Last Wednesday, Jeff Prince, a professor at Indiana University came to talk about the current difficulties involving the pricing of the internet and telecommunications. With technology becoming an integral part of life, service providers (such as Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Verizon, etc.) have changed their marketing tactics about selling internet. Professor Prince gave some much relatable examples, such as how much speed we think we need for our daily internet usage. For instance, if your primary workload on the internet involves watching videos, you would not need as much bandwidth, the amount of bits you can transfer in a second, as someone who streams live events. However, does the general public even understand what it means when providers say 10 Mbps, 20Mbps, or 150Mbps? And even if you get the top Mbps offering from your company, it does not mean that you will get the fastest internet speed. Professor Prince mentioned that the new focus is towards latency, which is the delay on the time data is transferred from servers and back to your computer. The higher the latency, the slower things load. However, much of this is not even marketed towards consumers. All companies do is market what people want to see, how much data can you transfer?

I thought that Professor Prince raised was very interesting since my parents approached me about upgrading the internet plan at home a few years ago. It seemed that despite the high bandwidth we had, our internet was still slow and it took me some digging around on speed tests and technology sites to learn that bandwidth is not the only thing that factors into your internet speed. With that in mind, the research that Professor Prince is involved in is trying to price internet speed. Since technology is ever-growing, how much are people willing to pay in order to get faster speeds? If you price the technology too high, you might not have consumers while if you price too low, you end up losing money. Interestingly enough, I do not have an expected price either. One tactic that the professor mentioned as being effective is to not let people come up with a price. You create different options of the plans and assign your own price and let the consumers decide if they want to take up that plan with that pricing. This way, researches will at least have a way of quantifying the value of internet speed and latency for consumers.

And at home, I have come to understand that bandwidth is not everything. Despite my parents falling victim to the service provider’s claims of “You’ll get 150Mbps with our plan!”, our 50Mbps plan is more than enough for the amount of usage we have at home. However, it was also nice to learn that bandwidth is not everything and it’s a sign to really research what you are buying before you set down your money. Overall, I really enjoyed this talk!