Courtesy of Om, LightReading’s Phil Harvey has this cool piece showing how the price of his high-speed service from Charter has fallen 80% in three years. Harvey presents a fascinating table that underscores a key point about high-speed Internet access: consumers are willing to pay more on an absolute basis each month for broadband service if speeds keep going up.
Harvey shows how the price per megabit has dropped from $41.94 in September 2003 to $6.04 in September 2006, an effective price cut of 80%. The cause of the price “cut:” Charter has upped the download speed of Harvey’s service from 1.5 Mbps to 10 Mbps.
Cynthia Brumfield at 11:27 AM|Comments(1)
It may be cheaper per Mbps, but his montly bandwidth bill went up by 2.5x. I don't know about Harvey, but I'll bet the average user's internet experience improves by less than 2.5x moving from 3 Mbps to 10 Mbps. Sure, it's over 3x faster, but most of what people do is either constrained by latency, not bandwidth, or it's constrained by the bandwidth of another bottleneck between the user and the server.
Posted by: eas at September 25, 2006 12:08 AM
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