Thread: Stop Virgin

Originally Posted by citizen

But bandwidth is only getting more expensive anyway, so somebody will have to pay the bill.

au contraire, bandwidth is getting cheaper. What would have cost $2000 a month 10 years ago is $29.95 today. The caveat in this argument is there are so many conflicting and incompatable versions of what 'net neutrality' is. I think most people pretty much blame their ISP if there is a slow connection, since its a fact most servers like BBC etc use high bandwidth connections. So if ISP Y restricts bandwidth to BBC it will get the blame, not BBC. There is so much excess bandwidth as it is, we just don't have a need for it yet. The primary expense in laying new fiber isnt the fiber, its digging the ditch through 50000 municiple zones, so when companies do lay new line they forcast ther reasonable needs for the next 20 years including a fair margin for dead lines, or lines that will go dead over the life of the run. At any given moment only about 10% of the lines that exist are actually hooked up to equipment, there are entire legs, like the one from Chicago to Dallas that are sitting idle with little or no traffic on them. There simply isnt a current need, (CHI traffic routes through STL to DAL).

Yeah, I'm not going to be getting myself in a flap over the media hype about some bandwidth crisis; I simply cant see it as true. If you're getting slow broadband the best thing you can do is move closer to the local exchange - or switch isp.

The return on their investment is they get to stay in business. Its a business expense plain and simple. If a car rental agency doesnt buy new cars they go out of business, but the new cars wont get any better mileage or provide any increased return. The return on the new cars is the company gets to stay in business. Just because the old equipment runs doesnt mean it will draw customers to your business. The same is true with ISP's. The new higher bandwidth equipment wont increase your profits, but if they dont make the investment, then they will lose customers to the other ISP's that do, that is why small ISP's go out of business. An ISP I was a partner in once is having that problem. The primary partner wanted to get in for the bare minimum investment, then when cable and DSL came to town he wondered why he wasnt growing at 100% a year anymore and was instead losing customers. It didnt help that he also sold everyones email address's to spam agencies and would boot people off the network if they connected for more than an hour. Hence why I cashed out when I could.