High speed cable and DSL connections are getting a bandwidth boost, along with per month bills. Verizon and Cablevision have both introduced consumer broadband packages with speeds in excess of 30 megabits per second, and have also boosted the upstream speeds. Even second tier cable providers like Charter are pushing cheaper, faster connections.
Charter is currently selling a 1o megabit per second connection for $60.47 a month. Our good buddy, Phil Harvey, a Charter subscriber, does some friday evening beer infused math and concludes that his price per megabit per month is around $6.04, down from a whopping $41.94 he was paying in September 2003. Now imagine if there was real competition.
Tell us, how much you are paying per megabit per month, and how does it stack up against what you were paying say three years ago. You can calculate this by using Harvey’s theorem: Divide your monthly bill by the speed being touted by your broadband provider.
I pay about 1400/mbit/month. GO ISDN! :/
$435/mo for T1 (bit the bullet over ISDN or satellite)… so… 435/1.5 = $290 per megabit.
And with Verizon’s loop prices on T1s going sky high (over 30% increase in the past 6 months and supposedly more coming), I expect our expenses to go UP, not down.
You wanna know who’s paying for all those FiOS deployments?!? It’s all the business folks and suckers like me who are stuck w/ T1 service as their only choice for broadband. We’ll see FiOS type stuff here around the time William Shatner gets a believable hairpiece.
1o Mbps -> 10Mbps
You have it good in the US. In Ireland, you pay EUR 30 for 1 MB download/256k up (41:1 contention) or EUR 40 for 2 MB download/512k up – with a 20:1 contention. The latter works out at EUR 20 per MB download – or USD 25.55 per MB.
Feels great to be living in the Netherlands. If you check this site http://www.bellen.com/ you can see the offers for both cable and DSL that are available in the Netherlands. (Zipcode is eg 2545AM) Lowest I could find quickly was 2 euro/mbit for Orange with a 20mbit DSL connection. That includes VoIP service. It goes up to like €10/mbit + voip day and night with using the incumbent KPN. In France IPTV is also included in the deal. Have a look at the websites of Free and France Telecom. Seems the Eurocrats made a good decision with their New Regulatory Framework for Telecoms and mandatory Unbundled Local Loop and/or Wholesale Broadband Access (/gloat)
I pay:
$20 for 1GB Bandwidth/month, 4cents/Mb for additional usage. Free Usage at nights (12am-8pm).
“Verizon and Cablevision have both introduced consumer broadband packages with speeds in excess of 30 megabits per second”
Where have they done this? In the 2 homes in the tri-state (NY,NJ,PA) served by FIOS? Until this is broadly available (which it is not) to a majority of customers statements like the one above are quite misleading.
Comcast: $14 in 2002 to $8.59 now. Thank god for competition – oh wait I have no other provider (DSL, FIOS or WiMAX).
funny, i just upgraded this week with RCN in boston – was paying 41 a month for 7megs down, 800k up, now paying 71 yes, 71 for 20megs down, 2megs up…however, multiple speed tests online show differing ups/downs, like 11down and 1.1 up etc..
does ANYBODY know of a great and reliable online bandwidth speed test? i’ve been testing hardlined even though i often use the wifi, because i think hardline speed tests should be more accurate…
24 Meg for £24 a month ($50) = $2MB. Plus I get 1.5MB up.
Actually, I usually get anything between 8-18MB down, with 24 being the theoretical maximum… but you asked for the advertised amount.
I’m not looking forward to coming to America on this front. My appartment in SF has fiber to the building, but it still only comes down to a 3-6MB connection per connection.
$4.90 CAD (~$4.36 USD) Mb/s with Shaw.ca in Vancouver. 10 Mb/s, 100 GB/month. The network is good, real-world downloads come in at 1.1 MB/s.
1.75 Euros/Mb in Spain.
I pay 35 Euros for a 20 meg connection provided by Wanadoo.
American prices (and Ireland, from reading these comments), are just still too ridiculously high.
“American prices are just still too ridiculously high.”
I think so too, it’s ridiculous
In France:
Free.fr offers Dsl 28 Mbit/s (internet,TV, Telephone)Wifi connection-Routeur 5 ports and up to 10 Go for personnal webpage for how much? how much?
