As Broadband Growth Slows, Expect Speed Boosts

[Commentary] The demand for broadband in the U.S., after growing at an explosive rate for almost two years, has started to slow, largely due to high market penetration rates and a struggling economy. UBS Research forecasts that the number of U.S. broadband connections will grow 11 percent in 2008, down from growth of 16 percent in 2007. The carriers -- the cable operators and phone companies -- are beginning to feel the impact, and are subsequently looking for ways to squeeze more dollars out of the broadband business. Verizon, for example, is pushing people to sign up for its more expensive FiOS service. Others are looking to use “speed boosts” as a way to lift their ARPU. It should come as no surprise that the carriers have let go of incremental speed upgrades and have gone ahead and doubled or tripled the speeds of their offerings. Why? Because bumping speed to 2 Mbps from 1 Mbps doesn't really feel like a big boost. A 6X speed bump, on the other hand, makes the Internet much faster -- and worth paying for. Suddenly, Hulu and YouTube become much more fun to watch. If a subscriber believes that he or she can download music, stream videos and connect to their favorite social networks faster, they will pay a premium price for that speed. Never mind the fact that how fast content gets delivered to our computers is mandated by not just access speeds but several factors, such as congestion on the backbone networks and servers’ ability to dish out data. As our accompanying chart shows, the downstream speeds might be going up, but the carriers are stifling innovation by controlling the upstream speeds. Broadband 2.0 is all about collaboration and sharing, and that requires just as much upstream bandwidth as it does downstream speeds. Regardless, this coming year is going to be fun as the cable companies and phone operators will do unnatural things to entice new subscribers, starting with offering faster connections at lower prices.
http://gigaom.com/2008/04/29/as-broadband-growth-slows-expect-speed-boosts/