Wisconsin Telco Monopoly SBC launches an inexpensive, bundled WiFi option for their DSL subscribers:
SBC officially announces $1.99 per month unlimited hot spot services: If you subscribe to SBC’s DSL service at a rate as low as $26.95 per month for their cheapest service, you are entitled to unlimited Wi-Fi hot spot service for $1.99 a month with a one-year commitment — after receiving free service until April 2005.
This gives SBC a giant sledgehammer to wield against the cable vendors trying to encourage people to sign up for ever-slower cable service. I’ll confess that I’m biased against cable because of the pooled bandwidth/pooled network approach. Cable modem providers initially had no protection against entire neighborhoods seeing each other’s networks. Then they restricted upload speeds to 128 Kbps on most links to defeat “servers.” Because bandwidth is pooled, it means that each neighborhood on a cable head end has a finite amount of bandwidth–the more subscribers, the more frustration.
WiFi News
Keep in mind that US broadband service significantly lags systems in Asia in terms of speed and price/performance. Korea and Japan citizens have access to broadband at speeds up to 20X faster than services we can purchase.