Wired gives this the headline “You Don’t Want Super-High-Speed Internet, Says Time Warner Cable”, but I think I’ve given it a more accurate title.
We might all want gigabit bandwidth at home, but I can certainly understand where a provider doesn’t feel that the bandwidth would be used and they might not even find people to pay for the new service anyway. Some days I’d love to have that kind of bandwidth and I lament that Verizon doesn’t offer FIOS anywhere near me, but then my download ends and I forget about it. For a provider that has to make a cost vs. benefit analysis on cannibalizing a cash cow, it’s hard to count on customers being willing to pay enough to cover the costs of building out a network. Particularly one which could require swapping out large swaths of infrastructure. The alternative would be to just upgrade the edge and offer the bandwidth knowing that it would be severely congested on the upstream end, frustrating those users who bought the bandwidth to actually consume it.