Slashdot Mirror
Comcast Launching $9.95 Low Income Broadband Plan
MojoKid writes "Comcast is launching 'Internet Essentials,' a new initiative offering discounted Internet access and home computers to families that meet low income requirements. The program was mandated as a requirement of Comcast's acquisition of NBC Universal, earlier this year. In that way, it's very similar to AT&T's Naked DSL program, which AT&T was required to offer as a condition of its merger with BellSouth. Internet Essentials will be available wherever Comcast offers broadband, which means 39 states."
What sort of bandwidth will Comcast offer for all 'Internet Essential' customers? Will they be farsighted enough to put them on IPv6, so that they don't have problems later?
It said right in the summary that this was mandated as a condition of the NBC Universal merger. I'm sure Comcast is more than happy to have people believe that this was their idea though.
Looks like it's a 1.5/384 connection.
http://www.internetessentials.com/faq/index.html
"That which does not kill us makes us stranger." -Trevor Goodchild
It's probably identical to a normal service but with every metric divided by two or some other factor. Why would they put this service on a different architecture when they could simply alter some database records for these customers?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Look, if they're going to offer subsidized internet access to low-income households, I think the real move should be to nationalize it altogether. If Comcast and/or the FCC can acknowledge that it is a public right to have affordable internet access for everyone, then it is high time the profit motive were removed from the equation. Oh, wait, you guys completely fucked that up with the national health care plan... carry on with your nihilistic ledger-padding then!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Read TFS. This was a condition of permitting them to acquire NBC Universal, so they are forced to do this.
You must have a child who qualifies for the free school lunch program and not have subscribed to Comcast within 90 days,. For a family of 3, that's under $25,000/year income.
The long term goal would be to move most, if not all, customers to the new protocol (not architecture). Since these would be new customers, they can start them on this, so that they don't need to upgrade later. Other existing customers can be moved to IPv6 whenever they are ready.
This six month old story on Ars mentioned more details on the program and 2 of the other major concessions they had to make to get the merger approved. Hiring Meredith Attwell Baker away from the FCC was probably a big help also.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/01/low-cost-broadband-key-to-comcastnbcu-merger-deal.ars
If the US had real competition you would have providers offering $10 broadband as standard without any income requirements. The rest of the Western world (ex. Canada) seem to be able to manage it. How long is the US going to let themselves be held hostage by the big two providers?
This six month old story on Ars mentioned more details on the program and 2 of the other major concessions they had to make to get the merger approved. Hiring Meredith Attwell Baker away from the FCC was probably a big help also.
Hiring her was the 4th concession.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
This is sad. Where I used to teach there was absolutely NO verification of income for the free lunch program. In fact, it was expressly forbidden to even question the qualification of any application, no matter how obviously egregious the situation. There were strong incentives for the school to qualify as many students as possible, linked to additional federal funding going directly to the school. Somehow I doubt this will be any better supervised.
Normally I ascribe all life to intelligent design, but in your case I'll make an exception.
Precisely!!! I don't mind this if it's a business decision by Comcast to win market-share/mind-share. But if they're doing it simply due to some utopian whims of politicians who want to 'bring internet to low income households', screw them. If internet access is a right, food is a right, a car is a right, a home is a right, a job is a right and so on.
I love the comment on the article from a guy who complains that other customers will have to pay for these accesses for the poors.
God forbid these people have access to internet and be able to raise better educated kids to contribute to society!
The horrors!
Seriously, rights don't exist in and of themselves. They're just things that society has decided are important and should exist for everyone. In the revolutionary era, freedom of speech was all that we could afford to give to everyone. But as society has gotten richer, they've decided to expand the universe of things that everyone is supposed to have (FDR's "freedom from want", to give an example). This is a good thing! Now, it's possible that this particular way of trying to improve the living standards of the poor is going to have unintended consequences, but that's the argument you need to make.
That aside, Comcast is a monopoly in most of it's markets, and the capital costs are too high for that to realistically change. Regulators are necessary to keep them from purposely restricting investment and access and reaping monopoly profits.
Well, as IPv4 addresses become scarce, having a load of customers on IPv6 with NAT64 to access v4 sites may be cheaper. Rolling this out for the people too poor to switch to an alternative service first makes sense from a business standpoint.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's one thing if people voluntarily choose to pay for other people's internet access, based on their income levels. But given a lot of reasons, not least being the state of the economy, I don't fault them for not choosing to do so. But government doing this is simply using its power for social engineering, rather then acting within its constitutionally defined limits. Which to too many Americans is fanaticism.
I think you're confused as to what a "right" is.
It doesn't mean it's given to you. It means you are given the opportunity to pursue it without undue harassment by the Gov. In a sense, things that are rights can also be a privilege if there is an associated cost. Really, all rights, natural and otherwise come at a cost. Even freedom is directly free, but in indirectly has a cost in that at some point you have to fight for it.
I personally think this is bad news bears all around. The infrastructure is already spread thin - at least judging by my internet speeds and costs. Last thing we need is a flux of new subscribers that are low-income (read: jobless or underemployed) who have all the time in the world to suck up my precious bandwidth.
