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US Broadband ISPs Expect Price Cuts
prostoalex writes "US broadband providers are trying to avoid the price wars, but the cost of DSL and cable hookups is still headed down with major promotions from players like Comcast and Yahoo/SBC. Currently there are 22 million US subscribers, 2 million of which subscribed during the past three months. It looks like the prices for broadband Internet are headed towards $20-30/month range, although most operators prefer to lock you into a yearly contract or provide special price for the first several months only."
My employer subsidizes up to $30/month for online access, so the cable internet cost isn't as painful as it otherwise would be. But the idea that price wars with the CLECs would drive cable internet prices down seems ludicrous, at least in this market (NJ).
Heck, considering that when I moved to my current house (end of 1998), Cablevision promised broadband within 6 months, and kept making that promise every few months for 2 years, I was grateful to have broadband in the first place! And that's what they must count on. Competition from another cable company, if not Verizon, would be nice. But the market tanked just as a competitor was considering jumping in.
Mencken had it right. So glad that's old news.
For us who live in Europe!
And AOL dialup will still cost $24.99 a month.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
If the average John Q. Public didn't have, or didn't think of getting broadband, I think this is going to be a major boost for them. I can imagine this effecting the majority of "average users" seeing the price drop on broadband, and wanting to get that faster internet connection, this may very well be an excellent incentive for them to upgrade to broadband.
I'm also personally excited about this, because of my tight budget, I just may be able to afford the beautiful broadband connection once again (I know cable broadband is available in my area, at least). I hope most, if not all broadband providers hop on this train, and they all lower their prices to something more affordable.
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
Its hard to figure out what has caused the difference. Is there more competition here ? I read once about a price cap. The lack of competition in the US may appear to be the most liekly answer.
When my parents signed up for broadband, they gave them a CD with adware/configuration. Sure, it configured a little checkbox: "dial a connection only when a network connection is not present", but it also flamed the computer with adware that randomly spawns popups and breaks IE.
I have not yet found a way to uninstall this.
Dad, if you're reading this, I'm sorry, I didn't know..
I HATE YOU ALL! THANKS COMCAST, FOR RUINING MY LIFE!!
>>>
I get 1500/128 service from SBC now for $29/mo with no price increase later. It's only specced for 768 down, but apparently they simply let the modem connect at its highest speed. Futhermore, they gave us an ADSL modem/router with both ethernet and wireless (and power line) routing built in.
I would like higher upload, but that's where the kicker is. Most people don't need it, and they can sell hosting services (ie, sell the upload and download seperately - double your money)
I imagine that it'll continue to drop as equipment becomes standard and they don't need to keep buying new equipment. Startup costs for the infrastructure and advertising are what caused the initial high prices. Now that the infrastructure is in place, you'll see more advertising about lower prices and better deals.
-Adam
Here in good ole Canada, the price for cable here is around 50 bucks, and if SOCAN have their way it will probably go up even more. Instead of going forward we are going backward and soon broadband will not be accessible to everyone. Sad really.
I've had cable internet for about 5 years now and it's increased in price 3 times. 40 -> 45 -> 50 -> 55 -> ??
small flowers crack concrete
I have dial-up at home, and the reason is that I don't want to sign a 1 year contract. I want to connect to the net with linux, but cannot as I am using netzero.
I contacted them to find out if they will support linux soon and here is their response.
NetZero is involved in a partnership with ThinkNIC to offer a Linux version of the NetZero software on the ThinkNIC machine. Currently, we do not have a downloadable version available for Linux, but please check back on our Web site at http://www.netzero.com for updates.
If you lost your job today, don't despair. You may die tomorrow anyway.
I decided needed high upload rates, so I'm shelling out ~$200/month for business cable. There's no clause against servers, and I get the super-secret phone number where a REAL PERSON actually answers. But it also is quite painful to the toy budget.
I hope they manage to continue developing the infrastructure for the technology. Otherwise, we're going to end up with so many cable modems per node that there won't be appreciable speed differences between cable and dialup during peak usage times. If the demand increases, but they refuse to continue to create infrastructure due to the new, lower pricing, people will be faced with higher-than-dialup fees for not much more real speed.
I live in the UK, you insenstive clod!
SBC promises download speeds as fast 1.5 megabits per second - one megabit is 1,000 kilobits - ...
Way to break down megabits per second into something the average person can understand, David Koenig. I guess you're trying to compare 56kbps to 1.5mbps, but still, how many people reading IWon News know what a kilobit is? Why don't you say "1.5 megabits per second means 1 megabyte takes 5.3 seconds to download"? That's something people could understand.
At least Libraries of Congress aren't in your conversion rate.
my blog
I have mediacom cable, and I normally get 400k /s down to play with (but only a measily 15k /s up.
i'd rather pay what i pay now for these great speeds than half my speeds cut by 75% when everyone and their dog signs up and gets on my node.
well... price wars typically trigger shakeouts where smaller competitors get driven out of business, so I'm glad price wars are not going ahead... small competitors making a viable go of it in the long run means increased competition.
Price wars are also typical 'testing grounds' in oligopoly situations, sometimes where one large provider tests another (that price wars are not imminent suggests providers are in perfect harmony [unlikely] or have too tight margins to risk a price war), othertimes they are coordinated attempts to show the consumer what great value they get and are more spin than substance.
Price wars are a bad thing - they cause small competitors to be driven out of business (long term this means the market in the hands of a powerful few) and the fact a company can undertake a price war means it has room to move even with discounted prices (surely bloated prices... it is in need of competition but has the 'price war' signal to any potential competition they are alert and the going will be rough).
Price wars are never a good thing.
karma karma karma karma karma chameleon, you come and go, you come and go.
I am using Verizon DSL. It is about $34 monthly.
But I think it is still expensive because I just use it for downloads only. The preferred price should be in the range of $15 and $20.
I really love my DSL, no caps, stable speeds, and high uploads. 1500/768 with 5 static IPs for $60/month is great :) with Cyberonic. Sorry, I don't have OOL in this area, so it can't compare!
So it doesn't apply to me either!!!
I got an email the other day saying that they're upgrading my upstream for free, permanently. Considering that I have a contract, that's an extremely nice gesture...
