Thou shalt not question Comcast

[jkinz-+hffLmS/kj4 at public.gmane.org (jkinz-+hffLmS/kj4 at public.gmane.org)]

On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 11:36:30AM -0500, Matthew Gillen wrote:
> jkinz-+hffLmS/kj4 at public.gmane.org wrote:
> > It is clear that comcast/(all ISP's) cannot afford to sell
> > residential services if customers can effectively "resell"
> > (or give away) those same "services" to others.
> 
> I don't buy this either.  They can always undersell you, since they are the
> upstream provider.  

Matt, they can't undersell "free"  and its difficult to undersell 
"priced at one tenth the cost of the service" (deep pockets and
time can win there though) but the price isn't actually relevant. 

Its not a market competition.

If You give away their bandwidth for free, and consume several times as
much bandwidth as they have allocated to each "residence" that pretty
much overwhelms their pricing structure.  Their business fails.

>  And it's infeasible for Joe Random customer to "resell"
> the service in any way other than dial-up. 

Dial up has nothing to do with it.
Dial up is not needed to resell SMTP transport (email portal) or
web services and those would both consume ISP bandwidth.


They are not worried about customers reselling access to the web,
they are (or were) worried about bandwidth consumption in excess
of their model. 

Now they have a new problem

Now they just want to make sure that you buy all your video
experiences from them. SD and HD level video. Most You tube stuff
is not a threat. HuLu is. YouTube will be. 


--