How much would you spend for home broadband?

What's the most you've ever paid for your small-office/home-office (SOHO) Internet broadband? For me, it was $350 a month, but that was in the late 80s and I had a fractional T1 using frame-relay direct to my house. In those days, it was worth it. In 2010, I have a 25 megabits per second (Mbps) Charter Internet connection that's running me $55 a month. It's not fast enough, but it's as fast as I can get in Asheville, NC. If I lived somewhere else though I could get Verizon's new 150/35 Internet service... for $194.99

Hmmm... given a choice, I'd probably pay that. But, then, I watch Internet video all the time, and I also have two dozen computers on my “home” network. What about you? Would 150Mbps be overkill? Is not quite $200 a month be too expensive?

Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) 3.0, will bring160 Mbps down and 120 Mbps up to ordinary cable users who don't have fibre to their doorstep. In theory, DOCSIS 3.0 will be available to 99% of cable users by 2013.

Eh... I'm not so sure that's going to happen that fast. To deliver that kind of speed required channel-bonding and other tricks that cuts down the number of customers that any cable provider can service on any given cable. In addition, the cable ISP also has to provide big enough pipes to the rest of the Internet to handle that much load. All this means is that it's going to be expensive. In turn, that will mean by the time DOCSIS 3.0 is available in my neighborhood, the price-tag will probably not be much less than what Verizon is asking for now.

Of course, I can always hope that Google will deliver fibre to my town. Asheville, after-all, is still in the running for Google's Fiber Initiative. The Google Fiber Initiative, for those of you who may have forgotten is a series of test projects by Google to bring 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) Internet to the home.

Short of a minor miracle like that happening, I expect, at best, I'll be paying $100 plus for 150 to 160Mbps in a few years. What about you? How much would you pay for 100Mbps Internet? Or, is your 300-baud Hayes Smartmodem still fast enough for you?