According to CNet, "Broadband newbies pick price over speed". But the conclusion doesn't follow directly from the evidence presented -- rather than valuing low price, they may value other aspects of the service.
For many, it is the unglamorous freeing of their good old PSTN line from dial-up contention, or the need for a second (or third) line. Dial-up has proven attractive to a huge number of users. I've been trying to coax my parents off the trickled Internet over a year to no avail. Sad but true. So those that move to broadband don't so much value price over speed; rather, they value uninterrupted availability of all their communications devices, particularly the telephone.
It could equally be that high-end users highly value an unfiltered always-on connection, and that speed Why? Because they want to leave their IM client, networked game, Skype client, home web server all running. That's my brother's household. He's after low ping times for gaming, which his relatively crummy cable connection supplies in bucketloads. Downloading illicit MP3s and Linux distributions isn't the mainstay of their connectivity needs, so he doesn't necessarily pine for more bandwidth.
Speaking of which, perhaps the nature of P2P clients like KaZaA tells us why additional speed isn't valued more. Perhaps the upload speed of peers regulates rate at which data can be downloaded. At the same time, users can only track so many downloads. Since many KaZaA downloads fail, or don't deliver quite what was expected, people need to pay attention to what's happening, and remember the artists and albums they were after. The download pipe requirements max out at the (shared) upload speed of peers multiplied by the number of downloads you can juggle at once.
So if you're a cableco trying to sell faster pipes, maybe you need to slip your users a better peer-to-peer client to create the demand...
Posted by Martin Geddes at 10:49 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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