Wednesday, September 14, 2011

How to sell the highest speed tier

RCN says it sees limited demand for higher speed tiers, such as 60 Mb/s. If you check pricing, you will see that 5 Mb/s comes at 30 $/mo, 15 Mb/s at 40 $/mo, 25 Mb/s at 50 $/mo and 60 Mb/s at 80 $/mo.

Basically, the situation is the same at most ISPs. More speed, higher prices. They are addicted to this business model. Profitability of the higher tiers is ridiculous, because costs are hardly different from the lowest tier service. Customers don't know this and some (few) are willing to pay more for faster services.

But is this the only possible model?

If all prices were equal, it would save the ISP a lot of money spent on marketing. There would only be the need to sell one speed tier: the fastest the network can handle. This would be priced at a level close to the level of the lowest tier available now. People would not only be extremely happy about their fast connections, but also save some money that they can then spend on value-added services, better hardware (to take out any bottlenecks in their connection) and content (no incentive left to do illegal downloads).

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