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FCC Considers Deregulation of DSL
Phlatline_ATL writes "In an article on ArsTechnica, they explore the FCC's current consideration to reclassify DSL as an information service and as such would no longer require the telcos to lease out their lines. This seems like it would effectively make the telcos the exclusive DSL broadband providers." From the article: " So after six months to a year it would be goodbye Earthlink and Speakeasy, hello SBC DSL monopoly (in the case of Chicago, where I live). So the telcos would get what they want, which is no competition while the consumers get screwed. But it's perfectly logical under the FCC's definition of broadband competition, where they want cable to compete with DSL--and hopefully IP over power lines and WiMax down the road."
"If only we were allowed to keep their lines all to ourselves," they say, "we would hurry to get fiber laid to every house in the land and offer faster and wider range of services."
It's not exactly as if DSL has been a "competitor" by any means in any area I have lived in. Its distance requirements, slow speeds, and typical poor telco customer service has always lagged behind services offered by Cable. This is speaking only from my limited experience with four different DSL providers and two cable providers so obviously YMMV.
When I first got DSL in the summer of 1998 from Epix/Commonwealth in PA it was 640/160 and remained that until 2003 (IIRC, I wasn't living at home anymore) at which time they bumped the service to 1.5/384 to "compete" with Adelphia cable. Five years stuck at half the speeds? Problem was that there was NO competition because Adelphia was only broadband downstream and analog upstream in many areas for quite some time.
Out at college we got DSL in the fall of 1999 when we moved into an apartment. Verizon offered the lines and we took up the local freenet ISP as they were cheap. They were offering 768/128 on overcooked DSLAM racks (two racks per T1 instead of one rack per T1 like it was supposed to be) and speeds were consistently in the 40kB/s range. No one would take blame and would always finger point at the other guy (it's the ISP's fault, no it's Verizon's fault!)
Roadrunner came to town in the fall of 2000 and we dropped DSL quickly. While our latency in online gaming went up so did our download speeds. At first it was a bit over 1.5mbs but quickly went up to 3mbs. There was no finger pointing as RR handled both the ISP and the line. Was it good? Certainly for me it was. Faster speeds, less downtime, and no finger pointing. Comcast was smooth in MN but working for them in OH I knew that there could be serious issues (depending on your location) with speeds, intermittent bloc-sync, etc. 1.5mbs and then 3.0mbs w/o any real problems. Problem here was DSL wasn't even available and if it was, it was only 640/128 for more money...
My idea of DSL being competitive changed only slightly when I moved in August of 2004 to a house that offered Charter (no servers w/blocked ports) and DSL (Frontier and ISP choice). I went with Frontier and Visi (local kick ass ISP that allows servers). For once in my DSL using life I am happy w/the speeds (currently 3712/448) and the service. Visi handles everything for me so I just contact one point. I would be *extremely* upset if I had to go back to Frontier as they don't allow online bill pay, aren't very nice on customer support, and are likely not as knowledgeable as Visi's guys. Charter, charging $39.99/mo for the Internet (I think it was only $11 for CATV making it a total of $52) was a ton less money than Visi/Frontier at over $60 (requiring me to have a voice line and the $25/mo ISP charge). For most the price alone is a no brainer. For me, because of the server issue, the couple extra bucks is worth it.
So in all those years Cable hasn't improved all that much and neither has regulated DSL. So where's the competition driving faster speeds? How will deregulating DSL do anything?
It's sometimes better for the customer to use the same line and ISP and it's sometimes better to use the ISP different from the line, but it's *always* better to give the customer a choice.
So, the FCC is going to "do us a favor" and push for businesses to continue to fuck their customers over? Freedom to choose is always a better option to than freedom for businesses to do what they want... They have proven time and time again that they don't have competition as they already charge astronomical rates for the lines. They probably can make more money by finger pointing and less staffed CSRs for their own ISP. What incentives do they have to move to high capacity lines if the only other option is Cable? None. Especially when it's in the best interests of the Cable company to keep their available down
They're not the cheapest, but their staff is the most knowledgable I have seen, and they're definately the most Linux-friendly.
The more people that switch away from SBC the more money the competition has to fight this stuff.
