A Step Closer (Or Not) To Cable ISP Diversity

Tom Veil writes: "Yahoo! posted a story saying that AT&T Broadband and Comcast have both made agreements to work with other ISPs in order to allow them to provide service through cable systems. The Earthlink/AT&T deal appears to be set at this point, but they haven't received FCC approval. Don't suppose this means we'll be seeing free NetZero cable, but hopefully competition will kick in and make things more affordable for cheapskates like me." Bear in mind that both companies provide cable Internet service and are seeking regulatory approval for a merger. They have good reason to sidestep suspicions that the result would be a strangling monopoly.

Comments

Competition

[friday2k]

I remember the deregulation of the market in Germany when Deutsche Telekom had to open their phone and Internet services. Lots of competition popped up. INITIALLY. Many of them are gone by now, because they sold under their own cost (read: under the price that Telekom was charging them). That cannot be healthy over time (see .gone bubble). By now everybody is about the same, they all raised prices and there a happy few. Did it do much for the consumer? Not really as I recall (but I do not live there anylonger). The only differentiator (basically) is service now. So maybe it is a good thing ...

Rumors

[h4l0]

i work for one of the isp's thats going to get a shot at at&t's cable lines, and i have heard that we are going to be offering about 500k faster down, and 128k faster up than what at&t is currently offering, for a little bit less than what at&t is offering it. keep in mind, this is still in beta testing in a few places, and it might change between now and then. but from what i have heard it will be at least faster speeds for the same price as at&t is offering.

Re:Appearences are deceiving ...

[digitalunity]

Check this out: Qwest.

Their DSL service is pretty expensive, unless you want MSN. Of course, this is competition at work, right? They only carry two MSN packages, both slow, and both cheap. In fact, it's cheaper to get DSL *and* MSN then it is to get DSL by itself, without an ISP. I feel fucking robbed.

Competition? HA! HA!

[Anonymous Coward]

I currently use Time Warner Road Runner after trying Earthlink's cable over Time Warner's line after being a Road Runner customer previously. "Competition" is about the worst word you could possibly come up with. Let me give some background.

In early 2000 I signed up for Road Runner. I liked the product but not the service, Road Runner customer service was awful. Last year as part of the AOL Time Warner deal, AOLTW had to open their cable lines to other providers, and Earthlink was the one they chose to go with in my area. Since I'd had problems with Road Runner I decided to give the Earthlink over TW cable a shot. I called to make the arrangements.

Signing up was easy enough. Within a week I had Road Runner taken off my cable bill and was going through Earthlink. At first the only difference was a new mailbox and new DNS servers. Then I started getting outages, downtime almost every week. Without failure I was getting days every week when there was simply no cable modem service. When I called up the Earthlink number they said they had no known problems and told me to call my cable company. So when I called Time Warner they didn't even want to talk to me since I wasn't really their customer.

My experience was much worse with Earthlink than with Road Runner. In my opinion, Time Warner was doing something to interrupt the Earthlink service over their cable lines. Earthlink support people were very nice and sympathetic but they literally had no power to do anything about my problem. And Time Warner, well they could give a shit because I was paying Earthlink and not them. They didn't want to help me. While I can't prove it I am positive that it was intentional. Time Warner did something to make Earthlink over TW Cable FUBAR while Road Runner over TW Cable was running OK.

The end result. My connection using Earthlink over TW cable lines was up and down, flaky at best. Outages lasting a day at a time, every week. Earthlink wanted to help but they couldn't, because it was a physical problem with the cable (supposedly) that they couldn't control. But Time Warner DIDN'T want to help because I was Earthlink's customer instead of Road Runner's. I wound up cancelling the Earthlink and going back to Road Runner after less than a month. And naturally I wound up losing money in the deal because I had to pay Earthlink for the full month that I didn't use, then I had to resubscribe for Road Runner.

If you think using another provider over your cable company's cable is a good idea, think again. It's the same shit as DSL. Just like the phone companies make it about impossible to get DSL service from someone else, and just like the phone company and your third party DSL provider keep sending you back and forth when you have a tech problem.. the cable company will do the same thing if you try to get another provider over the cable lines.

Don't bother. It's still a monopoly plain and simple. Offering "competition" is a bullshit guise, because it's still the local cable company's fiber, and if there are physical problems, the local cable co does NOT want to help you!!

It will only make matters worse.

[starphish]

By purchasing a resale cable modem service you are setting yourself up for an enormous disappointment. There are many telco companies that re-sell Verizon service, on Verizon lines. If something goes wrong and you need a tech to come out, the company that takes your money can't touch your lines, they have to have Verizon come out and fix your problem, which will almost always take at least 2 weeks to fix. If AT&T sells cable modem and your service goes out, it will be weeks before you are back up. If you think the 3 day wait you get angry about now is bad, you will be in for a wake up call. Trust me on this one. It will make AT&T look like the good guys. They will be able to boast that "their" service is better, even though it is identical. Your tech support will not have access to the UBR's to check the power levels or see what your modem's IP is. They will not be able to clear the host on the UBR's if you want to switch computers, they will not be able to see you coming online. The will just have you power-cycle your modem, and if that doesn't work the only thing for them to do is to send an AT&T tech to your home 2 weeks later, and the problem might not even be with the service. It would be a nightmare choosing a service that uses AT&T's lines.

Let's see better cable access in Ontario...

