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Still Little To Do About a Bad ISP
theY4Kman writes "The Washington Post reinforces the grim situation on Net Neutrality and limited ISP choices faced by Americans: 'The FCC's research shows that 78 percent of American households have access to only two land-based broadband providers and that 13 percent have one. Don't expect that to improve. Many competing DSL services have left the market, spurred by the end of line-sharing in 2005 and other corporate consolidations. A few months ago, for instance, AT&T elected to close its WorldNet DSL service. Meanwhile, technologies that were once promoted as alternatives to phone and cable-based services have flopped. City-wide WiFi access ... turned out to be a business bust. The power-line broadband that then-FCC Chairman Michael Powell lauded as having "great promise" in 2004 fared no better: Last week, Manassas voted to unplug its pioneering service. ... We have a situation full of lawyerly jargon, with risks that can't be dramatized by putting a sick kid on a stage. I hope you like your Internet provider, because you may be stuck with it for a while.'"
Given that "data" must be transmitted over the same mediums used by existing monopolies for decades (cable, phone, fiber, satellite), how could anyone expect anything different. I'm thankful I have at least 2 choices. It took a long time for me to have 2 choices for phone or TV.
All of the shutdowns, buyouts, prohibitive laws, monopoly over the lines, and other occurrences that killed competitors had nothing at all to do with the incumbent providers...
Regulation would fix this. The cost of entry into the broadband market is so prohibitively high that only the largest companies (e.g. Google) can even consider laying down a new broadband access grid. Line sharing is supposed to allow for open competition. But as usual, the ability of companies to donate millions of dollars, through various means, to campaign committees means our representatives listen to them, not us, and not common sense when their lobbyists put forward an anticompetitive bill.
Fix Washington, fix this. Like just about everything else.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Only one phone company.
Only one electric company.
Only one town government.
Only one state government.
All monopolies that abuse their users.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Did that ever happen?
The IT manager that sent Terry Childs to jail was supposed to have implemented it a year or two ago.
How many houses are passed by FiOS, Comcast, Time Warner, etc. residential broadband services and opt out? We need to understand why.
Do any of those "out-opt'ers" cite lack of speed as a reason? I bet not, I bet they either don't see the need OR can't/choose not to invest in a home computer and on-going monthly expenses.
Many workplaces are wired for internet access, millions of smart phones have some form of internet access, nearly every school building in America is wired to a high-speed internet connection (K-12 and college/university), as are most public libraries (the last two thanks in large part to tax subsidies paid, in no small part, by homes with more than one phone line), and let's not forget book stores, coffee shops, "grilled sandwich" shops, and, last but not least, your neighbor's "open" WiFi connection - the vast majority of Americans have a plethora of choices, and if they feel they need more choices, they need to work on their local PUC that authorizes the monopolies and duopolies in 91% of America.
Ken
DirecPC [Hughes Net] and WildBlue [Dish Network] have some products, as well.
It makes the government's eventual goal of controlling the internet that much easier if they have fewer entities to deal with. After all, that worked out so well with the financial system...
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Broadband over power lines was never a good idea. What idiot thought that transmitting RF noise over giant antennas was a good idea.
I'm very, very glad it failed and I hope it stays dead.
Perhaps it is time to split these big companies into two operations - ISPs and network operators.
After you have done that you can then mandate that the company sell back bandwidth on its network to its self as well as the competition. So for example let's say MyISP.Net own all of the cable in Texas, that network provider would have to sell bandwidth on its cable back to its self and any third parties that want to offer Internet in Texas for the same price with the same T&Cs.
That way you open up the network in that area to lot's of competition which encourages lower prices and better quality of service. Plus in addition to that you might spawn new companies who only want to built new cable without having to manage an ISP.
If everyone used pure H.T.M.L. and not this flasyh stuff
Pure HTML and flashiness aren't mutually exclusive. It's possible to make animations comparable to what is seen in SWFs with the <canvas>, <audio>, and <video> elements in HTML5.
So let's change the scenario.
If you don't like your electricity supplier, you switch to another one?
Or if you don't like your local telephone company?
Or what happens when the gas company doesn't suit you?
Or when your water supply isn't pure enough, do you switch to another water supplier?
