
Comcast Will Spend Millions on Khan Academy for Low-Income Broadband Adoption - spicyj
http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/16/khancast/
======
nhance
Every so often a company will make a move that is so smart that it boggles
your mind. To me, this is one of those moves.

For a company so evil in so many ways, this really surprised me.

Think about this, if this works, low-income households can increase their
earning power through learning skills that will allow them to make more money.
Once they're making enough, they'll be more stable customers for Comcast and
having used the internet to improve their lives, the internet will be one of
the last things to cut. (If I was in the position to benefit from this, I'd
never "bite the hand that feeds me" if I can avoid it.)

If they don't screw this up, Comcast stands to win hundreds to thousands of
new lifetime loyal customers (assuming they don't screw up retention).

Low income families increase their earning power.Comcast wins more business.
Khan is more successful. There are no losers.

This is absolutely brilliant. Good job Comcast!

~~~
VLM
Isn't comcast charging something like $10 for each 50 gigs over their transfer
cap?

Next thing you know, the electric company will give the manufacturer of
electric space heaters for poor people a grant so they can sell more and
cheaper space heaters to poor people, or perhaps a for profit water company
will give away free lawn watering sprinklers to poor people.

~~~
jimmaswell
That really doesn't sound like that bad of a price at all for going over the
limit you agreed to.

~~~
MichaelGG
$10 for 50GB? At 4 hours a day, every day a month, 50GB is only 1Mbps. 1Mbps
of transit costs < $1/month. So in a way, it's only 10x markup, which isn't
_terrible_ given the industry.

OTOH, people that exceed may be more likely to perform large transfers. If
you're downloading at non-peak hours, there's zero extra cost to the ISP.

This kind of problem is unavoidable when the cost and price structures vary.

~~~
ars
It's 50GB over 300GB - it's a VERY rare customer that uses 300GB in one month.
And even then this is only in a few cities, most places have no cap.

~~~
cobookman
Its not that rare to exceed the 300GB datacap if you're not using cable as
your primary means of video distribution.

Netflix uses 2.8GB/Hour of streaming on its highest quality setting [1].
That's only 107 hours of video per 300GB. Now include four family members, and
normal internet traffic...and voila you're over 300GB in one moth.

[1]
[https://support.netflix.com/en/node/87](https://support.netflix.com/en/node/87)

------
3rd3
It’s certainly going to be an interesting development how internet education
will effect the socioeconomic backgrounds of intellectually successful people.
This blog post [1] considers some possible outcomes.

[1]
[http://www.gwern.net/Conscientiousness%20and%20online%20educ...](http://www.gwern.net/Conscientiousness%20and%20online%20education)

------
MrVitaliy
Really bad customer service and overpriced internet for 90% of their
customers, to subsidize a small, selected segment of new "low-income"
customers. How much lower can they go as a company?

~~~
Datsundere
This. I have comcast and we get 20mbps when our plan apparently according to
the billing department is 50mbps. They say they'll transfer me to the
"internet" service department, but they never pick up.

~~~
kbar13
Analogy:

You buy a pipe capable of pushing 50 gallons per second of water, but only 20
gallons per second of water comes out. Do you blame the guy you bought the
pipe from?

~~~
markdown
Of course not, stupid! It's clearly Obama's fault.