If people want internet, they can work for it just like I have to. It's not a necessity to survive. Last thing these people need is another incentive not to succeed.
True. Also, given that Comcast has/is already used/using dual-stack lite (i.e. IPv4 over IPv6 connections) to provide both types of access, they can rapidly proliferate IPv6 this way, and spur more enterprises to make the switch to IPv6 more rapidly.
Read the details: it's ONLY offered to families with young children. If you're single and down on your luck, you're still down on your luck; if you're an older couple with teenaged kids fallen on hard times, tough luck for you, too.
Ageism strikes again. Think of the children!
Many Slashdot geeks like to act like Internet access hasn't changed in a decade but that is not at all true. You get a lot more for your money. I think about my own history on the net:
I first got a connection in 1996. It was dialup, 28.8k max. That was a little deceptive though as the ISP had only a 28.8 frame relay out, so if more than one person was using it, you got less throughput. It cost $15/month, but also needed a phoneline, which ran about $25/month so around $40/month total, about $55 in today's dollars. That would be $1900 of today's dollars per megabit. That later was upgraded to a bigger connection out, and then to 56k.
My first DSL line was a consumer 256k line in 2000. A bit flaky, but sweet broadband. It ran me about $70/month, which is about $87/month today. That is $339/mbit.
I then moved up to professional/business class lines since I want to have servers. I got a 640k DSL line with 5 static IPs in 2001. That was expensive, about $200/month since it was business grade ($240/month today). That is $375/mbit so actually not that much more for speed, despite being a higher class line.
When I moved to a house on 2003 I got a different business class DSL line from a different provider. It was 4mbit/768k with 8 static IPs and cost about $160/month ($200 now). That is only $50/mbit. It was later upgraded to 6mbit down, though my line couldn't really handle that.
Some time ago I switched to business class cable and I've gone through a few upgrades with them, currently I have 50/5mbit service with 5 static IPs which runs me $155/month. That's $3/mbit. I've had that for about a year now.
So the progression is:
1996: $1900/mbit
2000: $339/mbit
2001: $375/mbit (change to business class)
2003: $50/mbit
2011: $3/mbit
That's not a bad increase in speed for money. In 15 years the price has dropped to 0.15% of what it used to be. Also consider that I went from a connection that had to dial in, and had fairly frequent problems to one that is always on and goes down very rarely (probably 99.9% uptime or better).
I'm not saying everything is perfect or that we don't want to see more for less, but let's keep it in perspective here.
Also with increases, we pass more barriers and further increases matter less. 28.8k was slow for everything, even surfing text pages. However 15-20mbps is enough that you can stream HD video no problem and everything loads more or less instantly (you wait more on DNS lookup and the like). Past that it only really helps for faster software downloads. We'll have new uses for more bandwidth, no question, but it is mattering less and less.
I noticed big changes in what I could do when I moved up from things like 640k to 4mbps. I noticed minor improvements going from 10-20mbps (which I did a couple years ago). I noticed nothing really other than faster Steam downloads going from 20mbps to 50mbps.
So while I look forward to the day when I have gigabit to my house (real gigabit, not "a connection that technically runs at gig but you never see but maybe 5% of it" as is common in Japan) I am not chomping at the bit waiting. I also keep a realistic perspective of just how much faster things have gotten and how fast it is happened.
you are aware that just because something is declared a right, it does not mean that people must be given it...it just means the people have the ability to freely exercise the right.
That was precisely my point. More simply, a right is something I have b'cos I didn't need to deprive someone else of something in order to get. I don't deprive others of air while breathing, I don't deprive others of speech rights while opining, et al. But if I did, it would no longer be a right. All the things I listed above - despite the fact that everybody needs them - are not rights, precisely b'cos of the zero-sum-game nature of these things. If they were, farmers would have to give food to anyone who wanted it w/o paying for it, businesses would have to give jobs, automakers would have to give cars, et al. Even if people need certain things to survive, that by itself doesn't automatically make them rights. Rights means something that's yours and morally cannot be taken away.
"Looks like" is right. Problem is they are only required to offer it in areas where broadband is made available. They have already cherry-picked the market in specific, profitable areas. They don't service non-profitable areas which would be precisely the areas that this requirement would target. That said, "some" families will be able to better afford the services they have now but I didn't read in there that they could change their service plans if they already had one. And "making less than $25k"? Seriously? Okay, they are already on WIC, foodstamps and other assistance, so why not having access to broadband too.
I just don't see how this will help as much as people are hoping. Now if they were required to lay out infrastructure into the areas which have a higher population of these "less profitables" then that would be doing something to help.
Once they've got most of America's poor hooked, they'll throttle the service or make it unusable in some way, and most of those people will end up switching to more expensive, conventional plans. If people can pay $10 a day for cigarettes, they'll find a way to pay $60 a month or more to Comcast for access to pornography.
