[1st-mile-nm] Is Faster not always better ?

Wed Aug 28 12:31:06 PDT 2019

The big cable companies have unilaterally raised speeds with no changes in prices. In the most recent change I noticed one day that Charter had increased my speeds from 60/6 Mbps to 135/20 Mbps. The cable companies have done this regularly since back when the speeds were down in the 6 Mbps speed range. They may have done it before then since they started with 1-2 Mbps – I just can’t recall.

Your Michigan situation sucks, and just means that they haven’t upgraded the network there. In urban markets they have increased speeds in various markets from 100 Mbps to 200 Mbps for the same price you are paying there.

With that said, the days of no rate increases from cable companies is in the past. Most Wall Street analysts now expect them to raised rates every year. For the last year most of them buried the increases in the cost of modems and other hidden places, but they need to raise rates to keep up with earnings expectations now that they aren’t growing by double digit new broadband customers any more.

Forcing folks off slower, older packages is certainly a quiet way to implement a rate increase. I hear they are all quietly killing the old cheap packages. That’s only going to work for them one time. Once everybody is onto the base product they’ll have to raise everybody’s rates.

I think you are massively underestimating the existing number of gamers. Estimates are that 25% of all households have at least one serious gamer. You wouldn’t get that by talking to us old farts on this web serve. Gamers can use intensive broadband. I have a friend with two teenage boys who each run 2 – 4 games simultaneously on different streams. He had to upgrade from his 250 Mbps Verizon FiOS product!

From: Doug Orr <doug.orr at gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 28, 2019 2:58 PM
To: Doug Dawson <blackbean2 at ccgcomm.com>
Cc: John Brown <john at citylinkfiber.com>; 1st-Mile-NM <1st-mile-nm at mailman.dcn.org>
Subject: Re: [1st-mile-nm] Is Faster not always better ?

Hey Doug,

(a) Did broadband companies raise endpoint bandwidth and upgrade all their other junk with the expectation that there would be significant uptick in usage...or did they raise endpoint speeds, meaning they can charge higher prices, and implement minimal core improvements to back it up with.

I have, for example (anecdote alert!), a house in a podunk Michigan town (3000 population). The only provider is Charter. They used to have several packages, all of which could stream Netflix. They switched to where the minimum package is 40mbps for $80/mo. Way more bandwidth than I need and way more than I'd prefer to pay. Does that sound more like forcing everyone into a higher grade of service because they are totally going to be better competitors and provide better service, or updating cheap endpoint gear in order to justify price increases which offset losses from cord cutting? (Here's an articl<https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/01/charter-will-spend-less-on-cable-network-in-2019-but-charge-customers-more/>e reporting Charter is spending less on its cable network in 2019 and charging its customers more. Here's an article<https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/01/sorry-ajit-comcast-lowered-cable-investment-despite-net-neutrality-repeal/> saying, roughly, the same thing about Comcast [Comcast says they're spending more on infrastructure, but, who'd know if that's right?])

(b) I agree that school aged children and young people are bigger bandwidth users (as, I wouldn't be surprised, are children of Internet professionals :) And the question absolutely is, as you say, who are the isps making the network for? But, again, the question, fully, is, who are they building the whole thing out for -- caching, peering, aggregate bandwidth... Because it's the end-to-end performance that matters to the intensive consumers, not the "speed test" number, and raising end to end performance is way more expensive than giving people a faster endpoint. (Cable companies seem to be reporting getting done with their upgrade to docsys 3.1, which all fits. And, maybe not coincidentally, one of the big features in 3.1 is "active queue management.") Throttling and traffic shaping can give you a whole lot cheaper implementation than upgrading line cards.

Better numbers sound sexier. It's a marketing benefit to have higher numbers, and it makes the bar higher for potential competitors.

I'll stick with my baseless assertion that our isps are advertising and pricing for gamers and building and provisioning for 50 year-olds watching Netflix :)

  Doug
On Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 9:32 AM Doug Dawson <blackbean2 at ccgcomm.com<mailto:blackbean2 at ccgcomm.com>> wrote:
This is a topic I've been giving a lot of thought to lately, because this seem to be one of the new arguments that opponents of funding rural broadband are now using.

It takes pages to write a full response to the question (and luckily for me I have a blog where I can do that), but here are a few ideas that are part of the response to refute this concept:
- 2/3 of the broadband customers in the country are now served by the big cable companies, and those companies all now have set the minimum speeds of broadband for new customers between 100 Mbps and 200 Mbps. They didn't do this in a vacuum and the big companies unilaterally increase speeds every 3-5 years as a way to cut down on customer complaints about speed. I think there is a strong argument that these companies have established the 'market' speeds that customers want. Nobody made the cable companies increase speeds and this is one of those examples of the marketplace at work.
- Like with everything in this world, the users of broadband run the gamut on the spectrum from homes that barely use it to homes that will use everything they can get. It's really easy to talk to folks along the bottom half of that spectrum and assume that homes don't need faster speeds. This raises the really interesting policy question: do you set speeds based upon the average customer, upon the 10% biggest users, or something else? There is no automatic answer to that question, although I point to the answer above where the cable companies seem to have decided to cater to the top half of the spectrum.
- There is a huge difference in homes with school-age students and those without. In my opinion any discussion of the right amount of bandwidth needs to consider homes with students - other homes just come along for the ride.
- We know that the need for bandwidth and speed increases every year. If the policy is to build broadband that takes care of today's needs, such a network will be inadequate in five years and obsolete in ten years.

Doug Dawson
President
CCG Consulting
202 255-7689

Check out my blog at http://potsandpansbyccg.com

-----Original Message-----
From: 1st-mile-nm <1st-mile-nm-bounces at mailman.dcn.org<mailto:1st-mile-nm-bounces at mailman.dcn.org>> On Behalf Of John Brown
Sent: Tuesday, August 27, 2019 10:18 PM
To: 1st-mile-nm at mailman.dcn.org<mailto:1st-mile-nm at mailman.dcn.org>
Subject: [1st-mile-nm] Is Faster not always better ?

https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-worth-it/

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Respectfully,

John Brown, CISSP
Managing Member, CityLink Telecommunications NM, LLC _______________________________________________
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