The New York Times tells us, “If you get excited about the prospect of really, really fast broadband Internet service, here’s a statistic that will make heart race. Or your blood boil. Or both. Pretty much the fastest consumer broadband in the world is the 160-megabit-per-second service offered by J:Com, the largest cable company in Japan. Here’s how much the company had to invest to upgrade its network to provide that speed: $20 per home passed.”
By contrast, Verizon is spending an average of $817 per home passed to wire neighborhoods for its FiOS fiber optic network and another $716 for equipment and labor in each home that subscribes, according to Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. Those numbers from Japan came from Michael T. Fries, the chief executive of Liberty Global, the American company that operates J:Com.
Pricing at Liberty varies widely by market. In Japan, its 160 Mbps service costs 6,000 yen ($60) per month. That’s only $5 a month more than the price of its basic 30 Mbps service. In the Netherlands, meanwhile, it charges 80 euros ($107) for 120 Mbps service and 60 euros ($81) for 60 Mbps. Mr. Fries said that he expected these prices would fall over time.
In the U.S., cable companies, like Comcast and Cablevision, are moving quickly to install the fast broadband technology, called Docsis 3, and charging as much as $140 a month for 50 Mbps service. Meanwhile lack of competition means that other companies, like Time Warner Cable, are moving much more slowly to upgrade. Apparently, they fear that by offering 100 Mbps, everyone will be able to get video on the Internet, and then competition will bring the price for broadband down from $80 to $60 to $40.
Sounds good to us!