Way to hate. Do you presume that poor people are also stupid people and/or that non-poor people are smarter? Both presumptions would be ridiculous. People in general are pretty stupid and it doesn't matter which income bracket they fall into. A frikken CEO of X-Company could just as easily be hosting a botnet... worse, he might have half a dozen computers where "The Poor family" might only have one. (Admittedly, there will be thousands if not millions of "Poor familes" to each CEO but that's just how the division of wealth goes these days. Do you think you are "middle class"? Think again...
I had a similar thought. Affordable broadband access is an excellent idea, but it doesn't do much good to a family whose electricity and gas service have been turned off.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
It's not a necessity to survive.
No, it's not a necessity to survive, but in more and more cases it IS a requirement for kids in school of almost any age. Textbooks are disappearing in class, and the kids are expected to access an online version at home.
It would be interesting to see what the "poor" use the Internet for in a years time. Who here thinks the majority of the time will be spent filling out job applications or Khan Academy? I'm pretty sure YouTube, porn sites, and community flash mob organizing will be the major activities.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
True freedom of speech really doesn't exist anywhere in the world today. What is arguably more important in democracies is freedom of political persuasion, and freedom to hold one's own views. If one can express these views without harming any other person's ability to hold them (for example: inciting violence against those who hold opposing views would soon cause the system to crumble), then they should be perfectly able to express them in any way they see fit. Outside of this, I believe there are very few things people should have a "right" to.
The nauseating sense of self-entitlement in some "Internet access should be a basic human right" posts is so thick that I could almost cut through it with a knife.
"The most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough." -- Eric S. Raymond
Perhaps some other countries should be looked at. I'm not sure what he counts as "western" but the UK ought to qualify. I see a deal there for up to 50mbps for $60/month for cable Internet. Requires a 12 month contract. My local cable company offers 50mbps for $90/month with no contract ($60/month gets you 25mbps). In Spain I see 10mbit ADSL and phone service for about $60/month with a 12 month contract. That's in line with what you'd pay either the cable of phone company for similar service here. Italy seems to be almost entirely ADSL, not much fibre and no real cable. Rates are around $50/month for 12mbit.
I don't think the situation is nearly as rosy in the rest of the world as some geek types seem to want to think. There are places it is good, there are places it is not as good.
I'd love to see faster Internet in the US because, well, I'm a geek but I also am not going to claim people are getting screwed by 25mbps for $60. 25mbps is plenty fast for everything, including HD streaming, and $60 is not out of line.
It's probably notable that there are conditions on having childrens in age of going to school: I hope you don't suggest young teen and chilren go flipping burgers to pay for DSL because their lazy parents are human wrecks.
Comcast is in the process of rolling out IPv6 to all areas of the company so I can't see why this would be any different. Bandwidth will be minimal at 1.5 mb per second download and 384 kb per second upload. This program is designed to bring internet to homes that otherwise would not be able to afford the regular rate of 44.95. There are some conditions that apply for this service. Your child must be getting a subsidized school lunch and you are not elligible if you have paid for comcast internet at any other price in the last 3 months. It's not a bad idea but I can't even think of what it must be like to surf at that speed. It reminds me of dial up.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
Access to internet is as essential now as access to drinking water and electricity. Selfish bastards such as yourself can go back in your hole.
Infrastructure spread thin? Your speeds and costs are direct result of the lack of competition in the US ISP market. Here, on the right side of the ocean nobody can even remember the time, when the internet was volume limited or when you had to pay for it more than 20-25 euro.
But hey, what do I know? I'm sure your problem is not the greedy corps trying screw you over, but the poor cloging your tubes...
PS. Purposely ignoring your definition of "rights", because it would only start a flame war.
As far as I know there are only some parts of the Comcast footprint that are currently using IPv6 right now so I think that most will be on IPv4 for the time being.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
Thank you. I was beginning to think the whole country forgot what it means to have a Right.
As far as the whole Comcast ordeal, I'm kind of sickened by this. It just means that they told Comcast they can charge people with money whatever they damn well please while the government can mandate who gets Internet for a reduced fee.
What they should be doing is lessening the restrictions on the ISPs in communities and handing over the ownership and upkeep of the fiber to those communities. Start treating fiber like they currently do water, with a twist. Let the ISPs connect to the municipal lines and let the citizens buy their bandwidth from multiple competing companies.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
But the point is over all how you are getting lots more for less. I'm not saying the US Internet is the best in the world, I am saying it is not bad and has improved a ton in 15 years.
Also a few other things to consider:
1) Do you really get your promised rate, to all over the place? Something I've seen quite a few times, most particularly with Japanese ISPs but elsewhere too, is that they build a big WAN type of environment where there's a fast connection to the premises and to their stuff, but not to much backhaul. So great connection to them, good connection to some peers, not so great to other countries.
2) Do your taxes fund that at all? While taxpayer funded Internet is certainly beneficial for those with less money, the cost can't be ignored.
3) How are your housing costs? I pay $650/month (that includes taxes) for a 30 year mortgage on a 165 square meter place. I'm going to hazard a guess that your living arrangement is a bit more expensive.