I don't think I've ever seen an article bemoaning the lack of choices in any of the above services, so why not just push for treating internet access like we do electricity? Make it a highly regulated, government controlled local monopoly so we can all stop griping. Because that's the only way it's going to get fixed, unless a wireless magic bullet comes along.
And I'm sure that government-controlled data services appeal to so many Slashdotters that there will be an overwhelming cry of "do something!" (/sarcasm)
Be careful of what you gripe about, someone might just do something about it.
The local city wi-fi closed its doors recently and its service was picked up by a local phone company. Part of the problem was the price, at least for me. They wanted $50 a month for city wide wi-fi. My Comcast bill is $60 a month for basic cable (no digital box so we have HD which is extra if you get the box) and comes with high speed internet.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
It's possible to make animations comparable to what is seen in SWFs with the , , and elements in HTML5.
Yeah, except you won't actually be able to run them anywhere, since 75% of people use IE, and IE doesn't support those "technologies".
Even if people are using Firefox, Opera, Safari or Chrome, they'll only get access to a limited subset of the functionality, since the current implementations are incomplete and generally do not overlap across browsers. Not only that, but they still can't even decide on common codecs to use, for fuck's sake.
Flash, as fucking horrible as it is, is the only viable solution.
We had problems with our Optimum Online cable service for 3 months. 3 months. We called them twice a week for 3 months, each month they would say "Your nodes are over-saturated and we are working on it." A tech would come out, look at our lines, say they are fine, and agree that we are in an over-saturated area. For 3 months. We were paying for 30/5 service and getting 1/.5. Finally after 3 months of dealing with this non-existent internet access (you try sharing 1/.5 amongst a house of 8 people) they get it fixed and we call up asking for some sort of credit for 3 months of basically non-working service. Optimum said they could give us a week. A week! A week for 3 months of non-working service. Finally after being on hold for an HOUR they agreed to give us one month and then promptly hung up on us. We would have gone elsewhere if there was a choice, but there really isn't.
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
Again it all comes back to lobbying and campaign financing.
Doesn't sound like regulation to me, that sounds like America suffers from government corruption.
Really, a large corporation should not be paying Congress to lobby so they can kill their competition. This is the type of thing you expect from Russia and China, not the USA.
If I can have my choice of shitty banks, why can't I have my choice of shitty ISPs?
Lobbying. They lobby to make it appear that Internet access is a scarce resource. This is, of course, bullshit.
Internet access is an infinite resource depending only on how much capacity they build into their networks.
They prefer to keep their capacity artificially low the same way the chinese yuan is artificially devalued.
Thus they can charge more for it than it's actually worth.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Please keep in mind that American-style "regulation" is a lot different than that in other areas of the world.
In America, the people involved with regulating industry typically come from industry. A typical career path involves getting an MBA, becoming a mid-level manager at a large corporation, working their way up to a senior-level management position, then jumping to government briefly in order to put in place regulations that are very favorable to large corporations, and finally jumping back to a large corporation to profit from the "regulations" that have been put in place. Benefit to the consumer is completely irrelevant, and is thus ignored.
In other parts of the world, regulators do not come from industry, and they do not work for large corporations. Many are from academia, which does a much better job of putting the welfare of the general populace ahead of that of a small number of corporations. So we end up seeing regulations that benefit everybody, rather than just one party. Consumers are guaranteed safe, reliable products, while industry is still allowed to make reasonable profits.
1.Cable and FTTH 2.DSL 3.Satellite and 3G 4.Dial-up
It's an imperfect world, but all of those media [with the exception of dial-up] seem to be settling in the general vicinity of $75 to $100 per month.
Which I guess is what the free market is telling us is the cost of delivering high [or high-ish] speed "last mile" access to a nation with a population as widely-dispersed as the USA.
If you want significantly cheaper access, then I guess you would need to move to downtown Tokyo, or downtown Shanghai, and live like a sardine in a tin can.
There was an article a couple weeks ago about how lifting regulation sent more people into a market.
The FCC is actually unconstitutional.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
I can think of at least three towns in Northern NH that don't have a single land-based broadband option open to them. Heck, landline phone and cell coverage is spotty. Low population density - you betcha. But isn't that the sort of thing the billions of dollars dumped on the communications companies by the government supposed to solve? Oh, that's right, they turned the money around and lobbied with it instead of improving their networks.
Jealously hoarding mod points since 2007.
