First of all, I hate Comcast.

I hate Qwest almost as much.

snip

[I have satellite, because their cable tv sucks. no comment.]

> They've been waiting for the beast to topple.  The first push was the
> MSN partnership - I think that took the cable co's by surprise - Qwest
> now has less overhead, with Microsoft taking over the support for those
> customers.  Bishop to e6.

Qwest continues to claim they can only deliver 640/640 to my apartment,
they're not a viable solution. As for MSN, I think qwest was tired of the
hassle.

> Now they're giving it it's second push with the new DSL rates and
> speeds.  The cable co's have to respond, in order to appear competitive,
> so they up their speeds (but no price changes), eating further into
> their profits.  Cable Co's: Castle, 0-0-0  Qwest: Qf4

Bandwidth is amazingly cheap, especially when you're Comcast (formerly AT&T)
with all your bandwidth coming from att.net. The cable companies have peering
agreements with a lot of decent locations that also offset the "cost"

> I seriously expect to see a very drastic move by the cable co's within
> the next year (maybe a new partnership - Rxe6 to deal with the Microsoft
> bishop).  They've certainly set the stage for a big rate hike ("I know
> it's a lot of money, but we GAVE you a bunch of free bandwidth!").  Or
> tiered pricing on CableModem service.  Or a mass purging of "expensive"
> customers.

Comcast already had tiered pricing, they've just eliminated it with this
bandwidth jump (Previously you could get 3mbit downstream for an extra
$20/mo or so)

The "expensive" customers are only expensive to their node, it has nothing
to do with the amount of bandwidth they're using to the internet, only how
busy they're keeping the node they're on. Worst case, they have to install
another line card in the router and pair off another chunk in the ~700mhz
band on the node. DSL can't do that.

> They priced their service to be competitive with DSL, and I imagine they
> were operating on a pretty significant loss, or at least very little
> profit.  They were gambling that they had deeper pockets than Qwest, to
> afford operating their network long enough to gain a larger install base
> so they could raise their rates to what they should be (and they could
> afford the customer exodus it would cause, because of their market
> share).  I guess that's called a pawn storm :)

The operating cost of a cable network is much less than DSL, the cable
network is already there, all you have to do is plug in a headend unit
and deploy the cable modems to customers, replacing those nasty 45mhz-900mhz
splitters as you go.

The cable companies are making plenty of profit off their cable internet service.
They'll probably continue to raise rates, but that's what cable companies do,
it has nothing to do with their cost of providing the service =)

DSL is the Linux of the internet connectivity world, the geek value is high
(static IP's, blocks of IP's, sometimes control over your DNS) but the extra
expense isn't worth it for most people, nor is the lack of bandwidth.

-- 
Matthew S. Hallacy                            FUBAR, LART, BOFH Certified
http://www.poptix.net                           GPG public key 0x01938203

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