Just things to keep in mind when comparing things. US and Denmark Internet appears to be in the same general range of low single digits per mbit. Denmark is cheaper, but it isn't as though the US is an order of magnitude more expensive or anything.
I'd love to see faster and cheaper Internet in the US, but I'm not that worried about it. Internet here is fast enough, it is easy to get a reasonably priced connection that can do HD video streaming, fast web surfing and all that ($60/25mbits here, some places are a bit less or more speed). More is nice but not a big deal. Also I've seen the progression going strong, and I have no reason to believe it won't continue.
I'm not concerned about not having the fastest, cheapest Internet in the world. So long as I can get Internet that does what it needs to do for a reasonable price I'm ok with that.
This is hilarious. Having been watching J-Bloggers on YouTube for a while now, it's clear that broadband access in Japan runs about $12 a month (maybe a bit higher now because of the exchange rate) for EVERYBODY.
What is it worth for "the poor" to be connected on the same system?
Who wants to bet the "low-cost" computers Comcast gives out have cameras that can be turned on remotely?
I'm sorry, I'm paranoid. I stopped trusting anything a telecom does some years ago.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Absolutely! The deal for buying NBC should have been to get Comcast to either get out of the ISP business and maintain the network for independent ISPs to compete with a lease rate that covers cost to maintain the lines at the bandwidth the ISP uses, or hand the ownership of the lines over the communities.
My friend would qualify but his kids are not in school yet, and his oldest won't be for 2 years. So he and is family have to wait 2 years, what BS....
And by then, the price will probably have been "normalized" to $24.95.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
If people want roads, they can work for them. If people want courts, they can work for them. If people want civil defense, they can work for it. If people want measles immunizations, they can work for them. Last thing we need is a flux (sic) of new citizens that are low-income (read: jobless or underemployed) who have all the time in the world to suck up my precious infrastructures.
and wait till you find out what speed they get for their $12. While other nations are busy upgrading their infrastructure to meet consumer bandwidth demands, US' solution to bandwidth problem consists of raising service fees.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
He's partially right, though. Your hypothetical CEO will have a dozen boxes, yeah... but they'll likely be top-o-the-line or relatively new stuff, or something his kid may be tinkering with.
As a former poor person (in my case a struggling student), I remember what it was like to scrape up a box out of spare/cast-off parts, running an OS 'borrowed' from someone else. (props to the owners of nwark.com for selling me the bits, and to the idiots at my former employer at the time for clinging tightly to their Windows 3.0 licenses, but giving me a valid SCO UNIX kit).
Back then, and even now, most poor folk get their computers much the same way - big-hearted geeks bang together boxes and make sure the underprivileged kids have something to do their homework on - and these things aren't going to run the latest/greatest OSes. If you're lucky (like in Free Geek's instance) the boxes have Linux on them, but most of the time there's a copy of Windows ${old} installed because the hardware won't run the latest. Then there's the flea markets, where enterprising folks bang together similarly old boxes, selling them with a copy of Windows-something (maybe XP, maybe 2000, probably 98).
Unless the recipient is a geek (or a budding one), odds are perfect that the OS will never get patched, and that the users have just enough knowledge in using them that they can do some basic bits online, but not really do it safely.
Now sure, your typical CxO with a ton of machinery may be similarly ignorant of patching and such, there are a *lot* more poor folks who are prone to becoming bot-fodder than rich folk who are... especially once you consider that the further you go up the money ladder, the more likely you're going to see something with a stylized fruit stamped on the lid/box/monitor and running OSX.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
It's astonishing the doublethink required to support an entitlement mentality like yours, posting on Slashdot and enjoying all of the benefits of being born into a comfortable position in a modern society, and decrying freeloaders who don't have the same advantages as you.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
My mother only has 1Mb/s, and it's far better than dial-up. Downloading stuff is a bit painful - you actually have to wait or 10MB downloads to arrive - but for normal web browsing and email it's perfectly adequate. The main time I notice the difference is on iPlayer - her connection isn't quite fast enough to stream video. 1.5Mb/s would be. Anyone who thinks that a connection that's fast enough to stream SD video is unbearably slow has been living a very pampered existence.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
1.5-2.0 meg is slow anyways no need to throttle.
Now will they try to bill for basic tv on top of that? crack down hard on people who split that feed to a tv to get the clear QAM channels?
While not a "right" (poor choice of words, dude), I would certainly consider the Internet a "utility" that's fast becoming necessary for living in society. Pretty much like electricity, sewage, natural gas, telephone, trash service, and etc.
Sure, you can live without it, but it wouldn't be easy to.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
There are multiple types of rights. For example, there are the legal rights that are granted by the political system under which you are governed. If your legal rights are violated, then the government is supposed to enforce your legal rights. I know it doesn't always work that way, which is sad when the right being violated is a good and sensible right.
There are human or moral rights, but unless there's some entity is enforcing them(Wrath of GOD? Or maybe a superhero? ), they're imaginary rights, don't be surprised if those rights are violated. Some, maybe all governments probably violate some human rights. I don't know if everyone agrees what those human rights really are, if they did, then maybe we would see more revolutions?