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
Since where I live now (SE of Taco in Ypsilanti - halfway between Ann Arbor and Detroit), I have three options:
Dialup, which I can (for a while, anyway) get free through UMich, where I get a top speed of 33k, and my connection stays live anywhere from 30 seconds to 8 hours
Cable, where I pay $42.95 a month for a fast connection that stays up for days on end (but I still have to power cycle my network gear once a week to refresh my IP lease)
DSL, where I can pay $100 a month for 144 SDSL (something about living 14k from the CO)
Any price decreases for highspeed are welcome here.
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
Or you could just be lucky like me and be paying dialup price for DSL. BellSouth's billing / customer service system is soooo screwed up it's not funny (well, unless you're paying $20/m instead of $50/m like me)
I spent countless hours on the phone with them trying to get my DSL working earlier this year, and I ended up just being charged for dialup while DSL still works.
Here in Quebec we get broadband (DSL or cablemodem, your choice) for about 30$ CDN (thats 20$ US) a month.
What's keeping the companies in the US to offer similar deals?
Add to that wonderful 3 1/2 apparments for 400$ CDN in the best downtown districts, in a wonderful city.
And not the least, we can smoke pot freely in the streets, have awesome mountains for skiing/snowboarding, a way higher ratio of hot chicks compared to the states, and no Patriot Act or crazy politicians...
I wonder why people chose to live elsewhere
Huh? Dont think they have a lot in common? They do...
Casual dining restaraunts charge higher prices, and serve you more food than you (should) eat. This leads to fatter americans (eating more than they should, you wouldnt want to be wasteful would you?), and increased margins for the restaraunts. As long as you think, "hey, for $8 I got a lot of food", you'll be OK with it.
Cable companies are starting to do the same thing. My cable co (Cox), is looking at replacing the 1.5/128 plan with 3.0/256, and creating a new plan for $80 for 4.0/384.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Brandband prices have dropped in my area as more companies has started offerring the service. i was paying $50 for cable modem. After a while that dropped to $35.
Verizon came in and started offerring DSL @ 34.95 + a free modem. I switched.
a few months later verizon actually dropped our price another five dollars plus... Now paying $29 and change for 768/256. not bad, eh?
Ah, Optimum Online. I remember when my family got it, (5-10 years ago) - the price (30 if you had cable, I think) seemed high, but it stayed stable for a long time. Additional computers were discounted at $20, too. I came back from a year or two at University (3-5 years after first getting OOL), and found out it had shot up 10 bucks, despite their business massively increasing. A year later, it's up another 5 or 10. Not only that, but they took away the discount on extra computers. It went from $50 from two computers, to $50 for each. Last summer, we had 3 computers on which we wanted 'net access, so we had to shell out a major cash investment on a wireless hub and two wireless cards. Considering that it would have cost 300 dollars to have the extra 2 computers on for just the summer alone, it had to be done.
I don't get it - aren't monopolies/price fixing illegal?
GL
I have a cable from comcast and happy with it if not considering the price. Originally it was 20$ for 3 month but then as it was promised jumped to 50$/mo. Well I live with my g-f, so I've canceled my account and we made her a new customer so we've got that deal again.... Now we've being paying 50$/mo for 4 month already and I feel myself robbed... I think to try the same trick again but probably they would say that I'm not a new anymore, though before I also was a customer just at different address... Anyway - I will not lose anything besides 5-6 days of connection if we order it on my name right after canceling it...
The telcos still have a major problem with selling and deploying DSL. Their copper wire infrastructure sucks and they aren't interested in doing anything, especially spending money, to improve it. Even though I live in an area with above average population density, it's 25,000 feet to the nearest central office. That means no DSL for me. The number and placement of central offices were frozen decades ago, when this was primarily a rural area. New housing developments get SLCs (subscriber line concentrators), not copper pairs to a central office. If the telcos were serious about providing DSL service, they would upgrade their network to make DSL available to every customer, not just those lucky enough to live near a central office. I'm not a big fan of the cable company, but they have spent far more money than the telco on upgrading and extending their network.
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Comcast keeps giving me lower rates when my promotion ends. I have gone the last year with cable modem rates of $20/mo just by asking for a discount.
Drawback is that they DO NOT offer static IP. Although my IP hasnt change for a year, I may have to move to a more costly provider if my requirements increase.
What's perhaps driving their pricing is the competitors in my community. While Comcast was instrumental to spreading broadband to the South King country and North Pierce county with their pushing upgraded cable to rural outlying areas, I saw several miles of expansion over a course of months in the Buckly WA area, companies like Skynet Broadband with ads like Show us your bill and we will double your Bandwidth for the same price as your current broadband provider have cut into their sales and retainings.
Unfortunately recent server comprimises (a month apart) and the days of downtime for their subscribers has kept me from pursuing it. However the average user is often price driven, so perhaps they change over. In the long run it may be the quality of service and dependability that keeps them as loyal customers. I hope the little guy can do that, until then I am sticking with what works at a price I can more than afford.
Boredom's not a burden anyone should bear.
The bandwitch cost 40,60 ? for 128Kb
:-(
Poor...
I also have business-class cable at my home... costs about 80$ per month (the install was a very-painful and unnecessary 250$). It's great... I get about 3mb down, and around 256kb up, so it's still asymmetric.
Still, the tech support is MUCH better than the residential service (not that I ever call... calling tech support is a sign of weakness), and you get priority for bandwidth on the node, etc.
I like it... reliable, fast, no upstream port filtering, and they don't care if you run servers. I'll never go back to residential service if I can help it.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
...it's about damn time. I've been paying about $30 - $45US a month for years - first for 1.5Mb ADSL, then 8, 12, and now 24Mb ADSL. YahooBB will be offering 45Mb ADSL (3Mb upstream!) in January for about the same price (translation courtesy of the fish: here).
Amazing? Yes, I know. But keep in mind these technologies are severely distance limited and wouldn't really be an option in most of the US (I live in Japan BTW - no, not Tokyo and no, I will not buy you any anime). 8Mb ADSL and up normally drop WAY off at about 1KM. I have 24Mb ADSL from OCN/NTT and live about 2.5KM away from the central office. I get anywhere from 3 - 5 Mb/s down and a full 1Mb/s up.