Addressing Manassas, BPL was never well-conceived, and Manassas was destined to fail. I'm sorry, but you transmit an RF signal along an unshielded random wire length without radiation and susceptibility problems. The BPL folks wanted regulation to prevent interference from all the existing users out there, and then lied to their potential customers about the impacts. Good engineering practice, and adherence to solid engineering won out here. It's not like BPL was going to do great things: It's expensive, complicated and requires regeneration at each transformer, and a variety of other points along the way. It's bad engineering done poorly.
Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by tenure.
I operated a small ISP for nearly 8 years and was finally driven out of business by my upstream provider (a municipality in the form of a PUD) which illegally subsidized a competitor and illegally created another competitor. This PUD had invited a competitor into the area and created fake "contracts" that covered up a secret agreement to repay the competitor for 110% of its costs to compete with me. The competitor created invoices for "work performed" under the contracts that just happened to cover their costs; plus ten percent. The PUD also sent their own employees to work on the competitor's systems. This was (and is) actually against the state constitution, not just illegal. Unfortunately no state entity was willing to investigate this activity or prosecute the perpetrators and when we tried to sue we discovered that municipalities are protected from pesky problems like anti-trust and racketeering so the suits were dismissed.
Only four of the managers of the PUD were discharged over this and no one went to jail or was even prosecuted despite having substantial written evidence provided by whistle blowers inside the PUD (who released documents before the PUD could act to cover them up).
We sold out for pennies on the dollar of our investment and felt lucky to get even that because by the time we bailed virtually all the other smaller ISPs had also been driven out of business.
Would regulation have helped me? There was (and is) plenty of regulation but there was not even a token attempt to enforce them. We were told, off the record, by a state investigator that the problems were so big that it would have been economically disastrous to the entire state if they regulations were enforced.
This, mind you, in the state (Washington) which has had numerous scandals involving public utility districts; including the infamous Washington Public Power System repudiating $200 million in municipal bonds some 30 years ago. (WPPS still exists under a new name.)
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
A lot of places don't even have a choice between two carriers. It's cable from ISP XYZ or.... dial-up from the same ISP XYZ.
Polyopoly is a term for local monopolies, due to high cost of relocation. Historically seen in factory locations in industrial-revolution-era woolen mills in England, in modern times ISP local monopolies.
Solved by creating a mechanism for farmers to sell their wool to remote mills, not just their local ones. This became, by repute, the British Woolen Marketing Board, and a good attempt a creating a monopsony (;-))
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Now, what if everyone canceled their service to a provider. Surely that provider would also disappear, since it can't run without income. So like above, another provider could be formed to serve people.
So my real question, why can't everyone cancel their service with a monopolist provider, and sign on with whatever new provider came in its place? The only thing stopping this seems to be that most people are satisfied enough with their current service that they wouldn't want to be a part of this, and thus it does't happen.
One big problem with broadband over powerlines was the fact that it constantly interfered with the amateur radio spectrum, and between people denying this, and companies unable to filter the signal or otherwise prevent interference, you simply had interference with an allotted set of spectrum which can't be tolerated. It would be nice to revisit that technology in a couple of years if they can figure out how to quit interfering with other frequencies.
Yeah, Washington is rather ahhh FUBAR. Totally in the pocket of big business.
Here's a good one... I lived in Manassas for over 15 years and only recently moved. This is THE first time I've even heard of them trying to "pioneer" BPL! I thought surely it was some other Manassas but nope, I looked and there's a web site and everything - holy crap! You're talking about an area that dragged it's feet FOREVER to get cable internet. an area where I had to BEG to get the local phone company to sell meDSL - they refused but a third party sold me ISDL at some ungodly rate over the same lines the phone company said couldn't support me. The cable company told me for two YEARS that they were "rebuilding their cable plant" and would contact me when they were ready to sell me 'net service! Meanwhile just a few miles away in Fairfax there was cable internet and the phone company kept sending me fliers for their high(er) speed DSL but duh couldn't cross county lines to give it to me. Finally after years of this crap cable came though and gee not too long after that we finally got FIOS. Cable can kiss my ass with FIOS available.