If you live in anarchy, the only rights you have are the ones you personally have the ability to enforce. We might whine about not having enough freedom, but if we lived in anarchy, I think we might realize that in order to have freedom, we need a government that will stop others(bullies?) from oppressing us, and that in doing so it will have to oppress the oppressors, who in turn will whine about their freedom being taken away. Without oppression, there's anarchy, and anarchy sucks, but hopefully the oppression is only against bad behavior. Arggh! I can't seem to seem to explain this part well! Will some benevolent and articulate person help me on this?
I agree that the infrastructure is already spread thin. I often telecommute and I can tell when schools over and the kids hit the internet. And now we are talking about making it easier to have jobless people stressing the network all day. And to make it worse, those of us paying full price for the same service would be subsidizing others reducing the quality of our service.
It's not a right, it's a service. If you want it, you pay for it. If money is short, then you might have to cut something out of your budget, like alcohol, cigarettes, lottery tickets, etc.
seeing how this is rent free will they give out old cable modems that may or may not be able to run IPv6? Comcast still likes to swap / give out old SD only cables boxes and the old MPEG 2 HD only boxes as well. also the router needs to be able to IPv6 as well.
now it would be more accurate to say, most employers of people who frequent this site assume those employees have access the the internet.
There still are a good number of people who won't use the net even if you hand it them for free. It took our family years before our grandmother consented to even having a computer! We only convinced her that with a computer and internet she could get pictures of her grandkids daily, let alone e-mail from them. She didn't care to talk to her children all the time, she did want to write to her grandkids though.
Two industries I worked in we could care less if people had internet, both were service industries. I did contract work for one and the only requirement I saw at both was, you must have a phone. Now in certain states, PA is one, phones are considered a right and beyond that people have of certain income levels have a right to a free wireless phone and 250 minutes a month usage. (which explains the extra cost you pay to use your own cell phones)
I am all for giving people a cheaper means to get to the internet but don't assume that just because you and your friends use it that everyone does or will. I know many who are quite happy without it today and are just as productive as they ever were. I have friends with families where the kids are the primary users, the parents might use it for pictures and such. It all comes down to, do you use it at work daily? If not, then you might not have a reason to use it at home. I can list dozens of industries where the employees never need access to the net and many might not even care. Its getting more universal, especially with cell phones having web access but there are still people without cell phones and how long have those been around?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
How is a 12-year-old required to look at an online assignment, research online, and type a paper going to be able to work to pay for the equipment? Yes, the schools are filled with million-dollar computer labs, but they close when all the teachers rush out the door in the early afternoon. And since Comcast is already rationing customers to a few meager percent of the connections' capacity (in preparation for their merger with a TV/movie company) bandwidth can hardly be a problem.
well they have more high rises so it's easier to build a CO / RT / NODE just for that one highrise. Comcast will need more nodes and or kill off the rest of the basic analog channels to free up more room. Also SDV can help but to do SDV comcast will need to build out more nodes.
A right is whatever society defines it as. As technology improves, what we define as a right can be expanded. The question you're getting at is: should it be? By defining a right as the opportunity exercise it without government interference you're saying that it shouldn't. You're advocating a society without progress. This makes sense. You're doing well yourself, and another man's progress risks yours. That's what conservatism is all about. A handful of super rich manipulating frightened people desperately trying to hold onto what little they have.
Oh, and if the infrastructure is spread thin, BUILD MORE OF IT. Jeez, it's not complicated. We could use some public works projects anyway. Internet may very well be necessary to survive. For many it's becoming their only access to education and networking opportunities needed to maintain their communities and livelihoods. There are other forces for evil besides the gov't you know.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Most poor people already have internet, on their smartphones that they pay $100 a month for.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
1.5 Mbps is 30 times as fast as dialup. There's a *world* of difference between the two. In fact, you can do almost anything at 1.5 Mbps - browse the web, use email, watch video streams (maybe not 1080, but adequate), Skype, games, you name it. By contrast, with dialup everything except perhaps email is an exercise in extreme patience.
I used a 1.5 Mbps connection for a while - big downloads could be a bit frustrating, but on the whole it was quite usable. A lot better than when I had a nominal 10 Mbps on a congested cable network.
Comcast has a robust security suite available at no cost to subscribers.
No they were not forced to do this. They could have not purchased NBC/Universal. Clearly they decided the this condition was not bad enough to prevent the merger and that they could make more money even with it in place.
They were told by the government "we don't like you getting that big, and as such we fell that you will need to provide some good to the general population to offset the bad that the merger will cause. so it is mid 2000's broadband at near cost. without this condition we fell the american people will be unduly harmed by this merger."
Seems reasonable to me. The government is supposed to, after all, represent the people.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
Last thing we need is a flux of new subscribers that are low-income (read: jobless or underemployed) who have all the time in the world to suck up my precious bandwidth.
From a bandwidth perspective I'm more concerned about the folks that torrent lots.