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I thought Lassiez Faire supported regulation to the point where there would still be competition? Monopolies are not only bad for the consumer, they are bad for the economy. With 2 or 3 competing companies, not only can prices fall to below $30 for broadband, but each of the companies creates jobs. Of course the FCC has been in bed with the telco industry for some time.
it's be an SBC-Yahoo DSL monopoly. SBC's not the only one benefitting.
Didn't the FCC promise telecos that they wouldnt have to share Fiber lines with competitors? Why do they need this too? They have incentive to get to FIOS-like services and drop DSL completely. If anything, having to share DSL lines with competitors made moving to fiber more appealing to the big telecos. Sounds like telecos trying to make money through government intervention instead of being creative and bringing new products to market.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Clearly SpeakEasy and Earthlink don't know how to properly bribe officials to keep themselves in business. It's their own fault, really.
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This seems like one of those grand opportunities, like the building of the U.S. highway system, where the government could step in and provide universal internet access. Such a move would make it possible for people out in the countryside to get broadband and access to high speed internet services.
The current problem is that the vastness of America means that private companies don't find it cost effective to hook up Ma and Pa Kent out in the sticks. But under a government system, those people would get the service.
A lot of people don't want to pay for that, I'm sure. However, if you consider that the reason you have your broadband is because it just happens that you are lucky enough to live in a densely populated area. People who run farms and are otherwise far away from the crowds of cities simply can't generate enough demand to make it worth the broadband companies' while to hook them up.
This deregulation is the opposite direction that the FCC should be taking. There are certain things that the government ought to provide, or ought to subsidize in large amounts, and one subset of those is basic utilities. The Internet is one of the utilities that will be key in the future of our country. It makes sense that we get a jump on it now and wire (figuratively speaking. Wireless would work as well) the whole country up.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
I wonder if their hope extends to hoping that broadband-over-power-lines magically doesn't spam the radio spectrum with interference. Last we heard, it did...
Mind the Gap
DSL services are already monopolies in many areas, partially due to the significant infrastructure needed to roll out the service.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Isn't that like saying only one company is allowed to make pencils, and another to make pens, and those two companies will compete? They fight with the marker company and the crayon company too?
Is this what competition now is?
I agree. The same rules should apply to phone companies and to cable companies. The notion that the phone company is a "utility" but the cable company provides a "service" is outdated.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
For one, The local telco only has the infrastructure because of a pre-existing monopoly. You're not supposed to be allowed to leverage a monopoly in one market to undercut or prevent competition in another. Second, in many areas, it is simply not possible to string new cable alongside the existing stuff, or to get permission to rip up the roads to lay new lines.
Maybe because my tax dollars subsidized the construction of that infrastructure? Maybe because land owned by the government was used to put up the poles for that infrastructure? Maybe because the government told me I had to let the telecoms dig a trench through my front yard to lay cables? There's nothing wrong with letting a company profit from infrastructure they built... but when that infrastructure was largely supported by the government, then the government has the choice of whether it wants to let others use the wires. If the telecoms don't like it, the government can always deny them the priveledge to use public land to run cables.
Okay- say what you will about deregulation, whatever. The issue to me, is that these lines are on public property, and in public airspace... Would another company be allowed to build poles and run lines right next the current lines? If not, it seems that the phone companies should have to share/lease them out at a fair price.
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
The FCC already classifies cable-modem service as an 'information service' under the telecom act. (See the recent Brand-X decision from the US Supreme Court.) If cable modem service is an information service, then I see no reason that DSL isn't -- they carry exactly the same thing.
The real problem here is that there's not a whole lot of in-between: either you're an information service and barely regulated, or you're a telecommunications service and heavily regulated. To me, the scariest thing about the 'information service' classification is that it allows the carrier to decide what to carry and how to do it.
For example, your cable company starts offering a VoIP service -- what's to keep it from degrading Vonage's VoIP service? What about when they degrade IP video feeds that compete with their own pay-per-view services?
Antitrust law can take care of some of this problem, but it's a hard case to make.
The infrastructure built by the Bells was heavily subsidized by... your tax dollars.
Would another company be allowed to build poles and run lines right next the current lines?
McLeod has Fiber running 150 feet from my house along County Rd 46. I don't have access to those lines and they are likely sharing the "public space".
So why are they being treated differently? If we are going to regulate/deregulate due to public space I want access to that Fiber.
Didn't the phone companies get a lot of help from the government in building their infrastructure? Such as being able to put lines across people's property and in public right of ways, etc?
What?
