California Orders SBC to Split Phone, DSL Service

An anonymous reader points to this report at overclockersclub.com which begins "The great state of California has ruled that SBC Communications must sell local phone service and broadband service separately. This gives SBC customers the option to change local phone providers and/or choose any DSL company they wish."

Comments

I prefer one company to place my blame on.

[garcia]

The great state of California has ruled that SBC Communications must sell local phone service and broadband service separately. This gives SBC customers the option to change local phone providers and/or choose any DSL company they wish.

I had this option when I used Verizon in Bowling Green, OH for DSL. It was nothing but a hassle compared to getting DSL+ISP through Epix in NEPA or cable through Roadrunner or Comcast/ATTBI. Any issue that would come up with the Internet connection would result in fingerpointing at either the ISP or the line provider.

At least with cable there is only one person to blame. Slow speeds? It could be my computer but I doubt it. It's likely an issue w/the local lines or the ISP. I don't have to pay two separate bills. I don't have to call two separate companies when I want to cancel (signing up amazingly enough is dealt with through a central location in my experience).

I find DSL to be nothing but an overly expensive hassle at least in the areas I have lived (I realize that out west they seem comparable to Cable, if not better). I despise Comcast and what they have to done to dominate the local market but at least I can hate one company w/o a doubt rather than having to play catch the monkey if you can w/DSL.

A bit longer article is here at ZDnet from 6/14/2004.

Re:I prefer one company to place my blame on.

[niall2]

Up and until this past week I would have agreed with this. I have speakeasy DSL on a QWest phone line. Good service from the former. The later has a real bad track record.

I started to get dropped carriers on my DSL starting two weeks ago. It would go out for some time and then come back. The worst kind of problem...intermitancy. The first time it went out they saw it out and started the dispatch of COVAD. When it came back we canceled. The second time I was out of town and couldn't do anything at home so we canceled (and then it came back). The third time it went out they dispatched COVAD and then it came back. COVAD came out anyway and fixed the problem (the dsl modem was dying). I had an old DSL modem that we put in its place and things came back up and signals were all strong.

Now I know QWEST would have never done anything if I had a connection and it was their DSL service. And they certainly would not have let me use an old DSL modem I owned with thier service. Having lived in Texas I know Southwestern Bell, now SBC, would be in the same boat (along with any cable company I know of). They are all worried about keeping prices low and service to match (and keep it profitable). Being able to choose my DSL service allows me to get one that costs a little more ($10 a month plus more for static IP), but gets me the service I need for running a business from home.

Re:I prefer one company to place my blame on.

[mnewton32]

No matter what when there are two seperate companies controlling the fate of your connections reliability or speed you will never get an honest answer from either.

But the only company that has anything to do with your connection's reliability or speed is most likely the phone company.
I work for an ISP selling DSL, and there honestly isn't much that we have to do with the network. The phone lines are the telco's, the DSLAM is the telco's, the T3 lines leaving the DSLAMs are the telco's. We only get involved once traffic has gone all the way across the telco's network to our OC-3 gateways in the city.
Probably 60% of the calls we get are a telco problem. Fortunately most can be corrected by rebooting the modem (eg "My connection's slowed down" or "My little green light has gone out.")

Re:I prefer one company to place my blame on.

[ElForesto]

Cox Cable got an A rating from PC World in a reader's poll, and they deserve every bit of it. I've never seen a large company with such good support. The hold times are usually pretty short, all of the support is done locally during the daytime, and the repair people are often early and work very quickly.

Compare this to Sprint, the local DSL provider. You constantly get bounced between them and Earthlink, the hold times are usually 30 minutes or longer, and it takes talking to several people before you can get the problem fixed. I had them out on a DSL problem at the company I worked for, and the guy was here for 4 solid days (6 hours each day) until they found a provisioning problem that was causing our connection to constantly drop. Heap on top of that their billing department that doesn't know right from left and their TOTAL lack of local support (it all goes through Phoenix), and a loser is you.

I think you're dead on about DSL. Telcos have been criminal in the way they operate for decades because they have no competition. At least cable companies make the effort to try and compete with satellite.

Price Discrimination?

[swordboy]

Even though they are evil, SBC's DSL service is relatively affordable. It would be nice if California would also require that they not discriminate on the pricing side. This will be a moot law when SBC offers DSL for $150/month. It'll be cheaper to get the phone line and DSL bundle.

Finally

[faust2097]

I personally know 7 or 8 people who only have a land line because they need DSL. I know several more [myself included] who went for cable because there was no 'naked' DSL option. In San Francisco cable internet has been very slow to spread because the cable system is so old and hacked together.

That said, I'm never giving SBC a dime of my money again if I can help it.

Re:Finally

[Otto]

Verizon lied to you. DSL will work without a dial tone. They can hook it to a naked pair just fine. The problem is a bureaucractic one, not technological one.

Note that having "dial tone" is something of a misnomer nowadays. Most places will have dial tone whether you have a phone line hooked up there or not. It'll only call 911/other emergency numbers and the local phone companies (so you can call to get service), but it'll have tone.

DSL will work without tone though. All that's needed is a short enough wire pair between you and your CO.

Sounds good

[Anonymous Coward]

At first thought, it sounds like something of this magnitude (atleast in CA) might cause consumers to end up paying more in the long run, but I don't think that will be the case. I just cancelled my ADSL a month ago (but kept local phone service) through SBC because another company just finished running fiber to my neighborhood (offering phone, television, and internet). I think once the DSL side of SBC is required to compete on fair grounds with everyone, they will not only introduce new services (maybe through something OTHER than copper?), but I think it will give companies - not only DSL competition - but other service providers a fair chance to compete.