If you merely wish to say you feel that the duties and authority of government should be clearly articulated, that would be one thing, but I sincerely doubt that's the case. If it were, then you would be open to the idea of holding a convention to discuss the parameters for a modern day, where we can discuss things on their own merits, and not with some people relying on what was written centuries ago as if it were the last and absolute word.
The principles of the Constitution are "All Government shall have limits," "Federal Power shall be divided between the three branches of the federal government," and "Power shall be divided between the Federal government, the state governments, and the people as individuals." (The second two are both subsets of the first.) Everything within the Constitution fits into at least one of those three categories. Which of those categories should doesn't fit into the modern world?
My friend would qualify but his kids are not in school yet, and his oldest won't be for 2 years. So he and is family have to wait 2 years, what BS....
Yes, that is one of the conditions. If your friend's situation counters the imagined scenarios described here that folks who qualify for this are undeserving then you should post the details of it (really). I would like to hear real-life examples of who directly benefits from this program.
You can use whatever words you want, but the point of public policy is to broadly improve living standards for society at large. There could be some disagreement as to the proper degree of reliance on market forces to get there, but I don't have any patience for anti-social douchebags who claim that the material welfare of the population at large isn't as important as preserving their warped definition of liberty.
And you know what ? We're simply not able to pay for them. Seriously, if you raised taxes to 100%, and *somehow* this didn't affect the economy, we wouldn't be able to pay for what we currently have. So it's going to disappear"
Numerically, that isn't true. In the Netherlands for example, everyone has access to cheap and high quality medical care, generous family support and free pre-school, access to massive job-retraining programs that have kept unemployment below 4% even in recessions, as well as access to generous crime-free public housing projects. And they do it all with efficient government and slightly higher taxes, while maintaining a smaller debt burden as a percent of GDP and faster GDP growth over the last 20 years. More on topic, they also have faster and cheaper internet!
Conservatives spend so much time fighting the ghosts of hippies from the 70's that they fail look around and realize that other countries have largely solved the public policy problems facing this country and have done so in ways that made their countries stronger. But unfortunately, a lot of the political establishment is more interested in acting tough and serious than they are in actually solving problems.
Comcast is a monopoly in most places, and monopolies tend to purposely restrict supply in order to justify raising prices. A giant influx of customers that would force it to pile money onto building more infrastructure would be a good thing.
http://www.cringely.com/2011/07/bandwidth-caps-are-rate-hikes/ is a good article with numbers that shows how Telcos are purposely raising prices and restricting access even as their own costs go way down.
> The infrastructure is already spread thin - at least judging by my internet speeds and costs.
Look at this for a minute.
You pay more and get less, than a large part of the world (and check out Finland before you say anything about population density).
The only reason infrastructure is getting spread thin is that, for the most part, the major ISPs have been treating customers like cash cows and not investing any of their revenue in upgrades. This benefits them in the short term because it creates a scarcity that doesn't need to exist and justifies constant price increases. In the long term, however, it's causing the US to fall further and further behind the rest of the world.
> If people want internet, they can work for it just like I have to.
Apparently you think the story was about companies being forced to give free internet access. It's not. It's about offering internet access for $10 a month (which they have to work to get) and it's only available to low-income families with school children.
And, since you're probably an old fart with no clue, it is rapidly becoming a necessity for school children to have access to the internet. Homework assignments, extra study material, grades, announcements and other communications are increasingly being put on websites for the students and parents to access.
Of course, in most Western societies, people have come to regard some of those things as entitlements. Problem is that the moment someone else pays for something you use/consume, either that someone else will have control over it, or you will be reckless about how you use it. As Gary Becker once noted, there are 4 scenarios in terms of paying:
In scenario 1, X will take good care of himself, while not caring about how well Z's money is managed or spent.
In scenario 2, X will neither take good care of Y, nor care how well Z's money is managed or spent.
In scenario 3, X will not take good care of Y, but will be careful about how X's own money is managed and spent.
In scenario 4, X will take good care of himself, while also being careful about how X's own money is managed and spent.
Scenario 4 is obviously the best case scenario, where the most optimal solution will be sought after, due to selfish interests of X. Scenario 2 is the worst case, where X has no vested interests in either the well being of Y, nor the financial condition of Z. Scenario 3 is the best case for X himself, but the worst for Y. Scenario 4 has no repercussions on Y, but forces X to make the best decisions for both himself and his budget.
In the above scenario, X is Comcast, Y is the 'low income consumer', and Z is the government. In the plan above, scenario 4 doesn't come into the picture. What we do have is scenario 3, and once the government notices it not working, some will try and shift it to scenario 2 or 1. Scenario 4 is not even going to come into the picture, since Y is not being asked to make any of the decisions about spending the money. If Y was asked to spend its own money, you can be sure that the best decision would be made - Y would either make other budget adjustments to allow for the most affordable internet access locally available, or Y would choose to forego it altogether for the time being, use the library for absolutely essential stuff, like submitting resumes, until he got to a point where he could pick a provider.
