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Why There Are So Few ISP Start-Ups In the U.S.
An anonymous reader writes "Despite whispers of growing dissatisfaction among consumers, there are still very few ISP start-ups popping up in communities all over the U.S. There are two main reasons for this: up-front costs and legal obstacles. The first reason discourages anyone who doesn't have Google's investors or the local government financially supporting them from even getting a toe in the business. 'Financial analysts last year estimated that Google had to spend $84 million to build a fiber network that passed 149,000 homes in Kansas City, with the cost per home at $500 to $674.' The second reason will keep any new start-up defending itself in court against frivolous lawsuits incumbent ISP providers have been known to file to bleed the newcomers dry in legal fees. There are also ISP lobbyists working to pass laws that prevent local governments from either entering the ISP market themselves or partnering with private companies to provide ISP alternatives. Given these set-backs and growing dissatisfaction with the status quo, one has to wonder how long before the U.S. recognizes the internet as a utility and passes laws and regulations accordingly."
who?
Parts of Asia have their act together. The US is largely a 2nd world country in terms of internet access and rates.
Where government creates regulations and laws to favor "connected" businesses and interests. That's how the established ISPs have come to have so much power.
."..one has to wonder how long before the U.S. recognizes the internet as a utility and passes laws and regulations accordingly."
Now the author of TFS thinks *more* laws & regulations from the *same* crooks that have intentionally worked long and hard to *create* this situation are suddenly going to help!?
If there's enough crap stirred up to occupy the news cycle for more than a day or two, they'll do what they always do. Put together some Bill with a great-sounding name and at a quick glance looks good, but there will be sub-clauses and sub-paragraphs buried deep in the weeds of the Bill that actually make things *worse*.
Hmm, on second thought, where did I put that property title to that bridge? I may have found a prospect!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
The free market will yield low competition because providing the service is a strong technical monopoly, similar to electricity, gas and water. The author proposes we treat Internet like a basic utility but this is a bad idea: the municipal internet pipe will soon become outdated, the city council will reject any improvements because "it works good enough for most citizens", a private alternative will emerge and we are back at square one.
Instead of treating internet like a utility, the preferred solution in Europe is to create a public corporation that digs the trenches and channels where fiber and equipment are placed, with equal access for all competing providers. Since the technology evolves quickly, a nimble private investor is much more efficient in upgrading the network and maintaining a competitive speed. The low tech, highly expensive trench or pole can be amortized over a few decades with a flat fee that ISPs can pass on to consumers. It works.
The issue is not choosing between the market and the state, rather we should correct market failures with keyhole solutions that restore competition without creating bureaucratic and governmental behemoths. Municipal internet is probably better than what you have now, but is still an inferior solution.
There are 1000's of ISP's in the United States. WISPA alone has a huge number of members, and those are only ISP's offering wireless.
Address exhaustion means all new entrants are locked out anyway. To become a major US ISP you would need to control several /8s worth of IPv4 address space. There is no longer enough unallocated space to grant that to a new company. So the only way, regardless of other considerations, to become a big ISP is to buy an existing big ISP.
The same is true in Europe. You cannot build a new European ISP, because you would need a sizeable network allocation and they're all gone. As a new entrant you would receive roughly the address space needed to run your data centre, leaving nothing for customers. And that's it, forever. Could you buy what you need on the "open" market? Sure, buy from your competitors at a price they specify, that sounds like it would definitely work...
Nobody NEEDS the Internet for anything. It is wholly and fully a luxury item. Being able to look at funny cat pictures is not a dire necessity for anyone to get through life, and there is nothing that can be accomplished on the Internet that can't be accomplished by some already-established method.
There is no rational basis upon which to make the claim that the Internet is a utility.
You could have said the same thing about telephone 100 years ago, too, and the same thing about electricity at around the same time.
It is increasingly the case where you are excluded from participating in some parts of modern society if you don't have a decent internet connection. For instance, you're not going to be doing any MOOC courses if you don't have an internet connection that's good enough for video. You're not going to be able to find things out as easier as other people if you don't have a decent internet connection, and you can find yourself denied of many opportunities. It's not all about looking at cat photos. The internet has become embedded enough in modern society that you are now often at a disadvantage if you live in the US and don't have it, so just like the telephone became a utility, internet should also become available on a similar basis.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I often see to very different views on the concept of a free market. One is "free from intervention" and is producer-focused, which often leads to one or a few domninant players due to network effects and/or scale advantages. The second one can be interpreted as "optimal competition" and is consumer-focused, where regulations (antitrust, enforced standards, consumer protection etc) try to make sure that the consumer always has a choice and that a market can not stagnate into its stable state of one or a few dominant players. I think the telecom market in the US vs EU (and probably most of the world) is a good example. In most places, the government has mandated a single standard (for example GSM) and rules for roaming on a network. This has led to a big market of small service providers on a few networks (there is for example stiff competition on prepaid SIMs). What I have understood from the US, differing standards between the providers coupled with a subsidized payment plan for the phone effectively causes a lock-in situation for the consumer. I am definitely leaning in favour of the "optimal competition" interpretation of a free market (how can a market be free if the consumer does not have a choice?).
