In The Broadband Battle Between Speed And Price, Customers Choose Price
from the doesn't-look-good-for-cable dept
Back in October we noted that DSL and cable providers were trying to differentiate themselves from each other. The DSL providers were focusing on being the low cost provider, while the cable guys wanted to be the high speed providers. At the time, we pointed out that this was likely to backfire on the cable companies. People like the speed of broadband, but for most applications there's a "good enough" speed - and many people want it more for the always on connection than the speed itself. It's looking like we were right. The latest study shows that, despite cable's commanding lead in the US, many more people are signing up for DSL these days because of the lower price. It's the basic "good enough" argument. What DSL offers is good enough for what most people want to do with their connections now. Also, the speed difference is minimal right now. You don't get that much faster speeds with cable, and there's not much you can currently do with that extra bandwidth. It used to be that people would sign up so they could download songs, but the music industry is cracking down on that enough that it's become less of a draw for many subscribers as well.
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This isn't really surprising, as cable offers a ceiling on speed, DSL offers a floor. The more people use cable, the smaller a piece of the pie you get, because the bandwidth is shared.
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