Since that's not being done here, sooner or later, either X will do a bait & switch on Y, or get Z to subsidize some of that cost. Again, scenario 2.
Broadband is a utility that is necessary every day tasks. $9.95 should be the average plan price. You can get $100 computers, why should you have to pay more than that per year to keep it connected?
Twinstiq, game news
Well then, lets just say that in the context of the question, they didn't do it out of the goodness of their hearts.
Jeez, now I have to help pay for low income people to surf for porn on top of all the other things I subsidize for them?
If you make the proof of need sufficiently complex and stringent, you eventually reach a point where only a professional cheat can get through it. You also reach a point where the administrative overhead of the program costs more than the cheating.
Yes broadband is a right. So are widescreen TV, cellphones, food stamps, birth control, and fancy sneakers from all appearances. Next, a monthly crack stipend.
an ill wind that blows no good
Given that those boxes would be useless w/o adequate #IP addresses, and will introduce new incompatibilities w/ the IPv6 network that Comcast has been rolling out, Comcast s bound to determine that the costs of deploying IPv4 here will outweigh the costs of new IPv6 compatible equipment. And Comcast does have options other than giving out brand new cable modems. They could install routers @ a CO, then forward connections to switches in apartments, and directly provide ethernet connections to the end consumer. That would probably go directly to that consumer's laptop - I doubt that such consumers will have Wireless routers that will service multiple laptops @ home. Such an arrangement would enable them to save on installation costs w/ such new customers.
Yes. The situation could be worse. Therefore, those speeds are good! "Good" is subjective. Perhaps he just doesn't find those speeds acceptable at all. And I don't know why you're assuming that he is young just because of a small preference.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
What's BS is the fact that this friend of yours is having kids on a nearly worthless budget. Obviously he thinks so too if he's having to mooch of the government and the rest of the population for food programs and internet and every other "free" social program offered. Quit having kids if you can't afford them! I'm sick of paying for selfish jackasses like this.
...essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
This is great news. The internet can be such a powerful learning tool for children today and it can also keep parents connected with their kids. It is an excellent attempt to lessen the gap between the abilities and knowledge acquired between children from different socio-economic backgrounds in the school environment. Like many others stated, I do wish that this discount applied to seniors as well since it is a perfect tool for seniors to keep their minds in tune and connect with their family members who may live far away from them. Email Marketing Software
"Anybody care to prove me wrong?"
If you were wrong, considerable immigration would flow in the opposite direction.
It does not.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I saw it said it was mandated, but I didn't know who mandated it.
God spoke to me
When I bought my first house (650sq ft.) in a bad neighborhood (Police were always like, "why don't you move?"), but the folks in the 3-unit apartments on my court would have an RTO truck show up and bring in a big screen TV and couches and stuff, then 3-4 months later it'd show up again to take the stuff back. Over and over. Comcast truck was there all the time hooking people up as well (and probably putting blocks on the disconnect as well) as the box for the court was on my properly line.
Most of the teens all managed to have the latest shoes and jerseys too, and the adults all had smokes and alcohol.
It was a below poverty level living, but they didn't have it that bad. Let any of them win the lottery and they'd be back in the same place or worse in a year.
This was back when DSL first hit: I made a deal with some teens right next door - we'd trench over and lay a pipe for CAT5 and I'd share my Internet with them. I even worked out a deal with them to include a PC (low-end build from spare parts, but still, it worked just fine for the OS of the day). I don't remember the exact figures, but basically for the first 6 months they were mowing the lawn to pay me back for the pipe and PC parts, and after that I was paying them half the going rate for lawn maintenance (and they got Internet). All they had to do was mow the lawn once a week. I provided the lawn mower and gas. They just had to show up and spend 45 minutes mowing.
Guess how long that lasted? Yeah, needless to say they never paid off the PC parts, and sure never got paid for mowing (well, if you include the PC and couple months of lawn mowing, they made out).
Hindsight, I'd should have made them earn the piping and PC parts up front, once they had, then give it to them. Then go month to month on the Internet/mowing. Oh well, I bought a riding mower anyway (yeah, it was a big lawn, but I could mow it in 45 minutes with a push mower, or 10 with a riding mower).
Well, as IPv4 addresses become scarce, having a load of customers on IPv6 with NAT64 to access v4 sites may be cheaper.
IIRC comcast are planning to use ds-lite instead of nat64.
With DS-lite the "customer premises equipment" encapsulates v4 the packets and sends them over v6 to a box at the ISP. The box at the ISP performs network address translation on the v4 packets and includes the clients v6 address in the translation tables so multiple customers can use the same private IPs without conflicting with each other.
This is IMO the best solution as it avoids the need for ISPs to allocate private v4 IPs to customers, avoids the mess of protocol translation and allows legacy v4 only equipment to be used behind the customer premisis equipment.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
It's not a bad idea but I can't even think of what it must be like to surf at that speed. It reminds me of dial up.
Beyond a certain point page load times become dominated by latency and server side slowness not by the bandwidth of your own pipe.
