Comcast is a huge company leveraging its position as Internet gateway for approximately 20 million subscribers to get cash from others trying to provide services to those customers. In particular, they targeted Netflix because it competes with Comcast's cable TV and video on demand services.

Capacity was never the problem. The interfaces required to upgrade Comcast's interface with Cogent cost a few thousand dollars. Cogent offered to give Comcast those interfaces for free. Netfilx also offered Comcast free caching servers and a royalty free direct peering agreement that would have slashed congestion on the Comcast-Cogent interconnects and reduced both of their costs dramatically. Comcast wasn't interested.

What Comcast wanted was payola to allow Netflix access to Comcast's subscriber base. Comcast didn't care if that came in the form of Netflix using a CDN (Content Delivery Network), who pay Comcast for interconnects, or for direct payments from Netflix. They just wanted their pound of flesh.

Incidentally, in 2014 Netflix made about 267 million dollars in profit. Comcast made over 8 billion. I don't know what Netfilx is paying Comcast, but it can't be more than a drop in the bucket that is Comcast's approximately 69 billion dollar annual revenue. I suspect this was more about hurting Netflix than it is about protecting their bottom line.

Here are some sources backing up the facts and figures.
http://www.marketwatch.com/inv...
http://www.marketwatch.com/inv...
https://gigaom.com/2013/11/11/...
http://www.multichannel.com/ne...
http://www.practicalecommerce....

I've gotten burned by an Intel SSD. The Intel 320's data loss bug bit me, and that was on a drive that had the firmware patch to fix the flaw.

Never trust a single drive. RAID array is always better because it give you a chance to recover from a disk failure. Then back that RAID array to external storage. Then back up the essential data to off-site storage. With this drive, buy two and do a software RAID-1. With write speed like this you will never notice the performance drop-off.

The cabling wouldn't be much of a mess if if you use something like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

The connection it provided was stable and consistent as an internet connection, and they were very good about the SLA and were on top of outages. They were honestly the best ISP I've ever dealt with. But, we never used it for voice. I imagine they would not have been able to get away with that set up if we had wanted to use it for voice as well.

I felt a little ripped off when I saw how they were presenting us the T1 connection. I would have rather purchased internet access via bonded DSL lines than the pseudo T1 that we got, but it was not available to us at the time. I blame the local telco. I asked the phone company technician about it and he told me that they had basically stopped running T1 local loops whenever they could.

I've seen a telco run T1 over dual 768k DSL lines. They had a unit that presented a T1 on the client side, then connected back to the CO over two 768k synchronous DSL lines.

$600/month for a t1 is a little high, but not unusual. What you pay for with a t1 is not bandwidth, it is reliability, real-time monitoring, a dedicated circuit, and a SLA. T1 cost is dependent on distance from the CO and and how many phone companies the connection has to bridge through to get from your location to the service provider. T1's need a repeater every 655 feet and they roll that expense into the monthly charge. Internet providers also may may have to pay multiple telcos if they don't have a PoP (Point of Presence) in your phone company's facilities, and they have to bridge the connection across multiple telcos.

Around 2000, a company I worked for paid about 1100 per month for a t1. I repeatedly had resellers tell me they could cut that down to 400 or 500 per month only to have them call back a week later saying they couldn't do anything for me. To service the business, any Internet provider would have to chain that t1 through three different telephone companies, each wanting their cut, to connect to their PoP, thirty miles away. The incumbent telco didn't offer any sort of business Internet service at the time. This was not a sparsely populated area, but three different phone companies have carved up the county into 3 territories, and none of them were interested in making any investment in the region. So, we had to go outside the county just to find a decent Internet provider.

I have a hard time taking any zombie apocalypse plot seriously because of the following reasons: http://www.cracked.com/article....

I did enjoy "Shaun of the Dead" and "Zombieland".

Correction, that should read "eminent domain"

It depends. I had a quote for a place I used to work for about $22,000 to run fiber out to our location in an outer suburb. The ISP eventually did a project where they ran fiber down the street, and it cost us only 9 grand to tap into it. It should have been a lot less, but they ended up having to bore underground for 1/8 of a mile to get the fiber into our facility. The local power company wanted to charge an unreasonable amount of money to attach to the poles on our own property.

Not necessarily. A local municipality could build out a fiber network, maintain just the last mile connections and the layer 2 switching infrastructure, and lease that infrastructure to one or more ISPs who would link to the Internet and provide TV and phone service. US cable and phone providers don't rent out their infrastructure to other ISPs like this, at least not for general consumers, so there is no private business for the local municipality to to compete with.

Another option is to break up the local cable and telco monopolies. Separate the local loop from the Internet, TV, and phone service providers and put everyone on an equal footing.

A third option is for the local governments to seize the cable plant and infrastructure under public domain laws and give the cable operators and telcos a big middle finger. Considering how bad the cable, phone, and Internet service is in my region, I can't see how it would get any worse under government control.

Seriously? If it was just about power to run servers Netfilx would have sent them 100 bucks a month and called it a day.

Netflix gives the caching servers away for free, and once it's in place the ISP saves money on transit charges with the tier 1 backbones, Netflix saves money on transit charges, Netflix customers get better service because the video is served locally, and non-Netfilx subscribers get better service because congestion on peering connections is reduced. It's a win - win - win - win situation.

But, Comcast wants its pound of flesh. Outside estimates, (the deal is not public information), are that Netflix is paying Comcast between 25 and 50 million per year for a peering agreement. That's a lot more than the cost of electricity.

Because the coming time warner / comcast behemoth will be the ISP for a huge portion of the us. I have seen estimates between 30% and 50% percent of US Internet subscribers. Being the gateway to the Internet for that many people, and frequently the only choice in an area for high-speed Internet access, they will have tremendous leverage in negotiations with video providers, like Netfilx and Hulu. TWC/Comcast will have the power to pick winners and losers, and have already started flexing their muscles.

This is not a discussion about delivering a service better, it's about the power large ISPs have as gatekeepers between companies and potential customers. I am a Netflix subscriber, and I only have a 1.5 Mb connection. Netflix works exceptionally well for me. My ISP is the local phone company. I have friends and acquaintances on Time Warner with 15 and 20 Mb connections for whom Netflix was unwatchable until after they signed the peering agreement with TWC.

Frankly, that sound like a eugenics argument. We have somewhere around 3 million births every year in the US. Our population will not shrink if a few thousand or tens of thousands more people die per year. However, the increased burden of illness could severely damage our economy and reduce everyone's well being. In addition, choosing vaccinations or not is not a matter of intelligence, but rather of ignorance. That is something that can not be cured by modern technology or by evolution.