Cable is also cheap here. FDDH/FITH is coming down (that's 100Mb/s fiber) too. If Japan keeps moving at this rate, I figure I'll be able to buy a direct nueral connection to the "Matrix" within 4 or 5 years - for $20 a month. SUGOI!
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
They beat on that tired, dead horse that "Cable-modem service can be as fast for downloads as several megabits per second, though the speed can suffer if several users in one neighborhood log on at once."
Um, nope. The cable providers make allowance for that. That's so worn out. ALL the DSL providers trot that dead horse out in every DSL v. Cable discussion.
I had SBC DSL and it was absolute SHIT, plus they screwed me everytime someone down in billing farted..
I dropped them and got RoadRunner.
They penalize me an extra $5 a month because I have internet only, I don't have cable-TV.
With the penalty and tax, I pay $54 a month for bad ass speed.
I can download the latest distro at the rate of about 25 minutes per 700mb ISO..
That's plenty fast for me. And all my neighbors are on RR too. No problem...
I will stick with RR, SBC can go to hell..
I personally don't have a landline anymore (mobile only), but I am considering switching to DSL. I currently have Comcast right now, and my 6 months of $19.95 are over (announced by the now regular rate of about $60/month). Is it possible to get DSL without landline service? If I need to get a phone line, then I won't be saving too much money either way.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
I've got Cablevision, they are NOT an ISP. Why?
The cannot deliver reliable email, when you complain they suggest you use Yahoo or Hotmail.
Their newsgroup servers are so throttled down they are almost useless. Again, they suggest you use a third party provider.
No web hosting space? "Use someone else."
I could see just using them as a fat pipe and going elsewhere for any "extras". But at $600 a year, they should at least provide decent mail.
I can't have DSL, too far from the CO. I get free dial up, and am looking at it more and more.
Canadians are just nicer!
Quack, quack.
I live in Redmond and no points for guessing that pretty much every home is on cable or DSL - i had to choose comcast cable since i was out of the DSL radius and guess what? 1.5Mbps and 128k just didn't cut it - even at 25$ for the first four months wasn't good since pretty everyone around had the same package and i wasn't happy with my connection (online gaming suffered - downloads suffered during peak times). So i had to choose their pro package at 95$ a month :| (3.5Mbps down and 400k up) - I don't really eat up my bandwidth but i am paying more for when i need it, it is there.
Price cuts...pssshhh...pffft
T1s have been historically overpriced, so it isn't really a fair comparison. What would T1s cost in a truly competitive market?
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You've got snail!
Unless you like low prices!
The article states that Comcast was offering a $19.99 rate for cable modem rates.
That is incorrect. Comcast has run this deal multiple times where they offer $19.99 a month for three months. After that the rates go back up to something around $45.99 (IIRC). The rate is not being offered right now but will be back in a few months.
Mmmm.. Donuts
It is sad that we never got any real local competition. Big business improverishes society. The only way to have any meaningful competition is with hundreds of thousands of small companies.
I suspect that in the next several years we will see an occasional token drop in published prices, while the big boys pull games to control usage and line their pockets with hidden fees.
The first part of the internet revolution was dominated by the shear technical challenge of getting people wired to the Internet. I suspect this new phase will be about marketers trying to find clever ways to corral all of profits from the technology into the smallest number of hands possible.
...my current DSL ISP keeps its prices where they are and can therefore stay in business.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
but, as the grandparent said, they are for short term benefit to drive competitors out in order to charge high amounts in the future... and who ever heard of a company going out of business doing price wars???? Only the most well off companies with some of the highest priced products price-war, and then they still turn a profit (how overpriced were they before??? and how over priced will they return to being once the competition is driven away in this price war???).
Let em dot-com each other out of business. Used to be their usual game after they caught up with this Internet thing wasn't it?
Here in Chicago, Comcast is a whopping $59 dollars per month. That's right, sixty dollars for no-server allowed broadband. They currently have a 4 month promotion for 29 dollars, but it goes back to 60 soon enough. Broadband cable used to be 39.99 until Comcast raised the prices and decided to punish everyone who didn't buy their video service. No thanks, I've got a directivo.
The meat of the article is the SBC and BellSouth are going sub-30 for broadband, which is pretty damn good. I thought broadband in the US would remain stagnant for quite a while until someone found a cheaper way to sell this stuff. I've already seen people jump onto SBC and away from Comcast and the people I work with have no problem paying almost that much for AOL dial-up. I've also seen people drop broadband because its so pricey here, even though they would easily pay 30 bucks a month for it, but 50-60 is asking too much.
Here's to "dsl-lite" for non-power users currently being ripped off on dial-up and sub-30 dollar DSL for everyone else.
Comcast broadband has gotten fairly expensive. First owned by TCI in 2000, it was 19.95 a month for the first three months and $34.95 thereafter. AT&T bought it and the price went up to about $45. When Comcast bought AT&T out earlier this year, they hiked the priced to about $60. This includes a surcharge if you do not subscribe to Cable TV.
I called and complained. However, they said their market research indicates that the market would bear this price. Just before AT&T was bought out, I was paying almost the same price for the "premium" bandwidth plan.
I hope I'm not the only one who feels Comcast is gauging the customer.
Before Comcast bought ATT, I was paying 35/month for ~3M service. I had maybe 3 outages a year, of which I would be back up within an hour.
Now, I pay 49/month for <1.5M, and an outage / month which last anywhere from 4 hours to 2 days.
Comcast is beyond a doubt a bunch of screwups. i look forward to when local government gets smart and says no to monopolies. And yes, cable companies will still operate in medium to large cities without a total monopoly.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Sweden, for some very strage reason, has three providers offering symmetrical, 10 Mbps or bigger connections for less than 65 USD a month. I'm not a swede, and don't have information in English, but you should be able to decipher what matters here. The yellow box below the headline has the speeds and prices. One Swedish krona is roughly 13.5 US cents, prices are per month and anslutningsavgift is the one-time hookup fee.
As you can see in the Aftonbladet article, Telia has just entered the fray. They were literally forced to do so, by competition from Bredbandsbolaget and Bostream.
Bredbandsbolaget, apparently not content with losing their edge (their connections are generally considered better than Bostream's, dispite the bandwidth advertised), are preparing to roll out a 100 Mbps service next year, with a 300GB/mo traffic limit, rumored to cost in the neighbourhood of 120 USD/mo; I wonder how people will survive such terribly restrictive limits, heh.