Going from dialup to 512K ADSL was a huge leap but my experiance has been that beyond that there is little difference in normal web browsing (file downloads and video are another matter).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Is this profitable or beneficial to Comcast? If so why are they permitted artificially to discriminate against others?
If it is not profitable is the cost paid by the shareholders or their other customers?
... is a growth industry.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
Because there's no chance he had to go on the dole AFTER his second child was conceived, amirght?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
How many corporations do things out of the goodness of their hearts? People may be altruistic, corporations not.
I guess it's too bad that corporations don't have brief constitutions limiting their power. After all aren't they all just bodies of men vying for power. Sure you have a "choice" when it comes to companies, but even then it's been proven time and time again that if there's a dollar to be made companies can and will act in their own self interests to hold the public's feet to the flame and suck every $ they can out of them. This whole conservative privatize everything under the sun mantra is nothing more than dreams of power and being the one who sucks every $ they can out of a powerless public. The government while not perfect, at least at it's basic concept is supposed to be accountable to the people it's representing. If you privatize everything, you're basically back to feudalism, and every conservative likes to view himself as king.
And I hate passive aggressive douchebags who make broad generalisations like " claim that the material welfare of the population at large isn't as important as preserving their warped definition of liberty" in order to make it clear that they really only intend to write quasi-political flames rather than contribute to a constructive discussion on the topic at hand. OTOH if you'd like to read my whole post (rather than just the first sentence), I'd be happy to have a civilised discussion with you.
"The most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough." -- Eric S. Raymond
Yeah, both India & China are b/w them some 40% of the world's population, and according to those numbers (how credible is that source, anyway? Did they do their own survey, or what are their sources), there are just 12 computers for every 100 persons. Add to that the countries in Africa, Latin America and Oceania, and the percentage will dip even further. Not sure whether it'll be as high as 95%, though. However, I disagree w/ the metric here. Lots of people, not only in the Third World, but also in the Second and First Worlds, choose not to have computers, b'cos they are either computer illiterate or decide that they have better things to spend their money on. Whereas people on middle to low incomes may put computers pretty high on their priority list. So possession of a computer by no means implies that A is richer than B. All it means is that A decided that s/he needs to have a computer among his/her possessions, whereas B didn't.
Yes we would never declare something a right that would require someone else to do something for you. Now I'd love to chat more, but I have jury duty today, so I must be off.
Don't forget company cast offs. Once word got out I rebuild for poor folks plenty of local businesses give me a ring when they are getting ready to cast off their old models. i pick them up, since nearly all have an XP Pro sticker I used a stripped down XP Pro image I have, load them up with free software like LO and Comodo dragon, and sell them dirt cheap. this lets me pay for the gas hauling the things and lets poor folks have cheap computers.
I just had 4 PCs, average 1.6GHz with 512Mb of RAM walk out the door the other day. I keep a cheap USB keyboard/optical mouse combo for $10 and if they need a monitor I point them to a shop down the road that has 15 inch CRTs for $25. So for $60 they have a full PC, with full AV, loaded with software, and is ready for the net. Now that the latest refresh is starting I'm seeing more late model P4s so it is even better for the poor folks.
There are plenty of us guys helping out folks where we can. I got into it by accident myself. A former teacher gave me a call and asked as a personal favor if I'd look at a box for a poor student. This poor girl was trying to do her classwork on a 30Mhz (you read that right, not a typo, and this was in 05) with Win3.1. She was hoping to get another year out of this hand me down before giving it to her kid. she looks at me practically ready to cry and says "Can you fix it?" I knew I couldn't let the gal down.
I pick up the box and say "Sure, follow me" and when we're walking out I hear Shaun tell her "See? I told you he could fix it" I wanted to laugh and say "If you only knew what I was gonna do". I walked out to my truck and said "Where are you parked? well back your car over here by my truck". and when she did I popped the trunk and sat her old box in the back and pulled out two 1.4Ghz boxes I had gotten from an office job. I wiped and reinstalled them on the spot so the head of the company could see no data was leaving the building, I have automated install discs anyway so no biggie, and I was able to let them run while building out his new systems.
She started going "No no no...I don't have any money to buy PCs!" but I told her "Relax they are 100% free and fully loaded. I just don't have the room for them at the shop so you'll be doing me a favor" Well sure enough she starts bawling like a baby then. I loaded her up a couple of 15 inch CRTs, keyboards, and a couple of good ball mice that came with the systems. i heard back from Shaun like a year later than not only had she graduated and had a good job now but she made sure to pass those PCs on to someone else needy at the school.
So yeah there are a lot of poor folks with "hand me downs" and I'm sure that while SOME of them end up in botnets the ones me and the other shop guys throw together ain't in that category. I always give them a fully patched system, with full AV, and a nicer free browser like Firefox or Kmeleon or Dragon. done right a 1.5Ghz P4 can easily do basic office and Internet tasks quite well to this very day and when you see the folks light up at all the free software and the fact they can afford a decent running machine? Makes all the hassle worth it.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.