PS - Company I am getting fiber through is Surewest Broadband. They do have bandwidth caps, but they are not enforced very stricly, and they actually post what their monthly limits are. When you get 10Mbps both ways, you have to expect this. But with the Television service as well as Internet, Surewest so far has been great, and I am glad I made the switch from SBC Internet (and Comcast for television).

Re:What I've always wondered...

[silas_moeckel]

Yes DSL can be run naked down the copper pair. And just go with vonage for the phone provider. I just made the full out switch when I moved I dumped DSL and picked up cable with no issues except SBC sitting on the number transfer.

Re:How to get around this

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a similiar problem with the telecomm service for my apartment building. A crappy local telecomm firm *cough* Campus Communication wired the building with phone and ethernet lines, and it's impossible to get cable modem service, or Qwest DSL service (because of contracts the building owners have with the telecomm and satellite TV firms). They wired about 200 apartments with two measly T1 lines, and have constant problems with packet loss and zombie computers flooding the T1s. I get about 40K/s at the very most. The next rental contract I sign will say that DSL and/or cable modem service is available or I can walk out of the lease at any time without penalty. I learned my lesson the hard way. :(

SBC service in IL

[weeboo0104]

I used to have SBC until April of this year.

For $49 a month (which they say was discounted because I signed up for a year with Yahoo) plus $34 for local service, I had ISDN speed that they claim was 348kbps. I NEVER saw any speed faster than 100kbps. Their website test said the speed was 340kbps, but DSL reports.com and manually clocking my downloads told a different story.

I cancelled their service and ate the $200 cancellation fee for not using their service for a year. I'll never use SBC again.

I now use Wide Open West cable for my cable and broadband.

Disincentives

[scrod98]

There will likely be price breaks for people who do take bundled plans. We get a discount (of something like 10% off total) for having cable and a cable modem, and could get phone service through the same company. We are free to buy DSL or whatever else we want, just not cost effective to do so.

This is similar to all those 'frequent customer' cards at stores today. If you don't have the card, you can still buy a 2 liter bottle of soda, but it will cost you $1.78 instead of $0.99. In return, they get valuable marketing/demographic information.

Making you give up choice or information in return for a discount is not an incentive to buy, only a disincentive to buy from somebody else.

Re:Spiffy...

[89cents]

SBC has been quite competitive lately. Maybe because of the pending regulation.

SBC's DSL prices here

Your basic DSL for $26.95 for 384kbps - 1.5Mbps. I was getting 1.2Mbps. Now I have the "pro" package for $36.99 a month and am getting 2.5Mbps download. I used to have some service outages because their PPPoE server would be down and not authenicate me, but it been quite reliable so far this year.

Re:Spiffy...

[89cents]

I was paying $59.95 a month on their old plan, but after hearing about the deal from my friends coworkers, I just called them up and they switched be to a faster speed for much less.

Consider the Source

[oliphaunt]

Google news finally picked this up- interestingly the first link is to overclocker.com, instead of this one which has much better coverage of what actually happened :-/

California Always A Step Ahead-Not This Time

[GeekZilla]

Qwest in Washington has been offering "naked DSL" since February 2004. See this story.

Or this story this article. about Georgia Public Service Commission ordering BellSouth to offer naked DSL back in October 2003.

And of course, let's not forget this article.

I hate SBC

[rossz]

Back in February I switched my DSL service from SBC to Sonic.net. SBC was charging way too much for a static connection ($65/month) that was too slow (128k upload cap) while at the same time dramatically dropping the cost of the dynamic service and increasing the bandwidth.

Sonic had a special. Up to 6meg download and 600k upload for $45/month. I signed up immediately. I'm getting about 5Meg/500k and the service is great. During the signup process they asked what OS I was using. Gritting my teeth I said "Linux". Instead of the usual "we don't support that", the guy said, "cool, which distro?".

When I saw some funny stuff (IIS targeting viral infection) from sonic netspace in my apache log I emailed sonic's abuse department. The next morning I had this reply, "We tried to call the customer but were unable to contact him, so we disconnected his service until he resolves this problem." Yep, they actually disconnected a customer because his system was infected with a virus that was attempting to infect other systems.

The only problem I have remaining is with SBC. They still insist I have DSL service with them and keep billing me. I even received a nasty payment demand from them on the same day their marketing department called to sell me DSL service. I've contacted the CPUC to get this resolved since SBC refuses to fix the problem.

Re:California

[Ironica]

Yes indeed it is one step ahead of every other state when it comes to taxing it's citizens and businesses into oblivion and spending like there's no tomorrow.

Er... yeah, that's probably why, when you take *all* taxes into account, California ranks 10th in amount paid per capita (we rank 4th in amount paid in federal taxes alone). In spite of the fact that we have a much higher average household income and cost of living than most of the country...

Our state taxes are reasonable, our property taxes are nearly nonexistent, and we screamed bloody murder and then axed our governor when he suggested that, since the dot-com bubble burst, we should go back to paying our 2% tax (which was cut to 0.65%) on our cars each year, so that we could afford luxuries like fire and police.

As for spending? The Governator brought in Donna Arduin to uncover all that "waste" and "mismanagement" right? And was going to "throw open the books" (which have been available online for years now already)? And then after looking at things for a few weeks, she said very quietly, "oh, actually, turns out the LAO's office is right... you're just out of money." They couldn't find any waste to cut, so they are borrowing huge amounts of money to keep their promises not to raise taxes.

I don't think I'm being overtaxed when my husband and I got a $205 *refund* even though his state W-4 mistakenly listed 3 exemptions for last year...