In most urban scenarios, there isn't any divide and conquer going on. Having many providers competing in the same areas has its advantages.
I've never even been to Sweden, but happen to know a lot of Swedish netizens. Most of those are hard-core gamers, the most demanding users you'll find; anything short of 1MB/sec downloads and 10ms latency domestically, and they'll be screaming.
The bad part is they don't tell you what the limit is . So, even if you get the throttle removed, there's no way to make sure you don't get put back on it immediately. If you mention this, support says "Oh just use a file transfer app where you can lower the speed." But they can't tell you how low it needs to be to prevent getting smacked again. Is it MB per day? GB per month? MB per hour? Maxed KB/sec for a specific duration? You don't know. Their support doesn't know either, and they wanna keep it this way.
It's really easy to write speeding tickets when you build a highway, go "speeding is illegal" and then refuse to post speed limit signs or tell anyone what the limit is.
Oh and they do this to their "business" customers paying $109/month for the exact same service. No they don't get to know what the upstream limit is either or how it works. They get the same crippling for "possibly running a server" and calls from Lightpath about hosting if they go over and want it removed.
Why is it so impossibly hard to get decent upstream? The prices for anything over 200kbit up 24/7 are nauseating from most ISPs.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
The A in ADSL stands for asymmetric.
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We are a DSL provider. I know what Verizon charges us for a 768/128 DSL. If we charged $30/month for a 768k DSL circuit, we would be loosing about $8/month. This does not even take into account support costs, our link to Verizon, or our bandwidth from our upstream providers.
For a broadband ISP to make money by selling DSL, they need to either own the network themselves (ie Verizon, SBC, CLEC's, etc) or have major quantities of customers to get any type of discount from the ILEC/CLEC.
Luckily our broadband wireless lets us provide a decent broadband product at a decent price and actually make a bit of money off of it.
me and my 4 housemates shell out $200/mo for SDSL. Its tolerable, but having more download speed and a non-congested 128k upload line would be nice. Is it possible to get two DSL lines to one resedential building?
price cuts seem less important to me than speed upgrades. unfortunately that seems to require the underlying technology get upgraded. once we got 1mbps sdsl- usually ran 1.5, but someone in the neighborhood got a T1 and our line could no longer support taht speed, so we're stuck at 768.
...for DSL at $27/mo. If only SBC's pre-sales would actually answer my questions via email.
My wife spoke to a salesrep who claimed a bunch of shit that was against what is/was in the TOS/AUP. When I emailed to get someone from presales to answer some questions to clear this up, the twits it got routed to kept wanting me to call some 800#.
Uhm, hello? Its one thing to promise WTF you want to me over the phone. Give me 30 days to test the service vs. RR, a way to drop your service without having to pay through the nose if I think its shit, and put all of it in writing.
At least with RR I can drop them at any time without a penalty. Until the DSL providers start offering this ability, people like me will stay with RR. I just hope that if the prices continue to drop for DSL (or stay way down) RR will have to come down too.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
i have dsl through a local company that does dsl and dialup. $60/month. this included 4 static addresses.
bell was $50 for 1 dynamic address and (i think) $129 for 1 static. and way out of control for more than one static ip.
adelphia (cabletv) was $50 for 1 dynamic, $150 for 1 static address and *another* $150 if you needed another (one address per cable!)
bell jumped out with teeth and claws a short time ago. i had a (bell) customer with 5 regular lines and they were paying 225/month. bell offered them 5 lines and dsl for 195/month. something smells here, but i asked all the questions. it will be interesting to see if they can maintain a reasonable data rate...
*i* think they (bell) were afraid of adelphia and not the 'other' dsl providers. i think also it's a hook to keep customers on land lines. ya gotta have copper (or fiber) to have dsl. this may also be to keep people from moving that number to cell phone.
eric
this ought to be interesting.
How about a head unit for my truck's sound system that plays Ogg? I have yet to find one, anyone have a link?
Everything is more fun naked except cooking with grease.
But I'd like just to have broadband.
I'm an Australian who just moved from living in the USA to living in Seoul. In the US i was paying about $45 a month for RoadRunner. Performance was pretty good at around 3Mbps.
Here in Seoul I've got KT-ntopia which is a fiber-to-the-building 100BaseT-ethernet-to-your-apartment technology. I regularly get 30-50Mbps (yes, 3-5 megaBYTES a second). Unlimited use, and it costs me about $35 a month. Ntopia isn't available to older apartments, but there you can get VDSL (similar speed) or 5Mbps ADSL.
Population density definitely has something to do with it, but not everything. I can't think of any reason you couldn't offer the same service for the same price in a city like NYC. Similar population density and similar type of housing, and I'm sure most of the population nice and close enough to the exchange for VDSL to work.
Anyone noticed it is a little difficult to buy anything by a USB DSL modem nowadays? Plenty of 10baseT/USB Cable modems though. Have I missed something obvious here?
" They're both overpriced for what you get? "
Absolutely.
There have been articles in the computer press lately discussing that in Japan 20Mb/s download is the norm for approximately $20-30 a month, and Korea features 26Mb/s for the same price.
We get 1.5 and we're supposed to be *grateful*?
Your comparison with T1's is faulty for a couple of reasons:
1) The cost of T1's is artifically high because of the way the local loop is priced. Its a huge profit center, and the phone company has always positioned it as a way to subsidize residential service.
2) T1's have SLA's. Your DSL or Cable line does not.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I was the first guy on the block to get a cable modem. Then everyone else got one, and the speed decreased (everyone must have been running napster at the same time). But the speed is not that bad the past year. Having said goodbye to my cable modem after a bad customer service experiance a few years ago, and switching to AOL dial-up, I can say with 100% certainty that a slow cable modem blows away the best AOL could ever do with dial up. I ended up calling back my cable company for the cable modem after four months of AOL dial-up. I am happy as long as I can get over 100k a second. Just as long as pages load within a second or two. What I hated with AOL is it would take forever for a page to load.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
I think that a important "first" question needs to be asked. What is there available on the internet that can justify spending $50 a month in these lean economic times? It's nice that 2 million jumped on board. Now all the companies have to do is keep them. With what?
