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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
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.
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.
The difference is all the utilities you mention are highly regulated and in some cases run by the local government. If my local water supplier is delivering poor quality or too low of volume or their prices are outrageous I have two different options. One, I can elect a different mayor and city council who will fix the problem or two I can call the feds who heavily regulate water companies and require certain levels of purity and quality of service as well as pricing. When my electric supplier want so raise their rates, they have to ask the feds and they can't exclude my buying power over their distribution lines from the wind farm down the way instead of from the coal plant owned by the distributor. For that matter if I throw up a windmill they are required by law to pay me for what electricity I add to the grid.
Utility companies in general are often monopolies because of practical limitations to the infrastructure, but they're also traditionally very heavily regulated to keep them from abusing that position and because they are considered necessary services. So far internet access is not considered a necessary service and is not highly regulated at all. Companies aren't required to provide service to everyone in the area like phone companies are and they aren't prevented from leveraging those monopoly or duopoly situations by bundling other services.
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.
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.
If you don't like your electricity supplier, you switch to another one?
In California, I can do this. PG&E is required to carry someone else's watts for me, which of course only happens on paper. But still, I don't have to buy power generated by PG&E.
Or if you don't like your local telephone company?
Well, there's vonage... unless you can't get decent internet :p
There's also cellular; I terminated my land line and got cellular because SBC (at the time) was suffering from a strike, and they told me it would be minimum three days before they could come out and fix my phone line that had spontaneously, mysteriously gone bad. It was always SOP at Pac Bell and by extension SBC (and probably still in those regions, even though they're now called ATT) to steal pairs from one residential customer to give them to a new one, and to endlessly splice wire until it was amazing for it to carry any signal at all; they probably stole my copper for someone else. I went to an alternative and haven't missed a land line since. Actually, we have one now, but I try not to answer it. It's mostly spam.
Or what happens when the gas company doesn't suit you?
I have a tank from Suburban propane. I'm a renter so I'm not changing it, but as an owner I could change my tank, and get gas from someone else. If I were upset enough, I could mount a tank on a trailer and get appropriate licenses and placards to haul it around, so I could also handle the transportation part of the equation, and not pay delivery fees. Not that you usually pay those anyway, unless you are an on-demand customer, and demand gas before it is convenient. I have up to a month lag time between my request and the appearance of the truck, but one of the things Suburban does is they will wait until the price of gas is high to send out the trucks, and then they tend to charge vastly more than the national average, hoping you won't notice. We're using the BBB against them for the SECOND time right now; it worked the first time, let's hope for two out of two.
Or when your water supply isn't pure enough, do you switch to another water supplier?
You can build a catchment, although in my county, you are billed both for water you pump from it, and for evaporation. Can that even be legal? As in, constitutional? Anyway, I have a well. I produce my own water. Can't do this in the city generally, but that's the price you pay for living in an artificial environment.
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.
It might not be a bad idea. We have the best and cheapest postal service in the world. We could cut out half the days of service and that would still be true (and might keep it afloat longer at current rates of utilization and cash flow per day.) There's no security without encryption anyway; so what's the harm? It's not like they don't already have all the keys to the castle, making them the effective owners anyway. Might as well just let 'em hang a shingle.
Be careful of what you gripe about, someone might just do something about it.
Someone is already doing something about it. Consumers are getting boned by corporations. That's "something".
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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!
There is no free market for internet service. I have lived in over a dozen cities in 5 states. In each one, high speed internet service was a monopoly or duopoly.
Which I guess is what the free market is telling us is the cost of delivering
Rather what a fairly closed market tells us the market will bear if they don't have significant competition.
with a population as widely-dispersed as the USA.
Except that even more widely dispersed countries like Sweden have much lower prices.
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
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.
Because people aren't going to drop their ISP unless they know another one is there to pick up their business. Would you cancel your internet knowing there was nobody else yet to provide your connection?
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
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.
There are several things at work here. First you'd need motivated people to organize the customers. Next, you'd need someone to create a new ISP, but if you still only have one provider and no competition you might end up in exactly the same situation a few years down the road. Additionally, you need people to understand what is going on. Because our legal system has been fairly okay about preventing monopoly abuse, most people don't even understand the issues involved and assume eventually other competitors will appear, especially if the service can be provided cheaper (ignorant of the government subsidies, legal right of ways, and other impediments to fair competition). And lastly, you'd need people to go without what is a vital service for many of us to conduct our jobs long enough to drive the monopolist out, which could be long time especially if they have no bandwidth costs and they're getting state or federal government investment dollars.
You can't say people are satisfied when their choice is between organizing a complex boycott that may or may not work; or paying now and hoping real competition will some day be available.
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 know! I saw Fox News and they were saying that we could turn into them if we're not careful. I thought, "My God! We can't have that! Healthcare for all! Cheap and fast Internet access! Longer and healthier lifespans! Large breasted blond women everywhere you look!"
Thank god I live in the obese, sick, and exploited US of A!
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.
So why isn't it any cheaper or better in densely populated cities? It's not like the entire U.S. looks like rural Kansas, now is it?
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.
Keep in mind the US's "First past the post" system gives a huge advantage to the major parties.
$ make available