Read this, then you'll understand.
What is wrong is that the ILEC's (SBC, Verizon, etc) have had 100+ years as a protected monopoly to build their networks on the backs of their captive customer base.
CLEC's and other DSL providers have had since the 1996 Telecom Act to try to build a business in the face of the 800 lb gorilla.
It is silly to act like the ILEC's have been successful by building a business just like anyone else does. They haven't. They had the enormous advantage of being the only game in town for a long, long time.
What we need is structural separation.
Break each Babay Bell into two units.
One being a regulated company that owns the outside plant. It would be required to sell access to everyone equally at requlated, cost-based rates.
Take the switching and retail side of the company and put it into another, un-regulated unit. This company would buy loops from the regulated company just like every other CLEC does.
Of course this is pie in the sky.
The Baby Bell's have far too much lobbying power for this to ever happen.
Recovering the cost of installing and maintaining the infrastructure is a separate problem from providing a service on that infrastructure.
It's BS from the telcos when they say if they had to compete with other companies in thr DSL space they couldn't be profitable, or would have no incentive to put in fiber. Just like any business, the cost of the infrastructure would be passed on to the consumer, regardless of the company that supplied the service. The truth is that the telcos are not interested in competing because they would not be able to set their own premium fees for basic service.
Not all of the telcos are standing still, though...to their credit, Verizon has gone ahead with switching to fiber (which in itself shows that the comment about the barrier for switching to fiber is a lie). In my area that means we WILL finally have true competition between cable and DSL. I look forward to it.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Don't you think that telcos might like third parties? It's easy money. They don't have to support end users, and so they get a fixed fee every month for very little continued effort.
As a Speakeasy customer who relies on their static to get work done, I was greatly alarmed by this article on Ars when it was posted yesterday. So, I did a little digging, and found this article. From it, I learned that the FCC is now only considering dropping the requirements that carriers must resell their finished DSL services, not the actual CLECs that rent the lines and have phsyical equipment in COs such as Covad. The following quote from the article illisutrates their evolving position:
Since Speakeasy resells Covad services (or at least they do in my case), Speakeasy isn't going anywhere. Granted, no agreement has been met yet, but it appears that a block of the FCC Commissioners is looking out for us. It is a bit disturbing to FCC mucking with these rules in anyway. It is clear that they don't understand the degree of reliance folks have on these services for their livelihoods.
So, without competition over DSL and Cable, will consumers be "allowed" to have municipal WiFi, or will the monopolies still cry foul?
What about areas where the is no competetion (with cable, etc)? It seems to me like this ruling will be ambivalent at best for people in large metro areas, but rural America - whose broadband infrastructure is still spotty at best, and often unavailable - gets screwed.
I grew up and my parents still live in a small town (~1200 people) in northeast Ohio. Broadband cable became available from Adelphia - the only cable provider in the area - about 4 years ago, and the bargain price of $59.95/mo w/o cable TV. I convinced my folks to try it...it was only slightly more than paying for a second phone line and dial up. It was an improvement, but just barely. Terrible uptimes, slow speeds (lucky if a download broke 35kb/s), and other crap...but still not dial up.
A couple of years ago, SBC took over the local telco, upgraded the equipment, and offered DSL to those lucky enough to live in town. 1.5m/512k service for $30 a month. I got my parents switched over and the difference is astounding. They're currently getting 3.0m/768k service for $26.95. I thought, "WOW! Broadband has become cheap, widely available, and fast!"
Not so. I am heading back to college this fall to begin studying law. The local population near the school is about 10x the size of my home town, so i figured they had to have good broadband, eh? I called the cable company. They don't service my street. Ok. I called the telco. After initially telling me I couldn't get DSL, they called me back to say that I could, in fact, but that they had to manually verify the "rural" address by sending someone in a truck.
In order to get DSL, I had to subscribe to local phone service. After much haggling over packacges I didn't want, I finally got them to give me *just* local service for $17/mo. 1.5mb/128k(!) will be $50/mo more; effectively, $67/mo for crappy broadband. I'm being bamboozled.
After I had signed up for a one year commitment with the Telco, I found out that a local ISP offered DSL for $7 less per month. The moral of the story? ANYTHING that has the potential to reduce number of options available to consumers is bad. I had another choice I didn't know about...but at least it was there.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
So, does anyone have an address where we can write to the FCC and weigh in/complain on this issue?
