Slashdot Mirror
Why You Don't Have a Broadband Connection
blandthrax writes "I ran across this article on The New Republic. The long and short of it indicates that the reason why almost 90% of Americans don't have a broadband connection is because current broadband providers are preventing other ISP's from entering the fray. The result: higher prices for broadband connections and a general lack of innovation. An interesting read full of good details. And, as usual, we learn that countries such as Japan and Korea are far ahead of the US in terms of innovation and technological saturation."
Every year you pay more for less. At this rate, by 2010, We'll be paying $90/mo for 768Kbs. To put it in perspective, I used to pay $35/mo for 6Mbs. I understand ISPs need to make a profit, but they aren't going to do it by charging more for less. Hopefully tiered pricing will get more people to go broadband.
It's like I'm always saying. The free market only benefits the consumer as long as laws and senators are not for sale. Telecom laws in this country are being handed out like utility contracts in some single-resource dependant dictatorship.
When is the US going to get it's head out of it's sphincter and realize that telecom is a public resource. Or that public resources are to be protected for use, not auctioned off to the highest bidder.
Disclaimer: MINAA (Mummy! I'm Not An Animal!)
I have many collegues overseas. For starters, the [overwhelming] percentage of Japanese and Korean weathy enough to acquire broadband is highly suspect and inflated. Secondly, the degree of this "saturation" you speak of is much easier to attain in a relatively small country such as Japan or South Korea, south Korea being about the same size as Indiana and the total sum of Japanese islands being comperable in area to California. Got the smaller land mass? Build the infrastructure quicker and "saturate" it. If this is how "advanced" a country's 'broadband' (ugh) situation is, then Liechtenstein or Luxembourg might as well be the technological capital of the world.
That said a month to month contract (and no install fees) for a reasonably priced Unix and Unix like friendly provider with a self install kit in NoVA and I'd probably grab it.
~~ What's stopping you?
In my area, the two LECs (Local Exchange Carriers) are Verizon (evil!{my opinion}) and SWB (not as evil anymore{my opinion}).
When I or friends have tried to obtain broadband service from companies other than these, we come up against a brick wall: although smaller companies have the ability to provide dsl service in our area, they actually have to lease the lines from these LECs (verizon and southwestern bell).
It took weeks sometimes just for the LEC to have the access on their end set up, and any time there was a technical problem, we'd have to speak to both sides, where each party generally needed cooperation and information from the other. Needless to say, this was not something that was easy to get accomplished and it totally ruined my (and others) experience. On monday, I'm ordering broadband at my new residence, and guess what? I'm going to be getting it through one of the big boys. The reason, the hassle of trying to get service through two companies that are in competition with eachother is too painstaking.
Fine! You don't have to yell at me! But do repeat what you just said though because something's going on in my head.
Fantastic article, this piece really caught my eye:
In February, Powell, who enjoys a three-to-one majority on the FCC, announced a "proposed rulemaking" on "telephone-based broadband." According to the FCC's decision, telephone-based broadband services are "information services, with a telecommunications component, rather than telecommunications services." The distinction sounds semantic, but it has profound legal implications. According to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, telecommunications services have to grant open access to their facilities, but information services do not. By defining telephone broadband as an information service--a designation originally intended for content providers like LexisNexis--the FCC removed it from regulation, allowing the Baby Bells to ban other ISPs from transmitting over their lines.
What he's saying here is that the FCC can't regulate DSL because DSL is a service which provides content like AOL, MSN, Compuserve, etc. So if you have a DSL line, and you're reading Slashdot, the chairmain of the FCC believes that your DSL provider brought you this story.
Mike Powell is a damned industry whore, and a disgrace to his father.
There are lots of people out there who just don't care about having faster Internet connections. You always hear about some freak out in the sticks, salivating to get his paws on a fast pipe. What about the millions of people who have access to broadband connections but don't sign up!?
Let's face it: People like us are not normal at all. Most people dial in, check email, buy a CD from Amazon on occasion, and that's about it. I've told several people that DSL or cable is easily 50x faster than dialup. They look at me like I'm crazy, "Now why would I need to go so much faster? And doesn't that cost a whole lot?" It's like, you just want to bang your head against the wall. But when you consider how much TV normal people watch, it makes perfect sense. They don't really want unfiltered knowledge. They can't handle it. Why go looking for information when all most people want is the pap and pizzle the spews from the their TVs?
The powers that be learned their lesson from the fall of the Soviet union.
Free access to communications technologies for the common man will lead to the downfall of the corrupt system.
In the USSR, it was mimeograph machines and cassette tape recorders. In the United Corps of America, it's Napster.
I'm only half kidding.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
You have not suffered from busy signals enough.
Without busy signals a connection to a dialup is pretty quick. No real argument there.
Me, I like the always-on. I can walk up to my machine whenever and do what I want, how I want.
