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How ISPs Collude To Offer Poor Service
alexander_686 writes "Bloomberg is running a series of articles from Susan Crawford about the stagnation of internet access in the U.S., and why consumers in America pay more for slower service. Quoting: 'The two kinds of Internet-access carriers, wired and wireless, have found they can operate without competing with each other. The cable industry and AT&T-Verizon have divided up the world much as Comcast and Time Warner did; only instead of, "You take Philadelphia, I'll take Minneapolis," it's, "You take wired, I'll take wireless." At the end of 2011, the two industries even agreed to market each other’s services.' I am a free market type of guy. I do recognize the abuse that can come from natural monopolies that utilities tend to have, but I have never considered this type of collusion before. To fix the situation, Crawford recommends that the U.S. 'move to a utility model, based on the assumption that all Americans require fiber-optic Internet access at reasonable prices.'"
Crawford recommends that the U.S. 'move to a utility model, based on the assumption that all Americans require fiber-optic Internet access at reasonable prices.
This all sees well and good. Too bad it's not capable of happening, since the USA is run by corporations, and it'll be a cold day in hell before they shoot themselves in the foot.
If you want not retarded internet, your single only option is to move out off the continent.
``I am a free market type of guy... but I have never considered this type of collusion before."
no shit. try doing some homework. here is a quote from that rampant communist, Adam Smith:
``People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary." — book I, ch. 10, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published 1776.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
They're not a service, they're a utility, and they should be regulated as one.
There are small ISPs almost everywhere that on average do a better job. It's your own damn fault for continuing to buy from the big guys unless that really, truly is the only choice.
What, you never possibly considered that collusion happens because nobody wants to stop the gravy train? AT&T and Verizon and everyone else there have got it good, their train will chug along with minimum investment and massive profits for as long as none of the people aboard says "Stop the train! I want to spend billions of dollars on infrastructure investments and charge less to compete with you head on!"
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The situation as it stands is unacceptable. The telcos have proved that they cannot operate broadband service fairly without regulation. Therefore: something akin to common carrier laws should be in effect for all broadband service providers.
Can't we just enforce the antitrust laws? Where are the DoJ and FTC?
Fill in the blank.
Water is underground. It's a utility.
Gas is underground. It's a utility.
Electricity is (sometimes) underground. It's a utility.
Fiber optic wiring is underground. It's a ______.
Unfortunately, cable TV/internet is underground, and it's a crappy monopoly.
Competition will solve this problem. It may take a little while but Google's beta test of their ISP service seems to be going well and has the telcos running scared (even reportedly going door to door in KC checking on customer satisfaction). Google is making a move here and I can't believe they intend to come to some sort of gentlemen's agreement with the telcos considering one of the motivations for Google entering the market was to thwart extortion attempts by the major ISPs where they were attempting to force Google to pay them a fee in order for them to deliver Google's content at the higher speeds, when we already pay them for the service of delivering Google's content to us. This move by Google smacks of the style of the old industrialists, like Rockefeller building oil pipelines to circumvent back door deals made by the railroads to charge him more money for shipping oil. This industry is still young, but if Google proves it can be profitable to lay new fiber and thereby dispels the idea that we have to use the existing infrastructure of the telcos, we will see even more new players enter the market. Already many cities are partnering with local companies and universities to offer residents high quality local ISPs for less money. I think it's too early in this industry to jump on the whole "we need the government to fix this for us" train... in the end I can't see that being a great answer anyway... especially when you consider that all conventional utilities have to do is provide consistent power/water supply to their customers, and there is a lower quality of service ceiling than in the ISP game.
"move to a utility model, based on the assumption that all Americans require fiber-optic Internet access at reasonable prices"
Sure, this is common sense.
Sure, this could be a major national economic stimulus.
But - politicians are required to enact such a move and
they know who is buttering their bread and
they know it's not you.
The cable industry and AT&T-Verizon have divided up the world much as Comcast and Time Warner did
There is more to the world than US. I've never heard of Verizon, Comast or time warner
Wireless/Wired are already utilities in almost every locality they operate because the poles they put the wires and antenna on are managed by local city/county utility departments. They are managed today, as defacto utilities. Making it official wouldn't help though, their lobbies are far reaching.
