Would it actually be that much less costly to give you 20-25 vs 75, though? My uninformed assumption was that it was largely artificial once you get to a low enough speed.
Well, if there's not a cost difference, why do they keep trying to double my pricing when the base tier goes up?
My sense is there is some cost savings at these lower tiers, but more importantly it would prevent ISPs from jacking prices up while using higher speeds as the rationale ("Look, we just tripled your speed, and it only costs double!"). ISPs would be less likely to double prices without any service improvement. But since many people don't care about the service improvement, it's an illusory benefit for them.
In my area, a competitor just finished installing fiber to my neighborhood, and is offering symmetrical gigabit speeds for less (nearly half the price) than I was paying for 500/20 Mbps to the incumbent cable company before.
The cable company now needs to both increase speeds _and_ lower prices to even keep their existing customers. This is a good place to be, as a customer.
I've had many instances where ISPs increased my speeds without increasing prices.
If pricing stayed even close to fixed my gigabit internet would cost well over $10,000mo, considering back in the day I was paying SBC for less than a meg for more than I'm paying for a gigabit today. And that's before adjusting for inflation, those 90s dollars are worth way more than 2023 dollars.
Agreed, I suspect the cost is in providing the larger amount of bandwidth to the block or neighborhood (better cabling, cable modems, etc.) Once in place, the individual subscriber usage probably all costs the same for Comcast.
The big upfront cost is trenching. The rest is potatoes. If you think the "big heroes" of an ISP are the router wizards, oh boy. It's the permit people. A ransomware gang has nothing on the uppity council of a town of 4000 people.