with dozens of satellites in orbit and then no ISP subscription needed, FREE internets for everybody with an internet capable device, smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop, etc...
that would make ALL ISPs obsolete
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
All these idiot posts about how its the market that is constraining ISP development.
Never mind that it is a heavily regulated industry that is very hard to launch on a small scale despite logistically being very easy.
What drives the costs up are the pole fees. They're way too high.
Sell the poles to a co-op. And then let that co-op spread the cost of maintaining the poles around its members.
This should not be under the control of the cities. They just see it as a revenue making opportunity. And that attitude keeps the cost of using the poles high.
Sell it to a co-op. Then we can all use the poles/pipeline for anything.
You could have tiny mom and pop ISPs. That would be in everyone's interest except for the big telecoms.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Here the Netherlands much of the communication with the government is done over the internet, and I imagine this will only increase, also in other countries. But treating the internet as a utility is pretty much a requirement for this to work, as it doesn't make sense to make the ability to communicate with ones government a luxury.
Internet access is a right.
Loser-Pay Legislation would take care of the second one. Been saying it for years.
Eventually, those folks who oppose it simply because it seems too "conservative" for their politics are going to get their minds right.
The United States is the only major Western Democracy that doesn't follow the "british rule," where the winning party in a lawsuit is generally allowed to recover the costs of bringing or defending a suit.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
As long as politicians are involved and their little brown unmarked envelopes are passed from the actual players to them and industrials can contribute whatever they like to their campaigns , as long as money buys the politicians freely you think that politicians will actually do something ?
Wake up. Politicians in the USA are owned by industry and rich contributors. The interest of the People ? they couldnt care less.
In the USA , it's a governemnt of the people by the corporations for the corporations.
It cost google over $500 per customer to install when it got to pick and choose their customers. The local ISP is required by federal law to provide phone service to ALL customers. The actual cost per customers if you actually have to serve everyone is in the thousands. And yes, of course th local ISP is going to sue. It's the only legal recourse they have to fight a company that clearly has them at a regulatory disadvantage. Telcos are going bankrupt all across this country right now and it's not because they're raking in the money by over charging you.
When I look at my electricity bill I actually see how much the connection fee is. Mostly because it is itemized in the billing. I can also pay any power company for the power, but the "connection" fee still comes from the local company, because hey, they are the ones keeping the power transfer network in operation. The local company that owns the poles is highly regulated. They can't make too much profit. Basically so little it's only a good investment if you want to protect your money from inflation. If I had my own solar panels I would still have to pay the "connection fee" if I wanted to stay connected to the grid. I, however, could actually sell my excess production to the power grid. (this varies, and also needs some special equipment. They need to be able to cut me off the grid when doing maintenence, grid stability has to be maintained etc.)
The same basic principle also applies to former phone networks. The actual copper is owned by a separate entity, that has to lease the last mile to the company the _customer_ wants to do business with. Different companies offer isp services. They all pay the same amount per customer access to the copper owning company. Works great.
Water is still all in public utility company, both pipes and actual drinkable water running in those. I guess you could separate those two also, but then again, the same fee also covers sewers.
Why are there no oil company start ups? .... why is that question on /. ?
Why are there no new generation nuclear power plant start ups?
Why why why
It is mainly the stupids question I have seen since ages.
What is a start up? A small company of 5 to 10 or if you have the money 20 people. How should 20 people manage to be an ISP ... with what backbone, what grid, what wires?