There's plenty of providers that want to be in the game of providing the connection. They're prevented because of Telecommunications regulation (or lobbying driven regulation that benefits those already in place).
Perhaps instead of making them official utilities we should take a look at current regulations (many created by the Telco/Cableco's for their purchased representatives to sign) and remove the aspects that block competition. For wired, making the last mile OpenAccess to any company that wants to provide the connection is enough. For Wireless I couldn't say there's just too much regulatory and technology clutter (WiFi or Cell to make a phone or data call) to sort through but I suspect that allowing competitors in would be a first step.
This will happen as likely as the Democrats actually passing a formal balanced budget. I wish American business was as much about the customer as it is about the bottom line. You know, you can do both.
Municipalities should take over the physical wires and allow each customer to choose which ISP to connect them to.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Isn't this why Google created Google Fiber?
The primary purpose of Google Fiber is to give the industry a kick in the arse.
FTA: "A smarter goal would be to give most Americans access to reasonably priced 1 Gb symmetric fiber-to-the-home networks."
So when I read the FCC said speeds of 4/1Mbps was a minimum at first this seemed like a big number to me. Like in the line with luxury internet is what I mean to say. I considered it for a bit, and I conceded by 2020 that is fairly reasonable as popular as streaming video is becoming. Then this 1Gbps number gets thrown out there (or at least implied) as a "necessity". Now I'd love to get 1Gbps. That would be one of the happiest moments of my life. However, I'm fairly happy with my 10Mbps/768Kbps. Thinking of that being considered 100 times slower that what should be considered as vital as electricity is, just throws the credibility of the entire article right out the window. I might assume most Americans don't even have gigabit switches or gigabit NICs and I don't think I'd be wrong. In 2020 that will probably no longer the case. My logic here is that if something like a web server or an AD server can operate without saturating a 100Mbps link in a medium sized business, it's fairly up the wall to say everyone NEEDS 1Gbps in 7 years. Just my two cents.
..all your elected Congressmen and Senators elected by informed, focused voters who stay on top of issues like this. They all make sure these corporations will not get away with this...
My wired/wireless internet as of right now...
Home: Frontier FiOS - http://www.speedtest.net/result/2400548661.png
T-Mobile (at home): -113 dBm (no signal bars) - http://www.speedtest.net/android/327814150.png
When I'm out an about, I regularly get about 10 Mb/s up and down on T-Mobile, 15-17 Mb/s when I have full signal bars.
My recommendation, stop going with Comcast/AT&T for everything. Sometimes going with the 10,000 lbs. guerrilla isn't the right answer! :-)
Google needs to "leak" a presentation about their fiber project in KC with a slide that says.
Project Completion
- When Time Warner has no more customers in The KC area.
The current situation has a long history in a multi-billion-dollar ripoff of the taxpayers and customers of these companies. Cringeley wrote an amazingly prescient article on the hows and whys we have what we have today (I believe it was even featured here a few years ago when it was published):
The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen.
This all is nothing new, it was planned in the 90s, and we have pretty much the implementation of that plan today.
Does it piss you off? It pisses me off for sure. How do we go about fixing it?
1) Stop supporting the companies that screw us and found/support companies which do it right.
2) Get your friends/family/neighbors/community to vote out the bribed politicians that either enabled it, or turned a blind eye to it, and vote in politicians who are not bribed and will actually fix it.
3) Be willing to suffer for a while for a better future. The companies who perpetrate these scams set it up such that people will accept the suboptimal crap they are peddling because they won't take the inconvenience of being without said crap for a short enough time to send the message that the situation will change, or else.
But no, human nature (and American culture itself) dictates that nothing will change; the telcos have already won.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
You must be new here.
Why is Snark Required?
Pass a law requiring incumbent ISP's (if they run a monopoly in the region) to provide competitors with access to their copper/fibre network at wholesale cost.
Also tag on an addition that each incoming ISP has to give the ISP they are buying from the same ability to buy bandwidth at cost from them as well. Stopping a single big player taking over multiple markets and force others out by sheer financial weight.
