Why can't I just pay Comcast money and get a set exact pipe size that I can use?
Because the resulting pricing would be crazy high, like 512 kbps for $50/month and you really want bursty Internet service anyway because your usage is probably bursty.
Because the resulting pricing would be crazy high, like 512 kbps for $50/month and you really want bursty Internet service anyway because your usage is probably bursty.
Wholesale bandwidth pricing isn't anywhere near that high, and back haul costs at most double it.
$10 per mbs per month isn't uncommon for wholesale bandwith pricing from "on-net" buildings (and now days $2 to $4 isn't unheard of). The back haul cost to your local C.O. is probably roughly around $10 per mbs as well (admitedly I'm going of backhaul costs from Toronto to Waterloo up in Canada) and then your down to the local loop. We will assume the cost of the local loop is allready covered in the existing price paid, so if the user wanted N dedicated mbbits it should cost N[margin][12 to 20 dollars] per month more. Now are most users may not be willing to pay for this.
A frequent way of dealing with the "bursty" nature for servers is 95th percentile billing where by you pay for the max of what you use, dropping the top 5%.
Admittedly these numbers are very back of the envelope, but I think its a bit more realistic than $50/month for 512kbs.
Or if you start with 7 Mbps for $50 at ~20:1 oversubscription and then divide by 20 to get down to 1:1 oversubscription you can get some scary numbers.
I don't see that as a problem. It's just an education issue. Besides, better products thrive in a marketplace with educated consumers.
If broadband providers were required to advertise their offerings in a consistent way (as they are here in Australia, although not in the way I describe upthread) choice for consumers would be a lot easier. The only people that lose are the big companies with big marketing budgets and inferior products.