Being Stingy with Broadband Speeds

I’m taken aback when I see fiber-based broadband providers offering what can best be described as stingy speeds. The other day, I ran across a broadband provider that offers a range of speeds between 25/3 Mbps and 100/20 Mbps on fiber. Earlier I ran across a provider that has fiber products as tiny as symmetrical 10 Mbps. This frankly mystifies me, and I always wonder why somebody with fiber would offer broadband products that are similar to their competitors. I figure that part of the reason is what I would call old thinking. Somebody offering that kind of speed is likely a small telephone company that used to offer DSL or a small rural cable company that didn’t have fast speeds. DSL products were set at a range of speeds up to 25/3 Mbps because that’s what the technology would allow. I can’t imagine the thought process that says the slow speeds are adequate. According to OpenVault, 75% of US households are currently subscribing to download speeds of 200 Mbps or faster. That includes over 14% of homes nationwide that are subscribing to a gigabit product. It’s clear that people want faster broadband. I think another part of the reason that a provider would set low speeds is a fundamental belief that customers that buy faster speeds will somehow cost the provider a lot more money. But after having seen the impact of hundreds of providers that have upgraded to faster speeds, I know this is not true. Another reason behind offering slow speeds probably goes back to the day when buying Internet backbone connections was extremely expensive, and operators feared that a burst in usage would cost a lot. That’s also not true anymore in most places. Wholesale broadband prices have tumbled over the last decade. I know providers that are buying eight or ten times more bandwidth than a decade ago, at basically the same cost.  I can’t understand providers that have these stingy pricing plans when their peers a town away have normal broadband pricing.