It might not make much difference, but at least the attempt would have been made...
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Phooey.
Your cable bill has tripled? Are you getting more channels than you used to? Why don't you switch to satellite if you're unhappy? Or, wait a couple of years for the telephone company to start providing TV.
The Savings and Loan crash was mainly because the federal government wasn't charging enough for the FSLIC insurance -- normally you pay more for insurance on high-risk activities.
The old airlines have been in trouble because they're having trouble competing in a deregulated environment. Southwest, among others, is doing pretty well. The reason that they're bailed out is that the Congress is too lilly-livered to actually allow competition to work and let the weak players die off. If the business model is so bad, why are there so many new players?
Deregulation does cause upheaval, no doubt about it. But, markets work better than regulators do.
No company is going to be able to install the nationwide infrastructure that the telcos have -- it would be a multi-trillion-dollar investment if it was even possible given the amount of disruption to everyday life (digging up streets, etc.) that would be required. It was built piece by piece during the monopoly era, funded by a combination of tax money and monopoly profits, over a period of 90 years. The only way to participate in the DSL market is through the existing infrastructure.
To anyone who thinks Bell Telephone was a benign monopoly, well, you're wrong. I remember all too well the days when you had one choice of long distance carrier -- AT&T -- and you paid whatever they felt like charging. I remember when a 3-minute call to a town 15 miles away cost $1.63 (my parents made sure I'd remember). I remember when you were legally prohibited from owning a telephone; you had to rent them from the phone company, and since they had a monopoly there, too, they had no reason to offer anything more than desk, wall, and "princess" styles, and a handful of colors (about 5), so they didn't. I remember when long distance calls were something you made on special occasions, birthdays and holidays, not how you chatted with your friends for hours. I remember when they required you to get permission before connecting so much as an answering machine, and argued that allowing people to plug in their own hardware would cause the entire national phone network to collapse. (funny, it's still there) The Bell monopoly was never benevolent.
It is just mind-blowing that the federal government is redefining "competition" as "closing down multiple profitable companies competing in a given market and turning that market over to a single monopoly."
The power company owns the poles (and hates it when people call them telephone poles). Nothing is stopping a company from leasing pole space from the power company to run lines to compete with the phone and cable providers except the extreme cost.
Actually in most cases the poles are owned by the power company or a 3rd party who leases them to both.
And if you wanted to come in and run your own lines, they'd probably let you. Just pay the same everyone else pays.
If the FCC is going to deregulate DSL as a info service then the phone companies should be required to offer naked DSL. Currently, BellSouth requires all DSL customers to have a full service phone line. Other bells have the naked DSL option.
Not to mention that other companies would not be allowed to lay their own infrastructure by the local governments. And if a local government did allow it, the local telco would be all over them with lawsuits.
6
If cable wasn't already established along with the telephone infrastructure, we would not have cable today. They snuck in when they weren't seen as a threat. As it is, the telcos are suing governments who allow wireless setups.
http://www.muniwireless.com/archives/municipal/48
Not only that, but Verizon flatly refuses to provide DSL service of any kind to this area. You get Comcast Cable or no broadband. But competition will keep the companies in check. Yeah. Right.
> SELECT * FROM MPSC WHERE clue > 0
(yeah, yeah, blatant ripoff, but I'm irked)
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
I use a DSL service that I love. They give me 1.5mbit/384kbit. Maybe it's not blazing speed, but it's fast enough. Ping times are low. The great things: I can run servers on my system. I get a static IP. And I get amazing support.
Exhibit A: I called them up because an installation had gone wrong and I couldn't get online. Wanted to know whose fault it was. Turned out I hadn't released the DHCP properly, and it was waiting to time out, so they reset it on their end - and then I realized I hadn't written down any mirrors for my BSD distribution I was trying to get working, and didn't have any other working computers. So they tracked down a BSD distribution site for me and gave me the URL.
Exhibit B: They have semi-supported IPv6 tunnels (in that the service is available, but is not *officially* supported - unofficially, it is supported.)
Exhibit C: They have a server-side firewall to block incoming ports that tend to be problematical. It's configurable by the end-user. Yes, I have some control over *their firewall* on their end. (One of the options is "off entirely", for the curious.)
How much of that would be preserved with Verizon? Fuck all.
