Re: FCC Chair Rosenworcel Proposes to Investigate Impact of Data Caps

[sronan () ronan-online com]

Or the investment to upgrade doesn’t make financial sense.

> On Jun 20, 2023, at 9:54 AM, Mark Tinka <mark@tinka.africa> wrote:
>
>  
>
> > On 6/20/23 15:20, Mike Hammett wrote:
> >
> > Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
> >
> > When you go down in density, your fixed cost per customer really escalates and you simply can't afford to provision 
> > as much as you'd like to. When you leave glass as a transport mechanism, scaling isn't easy. When you don't have a 
> > wireline to the customer prem, scaling isn't easy.
> >
> > You might have a licensed backhaul going 10 - 20 miles to feed a remote cluster of customers (be it wireless, 
> > copper, coax, or glass as the last mile). Those are more or less limited to about 1.5 gb/s. Spectrum availability 
> > can reduce that. You can sometimes stack them, but again, spectrum availability would be king in that decision.
> > You might have fixed wireless as the last mile. We're starting to see platforms capable of multi-hundred megabit per 
> > customer with a sector capacity of low gigabits, but again, spectrum availability comes into play here. Those 
> > solutions require line of sight (or close to it) and only go a few miles. The systems that can penetrate foliage 
> > really cut your per-sector capacity to around 100 megabit, shared amongst all customers. Those are simply 
> > limitations of physics.
> >
> >
> > When you don't have the benefits of scale, the only viable path forward in a managed setting is usage-based billing, 
> > with some amount of included data.
>
> We are saying the same thing re: mobile (when I say mobile I mean wireless) providers. Because spectrum is a 
> limitation, capped services make sense. 
>
> When I say "fixed line", I mean end-to-end, i.e., from CPE to nearest ISP PoP, all on wire. In such a case, if an 
> operator is still offering a capped service, it is because they have no incentive (competition) to do otherwise.
>
> Mark.