In a word - excessive.

Highspeed Internet access is the second best racket the phone companies have going - second only to cell service. Ameritech is a prime example of the billions of dollars in profit that can be piled up providing mediocre cell phone service. That's in comparison to Nextel who provides poor service and still makes obscene amounts of money.

But back to broadband. Those who know what it takes for the phone company to provide DSL to the subscriber wonder why it's more expensive than dial-up. Basically all they do is swap out the line card for your loop and configure it. Done. After that it's just bandwidth costs which, for the average user, is a few pennies a day within the phone company's aggregate bandwidth costs.

Dial-up is actually a more maintenance-intensive service due to the big modem banks that must be maintained. And there's the additional cost of the inbound phone lines for all those modems. With DSL, the only phone line used is your own.

In reality, DSL should be cheaper than dial-up and since there are numerous vendors who will sell you dial-up for $10 a month, there's no way DSL should cost more than that unless the customer is moving megabytes of data every hour all day. Charge that guy extra and charge the rest of us what it really costs to provision the service.

Broadband is a colossal ripoff.

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29mar