lanbrown wrote:
Maybe we should try 3) The cost of upgrades is higher and higher. 100GigE card for the CRS core routers; $100,000 for the card and $100,000 for the optic. 10GigE is far cheaper, but you are limited to the number of ports in a group and the number of groups you can have. 100GigE also is very picky about fiber and has a problem running on older fiber; like over 5 years old or so. Adding more and more bandwidth is getting quite expensive. When you have people that feel that they have the right to use as much bandwidth as they want, it doesn't pay for those upgrades.
I don't buy this. I have no doubt that the cost for network infrastructure is significant, but if AT&T is in such a pickle that they are desperately raising rates to cover the cost of that infrastructure, then they are absolutely terrible at planning and anticipating their patterns of growth and with network development/management.
Or perhaps U-Verse is growing 500% faster then AT&T ever imagined, and perhaps their engineers and planners never could imagine in their faintest dreams a world of Hulu, MLB On Demand, Amazon and Netflix, and AT&T desperately has to cut bandwidth use by customers in order to stay afloat.
Nah. They just want to make more money. Not a sin in capitalism, of course, but why lie to us (the customers) and degrade our service while keeping the prices the same. I bet the bandwidth caps would go down much easier if AT&T issued a "mea culpa" and lower internet rates across the board, say by $10 a month, even while keeping the caps, ostensibly to make those using more bandwidth pay for it.