To become an ISP you need multiple of billions of money ... or new laws with access to existing wire infrastructure.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The cable company, which by default is the ISP for most urban dwellers, is a utility. They collect fees and pay the municipality for the right to be a legal monopoly
Except for banking. And filing some legal papers. Education. Weather reporting. Checking commodity reports, which is very important to farmers. Rapid shipping of design documents to job sites. Those are just a few I can think of.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
If people are really fed up with Comcast/Cox (ME ME ME), it seems to me they'd be willing to commit some serious cash for an all-or-nothing KickStarter to launch regional ISPs. Of course, the team(s) would have to be well-qualified to be able to get the job done once the money is there - so that rules me out - but surely such a team exists. Merely by raising their hands, such a team would get control of millions and millions of dollars to get the job done.
wery good facebook video izle indir
Because NSA is tired of adding new ISP's to their list of "insert monitor here" entities? 8^O
There is no need to imagine what might happen, we've had regulated industries and we know how they work. An example you probably remember is long distance phone service. The government set the cost recovery rate at $0.40/minute USD1980 ($2 / minute in 2014 dollars).
If you want to ponder about similarly situated ISPs and their upgrade plans, imagine you are on the board. You have two choices:
a) Issue more stock to raise $80 million and risk your reputation attempting a difficult upgrade, the split get the government-mandated $10 million profit with the new stockholders.
b) do nothing and have the mandated $10 million profit all to yourself.
When your profit is set by law, the only rational course of action is to not rock the boat and spend your days on the golf course.
Courtesy of Nat Torkington of O'Reilly and BoingBoing, video interview with Susan Crawford about why the Internet should be treated like a utility. She’s the only policy person I see talking sense. There’s a multilarity coming, when a critical mass of everyday objects are connected to each other via the Internet and offline devices become as useful as an ox-drawn cart on railway tracks. At that point it’s too late to argue you need affordable predator-proof Internet, because you’re already over the (sensing, e-ink covered, Arduino-powered) barrel.
davecb@spamcop.net
*GASP* Whatever did people do before the internet???!?!?
Let's see:
Brick & Mortor at their local bank. Many still do it this way today given the security nightmare that online banking has suffered recently.
Again, a trip to the lawyer's office...
That's why God invented schools...
NOAA Weather Radio...
Phone call to broker...
USPS/ UPS/ FedEx Same Day Delivery...
Keep thinking since there is nothing that truly requires the internet.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
The problem in the USA is vertical integration.
The cable to get your broadband Internet comes from the same company as the one that provides you with Internet which is also the same as the one that provides you with television.
Imagine if you could take Comcast and split it up into physical cable provider, television content provider and internet provider. No common ownership structure allowed upwards or downwards. Now the ISP company needs to buy access from the cable provider at a wholesale level that should be offered to all ISPs at the same rate.
If there aren't enough IPv4 addresses then just become an IPv6 ISP with an appropriate IPv4 - IPv6 gateway.
Doing taxes in the Netherlands.
Yes, it is no longer possible to use paper, you are required by law to fill them in on the Internet.
I guess you could do it via an accountant, which will do it on the Internet for you, however since you are still responsible for what your accountant does they might as well not exist.
And compared to using the internet, every one of those alternatives is either more expensive, more time consuming, or both. As time goes on, the brick and mortar method will become 'depricated' as anyone still catering to that group will be less cost effective than their online-only counterparts. Obligatory car analogy: Once upon a time, people could get anywhere they needed to go via public transportation or by simply walking. Automobile travel enabled the 'big box retailers' model, and local businesses in small towns evaporated.
Same thing with cell phones: People once used a combination of pagers and pay phones. Now there's very few pay phones, so that model is no longer viable.
There were thousands of independent ISPs once, they extincted themselves because they lacked the vision to work together and instead died one by one. I had a ringside seat.
Hope is the currency of fools
You assume the regulation does not require them to upgrade.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
To become a small town ISP by providing longer range WiFi and deploying it in the 5GHZ or 24GHZ spectrums. Ubiquity makes very reliable equipment to make this happen and if the area is terrain-friendly, it certainly is possible. To build out a high speed, broadband wired infrastructure is nearly impossible with the government and regulatory issues alone. Ever notice how the large telecom corporations wine about free markets when bills are introduced that don't favor them but when the legal winds are in their favor, it is "fuck free markets, we want to own it!"
Not sure why I am feeding a troll here, but your arguments are akin to "let them eat cake." Things that consume time for no real value are a tax; Internet service helps you avoid that tax so you can spend your time doing things that are economically, socially, or emotionally productive.
Corporate profits and GDP growth have a pretty strong dependency on productivity numbers. Over the last 20 years a majority of the rise in productivity was due to the massive network buildout for telecom and internet.
So nowadays the internet is inextricably linked to the economy as a whole. Akin to other vital components such as electricity...things that qualify as "utilities" because of their economic importance to our society. Try removing the internet and see what the effect is on your 401-k.
