Hacker News Reader

Comment by karpodiem | Hacker News Reader

Comcast has hiked standalone broadband to $75 - http://stopthecap.com/2017/12/21/75-month-broadband-pricing-...

Interestingly, you can get a cheaper promotional rate if you bundle local TV channels (cheaper than $75/month for both internet + tv) so Comcast can inflate its video subscriber (to boost their stock price) amount and they hope you forget you're on a promotional rate your bill jumps $30-40 after you drop off promo. You're free to negotiate (most people do) to get back on the promo rate; many people have success with this, but it's just a cat/mouse game and a hassle.

And Comcast also has a 1TB monthly usage cap. When the era of 2160p + HDR arrives in the next few years, people will chew through that cap rather quickly.

Comcast will continue to jack up standalone broadband prices to hedge against fleeing video subscribers. Why? Because they can, and have very little competition in most markets.

View on HN

> Comcast will continue to jack up standalone broadband prices to hedge against fleeing video subscribers. Why? Because they can, and have very little competition in most markets.

That's coming from the perspective of an HN reader, for whom wireless isn't "competition." (I get it, I've got two fiber lines to my house; 3 gigabits total. My daughter uses it to stream Magic Schoolbus.) But for the typical user, 5G wireless services (say 50-100 mbps with 100GB data cap) is going to be enough. We're already at 15% of households making $100k+ ditching wired Internet for 4G. That number is growing, and will explode when 5G service rolls out.

I'd argue that with more than two people in a household and everyone switching to streaming services, you'll need to offer at least 400-500GB data caps for fixed wireless 5G.

Several of my renters are single, and their streaming usage for an individual is ~450GB/month.

For comparison, in Sweden right now you can get a 500 GB cap 4G broadband plan for $50/mo.

You need 400-500GB to accommodate who? According to Comcast, median Xfinity data usage in 2H 2017 was 131 GB: https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/data-usage-average-.... That's going to be squarely within the range of 5G (analysts are guessing around 200GB caps at first). Also, expect to see video content be zero-rated (it makes technical sense--watching Netflix from one of Netflix's co-located CDNs puts a lot less load on the network).

Remember, 5G doesn't need to be an alternative for everybody to wreck the ability to raise prices to compensate for lost TV revenue.

> According to Comcast, median Xfinity data usage in 2H 2017 was 131 GB

Given their recent push for data caps (and make money off of overages), I'm sceptical of their numbers. They have a pretty obvious incentive to misrepresent (if not understate outright) the value to make their caps appear generous.

Also, is median (same as 50th percentile, right?) really the right statistic to consider? I'm not sure any one number is sufficiently meaningful, as the shape of the graph can be particularly informative.

More importantly, how has that changed over time, as compared with the penetration of 4K TVs versus 1080p ones (or the availability of 4K content or some similar metric)?

Conversely, I think mobile data is also more likely to be significant as competition in multi-person households, even with the caps you mention, because those have a chance of being per person/handset (absent family/share plans), while Comcast is likely to be one cap per household no matter how many people/screens stream at one time.

Agreed, I think the histogram would be bimodal, split between people that solely watch cable TV and cord-cutters that solely stream.

My Comcast went down yesterday for about 18 hours (I have zero other options at my apartment for high speed Internet) and I tried tethering on Verizon LTE to play some games. Latency was between 60ms and ~900ms with some random disconnects. This is in TF2, which runs on the Source engine. Anything above about 400ms is pretty unplayable.

Bandwidth caps are yet another issue. 4G is NOT a suitable alternative for me today, and won’t be in the foreseeable future. Maybe if I had a dedicated antenna transceiver on the roof (also not allowed at most apartments) and they massively upgraded tower capacity had a 10-100x increase in bandwidth caps, but....I’m not holding my breath. If Verizon can keep getting >$100/mo ARPU providing 5GB of data with Comcast getting the same for providing 1TB and both have monopoly / duopoly conditions, they have no incentives to compete or upgrade their infrastructure.

