ISP Trying Free (But Limited) Home Broadband Plan

adeelarshad82 writes "Earlier today FreedomPop, a telecom company headquartered in Los Angeles, announced its plans to launch a very low cost home broadband plan for extremely low-intensity users, with 1GB monthly for free. Clearly this is much lower than an average U.S. home broadband usage, which is between 24 and 28 gigs per month. The 1GB of free Internet is basically a teaser; the company aims to disrupt the cable and DSL business with its 10GB for $10 plan which is extendable by paying $5 for each additional GB beyond 10."

Re:Not Cheaper

[cluedweasel]

And one of my remote workers gets through 4Gb to 5Gb per month and she has the privilege of paying $56.99 per month for that. Just because this pricing doesn't work for you, doesn't mean it's a bad deal for everyone.

Re:Attacks on bandwidth caps are shortsighted

[SJHillman]

Holy shit, I didn't realize we had The Guy Who Is Representative Of Everyone's Bandwidth Usage on Slashdot.

(If you didn't get the sarcasm, what I mean to say is "Maybe this product is targeted at certain demographic/market of which you are not a member")

My maternal grandmother uses a few dozen MB a month, she does almost nothing beyond email a couple times a week, look up the odd recipe and a little online banking. My paternal grandfather does even less with his Net connection. Both are on fixed income.

Evil

[Iamthecheese]

Customers who use the internet in more sophisticated ways, for example to cut their TV cable and stream; to use bittorrent; to game, and so forth will not benefit from this pricing plan.

We're left with less informed and poorer customers as the target demographic. The problem here is that most people and especially those in the target demographic don't realize how many bits that javascript game is transferring. They don't realize Mom's facebook page links to 3 gigs of pictures. This will inevitably result in a large percentage of their customers going far over the cap and getting hit with an unpayable bill.

I would like to think this company will simply cut off internet service at cap but a much, much more likely scenario is debt collectors harassing poor people for anything they can get.

This is evil from start to finish.