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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
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.
I'm not getting FiOS any time soon, although the towns all around me are. My town won't allow Verizon to put in FiOS until they stop the practice of removing the copper when installing fiber. Verizon is using its monopoly power over the PUC to remove choice from consumers. My PUC won't stand for it, so we all get screwed. I certainly don't see that the PUC has any power over Verizon here.
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.
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!
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.
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.