So competition and the ability to provide better/ value for money services in other area outside their usual network means less stagnation and fewer "single entity monopolies" in the country and the users win ^_^
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
Until 1984, national telecommunications was a regulated utility, with the government controlling prices. A long distance call was $2.87 per minute. In 1984, it was deregulated and natural competition quickly brought the rate to $0.10 per minute - a 97% reduction. Tight government regulation of internet service as a utility is a great idea, if you want to pay $12 / GB. I can understand how this might have been debatable in 1812, but in 2012 we've already tried both ways over and over again. Competition beats government fiat every time. Maybe you haven't noticed the existing competive system has brought us from 14 kbps to 14Mbps, a THOUSAND times as fast as a few years ago?
Not going to happen, and if it does it will happen in a way that will REINFORCE the monopolies of the current big players. Just look at how the wireless spectrum auction went down a few years back. Even Google, throwing around billions of dollars couldn't get a part of the spectrum designated for public use. Thankfully they were at least able to get open apps and devices pushed through, but the big players even fought that tooth and nail.
Lack of demand my ass
When a city tries to start its own municipal internet and the incumbent telecom sues their asses off, gets an injunction, and then drags out the court case while they build their own internet right under the city's nose, it's not lack of demand, it's blatant anticompetitive rent seeking.
a national fiber network would be a huge infrastructure investment with lasting benefit, like the highway system.
That $2.87 rate is in today's money, in other words inflation adjusted. The correct rate decrease immediately after seregulatuon was about 50%. Of course competition also brought us VOIP. With Vonage, for example, long distance is 0 cents per minute, a 100% reduction from government regulated rates.
I've found with Century Link, if you choose the option to disconnect service, they'll connect you to someone who can actually get you good speeds and at a good price. Kind of sad it has to come to that, but now I've got 40/20mbps DSL with a static IP without having to pay for a business account. They're only charging me $35 bucks a month, though it'll go up to $75 after 6 months. Still better than anybody else in town by far. Oh, did I mention no monthly bandwidth cap? I can't say this will be the same everywhere, since it might not be possible at that location, but they'll hook you up with a far better deal than their sales or tech departments. This should last me until the city's gigabit fiber project comes to my neighborhood in Seattle.
As usual, someone that lives in a large city has no concept of what it's like to live outside their metropolis. His plan might work in New York, but in Iowa, not so much.
It wasn't that long ago that I used to envy the US infrastructure here in Australia, amazing how fast things can turn around. We now have access to AU $100 plans with 1TB/month at 100/40 Mbps speeds, it's things like this and our free health care that have our citizens up in arms over how our government continues to meddle in our lives!!
Free healthcare in Australia? I thought most people on /. were WAY too smart to buy that BS. Of course the government healthcare doesn't pay for important things like say, ambulances, but it does cost the average family $8,800 per year in extra taxes. Almost nine thousand dollars for crap coverage and still some people are thankful because it's "free" (meaning the govt forces you to pay for it.)
After being forced to do it the govt way, Oz has worse healthcare than 46 other countries. (Based on availability of doctors, other metrics put Australia 25th through 70th, but always beneath some banana republics.)
Don't drink the Koolaid.
Politicians are the most slimy creatures on earth they know how to sabotage like nobody else. Even when you win or compromise they'll can sabotage it and do...
Your competition does not win every time. Government does some things better; not everything but some things. To be so extreme illustrates religious irrationality. Religion can be a blind adherence to an ideal that has no proof - just like the communists thought they had the road to Utopia... Doesn't every religion have this in common? An aim for some kind of Utopia?
I just spent a week in Choctaw. I didn't enter Walmart during that time. Meaning, I bought everything from their competitors, which you claim don't exist. YP.com gives 166 results for "groceries" in Choctaw. Some are bogus, I bet, but even if 75% are bogus, that's still 41 outlets other than Walmart.
From the sewer lines to the Federal Reserve, all natural monopolies should be co-ops.
In the US, cable lines (like power, gas, water and sewer) were installed with public subsidies and on public land but then turned over to for profit corps that have monopolies.
Do you want to compete with AT&T wireless? Too bad, the government won't let you.
Do you want to compete with your local sewer monopoly? Nope. Government says no.
Maybe you want to start a new pro sports team? Nope. They have legal monopolies too.
What the US has today is kleptocracy, the same as Rome before it fell.