(Addendum: While digging through the config to see what the exact state of IPv6 was, I just realized I can change my reverse DNS entry for my static IP. Through the web interface. With full official support. I love these guys.)
(sonic.net, for the curious.)
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
Heh, I found that my local ISP Linkline is offering speeds just as good as Speakeasy, same liberal ISP policies (allowing servers, etc) and their tech support kicks butt, for cheaper than Speakeasy. Of course if you're not in SoCal than this doesn't apply.
...in bed
NEWS FLASH
The FCC just ruled FOR the deregulation of DSL. Takes affect in 270 days.
I work for a small ISP in Fairfax, VA and this move puts our business in immediate jeopardy. My company is part of a lobbying group called the Washington Bureau of ISP Advocacy (WBIA). There are tons of useful links on their website such as how to contact your local senators and how to contact the FCC directly.
http://www.wbia.us/
Please visit and write your local and federal represenatives and tell them that you want the freedom of choice!
McLeod has Fiber running 150 feet from my house along County Rd 46. I don't have access to those lines and they are likely sharing the "public space".
So why are they being treated differently? If we are going to regulate/deregulate due to public space I want access to that Fiber.
The EU regulations, which are pretty sane, have a simple distinction. Run a network open to the public and you get regulated, but you get unparalleled access to public lands. Run a private network and you're at the mercy of local government collecting huge amounts of money for a permit.
And here's the rub; if you run a public network (such as cable, dsl, etc. for IP, telephony, even pagers) you're regulated by your friendly national telco watchdog, who insist on calling everyone who has more than 25% of a market's share a monopolist (DSL being 1 market, cable being 1 market, etc.), which gives them the option to force you to bring your prices down to cost+a reasonable profit.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
It depends on where you live. Some places the power company owns the poles. In other places the telephone companies own them. Then there are the distribution companies. They just own the poles and right-of-ways and don't make either electricity or dial tone. Regardless of who owns them they are almost always part of a regulated utility monopoly, and therefore come under the controls of the PUC in your state, and they don't want the poles to become overloaded. Either technically or visually. There are regulations on how many cables can be on the poles or burried in the right-of-way. There are regulations on how close they can be. So, when it's all said and done, most places it is almost impossible to get cable for new technologies run, so forget competing technologies. Why in the world do you think municipal wireless initiatives are getting so much push? No cost for wiring IS a factor, but a lot of places they simply CAN'T run the wire.
"previous behaviour of trying to limit people's speed"?!
I worked in the wholesale DSL service & repair department of BellSouth with: access to about 100 Nortel Shasta BSN5000 switches; 15,000 Alcatel DSLAMs; 30 Sun AMS (Alcatel Management System) servers; control of all BellSouth's ATM data switches; complete end-to-end user-to-NSP control of 1.5 million ATM circuits, access to every system the company had that affected service in any way (some up to 30 years old), authority to dispatch any kind of technician...
If BellSouth wanted to, they could run a script that within 2 or 3 days would, on average, triple people's bandwidth. It wouldn't strain the system in the least. The network is big and empty. Further, the other ISPs were always miles ahead of the poor underpaid bellsouth.net tech support in competence. These days, I hear bs.net has gone even farther downhill, outsourcing level 1 tech support to India, he Phillipines, and even Costa Rica, while at the same time introducing time-and-motion studies and oppressive surveilance on the techs doing my old job. (every keystroke and mouse click recorded, microphones in the cubes that can't be turned off whether or not you're on a call, etc.) The performance metrics measure everything but whether the problem was fixed, and leave no room for creative problem-solving, and as a bonus they have required meetings for all techs on these worse-than-meaningless statistics every morning. Now that they don't have to provide service to other ISPs, I predict that they will find some way to make it even worse.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Never works like that.
Double standards are part of having a shitty government. They will say, "You want to build here? Ok, we'll give each of these people $5,000 to 'git." to a big developer. If you're a startup or some average citizen, they'll say something like, "And make all those people move out? It would cost so much to fairly compensate them, and they would be resistant to moving! Those houses and folks are old, let them be."
Consequently, if I said someone was violating my copyright for a song, I'd be laughed at and no one would do anything about it. But when the RIAA says it, the fucking FBI is beating on people's doors!
You'll get access to that fiber line when they can profit from you having access to it, and more than pay for their original costs of bringing it into the area.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
No more considerations needed... It's already happened
US FCC eases regulations on DSL broadband