I’ve been intrigued by thread starting to make it’s way around the blogosphere started by Brian Barrett over at Gizmodo on the “death by a thousand subscription fees” we all suffer from as geeks and technology consumers. Not surprisingly, Steven Hodson picked up the ball and ran with it over at the Inquisitr. Both writers made some strong points, I wanted to take it a few steps further based on some technological innovation I’ve been witness to the last couple of months.

Brian Barrett pegs the monthly costs of being a geek out at about $208-738 a month, but unfortunately, in his analysis, he tries to lump together a lot of hardware and service costs together, making his estimates pretty confusing.

As I mentioned over on Cali’s post-CES wrapup, one of the first things I look at when I evaluate a device is cost. Something few tech folks seem to do is remember that there’s a great psychology to the success of a thing that depends almost entirely on its price point. Many people will impulse purchase things that are less than $100 that at the same functionality level they’d never consider purchasing at $125. I talked about this pretty in depth when I addressed the eBook reader manufacturers earlier this week.

Still, all those costs add up.  These days it’s almost requisite to have a smartphone, a livingroom TV, a media player, a game console, a laptop and all the requisite subscriptions that go with all those devices having to do with connectivity and usage.

You can check out Brian’s post for his original graph, but I’ve recreated a version of it here that breaks it down further so that we can understand it a bit better.

I’ve broke down the costs of living into two sections: Devices and Services. All the device prices are prorated, or as I said on the graph, amortized monthly over the course of one year.

I’ve also color-coded the entries. 

White: There were a few things on Brian’s list that only a few people have or have a need for, which I left un-color-coded (or white).
Yellow: These are what have been traditionally considered “standard kit” for most geeks or tech-enabled households – a smartphone, home internet, cable TV, and a portable PC of some kind.
Blue: The point of this post is to show how the balance is shifting from expensive to cheap.  I’ve color coded a few items here that you can consolidate your other services into and save a metric crap-ton of money with.

Yellow: Renting the Cow Gets Expensive.

I completely agree with the original thrust of the posts that Brian and Steven put out – things are getting expensive.  The tag line we all seem to have to use lately is “in these trying and tough economic times,” which is true (but somewhat laborious to hear constantly).

Nick Carr, as Steven said, put it nicely:

It’s a strange world we live in. We begrudge the folks who actually create the stuff we enjoy reading, listening to, and watching a few pennies for their labor, and yet at the very same time we casually throw hundreds of hard-earned bucks at the saps who run the stupid networks through which the stuff is delivered. We screw the struggling artist, and pay the suit.

Somebody’s got a good thing going.

Perhaps if we paid less for the dumb pipes to everything we use, we’d be more willing to accept the existence of certain paywalls, and the announced paywall from the New York Times today wouldn’t be universally panned as a death sentence for the company. Right now, we don’t live in that world. We might soon, though.

If you tally up the score from the services and devices I’ve marked as yellow (which, by no means, are a conclusive list, simply covering the bare minimum to get online and exist in a media connected society), the total comes to a monthly cost to the consumer of $265 to $405 a month.  That’s the minimum cost to the average geek consumer to stay connected to his world using the cheapest equipment and services available.

As a basis for comparison, my first house, which was about 2,000 square feet and two stories, was $350 a month to rent (in 1998). Or, if you prefer, it’s roughly the cost of 100 pounds of beef purchased from the McDonald’s value menu today (that’s 1/7th of an entire beef cow).

Blue: Convergence and Disruption are the Names of the Game

I recently subscribed to Clear’s 4G wireless services as a replacement for my home internet connection, a connection that serves my wife’s xBox activities, my son’s web-surfing, and my own considerably high net bandwidth consumption. The impetus of the move was a five-day downtime from Time Warner’s Roadrunner service that had no resolution in sight.

As I’ve said before, I was exceedingly pleased with AT&T’s Uverse service, which served up speeds of up to 29.9 Mbs over a fiber connection, but when I moved out of their service area I had little choice but to go to the overpriced Time Warner. With UVerse, I had more channels than I could watch in a lifetime (and it always seemed like they were adding more). The Internet service did have occasional downtime (as any does), but its downtime was rare and was fixed quickly (as long as you could navigate the automated voicemail hell of AT&T’s customer support lines).