That's news to me! I invite the slashdot crowd to see how much Australia's two competing cable providers charge for their respective services. Take note of the download allowances.
Optus
Telstra
How is that for good value?
"-- telco's aren't willing to drop money on upgrading the system because they're regulated against recouping that money in a reasonable time frame."
If that's true, then the telco's are doomed.
They aren't doing anything on the low (consumer) end to broaden their market - after all, they could invest in a broadband technology that would work over their existing copper. And while consumer POTS are probably pure gravy for them, wireless service will cut them off at the knees in 10 years.
So where will they go then? They're "profiting" now at the expense of future viability because they won't plow those "profits" into upgrading the infrastructure.
And if you think the PUC's will allow them to raise POTS lines to make up for loss of revenue, then you're not paying attention.
Wireless is ruining the telco's, they know it, and don't care. Seems like a funny way to run a business if you ask me.
Silly yanks... here in Canada we have a huge (and better) cable and phone network - our DSL is much cheaper, $35 CDN a month, and cable is the same price. It keeps getting cheaper too. Americans seemed to like VHF tv and didnt get involved with cable. Cable is very commonplace in Canada, moreso than in the US, at least thats the way it was 20 years ago.
We Canadians are lucky to have two monopolies, Bell with the phone lines and your regonal cable monopoly, that just happen to hate each others guts. (The cable companies divided up the country sbout 10 years ago.)
The hate part comes from the family of nutters with the Rogers name. Big cable & cell phone company. Needs bailouts (investments) on a regular basis. They have a stockholder problem. Something about the desire for profits.
Both teams keep going to the CRTC (Canadian FCC) to crack open the others business. Bell wants to run TV cable but is not allowed, hence it's trying to get their DSL service set up for streaming movies. Not there yet so Bell is also into satelite TV. The cable companies want the phone lines and ditto on the no go.
To keep the hate fires burning, a couple of months ago one of the Rogers clan opened up to reporters about their VOIP plans & tests. Strongly hinted at trying to grab ALL the local phone business from Bell.
Strangely, they are actually fighting it out in the marketplace (at least here in Ontario). Bell ads on TV are more than common. Most white box PC's come with a rogers cable software CD and 'come hither' pricing (3 month free). Bell ads pound and I mean POUND on cables sharing slow downs. Rogers counters by taking over a cable channel with a never ending loop on how easy it is to install & use.
Gotta love a good turf war.
The real important thing for me, and probably for an increasing number of power users is the upload bandwidth, rather than the downsteam. I would much rather get 1mbit/1mbit than 3.0mbit/256kbit.
On that note, does anybody have an ISP (say in LA) that offers more upload that the typical 256kbit or 384kbit on cable connections? Between Bittorrent, and streaming mp3s from home to work, that amount of bandwidth just doesn't cut it anymore.
Doesn't everybody love femtoseconds?
Check to see if Earthlink can instead provide service.
Over the same Time Wanker lines, Timer wanker sends the bill, no 'upcharge' for not having cable.
South Korea
Area (sq km): 98,190
Population: 48,289,037 (July 2003 est.)
Internet Users: 25.6 million (2002)
Your statistics is incomplete unless you have data for "the other half," my country. Here you go.
North Korea
Area: 120,540 (sq km)
Population: 22,466,481 (July 2003 est.)
Internet Service Providers (ISPs): 1 (2000)
Internet users: 3 (my guess)
[source]
some math
ISP / Population: 1/22,466,481
Not to mention, I am one of the three internet users in my country. The other two are hackers working for the government, cracking gentoo servers. My nation rock.
Kim
My Comcast bill just came in, informing me that my rate has been increased by 33%, from $45 USD to $60. And they billed me for the increase retroactively to October. Thanks Comcast!
The enclosed letter said they had to "adjust" my rate to be able to provide me internet over my cable connection. Hmm, so what do I have right now?
I would switch to DSL now but all the offers are cheap for the first year only, then jumping to 50+ dollars a month, while I am locked in for 2 years. Locked in with half the outbound of my current Comcast connection (which is 256 now, the one thing Comcast actually changed/improved since this all was run by @Home 4 years ago).
WTF, this is NOT getting better. From my point of view, it is getting markedly worse. BTW, I am in the SF Bay area.
But unfortunatly, the majority of the telecomunications infasrtucture (including the copper to everyones homes) is owned bt Telstra.
And Telstra charge $$$.
So, everyone has to charge $$$.
They're up to $52 a month. It's a great connection but how high will the price go?
Having just moved from the SF Bay Area to Wellington New Zealand, I'm now quite aware of just how good the situation is in the upper 48. In SF I was paying ~80/mo for around 1.5/256 ADSL with 5 statics, and there were slightly better deals available. Down here I've found that Telecom NZ has the monopoly thing going on, and it's reflected in their pricing. Their starter option is ADSL capped at 256k each direction, for $49/mo. Besides capping the line, they only give you 500m/mo usage, and charge $.20nzd per meg thereafter (yes Virginia, that's $200/gig). The maximum available is 2gigs/mo, at $69, with the same overage charge. You can also opt for an uncapped line (sweet, but wait for the downside) with only 1gig data available. I can easily use 1 gig in one day downloading the latest ISO for some distro or another. In Auckland there's a bit more competition, but it's still pretty damn expensive. Granted, undersea fiber ain't cheap, but regardless it's pretty clear to me that Telecom is making the most of their monopoly. I opted for the uncapped line (as 256k is too bloody slow for my tastes) but I'm gonna have a hard time keeping below my cap. I'm already sitting on about 600m and I've got to make it to xmas day before getting my next gig. Vonage is eating up a lot of that, but even at .20nzd/meg it's considerably cheaper to use Vonage than dial internationally. But in order to stay low on bandwidth I actually leave the ATA186 unplugged-Vonage will eat about 2-3m/day just doing the "ET phone home" bit.
By comparison to NZ anyway, broadband in the states is really quite reasonably priced already. I do hope the various efforts to pull the plug on Telecom's monopoly are sucessful. A lot of things about the states kinda suck (which is why I moved here) but broadband is not one of them.
ehintz
I live in MA am changing providers to DSL.
Comcast is actually raising the rate yet again, so I've decided "what the hell" and decided to drop them.
