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Cable Companies Stick By The "Speed Matters" Mantra As Customers Head Elsewhere
from the yeah,-keep-trying dept
You have to wonder if the cable companies are actually starting to believe their own marketing material. They certainly repeat it often enough. In 2003, as DSL providers started dropping their prices, the cable guys held on, claiming that they would compete on higher speeds and higher prices. That hasn't seemed like a very good idea. It quickly became clear that lower prices worked as DSL began to close the gap by signing up more new users. Then, of course, DSL providers started to catch up in speed while still dropping prices even further. The cable response has been to keep their prices high (though, some will apparently quietly drop the prices if confronted about the DSL competition by individual customers) and claim that mysterious, unknown "services" were more important than either price or speed. Now, with the latest studies showing that (once again!) DSL subs are beating out cable thanks to low, low prices, the cable providers are still in denial claiming that their "research" shows people look at speed first, and price second. Who cares what their "research" shows when compared to what the actual subscriber numbers show? That research is meaningless. At best, it's misleading. "Speed" may be important when you're comparing DSL or cable to dialup, but for many home users, reaching a certain speed is considered "good enough" for now, and then price is all that matters. In that game, the DSL providers are beating cable guys easily.
Reader Comments
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Speakeasy
Woah now. DSL is beating cable on speed and price? I don't think so. I have yet to see a DSL provider who can give me 8Mb/768Kb for $55 a month, but Comcast can (and installation is less of a headache to boot).
The BroadbandReports.com ISP directory seems to agree with me for the most part.
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Re: Speakeasy
I didn't say DSL was beating cable on speeds, but that they were "catching up," which is accurate. And, as the telcos move to fiber (either to the premise, curb or node), they'll start to pass what cable can offer.
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Re: Speakeasy
I will gladly move away from Cox cable the moment SBC demonstrates reliable and clue-full (as opposed to clue-less) fiber. Till then, it's not worth it.
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Re: Speakeasy
I have had DSL for almost four years and I get 3Mb/1MB cheaper than the original 512Kb/256Kb. I checked the Comcast website and they still do not offer anything where I live.
That sort of makes the choice easy.
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Re: Speakeasy
Cavalier offers DSL 10Mbps up, I forget the down speed. The rep I talked to said it was more like 8Mbps off-peak. Might not be a real world number, but I agree with Tawgley.
I didn't get Cavalier because they couldn't do it in my area, but there's the provider you "have yet to see." And it's $25/month if you have their phone service.
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Re: Speakeasy
I agree Cavalier DSL is fast and affordable, but several times a day it just becomes unavailable to me, and always at the worst times. It may be our old phone lines that are affected by the weather (sometimes I get static on the phone line when it's rainy.) Do you ever have this problem? I'd keep Cavalier DSL forever if the service was more reliable.
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Re: Speakeasy
"8Mb/768Kb for $55 a month" ?
CavTel [Cavalier Telephone] gives me 10Mb/1Mb for (included in my entire plan w/ phone service) $49.95/mo
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It's still true..
My Comcast cable modem gets 4mbit down consistantly. I have only had 1 outage. On the other hand, my boss has a Comcast cable modem (4mbit too) and he got a Speakeasy DSL line as a test. They advertise 6mbit down/768 up. He said that he has barely been able to break 1.5mbit with the line. Pretty much the same deal with other DSL users I know. Most of them stick to DSL because they have static IP addresses and run small web servers at home.
Oh, and I'm not in the boonies, either. I'm in the Silicon Valley, only a mile from a sizable NASA installation.
My cable modem is $45/mo, and the speeds are great. I don't use any of the other advertised Comcast services.
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RE: Cable Companies Stick By The "Speed Matters" M
While I agree with the points in the subject piece, I wonder if there isn't also a missing piece. If most are like me, I'll do ANYTHING that is price competitive (ie LOWER to make up for the hassle of the switch) just to get away from the absolutely abysmal service of the Broadband Cable industry .. sure speed matters but you seldom if ever get the speed promised, there are have DAILY service interruptions and it ain't getting any better as cable consolidation continues aided and abetted by the very 'watchdogs' who are supposed to assure competition.
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Dilbert
Wasn't it in his book The Dilbert Principle (copyright 1996) that Scott Adams pretty much summed up this competition this way: "Cable companies are populated by the guys who can't get jobs at the phone company." He predicted that this is how things would turn out, nine years ago -- not bad!
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Re: Dilbert
Well, actually it was "The Dilbert Future" (1998). And in it, he predicted that the cable companies would deliver cable broadband as poorly as the Bells delivered ISDN and that, in the meantime, the Bells would make ISDN easier to install and configure and we'd all be using ISDN while the cable companies tried to catch up.
So not exactly a perfect prediction.
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Price vs Speed
I personally look at speed before price. I had DSL for a bit (and cable at the same time - had some problems with RR and was thinking of moving to DSL). The DSL was MUCH slower than the cable, even though 1/2 the price. I gladly pay for the higher priced, higher speed cable. There's a couple of stories out today about getting 100 megabits out of cable. I'd pay a lot more than I'm paying now for that. I mean, I can rip 40 stations at once and get 2k songs a day, with my current cable mode... with that kind of speed I could do download 10k a day!!! :P
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