And posting this comment took 3 tries due to network timeouts.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
The problem here is you are proposing new government regulations to correct the damage of previous ones. The truth is that competition is restricted by government, notably localities, who do not want unlimited wires in their neighborhoods. Wireless space, likewise, is limited by FCC licenses. Both are government imposed limits that help to create local monopolies and oligopolies in general. Your assertion that these are natural monopolies is not true. In fact, a natural monopoly is very rare today. Nearly all monopolies today are the consequence of laws and regulations. I do not consider such monopolies to be "natural"
In the small Northeast town in which I live, the TWO, ONLY high speed providers divided up the streets. One street gets cable, the next dsl. Sometimes it is neighborhood by neighborhood. Some main roads get both, but prices are similar based on other bundled services. There are no other options because these companies own the physical infrastructure. There is no competition. There is no market. It's controlled so neither provider gets accused of being a monopoly. This happened over a decade ago when this area first got wired up for broadband.
They advertise high data rates, but don't build out their networks to match. Since this has not appeared in their SEC filings over the last several years, executives have two choices: throttle usage, or go to jail.
I can't get dsl service even though there is a central office within two miles of my house in either direction. I spoke to an AT&T serviceman who was working in one of the enclosures. He told me the other central office was the one that supplied my phone service and it was too antiquated to support dsl! Then he tells me fiber already runs past my house and in a year (or two) AT&T is supposed hook everyone up, maybe. Until then I will have to use low cap, high cost (17gigs for $80 a month) satellite service.
Construction costs for aerial fiber, 2010 (last year I had good numbers): $7.00 per ft, not including pole attachment fees (rent).
Construction costs for underground fiber, 2010: $12+ per ft, no ongoing pole attachment fee, but some sort of fee needs to be paid for access to the Right Of Way.
This is just to put it in the ground from one place to another. Equipment costs for connecting to your ISP add another $2000 or so, maybe less if your ISP has a switch in place and you just need to purchase an SFP (GBIC) on their end. Oh, and you haven't really connected to anything other than your ISP's demark yet.
On going costs: fees to join the local call-before-you-dig monopoly, fees for someone to locate your cable when someone wants to dig. Technicians to repair fiber when dumptruck/garbage truck snags the cable and breaks it, or when drunk/idiot/snowplow runs off the road and destroys the underground pedestal.
broadband is much slower and cost much more stop being little bitches
I keep trying to figure out how to fix this with our corrupt state. I think the fix is two fold.
#1 Change our president he keeps appointing industry insiders from telcos and entertainment industry to the FCC. As long as he is there we probably cant fix this. Which is sad a President in the second term should be screw the campaign donations I want to make America better for the people its not like he can run again.
#2 Stop all incentives for the telcos to lay out fiber. We already threw money down that hole time to stop.
#3 Someone try to get the tech industry to roll fiber to the entire country. It is estimated to cost 145 billion to run fiber to every household in the state. I would even support 90% To try to keep costs down and allow wireless to serve the outskirts of normal population centers. This could be done by a simple $150 billion interest free loan (less than the auto industry bailout.) that could be worked out with say 3 to 5 large tech firms with a stake in the USA getting fiber. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Intel and CIsco. They could fund some sort of spin off ISP to do the job, Google could sell lease or put its fiber network in that companies trust as the backbone, and the government loan would allow them to purchase the verison fios plant and google fios plant as a starting point. They could also purchase any aging copper telco infrastructure being dumped by ATT and others and use that to get the right of way to start running new fiber by replacing that copper as it hangs or is buried.
In the end the only way its going to happen is if we find away to bypass the current network owners.
Too many conspiracy theorists here and no can see the forest.
I have three wires into my house, electricity, cable TV, and phone landline, all 'natural monopolies (price Last Mile buildout before complaining about monopolies).
I can get internet thru two of the wires and they compete with each other for my business. There is supposedly a way to use electric wire for networking but nothing is commercially available. When it is, there will be 3 companies competing.
1. How close do I have to be to a wireless provider for decent speed? (I assume cell-phone coverage)
2. When everybody and his brother is now using the same wireless spectrum how fast is the speed? (There is a reason cable becomes slower when more people use it).
The reason traffic on the interstate slows down during rush hour is not because the contractor was skimming profits or was married to the mayor's sister.