I can get DSL for much less than cable now, and to be honest I hope to see a reliability improve dramatically. Only time will tell. In addition, performance with Comcast has been spotty, and the fact that I had to change my email address numerous times over the past 3 years means that I don't really care about having to change it again, especially since changing providers will save me signifacant amounts of money.
Help.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I pay about $55/mo for 1.5 Mb, but in all seriousness, since their TOS forbids almost anything useful, the only time I really NEED that bandwidth is when I'm downloading the ISOs for a new version of linux, or the occasional game demo. I'm thinking I might be nearly as satisfied with a 128K DSL connection, which is $20/mo less. Granted, there's a huge diffrence in bandwidth there, but again...the time I'd use 1.5 Mbs is so limited, I'm beginning to wonder if it's worth the extra money.
The last time I checked, the local loop charges ALONE accounted for $37.50 of my $50/month DSL bill (1.5/256 w/static IP), and MY rates are only $50 because I've been a snappyDSL customer for aeons and was grandfathered in at the old rate (I think their current rate for what I have is $60-65/month).
BellSouth.net and a few others dip down to $40 or so, but they positively SUCK. They HAVE TO... after the local loop charges, they get MAYBE $2-3 from the customer (bellsouth.net is really whomever inherited UUnet operating under bellsouth's name). The REAL BellSouth collects the lion's share.
As long as the local loop charges are $37.50, I don't see HOW the monthly service charges could POSSIBLY fall below that rate for ANYONE (bellsouth.net included... as mentioned earlier, they're just borrowing bellsouth's name).
What I *really* want to do is drop my worthless and never-used local phone service and just keep the DSL. From what I've heard, bellsouth *has* to let you drop your local phone service and keep your DSL if you scream loudly enough, but all the rules regarding timeliness of repairs go out the window once the line no longer has local phone service (ie, they can take days/weeks to even SCHEDULE repairs to a DSL-only line, but need to take action within 4-6 hours -- even weekends/holidays -- if it's a voice line). Sigh. Circuit-switched phone service is a useless dinosaur. The sooner it's gone and replaced by VoIP, the better IMHO...
For two years I had SBC DSL and had no problem, everything was great, good speed, same ip for over a year solid then suddenly I started getting outages, every night, between 6-10pm.
I did everything I knew to fix the problem but it always came back, almost like clockwork at the same time and ended at roughly the same time every night. When things were working the speed and stability was as I'd come to expect, when it wasn't I was basically cut off. I even let my pc sit and ping a server (one of my work servers) while I was out for town for a weekend and it still happened, so I was convinced it wasn't anything I was doing.
Eventually I called SBC and they "fixed" the problem (their explanation "Your phone line has degraded.") by halving my UL/DL speeds from UL 1.5M to 750k etc.
Everything was fine, then a couple of months later, the problem is back. Same problem, same answer, cut my UL/DL in half again to 380k. At this point I start looking for alternative services, alas none are available, and other DSL providers were out they'd be using the same crap lines/equipment that was causing the problem...
Few more months, it's baaaaack...
Suddenly I'm playing $55/month for 128k down with insufferable packet loss (i.e. no meaningful online gaming) and no recourse. Eventually my local cable company finally wired my block and now I'm back to 1.5m so the story has a happy ending for me. Not so happy an ending for SBC as they were nailed in a class action for these very problems, slower than advertised speeds, frequent interruptions, barely functioning Usenet servers...
Read about it here.
As I'd already switched to another provider I was only due $20, but those who were still on SBC could get up to $100 in, get this, credit from SBC for DSL service! If you were so fed up with SBC that you wanted to cancel your service before the one year contract was up that $100 might go a long way toward your cancellation fee.
Given all this frustration I'll never recommend SBC to anyone.
Plus, their phone CSRs have a neverending litany of "We don't have supervisors", "I am the supervisor", or "There is no other tier of technical support available". Great tip to get to someone who knows what their doing in a tech phone tree: Lie just like they do. An (somewhat embelished) example:
CSR: "What version of Windows are you running?"
ME: "Three".
CSR: "Three?"
ME: Yeah, three.
CSR: There's no such thing as Windows 3.
ME: Yeah, there is, I'm looking at it. It's on an old 486 laptop. I've got Trumpet Winsock running and a PPOE client I wrote that used to work fine, but now just lets me connect and ping servers on my local subnet, but ever time I start up a web browser I get a password dialogue and no matter what I type it comes back with some Redback Aggregation Router configuration thingee about "Do I want to commit these changes and reset " or something like that.
CSR: Uh, let me put you on hold for a minute.
That's how you find the supervisor...
-dameron
As if those of us in California ever see our bills cut, particularly in loony Monterey County - the wealthy area with wages untouched by the boom but lowered by the recession!
I don't know what your speeds are but I had a non-artificially capped 640/256Kbit business DSL line for $70 a month. Cox wanted to charge $200 or so for a line that was only 50% faster up and artificially capped. Since I was (and still am) running a very large web-site it's the upstream speed that matters. Cox also caps the upload amount at a rediculous 7.5GB. Compare that to the 50GB+ I was doing with my DSL line. It was nearly saturated when I went to colo.
Qwest couldn't get me a faster line either due to my distance to the telco.
I now pay $175 a month for 30GB of transfer (+$2 per GB over) for a 10Mbit colo line at the ISP I had the DSL account through. I've had to All Access Pass more to keep the transfer amounts down but I'm working on alternate ways to bring in funds so I can open it up a bit.
I also switched my home internet connection to Cox (and got digital telephone) since Cox is a better deal for typical internet use.
If you're running a server you may want to consider that road. Colo packages tend to be cheaper and far faster.
I use a custom version of WinVNC so it's not too terrible maintaining it. Having the server physically accessible 24/7 was nice.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Price wars are a bad thing - they cause small competitors to be driven out of business...
Not necessarily. Price wars usually means there are several companies trying to establish certain market share. What you're talking about is when one deep pocketed company sells a product well beyond the price in order to drive competition out of business. Once the competitors are out of question, the price goes back up. I believe this process is called dumping in economics, and is considered illegal. It might be tricky to prove though.
There's nothing wrong with healthy competition, it drives innovation, and customers get better product for lower price.
What's REALLY bad is monopoly.
The purpose of life is to find the purpose of life.