I can start it downloading a file and walk away knowing the phone company won't cause it to hangup at midnight (actually happened to me once, long time ago).
Yup. That's the obvious answer.
From the story:
While other kinds of telecom prices--from long-distance and wireless-phone rates to super-high-speed oc-3 lines--have fallen, prices for high-speed cable and DSL connections have actually risen.
People vote with their wallets. If you want to sell more of anything it has to be percieved as being worth the money.
For most people, internet connectivity is not nescessary, and a faster connection is even less so. Especially for 3x the money.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
Monopoly/oligopoly depends on scope.
Nationally, it's an oligopoly, but in to any particular customer/metro area it's a monopoly... unless they're allowing 2 companies to coexist on the same poles in certain places now.
m00.
Comparing something like this in the US to Japan and Korea doesn't make any sense at all. They have much less space to deal with, and a far smaller rural population. The US is full of big empty spaces and would better compared to Russia or China as far as how many people are connected. It's a lot easier to connect large numbers of people when they live in a small area as opposed to a huge mass of land where they are spread all over.
What?
You can promote socialism all you want, but you cannot discredit an economic system that doesn't exist.
free-market.net
In most cases, the cable internet situation is in fact a monopoly. If Cox, RoadRunner, AT&T, et. al. actually went head-to-head in THE SAME MARKETS, then you'd have oligopoly. Unfortunately, most municipalities have one cable franchise with a long-term license. Here in Mass., it doesn't really matter whether Cox offers cable modem service for $30/month in Georgia (I know, probably not true, just a hypothetical situation); Cox isn't an option here. If you want cable modem service, it's either AT&T for nearly $50/month or "Hit the road, Jack." A situation where one must spend several thousand dollars to move to a town with a different cable company is not my idea of competition at work.
In terms of broadband access as a whole, many places are lucky to have a duopoly (cable plus a single DSL provider). Slightly better, but still not enough competition for my blood: when one raises prices, the other is just as likely as not to sacrifice an increased market share and choose a higher price and profit margin.
Granted, there might be places where there really is an oligopoly at work, but my belief is that those places are the lucky, small minority. Now, if you had no choice (i.e. like auto insurance in most states, doing without was not an option) but to buy cable modem service from your city's franchisee, then I suppose one could say that cities with a less expensive cable company were competing on the cost of living there. I really hope the U.S. doesn't reach that point of corporate domination, however...
It just struck me that the USA is increasingly seems to be getting behind when it comes to new technology.
Broadband is just one example where the USA lags behind other parts of the first world. Mobile telephones is another where the Euros and Japanese seem to be in the lead. With technologies such as Digital Cameras, Camcorders, DVD etc. Japan seems to be clearly in the lead. The XBox is trying to catch up with the Japanese PlayStation and Gamecube. With cars, it seems that the Germans increasingly have the lead.
Thinking through all the technology I have, hardly any of it is American. My laptop is Sony. My mobile phone is Ericcson. My car is German. My watch is Swiss. My DVD, television, Playstation, PDA etc. are all Japanese. My building architechture is European. About the only American technology I have is a HP printer.
The funny thing is that this is probably going to provoke a load of responses from Americans saying what bullshit it is to suggest that the USA does not lead the world in technology and it will probably get modded down to -1. Go on then. Whatever.
You're just noticing this? Not that I disagree with most of it, but you're neglecting a minor point-- Most of the R&D is "made in the USA" when it comes to technology, and farmed out to foreign markets for production. And just for something to chew on, who developed the technology for the CPU in your computer? Your high end graphics card? Who has been the leader in computer developemnt and innovation for the last few decades? Not saying your wrong, but it's a relevant point to study. When it comes to stuff like this, I think America is on the wrong side of the scales. It's not national pride when I say more stuff should be made in America... It's financial security. Hey, lets go to war with... China. Ow. That's gonna seriously hurt the marketplace for a bit. We're way over-leveraged when it comes to our relaince on foreign markets for daily items. World trade is good... To a point. Unfortunately, the US is past that point.
Fact is (speaking as an American if it isn't already obvious), the US is the leader in technological development, not always, however, in its application into the market at large. I think Japan has everybody beat in that arena...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
...or the Ulysseses ($50), but that doesn't have that cool ring to it.
Your average consumer doesn't want to cough up fifty bucks for broadband. I'm not an expert on bandwidth costs, but I'm willing to bet that they'd find bandwidth a lot less expensive if they ever really had to compete for customers.
My guess is that in a few years, it's theoretically possible for people to have cable modem speeds for $20 a month -- what the average person is willing to pay. The problem is, with broadband costs still ridiculously high, there's little incentive for average folks to jump on the (brace yourself for a bad pun) "band" wagon. Hell, I don't like paying fifty a month for my cable modem.