Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] AT&T tiered pricing...

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Fri, 2 Aug 2002, Spurling, Shannon wrote:

> Here's an article about AT&T and their cable modem pricing,
> courtesy of slashdot.
> http://news.com.com/2100-1033-947559.html?tag=fd_top

Note that there's a link from that link, too.

> It's kind of interesting when you think about it. There are a
> lot behind the bandwidth that governs the cost. It was kind of
> silly to think that you could actually buy 10Mb for under $50.

Well, I thought the claim was more something like 3Mb although in
fact you could get speeds even slightly higher than that (which is
why I used a lot of Mozilla nightly builds; they'd download in less
than 30 seconds...).  Plus, since this was essentially planned as a
web-surfing business, traffic was bursty, there were no guarantees
on what you would get, they had local caching proxies, and I'm
pretty sure they way oversold their bandwidth.  But I'm sure they
were losing money, since they went bankrupt. :-)

But right now, you get "up to" 1.5Mb down for about $45, which would
work out to $1350 for 45 Mb down (in theory).  Given the burstiness,
I'm sure they could oversell at a 10:1 ratio at least, so they would
get at least $15000 for something that would be vaguely like a ds-3.
That would appear to support 300 users at something close to 1.5Mb
down.  (Didn't @Home run all of Columbia off of a single ds3 at
first?)  And I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers were even a bit
better than that.

Bandwidth might not be as low as $5600 per ds-3 around here, but I
suspect that they're now doing just fine in Columbia.  (Even at $10K
per ds-3 and 50% overhead they'd be breaking even, right?) I wish
there were public numbers on how many users they had and what they
were buying for bandwidth, but I've never seen official ones.

[snip]

> I'm actually wondering what kind of access is actually being
> offered at the 1.5Mb level that people are getting now with
> their cable modems and DSL. It's just something interesting to
> think about, I think.

Well, I'm sure somebody will point out where I've made some stupid
error here.  Feel free for it to be you. :-)

> Just my $.02

Actually, that will only buy you a 300 baud connection...

jking

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