Verizon to Charter: Not so fast!

In the escalating speed war of download speeds, Charter seemed to up the ante this week with a (limited) 60Meg/sec DOCSIS 3.0 alternative.  

Verizon responded immediately by pointing out that the speeds were only achievable if certain (upstream) pipes were widened -- something they might already have done.

Interesting concept embedded in the back-and-forth is the concept of guaranteed quality-of-service.  You can't offer a triple-play without partitioning bandwidth.  For example, if you put all your eggs in winning the download competition, your users may not have enough bandwidth allocated to make a simple phone call.  Similarly, triple play users can reasonably expect to watch TV and make a phone call at the same time.  

This is going to get interesting... More here:

http://www.cedmagazine.com/Verizon-DOCSIS-3-0-not-answer-013009.aspx

Broadband usage caps con't

We've looked before at how long "all you can eat" broadband subscriptions would survive.  And, we've seen that Comcast (and others) began experimenting in 2008 with charging by the Gigabyte.  Now, a new white paper has emerged that challenges the tenet that phone & cable companies should sequester their top 5% of users by charging them more.  The reason?  These "data hogs" might actually be performing a useful function by effectively serving as a "node" on the network.  

For more info, check out this link.

Will 2009 see the continued shift of Broadband to usage-based-pricing at the same time as Voice continues to slide to flat-rate?