There is aggregated data on this, based on millions of data points: https://opensignal.com/reports/2018/01/usa/state-of-the-mobi.... Average latency for all four carriers is under 70 ms.

As to bandwidth caps: for $100 including fees, you get unlimited on Verizon, which has a 22 GB soft cap per line (in practice, you can use way beyond that).

Your point about duopoly is completely divorced from facts. The cell carriers are in a market with four competitors, and invest massively in infrastructure (tens of billions of dollars a year). Cellular has improve way faster than many other areas of technology over the last decade. 10 years ago, I had a Core 2 polycarbonate Macbook and AT&T 3G service. The former is still a perfectly serviceable computer (the new Macbook is maybe twice as fast). But my Verizon LTE is probably 10-20 times faster than my 3G service.

What else do you use that is 10 times better than it was a decade ago? Google Search? Gmail? Facebook? iOS?

>> What else do you use that is 10 times better than it was a decade ago? Google Search? Gmail? Facebook? iOS?

Heh, ironically, the "wired" internet is surely 10X or more faster than a decade ago. Anecdotally, I have a 1 Gbps connection now; year or two ago I had a 250 Mbps connection, and 2-3 years prior to that it was 50Mbps. Ten years ago it was, what, 5Mbps or 2Mbps.

You (and I) are one of the lucky few who live in area with gigabit internet. The average speed is 55Mbps (https://broadbandnow.com/report/2018-fcc-international-data-...).

But the price of cellular data has come way down. For instance when the iPad was first introduced, it was only available in the US on AT&T and was $25 for 2Gb of data per month. Now I'm paying an extra $20 a month on T-mobile for unlimited data for my iPad.

The cellular iPad wasn't even worth it for me until I could get unlimited data for $20. For that amount the extra convenience of not having to tether and basically having a second phone is worth it since you can get and receive regular phone calls to your paired cell number from an iPad even if your phone is dead.

Nice. Myself, I did not see price drops -- I've been paying ~ $100/mo for cell phone plan (5GB data) for some years now -- 3 years at least maybe 5 years or more.

In the US?

I pay a total of $180 a month for 5 phone lines unlimited data on each + an iPad, unlimited 512Kbps tethering on each + 10Gb of high speed tethering on one for my son who uses his cell phone for his only internet. This is with T-mobile. They also throw in a family Netflix plan (4 simultaneous streams) with it.

Canada. Looks like unlimited cell data plans are not a thing here, at least not yet.

Wireless can't compete because if everyone is on wireless, it will be dead slow, unless you make the cell size incredibly small. Small cell sizes require far more radio towers (often a non-option anyway due to zoning restrictions). And even if you do get microcells setup on traffic lights every half mile, you will then need the last mile infrastructure that comcast has for backhaul, unless you want to build your own land network. So I don't see the competitive advantage over another company just coming in with landline.

The other idea for small cells is femtocells, but in that situation you are running traffic over home internet connections so it is definitely not a way to cut out comcast.

Even at 5G speeds and 100 GB data caps, home internet being run over wireless would completely overload most of our current wireless infrastructure. The cell sizes are just too large for that kind of capacity.

Small cells will be a critical part of 5G deployment. The FCC is projecting they’ll need to approve ten times as many cell sites for 5G as have been approved to date for all previous technologies. They’re working to reduce the regulatory barriers to doing that: https://venturebeat.com/2018/03/22/fcc-votes-to-streamline-5...

Small cells are still way cheaper than building land line. I had Comcast run fiber to my house recently, and it was very interesting to see the process play out. Aside feom waiting months for a permit, running fiber along the main street was quick. Running it down my weird little side street took just as long as running it half a mile down the main road. And running it through my yard took just as much time as that. Getting rid of the last 1,000 feet is a huge benefit.

I currently pay Comcast $35/month in suburban Chicago for 25/4 (down/up). This is without a contract. With 12-month contract is $25/month.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com