Time Warner, on the other hand, has a fraction of the channel selection, and I hadn’t had a single day of uninterrupted service since I got the service back in December. The wireless router had to be replaced three times since I started in December, and they had to come out to rebalance the signal levels at least a dozen times. The list of issues I’ve had with them is comedically long, but one thing it’s not: atypical for most people.

In general, connectivity providers’ service levels have continue to sink in recent years, and nowhere is that more prevalent than with Comcast’s and AT&T’s adversarial attitudes with their customers (I don’t even need to cite a source here – search Google Images for Comcast and AT&T and enjoy the anti-fan art).

There were two technologies at CES that specifically caught my attention: the FemtoJack and Clear’s 4G Wireless service.

FemtoJack + Netbook + WiMax = Mobile Connectivity. Cost = $53 / month.

The FemtoJack was a nice little scoop Mike Coop brought to the site on the first day of the show. In case you missed the details of this one, the FemtoJack works like the MagicJack – it give you free phone service when connected to the Internet or an Internet enabled computer. It’s going to cost, according to reports, a flat fee of $40. That allows you to take any mobile phone and use it for free calling services.

Clear is, obviously, a service I’ve been following for some time.  They offer WiMax services in many US metro cities that (as long as you’re in their primary coverage areas) performs at the promised speeds.  Monday night, I recorded a Skype conversation with Art while my son played Call of Duty on the xBox 360 using the group voice functionality, while my wife simultaneously surfed YouTube. You can hear the recording of the podcast Art and I did here – the quality, all things considered, is superb.

If you combine the functionality of Clear (or comparable 4G WiMax providers) with a FemtoJack and a charged up netbook, you’ve got all the functionality of a slate, iPhone, and regular mobile voice line. This combination costs you around $53 a month, and saves you around $150 a month.

WiMax + xBox 360 + Netflix + Hulu = Home Entertainment. Cost = $61 / month.

When you apply the same economics to your home entertainment system is when the savings start to pile up. I use the same WiMax connector I use for my mobile computing and connectivity needs as I do for my home, though there are options to separate that out. My suggestion, if you’re following this plan, is to get a mobile connectivity device if you’re a single person, but double up and get the home unit if you have a family or roommates that would use your connection when you’re not home. If you’re a single person, though, you can drop another $25 a month from the cost here.

To the point, though, the xBox 360 has a number of features not widely publicized as possible for replacing your home entertainment needs. Certainly, the thrust of and primary usage for our househould on the xBox is for gaming, but for a small upgrade fee, you get xBox Live and Netflix, which give you access to thousands of movies and TV shows, as Art Fewell discussed recently. Adding a Windows box to your home network next to your TV set adds an additional level of entertainment options: Hulu. If you’re not familiar with Hulu’s programming options, you’re likely living under a rock, but it is pretty vast, current, and at the moment free.

There’s a home-install aspect to going this route (you’re not going to have a cable guy on call to fix it when things break), but the upside is that even Windows is more reliable than the schedule that most cable techs keep (“…we’ll be there sometime between 8 AM and Armageddon”).

Most impressive, though, is the monthly savings. You get almost 100% of what would you’d be getting not only from cable TV and Internet service, home voice connectivity, but it’s a fraction of the cost. That sort of selection and set up would normally run around $300 a month. With this setup, as described, it’s going to run you between $36 to $101 a month (including the amortized monthly cost of the equipment).

What’s the Downside?

Not all of this is available everywhere.  It might be a while before WiMax is universally available. Steven Hodson and I were chatting briefly about the lack of antitrust protections in Canada and the longshot prospect of there ever being true telco competition in there.

In the US, it’s less bleak. This “death by a thousand subscriptions” is a market opportunity created by bloated and greedy connectivity mega-conglomerates. It’s not required that there be $500 in fees each month to keep me connected to the world, and this list of service combinations proves it.

As William Gibson says, the future is here, it’s just not yet evenly distributed.