I found it best to just go with a mom & pop ISP. When we first signed up for 512 synch. cable, it was like $50. Rip off? You bet. Then, we downgraded to 128 synch for $20. They never changed the line speed, so my servers still get their 512 synch. at a 128 price. As a side note, this was the only cable company in town that offered greater than 256 on the upstream, which my servers use heavily! I call the little mistake justice, pure and simple. $50 for a 512 connection in B.S. The main reason that they can charge this much is because their competition charges about the same.
That being said, there is a 512/256 DSL connection by a company here, but its that wireless crap, and when it snows heavily (live in MT), inet goes down. At my current provider, access has only been down once in a six month period, and then the downtime was 1 hour. Makes you wonder though, why the hell is downtime even allowed? I am not the only person in the world who knows about OSPF routing, and redundant data links, am I? I mean seriously, how friggin hard would it be to install REDUNDANT routers/data lines? Answer: not very. Its not uncommon for a provider to have issues that are city or state wide, if a router goes down, your cash machine shouldn't. Guess they just don't care though, because they already have your money, and everyone else has shit for downtime.
I live in Canada and I only pay $44/m for my 3mbit cable. That's what, about $30US? It gets cut down to $40/m if I suscribe to their digital TV package.
For $55US a month, you guys better have a decent connection.
The Telecomm Act of 1996 created a situation of forced infrastructure sharing. It was called deregulation, but it was nothing even close. It expanded regulations that caused the Last Mile Problem to grow.
Telecomms needed to lease their lines to competing companies. This was supposed create competition, but all it did is hamstring the telecomm companies. There was no incentive to upgrade lines, and there was actually negative economic reason to spend the cash since recouping costs became extremely difficult. AT&T was once ordered to upgrade part of their infrastructure. They refused to do it and instead thought it was better to just accept being fined.
This was a terribly minguided attempt to follow in the 1980s' divestiture that created the Baby Bells. While the divestiture was interference in a mature technology that was almost devoid of change, the 1996 Act was trying to regulate half of a newly developed industry. Regulators and law-makers didn't understand how markets always find solutions to problems when there is a demand.
Along came cable modems, whipping the crap out of DSL. Cable had no forced infrastruture sharing and would have created a terrific competition scenario against DSL. However, with DSL tied up in regulations, cable was been slow to change.
-Homo Economicus
(Yeah, I'm a professional economist, but I really don't pay attention to telecomm regulations, so I might be slightly off on some specifics.)
Long time reader, first time poster. I don't understand something. What good is a Cable ISP with lightning fast DL streams if they put a bandwitdth cap on the amount you can dl/ul!!??!? With some outfits it is softcap, where they don't tell you how much or provide anyway to monitor it. You just wait for the cablecops to write you a nastygram. I am sorry I was spoiled rotten with my @home before I got moved to COX after @homes demise. I remember the days of COX (others are still using this methoed) promoting an UNLIMITED service. I know, read the TOS, which reads like every TOS and that is "we can/will change our terms at anytime". That is the funny part, I have a brand new BW cap and still NO ONE has notified me of the change. I had to bump into it in some obscure forum on the net and go back and read my TOS to see the changes. In all fairness to COX they have not started to enforce this limit as far as I know. I am sure the horror stories will start at some point. Sorry for the rant but everything (not just in this thread) is about how fast, well that is all well and good but if you cannot use it what is the point of a 3-5 mps connection.
VNCing home is great, as I get screen updates like I'm on a LAN, but trying to download the lastest BeOS Max version sucks, as it takes 1.73 trillion years.
I am running Overnet, and wow! Uploads past 820k/s. I've got a friends list 5 miles long. (Note to RIAA - I'm not sharing any of *your* shitty music) - This is well past the upload speed for the business or 'uber-gamer' accounts.
So, for anyone in the know - how does this compare to other ISPs or say, a *real* website hosted somewhere? What can I do with this? I don't know that I'm geeky enough to take full advantage...
Its not a matter of usage to me.. Speed is important... Do you want that ISO about 12 times faster? If no, then why not just get a $10 a month cheap dialup... With download splitting/resuming, you could get it a lot cheaper, for 1/5 the price.
/. were to alloww editable posts, think of all the lamers that would get something modded up to +5, then edit the post to say something lame... Too much freedom to make things worse. just my opinion though
and in reply to your sig: if
[sig]www.masterslate.org[/sig]
first, they live in a smaller area, with less people compared to the US, where we have more people spread out over a large area..
and their services are government run and operated IIRC..
so, they're gonna get a better service for lower cost.
that and it's not as hectic to keep that speed since they only have to do it over a small area.
south korea isnt that big, and japan is about the size of california, so to compare the US with 2 relatively small nations is an understatement.
if we had that kind of throughput here, we'd be paying 500 a month. and it isnt so much the evil telecoms.. hell, I'm not even averaging in what the telecoms will charge... I'm putting in just the basics.... they have to have the backbones to do it, the manpower to install lines that can handle it, have repeaters installed to extend the service into an area that's farther from the CO, etc.. we have tons of hurdles to jump.. hell, we're still far away from getting the country connected to broadband.. there's areas that still dont offer modern dial up services still.
Japan has it easy because they have so little area to cover. The US, we have billions of square miles to cover. that's somewhat why we're still stuck back about 10 years with broadband... it's just not a feasible technology to have going at that rate for the common household yet, when it becomes more common (like dial up is.. yeah, dial up is still more common than DSL or cable) then the price will drop.
and since japan, it prolly got popular right away, it kept a low price.
Everything in your article is correct, except the pricing. The cost is about SEK 300 per month for 10 Mbit, about $35.
Also, 26 Mbit symmetrical is getting common for about $50/month, and there are rollouts of 100 Mbit (although still in test areas).
Additionally, I think that people in the US are very narrow-minded in terms of last-mile delivery of Internet access ("DSL or cable?"). My apartment is wired to the local switch into the municipal network; I have 10 megabits to my apartment, Ethernet all the way. No cable, no DSL. There is simply an RJ-45 jack on the wall, next to the phone jack.
(That's 10 Mbit symmetrical. Public, static IPs. No silly no-server clauses; the only limitation is that I can't use the connection for commercial purposes.)