Why they ever thought BPL would fly in an environment like that is beyond me. DSL in that area was stupid because the phone company wasn't interested, cable is actually pretty decent and most of the area is older with overhead wiring so not hard, and FIOS is making huge inroads also using the overhead wiring in many places. FIOS is smoking fast too and the cable was decent. What exactly did they think BPL was going to offer?!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
There are two reasons you care about your broadband provider - price/performance, and policies. Yeah, if there's only one Layer 2 DSL provider, that's going to limit the speed you can get to whatever your telco offers (though in many places you can also get Covad or other alternate DSLAM provider using telco copper), but for me what's at least as important is the set of policies and pricing on things like static IP addresses, bandwidth caps, being allowed to run servers at home, etc. And for that, you really can get multiple choices of Layer 3 DSL provider, even if they're still reselling telco DSLAM service. I'm using Sonic.net, many people use Speakeasy, and there are other national providers as well.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Speaking strictly to the US population, this should be no surprise. To the best of my knowledge, this situation is exactly what you have been warned about for 10 years, and so I assume is what you want. If it is not, you had best get involved.
To briefly remind people, it was during the Clinton Administration that the 1996 telecommunications act was passed. This was very controversial, and just like today, there was much misinformation and propaganda that was spread about it. I'm not saying everything about the bill was good, but it did give a start to competition in the telecom/Internet industry.
If you will recall, before this time, the baby Bells and GTE (now called Verizon) were very hesitant to adopt any new technologies for Internet access. There was a huge fight to get telco's to adopt ISDN. After this bill passed we started to get new companies like Northpoint, Covad, and others, trying to sell DSL and other services. In response, the baby Bells and GTE were making deals with ISPs to provide the copper lines and DSL signaling, while the ISP provided the IP (and up) layers. The telco's made promises to not enter the ISP market.
Then we had the dot com bust, the election of the Bush administration, and 9/11.
The Bush administration then emasculated the 96 telecom bill, removing the parts that fostered competition to the large telco's. Soon after, Northpoint, Covad, and virtually every other similar type of provider went out of business. (Covad did eventually re-organize and return.) The telco's now broke their deals with the ISP's, and became ISP's themselves. The telco's would allow ISP's to resell DSL services to end customers, but the telco would charge the ISP the same rate the telco's sold services to end users, and would expect the ISP to be the first level of support. The telco's successfully cut off the air supply to ISP's and the ISP's that were not diversified enough, quickly failed.
Now you have Ma Bell back together again, and few choices for an ISP. Now we have concerns over net neutrality, or our ISP behaving like the big telco's (we don't care, we're the telephone company).. What did you expect?
The answer to net neutrality and a lot of other related problems is not to regulate ISP's. The answer to provide end users a choice of Internet Service Providers. Your choice should not be limited to the republican idea of land line, satellite, or cable. We need a telecommunications act of 2010.
I currently work for a WISP, and with the new FCC give away, they're doing practically the same to us.
It really sucks when you as a private corporate citizen have a government entity use their monopoly to try and destroy your business. I can relate to your frustration, and can only hope that we don't end up like you did.
Regulation (or should I say our current regulation) is only used to limit, hinder, and price new competitors out of business.
Big ditto on that. I kept donating money to the ARRL's Spectrum Defense fund.
-=[ place
In some states electric lines are "shared" - you have one company that runs the wire to your house and other companies actually provide the power.
If we did this in the Phone/TV/Internet arena it would be like your local telco and/or cable provider would run the wire but you would pay a local or national provider for dial-tone, non-broadcast TV, and an Interweb tube. Your local "wire provider" would be prohibited from offering you the actual services except by an "arms-length" subsidiary, which they would have to treat the same as any other service-provider.
Is this going to happen this decade? Not as long as the big boys keep funding elections it won't.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You're trying to make up excuses as to why we in the USA are being royally fucked over when it comes to Internet service.
Fuck you, corporate apologist.
I own an ISP and am an electronics engineer. We provide both wireline and wireless internet access (WISP), as well as, telephone service (VOIP). Due to technology limitations and regulations on technology, we are limited to what speeds we can offer our customer base. The most helpful thing Government can do is free up additional spectrum that is currently not available to the wireless ISPs out there. However, when they have done that in the past (3.65 GHz band), they take input from the Big Players (ATT / other telcos) and make the equipment rules such that there is not a way to effectively use that spectrum. This squanders spectrum and prohibits innovation. I would like to see a band of frequencies as large as the 5.7-5.8 band that currently exists with the following requirements: 1. All operators will use electronically steered antennas thereby essentially making the entire network a Point to Point connection. This would greatly eliminate the tremendous interference we presently see. 2. Open up Ultra Wide Band for WISP use. This is the only way we will be able to provide the speeds that are going to be necessary in the near future. UWB could be limited to a specific band, or due to the electronic steering, opened up across all bands as the likely hood of interference would be greatly reduced. That's my 0.02 Marco Coelho Argon Technologies Inc.
