Thank you ICE!
February 3rd, 2009Finally some good news?
ICE (Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad), the state monopoly, has decided to lower bandwidth costs. They will be doubling the bandwidth for each of the 80,000 subscribers for free and lowering the price for new customers. This is good for me since I only have 1mbps/256kbps and I am paying around $40 per month for this.
However, by doing this ICE is expecting a 140% increase in the number of new customers. This could end up exacerbating things because ICE already has it’s share of problems with dropped connections and DNS issues. Hopefully with the extra money they make from the new clients they will be able to better support their system and their clients. This is just me being optimistic. In reality, I’m sure they will not expand their services in any way, but just make them cheaper so their clients are in no position to complain about the shitty service they receive.
I’m wondering if this has anything to do with the TLC (free trade agreement w/ US). If a company like Verizon came here and offered FIOS service to my house, I would be all over it, but if ICE keeps lowering their prices, I would probably stick with them and their shitty service. It seems that the business model of all state monopolies are the same: fuck the customer!
I guess that’s what happens when you’re a cheap bastard like me.
The original story can be found here.