29.99 euros/month (tax included)
And with that you don’t even need to suscribe to a telephone company it all comes together.
And this is one company among others like neuf.fr wanadoo.fr that offer about the same thing.
If you want a complete list(in French) of all the providers in France here is a link: http://www.dslvalley.com/adsl/offres-adsl.php
In the U.S., I pay about $2.75 a month per Megabit-per-second. Where I am in New England, FiOS is pretty prevalent. Since FiOS rolls out town by town (something of an over-simplification), you have to be lucky about what town you’re in. But there are something like 40-50 towns in my state that have it.
Here’s a tip to people who live in Verizon country, call up and ask. And keep calling. I got FiOS in my town six months before it was announced in my town. That’s because they actually roll it out street by street, and often don’t announce until most of the town is ready.
That $2.75 is for the 15Mbps service, which at the time that I ordered it late last year, was the best bang for the buck. I should check on the 30Mbps service. I turned it down initially because it would have been more like $5 per Mbps.
For those of you “stuck” at 1-4Mbps, for straight surfing you hardly notice the difference. The Internet is largely Web-server-bound. If you’re into online gaming or addicted to Web video, that’s where you’ll notice the difference. Especially the latter. But even that is server bound. Akamai and others are going to need a whole new game plan in a few years — if not sooner.
30 Euros per month for 20 Mbits with Free.Fr in France, so 1.5€/Mbits or 2 dollars. TV and free phone are included.
Right now I have Charter pipeline 10megs/1megs for $49.00 a month with a cable package. But, if you don’t have the package it will cost you $60.00 or probably little bit more. I’ve been with Charter for about 3 yrs now. When I first signed up with them, I have 3 megs, and I was paying $39.00 a month. 10 megs for 49 bucks a month is worth the money.
btw, i spent a few hours off and on lookin over online speed tests and found this rather solid one, with both download and upload from multiple sites across the usa:
http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/
My fav speedtest is http://speedtest.net
In Ireland I’m paying $50 per month for 6MB. I could get 20MB for $100 a month including tv and line rental (not yet available in my area).
I live in the Bronx NY and Optimium Online is getting saturated and Verizon DSL isn’t much better. I can’t wait for Verizon FIOS or Optimium Online Boost. Until then I will stay with Verizon DSL only because it’s a least a dedicated line, where cable is shared bandwidth. OOL cable subscribers are lucky here if they 3-4 Mbits upload speed. My Verizon DSL tops at 2.6 when they claimed 3 Mbits upload.
In France, where there is real competition among BB players (France?? Competition?? Shock, horror!), you can get a 25Mbit line for Eur 24.99 (that’s about $30) – and that includes TV over IP and unlimited national and international calls (to 15 destinations). Amazing thing, competition.
Yahoo/ATT offering DSL at 1.5Mb = $12.95/mo, 3Mb = $17.95/mo
Big woop. So cost per megabit has gone down, particularly if you are willing to go with higher tiered service. On the other hand, the value of the last 4mbps (the difference between 6 & 10Mbps) for the average user is far lower than the value of the first 2mbps (the difference between dialup and a 2mbps link).
I imagine that the average selling price has also stayed pretty constant since there are basically new options at the low end since DSL providers started offering 256/256 intermittant connections as their low price offering. Average selling price might even have trended up, since there aren’t really viable lower cost options to offset the effect of people who go for these premium offereings on the average.
Yahoo DSL for $30/month. Download speed around
4.5 Mb/sec. Upload ~600kb/sec.
In China, I am paying $15/month for 1Mb/sec DSL.
$54.95 for 4M down/ 384k up, Adelphia cable in western NY. That’s $13.7375 per megabit. Anxiously wating for FiOS to be hooked up. Not that I like Verizon, but there’s no other competition in my neighborhood (don’t count DSL as real competition and Verizon’s making it go away in favor of FiOS.
re: “Harvey… does some friday evening beer infused math… “
How dare you, sir? I’m a Bushmills man. Especially when math is involved.
Cheers,
ph