[The Evil Beaver]

We have three (or is it now two) cable providers in southern Ontario, each in their nice little zones. Where I am, there's Rogers Cable, with horrible cable internet access since before @Home died. Cogeco, out in the boonie areas (Niagra, Belleville, other places like those) provides access too, better from what I've heard, but then again, I'm not in a Cogeco zone. Shaw, the company that seems to have all but vanished, never provided cable internet access, at least not when they had control of the zone I live in.

So my only alternative is to go with Bell/Sympatico for broadband access, or get a T1. Considering what either costs, compared to hellish cable or my so-so dialup, I'll stick to Primus, thanks very much.

Let's see real cable competition in Ontario, followed by _working_ (as opposed to spotty) cable internet access.

Cable was *Always" Open

[billstewart]

Cable modem service was *always* open - that was what really upset the other ISPs. Both the cable companies and the Enforced-Openness ISPs picked the wrong issues - the cable companies "won" by better political lobbying, and killed their industry in the process by causing several years of delay in the growth of their customer base while trying to pay off big debts and delaying their transformation into the new telephony industry. Here's what openness really did and didn't mean:

• YES - Routes packets from the user to anybody on the internet. That was the real problem that upset the competing ISPs often objected to, because this is what makes their traditional model of dial-plus-mail-plus-web obsolete. The obvious implementation of cable modem service is to do routing from the head end on up, unlike DSL or dial services which fundamentally provide Physical Layer or Link Layer services between the end user and some service provider that builds IP connectivity on top of them. Some cable providers do obnoxious things like PPPoE or use 10.x addresses with NAT to give them more control over their users' access (e.g. make it easier to cut off people who don't pay their bills), but they're not necessary.
  
• YES - Routes packets from the user to an email provider. Until the recent problems with spammers started some providers forcing Port 25 through their own relays, this was available, and they all will still allow you to fetch your email from your favorite POP/IMAP/Webmail provider. Some ISPs will only let you retrieve your email if you connect in through their dialups, but that's the ISP being closed, not the cablemodemco.
  
• YES - Lets you retrieve your AOL mail. AOL was one of the big complainers about competition from the cablecos, but they have offered a $9.95 service for a long time that lets you use AOL services from your real ISP.
  
• NO - Competing email service from the cable modem company. Sure, if you were an Excite@Home customer, your webmail account didn't have banner ads on the top the way the free webmail accounts did, but this isn't a real issue, and the Enforced-Openness ISPs shouldn't have tweaked on this one - there were lots of free webmail services competing with them, and providing POPmail and other good-quality email service was the way to compete.
  
• YES - Provide big pipes to service providers that want better performance than they'd get on the open internet. I know that Excite@Home offered this, and I think some of the others did too. Most ISPs can get by with one connection into the cable network, in which case they don't need it, some need multiple connections, e.g. at the big regional peering points, and almost nobody had applications that needed to actually get down to the individual head end - the cable modem companies' regional concentration networks were adequate for that. I don't think the cable modem company lawyers who did the big Resist-Enforced-Openness-We-Paid-For-This-Network lobbying campaigns ever had a clue that they were talking out of both sides of their mouth by tweaking on this issue. Once you've got a routed network, you own the user's connection, and the rest is just implementation and pricing. They already *were* open, in the ways they were telling people it would be *way too expensive* to open up their networks, and they were too clueless to know it.
  
• YES, THIS ONE WAS CLOSED - Decent billing systems that can handle wholesale ordering. This has two impacts - can the ISP market and sell the service to customers and get it provisioned without making the customer order it directly, and does the bill say "Your friendly neighborhood ISP" or does it say "Cable Modem Service From Your Cable TV Company"? A number of the Enforced-Openness ISPs ranted about this, but they failed to make it their major lobbying focus, even though it was the key issue and was the most fixable, and they let the Anti-Enforced-Openness cableco lobbyists lead them off into arguments about connections to the head end. This was one of the big failings of the cable modem companies - it's not strictly necessary for openness, but the big problems they had besides upgrading obsolete hardware were How To Get Customers To Buy Broadband, and wholesaling would have given them more options for finding the content and marketing plays that worked. As it was, the closest they really had to a wholesale marketing connection was Napster :-) Since it was free, they didn't care that they couldn't get the cableco to do billing, and it *was* one of the big reasons people bought broadband. This policy problem especially irked me, because AT&T Broadband's parent company AT&T *does* do wholesale billing for dial ISP services that want to do the same things with their modem service, but the billing systems for cable were totally different and the @Home marketing people were clueless.
  
• NO - Lower prices for wholesale accounts. The Enforced-Openness ISPs did tweak on this one, and spent a lot of time whining about it instead of hitting the billing system openness issues. Yes, it's harder to compete by providing email service for more money than the free webmail at the cable co, but you can do it.
  
• YES, THIS ONE WAS SEMI-CLOSED - Policies against users running servers or providing services on their home systems. (In an open environment, each ISP would probably be able to set separate policies about this, but that's not easy in a routed-from-the-head-end network.) This was another cluelessness on the part of the cable modem companies - they thought that by spending $6B for Excite, they could provide enough exciting content to get couch potatoes to buy their service, instead of realizing that they desperately needed compelling content and that Central Planning wasn't the way to make it appear. Sure, they had to deal with performance issues, and the no-servers policy was partly because the early cable modem systems didn't have mechanisms to limit users' upstream bandwidth, which was the technically constrained resource in the system, but in spite of all those Pac Bell DSL "NO Web Hogs" commercials, performance was never really a problem except in one of their initial test cities which turned out to have some bad hardware.