Court Ruling Points Way To Broadband Regulation

DarkHelmet writes "An article on CNET News indicates: 'A U.S. appeals court has rejected the Federal Communications Commission's request to rehear a case, in a move that could prompt local governments to regulate the cable industry.' The piece explains: 'The rejection could pave the way for municipalities to force cable companies to share their broadband Internet lines with third parties.' I personally can't wait for companies like Speakeasy to branch into the Cable Internet market and provide 10-100mbps service."

Comments

Always a downside

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, with government regulation your cable bills will be cheaper, and your service better. Great. But once the government has latched onto this industry it'll never let go. We could soon see cable TV channels with an anti-war bias get censored off the air 'for our own good', and copy protection built right into the cable system (protected by the DMCA, naturally). Say goodbye to having non-fritz chip enabled machines (like Linux boxen) working on broadband. I hope it doesn't come to this.

Re:Always a downside

[mgoren]

I just want to point out the other side.. that there is also the possibility of censorship by the cable company when there is no real competition. If everyone ends up getting broadband from one cable provider or an oligopoly of a few, those providers have the ability to decide you can't run any servers, you only get x upload bandwidth, your screening of Disney's movie (if, say, the cable company buys disney) will receive a higher QOS than a movie from some other company, etc. All of these either are already happening or really could happen.

While I certainly understand the concern about government censorship, if I'm not mistaken in this case we're talking about the government forcing the companies to allow other companies to use their pipes. While this may or may not be fair, there will be compensation (obviously the companies using the pipes will pay), and it should force competition... which is a Very Good Thing for the above reasons. And it doesn't seem likely to me that this type of regulation would cause government censorship... (the reclassification as "telecommunications" would allow government spying, but that's not really anything new.)

10/100 over cable?

[Anonymous Coward]

With the current DOCSIS 1.0 spec, 10/100 is impossible. And due to the fact that most cable providers only support DOCSIS 1.0 right now, the only way you are going to see 10/100 to the home is over fiber... And I don't think that is going to fit into the speakeasy price plan of 19.95 a month...

What's the point?

[grumling]

If cable companies have to open up their lines, what's the difference? Your favorite ISP will just set up a domain, or maybe a mail and www server near the cable system's backbone, and charge whatever the cable company charges them + 50% retail markup. Strangely enough, it will cost about the same, have the same level of service, etc.

You'd think that maybe we all would have learned something after the DSL fallout earlier in the decade.

Re:de?

[unitron]

You aren't so much wrong as defining regulation too narrowly. This is about shifting the power to regulate away from the federal level to the municipal level.

Not that I expect to have any more power to get local authorities to do as I wish than to get the federal government to do so. It'll still be about which rich guys are buddies with which other rich guys.

Re:If the cable bandwidth is shared

[Anonymous Coward]

uh...so what you are saying (without realizing it)

share the bandwidth nearby

or

share the bandwidth, just further upstream.

and if cables bandwidth is shared...there must be some huge headroom, because here in san antonio, sustained downloads of 375Kb/s is now possible(we had a recent speed bump)

that's just shy of 3Megabit....faster then a T1 on the download side.

on the other hand...DSL here, max sustained download is 140Kb/s

so what was your point again?

Re:Whatever...

[DonGar]

Who says prices are falling? In my experience they've been going up for the last couple years. Of course, comcast has moved in where I'm located.

Telecommunication Act of 1996 ??

[matthewcraig]

First off, cable companies are already regulated.

In fact, the broadband market should already be very well opened to competition through regulation. It's been many years since The Telecommunication Act of 1996 was passed to do open their markets. The question is why is it not working out like predicted? There are a few companies that are moving into very specific cable markets, like Knology. However, this act was supposed to open up all markets (telcomm, cable, wireless, satellite) to anyone who wanted to sell services over existing bandwidth.

The fact we aren't seeing more competition can only be explained (a) if there are no interested firms, (b) if existing customers are too apathetic to new/quality services, or (c) if the regulation of the act are not being enforced. Does anyone know how the regulations of this act have played out in the past eight years in corportate practice? The article seems to indicate that FCC has been dragging their feet enforcing at least the cable market.

As far as I can tell, the regulation of TA1996 should be more than adequate for competition, in theory. Maybe future regulation will be a federal push encouraging existing carriers to roll out broadband to rural locations, although most people have satellite out there.