On Wed, 11 May 2005 11:08:41 PDT, Matt Bazan said:
why in the world would anyone want to purchase dsl from a private reseller when i can get 4mb down 384 up from comcast for $25?
What date does Comcast project the *reliable* availability of that service at that price point in *my* area? Make note - I'm at the end of Virginia that's closer to the coal mines than to civilization - there is a county adjacent to this one that has one (singular, less than 2, etc) traffic light in the entire county. Although people in the 3 major towns right in this area have connectivity, there's *large* geographic areas in the vicinity that are well over 20K cable-feet from the local telco CO, and a similar distance from a cable head end. Yes, both the cable and DSL providers have major infrastructure challenges for entire counties around here. There's a lot of people around here who are lucky to get 19.2 dialup over the existing copper, and a number of small ISPs operating in the area. I have a friend who is making money by selling the entire range from "150 hours/ mo of dialup for $8.95/mo" to co-lo of servers to web/mail hosting to providing dedicated leased lines - and one of his big selling points is that if you get service from netZero or AOL or other big providers, "the CTO will stop by your office in 20 mins and help you fix it" isn't an available service, nor can you say "this isn't *quite* the combo I wanted, can we negotiate?". And I'm sure that he has a good long-term market niche selling personal-service DSL to all the customers that are outside the cable plant's reach, but have good enough telco copper. And even when there's fiber to everybody in *this* area, he's *still* going to be able to make a living reselling the concept of "value-added personal local human support". (Yes, anybody who tries to take on Comcast's "4M/384k/$25" deal head-on in a major metro area is going to have a hard time - however, Comcast probably can't *sustain* that price point and at the same time provide any other services. There's plenty of niche markets on every side of that pipe-size/custom-service/ price-point/location combo).