I honestly don't know why the US is lagging so much in connectivity. It's just not "broadband" vs. "not broadband", but the bandwidth you do get even when labeled as "broadband" is inferior, too. Surely the business case can't be THAT different from SE Asia or Europe?
In the Netherlands we are already in an ADSL price war. Providers are offering ADSL connections from around EUR15/month and regularly increase the speeds. In january it's going to reach 2M/320k for around EUR35/month. Most of theses plans are unmetered, and you get a fixed IP address.
For the consumer this is great - lots of choices and decent service.
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
price wars do not have to extend to dumping. if a company embarks on a price war it has made the statement profits were very high before. the price war is intended to drive competition out of the market. the result of the price war is a less competitive market. prices should be kept low enough for price wars not to be feasible.
Your sig reads: Will slashdot ever drag itself into the year 2003 and provide the ability to edit posts?
Don't you realize that in a moderated forum that attracts thousands of trolls, editable posts really don't make sense? Imagine that +5, Funny being edited into something worthy of -1, Troll. The editors have it right: preview or post, no editing.
Well Im in Australia and I am currently hooked up to a 512/128 connection for au$90 for a download limit of 4 gb.
:-)
:-(
The lowest unlimited price for 512/128 is about au$90 (us$60) (and that is crap speeds -slow) a decent unlimited comes at au$100 (or us$66).
Decent 1500/256 (that is the fasted aussie) is at i think au$230(about us$160).
DAMN TELSTRA.
Ps there is 62 us cents in 1 aussie dollar. so think about it in us dollars
pps all money conversions are done in my head (only rough not exact)
My cost here has risen.
I think they are dreaming about this war, and dont expect any of these 'lower prices' to filter down to us here.
Though it would be nice to cut my bill by 1/2.. i wont hold my breath.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That website in your sig is a laugh riot... almost choked on my mountain dew reading it... thanks!
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I prefer to pay a fair price for the service, not some special or promotion or undercut-to-kill-the-competition price. By fair I mean marginal costs, my share of fixed costs (total/number of users) plus a compensation for the initial investment, sufficient to give a normal ROI.
I don't like both when the provider tries to suck me dry and when the provider gives me low promotion prices which he has no intent of maintaining later.
Brifly put, I hate modern capitalism and its perversions.
P.S. And personally I prefer 60$/month ADSL (64/16). What a bargain!
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Just reset the score upon edits.
It's Growing at a rate of 12 terabytes per month... It's currently got over 300 terabytes of data.
hey, I've been trying to get the Paris Hilton video on dialup. Accept no substitutes!
I wonder if the God-like powers of the DMCA, or similar legislation, will let the cable companies subpoena Slashdot info to find all the anonymous cowards who've admitted to cable theft?
Mencken had it right. So glad that's old news.
Large corporations have a strangle-hold on the infrastructure behind broadband in this country. Aside from federal regulation (less than ideal), the only way that prices are going to go down to where they should be ($15~$25) is if there is a price war among them.
Sounds to me like parent (fastidious edward) has a personal ax to grind (read: has owned a small business that went under due to too much competition), and can't separate business from his emotions.
Cable prices are about the same for home users. That gets you 3Meg down and .5meg up, but subject to the neighbourhood glut problem.
For $20CAD/month the cable companies now offer cable 'lite'... 120K down and something similar up. I think that Telus has responded in kind.
The Canadian dollar is currently worth about $0.75USD, so that would be about $33 and $15USD/month respectively for the two levels of service.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
That's exactly what I am doing... I find that while an optimum online cable modem is nice, it is not worth the extra cost to me at this time, so I am moving to an ADSL line and saving a third.
I just got tired of the crappy customer service from SBC (1.5 Mbps up / 6.0 Mbps down) that was really 384K up/900K down for $200/mo, and cable blocked port 80 disallowing me the opportunity to run a web server from my home, so I found some good competition and got a T1 piped in and now I work from home for $400/mo. I use the bandwidth up, and this has helped me out immensely in doing my work from home. I still hold down a full-time job but now run a hosting service out of the house and run a service based computer company out of my office. If it had not been for competition in the market I would be paying $1600/mo for a T1. I think that good competition in the market keeps the prices low and give customers a better chance of getting a deal within their means.
If you looked at where broadband is available, I think you'll find that its only available in the US where the population density is certain to be higher than 250 users per sq km.
t s/ FCC-State_Link/IAD/hspd0202.pdf.
The cost of serving low population density areas causing high rates doesn't wash since the low density areas cost zero because there is no service.
79% of the zipcodes in Alaska have no high speed internet providers, Arkansas 39%, Iowa 49%, Kansas 35%, Kentucky 40%, Maine 35%, Minnisota 35%, Montana 48%, Nebraska 44%, New Mexico 34%, North Dakota 72%, South Dakota 63%, West Virginia 58%, Wyoming 47%. Those represent a lot of sq km.
From an FCC report:
"High population density has a positive correlation with reports that high-speed subscribers are present, and low population density has a negative correlation. For example, as of June 30, 2001, high-speed subscribers are reported to be present in 97% of the most densely populated zip codes and in 49% of zip codes with the lowest population densities."
"For this comparison, we consider the most densely populated zip codes to be those with more than 268 persons per square mile (the top three deciles),and the least densely populated zip codes to be those with fewer than 25 persons per square mile (the bottom three deciles)"
"Our analysis indicates that 97% of the country's population lives in the 78% of zip codes where a provider reports having at least one high-speed service subscriber. Moreover, numerous competing providers report serving high-speed subscribers in the major population centers of the country."
http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Repor
I'm wondering if the trend of having more workers telecommute recently is helping to keep the pricing faith alive for broadband providers. It's easuer for someone to agree to $40 or $50 a month if they're expensing it...
The Environmental Protection Agency doesn't regulate industry in the same sense that the FCC regulates communications. EPA regulations deal with notion of protecting (the legal concept of) property. If you dump toxic sludge into a river that I have water rights to, then you are reducing the value of my property. Most FCC regulations discussed in this forum (and the rural electrification program you mentioned) deal with the notion of a public good. How effective are any of these agencies? Well that's another rant...
Did you know that US taxpayers are still paying for new rural electrification projects which include such "necessities" as new ski resorts? I think its safe to say that this agency has outlived its usefulness providing a public good. (A former director of this agency agrees).