What $10 gets you in San Francisco
Anyone who’s ever listened to the Engadget Podcast knows mine and Peter’s utter disdain for Time Warner Cable, internet provider during my New York years which couldn’t seem keep access up for more than a week without an outage. San Francisco pleasantly surprised me with same-price cable net access ($45 per month), but with nearly doubles the speed of New York’s fastest connection. We’re talking a 10 meg line here for $45. I know some FIOS user somewhere just laughed at me, but for cable in 2006 that’s pretty freaking good. Still, all that video uploading has been wearing pretty thin on the 384Kbps upstream cap, so I decided to chance it and see if Comcast had a faster home office version. Even if it was $200 a month for 1Mbps up, that’d be worth it to me. So you’ll imagine my shock when they offered up a “faster” version of their access (quoted to be 8Mbps / 784Kbps) for a mere $10 more per month. Network overhead prevents me from getting every single Kbps from that 784, but 12.5 / 700 for $55 makes me a happy, happy web-worker. Could I be more stoked? Well, maybe if they offered WiMAX or something.
Co-founder of 
I’m with Pacbell, er, SBC, er, AT&T DSL, and I actually just lowered my monthly fee from 45 to 39.99 and also bumped to a FASTER speed! My apt might be far from the cooler parts of town, but it is nice and close to the d-slam!
move to sweden. i pay circa $39 for 10/10 :)
I dare you to perform the same test at various times between 8:00pm – 11:00pm, you’ll be surprised. This is your peak capacity, not sustained connection speeds. Imagine if you want to stream 30 min of video to your tv through a media bridge… Soon you’ll see TVs with ethernet jack’s. Video is changing traffic patters like no time before.
Wimax is a joke, it will take decades before you get sustained 5mbps at peak our.
Remember, you’re dealing with a shared network… the more broadband penetration goes up the worst it gets… Nodes need to get closer to end user’s homes, less sharing… lots of $$$ to be invested. Wimax is also a shared network, you just cant predict who’s going to be on it.
I work in a PE/VC/Tech fund in New York and am happy to walk you through the thesis if you want.
Regards and keep up the good work …
Actually Ricardo, 8-10PM isn’t that super relevant. I work from home, and that’s my sustained speed during my work hours — I download between 1-1.5MBps and up at 80KBps consistantly now. That said, yes, the industry faces some unique challenges moving forward! People’s hunger for bandwidth is insatiable, and we’re going to have to look at fundamentally different approaches to byte delivery in the next ten years. But today… today I’m a happy man.
Move to Ireland, i pay $59 pm for a 3MB/384KB DSL line…ugh
Counter Strike on a 12/768, now you’re talking…