Broadband Internet has been seen by many, as an opportunity not fully being utilised. The four P's of marketing broadband have failed based on the new technology not meeting its projected sales. The price, product, place, and promotion of broadband have all come under scrutiny somewhere along the way.
Many of the articles collected have one way or another shown the flaws on the current system and the measures (or lack of) that have been put in place to correct the problems.
The 1st problem that becomes apparent is the price of broadband. Most people have found that the price difference between dial up and broadband is too great for the extra functionality that they will get. Although this was at first quite true, with broadband cable costing between $40 to $60(US), company's soon realised that not every broadband user is the same just like dial up customers and hence the adoption of tiered pricing came about. This was a particularly interesting concept though since some people argued that broadband was about fast access to greater amounts of data, and by putting restrictions on plans, this would result in reduced functionality and higher prices for top end users. Whilst on the other end of the spectrum, this would make way for lower priced plans with little functionality. This would mean that users could purchase broadband internet and pay almost the same amount as they would for dial up except they would be surfing four times faster.
By having this system in place, users would be able to make the transition to broadband with much more ease with the cost factors being eliminated. Again, questions were being raised about this concept since some people saw this as a short term solution, and a hindrance to the long term viability, and progress of broadband. The way that these opinions were being justified was that when people generally hear the word broadband, they immediately think of high speed downloading of music, data, and video.