Almost any political view lies somewhere between Democrat/Republican or Left/Right
There are at least economic left and right on one axis and social left and right on another axis. The U.S. Libertarian Party's political quiz graphs these on perpendicular axis as a sort of "political compass" with the Dems at the west, the GOP at the east, and the Libertarians at the north.
Is this a good time for me to ask what happened to the mesh networks we were promised?
It's 2010. Forget the flying car. Where are the mesh networks?
There is another broadband-like tech out there that gives a lot better than dialup, and isn't tied to real laggy and limited transfer satellite or cellphone telcos, and that is motorola canopy wireless tech. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Canopy
I am using it from a local mom and pop ISP outfit and it works OK, and is cheaper than a landline and dialup account. And man, I am grateful too, there was no way that the cable company or the local wired phone monopoly would ever bring broadband here. And it's different from wifi, you can be many miles away easily (I am around seven or eight miles from the main broadcast antenna) and still get service, you just need your home antenna aimed correctly. It's not blazing cable fast or anything, but it is a huge step up from dialup, and because no cables or wires are needed, doesn't have the same sort of giant huge upfront costs for deployment for the ISPs.
It seems like if a community wanted to generate competion for internet, phone, and TV service, there should be a creative way to apply eminent domain laws. The community would take the property (cable/phone line), pay the cable/phone company a "fair" price, and then allow any service provider to use the lines. The hard part would probably be determining the fair price and coming up with the money to pay for it.
Here in Australia, we tend to have much smaller data allowances and higher prices (Due to higher data costs in Australia; We're very remote).
However competition among ISPs is fierce, and most areas of the country have dozens of different ISPs to choose from. This has lead to a very innovative market.
Finally, something about our internet that is better :P.
What would it take to develop wireless mesh networks worldwide and completely obviate ISPs? The tech has been around for quite some time, and I've seen instruction sets that make it look inexpensive, but unless other people have the same capabilities within range, not terribly useful. It seems in principle a bit like hardware p2p. I also find it very amusing that Google Reader saw fit to drop a Comcast ad into this item.
I am posting anonymously this Time because I am a coward and I don't want to lose this connectivity I have. I live in the suburbs of a moderately small town. Because my home is in a sub-development with only a few dozen homes, we may never have FTTH. The old copper we do have cannot support DSL faster than 1.5. Verizon is the local DSL provider and they claim to sell 3Mb DSL service for $39.00 per month. The last time I tried to have them put that in, they couldn't get a clean signal over 1.5Mb, and they still wanted the $39. I told then to take their stuff and scurry away. So I am left with satellite, or Comcast. Since I wanted to go as fast as possible and I needed at least 1 fixed IP, I had to go with Comcast's "Business Internet" Now this is really a sad joke, because it appears that Comcast doesn't have a clue what level of service business users expect when they pay business rates. The first trouble I had with them was their refusal to properly hook up my reverse DNS. They are the first provider I ever had a problem with about reverses. The next trouble I have with them is when I tried their TV service. I had it for a few days and decided I didn't like it. So I cancelled the service and returned the set top box. A few days later, on a saturday morning, my "business internet" goes away. I call and they cannot tell me anything, as there are no known outages in my area. They schedule a service call and several days later a technician comes out and discovers that someone (Comcast) disconnected my cable at the junction box. It was the Comcast TV folks who wanted to make sure I couldn't get TV by disconnecting my coax, unaware that I was a business client and had business service on that wire. Two years later I tried the TV again, and the same thing happened. When there is an outage, I cannot get any real information about what is happening or when it will be fixed. BUsiness clients who have revenue web sites cannot live like that, offline for days at a time. There is very little chance of anything changing any time soon, so I have to kiss Comcast's ass and hope nothing bad happens unless I want to get by on whatever functionality I can get with my iPhone and AT&T. I shouldn't complain, but I pay $100+ a month with a three year contact (business class requires it), and it really galls me what they call "Business Class Service".