In other words, there's too many governemnt regulations to have new competition, therefore the solution is to add more government regulations.
Perhaps, just perhaps, the solution is to allow very small startups the ability to compete in individual buildings and small cities.
Absolute genius! Make the Internet a utility! Then, for the first 20 years, the national ISP can enjoy a monopoly, and screw us. THEN - we can have "deregulation", and break up the monopoly, and end up right back where we are now! Truly inspired idea!
c) Take the excess and form the most successful R&D lab and innovation engine the world has ever known.
And, while prices didn't drop a lot, service certainly improved in leaps and bounds. We used to have party lines (shared lines where only 1 subscriber could talk at a time to an outside number, but all members of the party line could chat with each other however much they wanted. We also used to have manually operated switches, 5 digit numbers, etc etc etc. All of those were "upgraded" within the monopoly window to the systems that we still use today.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
*GASP* Whatever did people do before the internet???!?!?
Wasted a lot of time going to the bank, lawyer's office, USPS/UPS/FedEx, listening to crappy NOAA for the item of interest to come up, spend hours getting through to your broker to sell during a market drop, etc etc.
While you may have the time to do all those things, some of us are actually working and fully booked. I can live without all of them, much like I can live without electricity, gas, or even sewer/water service (solar/generators, wood fired stoves, septic systems and wells) but those are all much more inconvenient than the "utility" services.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
US telco regulation does the opposite of what such regulation is supposed to do: promote competition, preserve consumer choice, reduce prices, and increase the quality of service. Monopolies granted by municipalities to cable operators, and the deregulation of the Baby Bells, do exactly the opposite-- they protect incumbents with entrenched positions and raise barriers to entry. It's a classic case of regulatory capture on multiple levels.
The idea of municipalities now wanting to run their own ISPs, because it's so clearly a job they should be and can be doing better than the private sector-- is now resulting in lobbying groups sponsoring legislation to make it illegal to do so in order to preserve the monopolies-- is surreal to the point of absurdity.
Not arguing your point, but you must be using a wonky inflation index to get you from $0.40 to $2.
http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cp...
It's a social advantage on all fronts, to have the Internet. We are better off as a society, for having it. To say it isn't a needed product, or that it shouldn't be protected from certain economic interests, namely those concerning monopolistic and isolationist practices, by placing it in the category or utility, is old thinking. The Internet should be just as protected as those natural gas lines, water lines, and oil infrastructure pipes that keep this country moving.
Also, 'phone call to broker'? Do you really think your landline phone call traverses a different set of fiber cables than what standard home Internet traffic does? How cute!
The simplest case is that they aren't required to upgrade. The slightly less simple case is that, like with phone service prior to 1984, regulators set upgrade targets based on information provided by the companies. In the first step, the second case is exactly like the first: a rational actor will blow smoke at regulators trying very hard to avoid significant upgrades (because further investment in upgrades by definition reduces their ROI in a defined-profit model).
When it becomes clear that some upgrade will be needed, the same calculations apply to the marginal cost of different upgrade options. The difference between a $10 million upgrade to the copper vs. a $80 million switch to fiber is $70 million, and far more risk. As above, the extra $70 million and extra risk is a bad thing for the company, so they should fight to only do the $10 million upgrade. In other words, choosing between a $10 million upgrade and a $80 million upgrade is exactly the same as choosing between no upgrade and a $70 million upgrade: a non-stupid company will spend as little as possible, and risk as little as possible, because either way the get the government-mandated profit. Look at the history of (minimal) AT&T service upgrades during the decades they were fully regulated.
Contrast this with removing the government mandated monopoly, in which case a $80 million upgrade will allow the ISP to offer service with 10 times the speed of their competition, resulting profits increasing by $180 million.
Further, consider these two sets of choices:
Compete.net has $80 million to spend on upgrades. They can either spend $80 million on fiber, or $65 million on fresh copper.
If they buy fresh copper, outages will be reduced, increasing profit by 2%. If they buy fiber, service will be WAY better, increasing profit by 50%. Acme should of course spend the money on fiber.
Regulated.net must spend $80 million on upgrades. They can either spend that $80 million buying fresh copper or spend it on fiber.If they buy fresh copper, profits are unaffected. If they buy fiber, profits are unaffected. If they buy $65M worth of copper from the CEO's bother-in-law for $80M, there's an extra $15M profit to the company run by the brother-in-law, to be shared with the family.
Regulated.net doesn't CARE that they've wasted millions of dollars by essentially giving it away to friends and relatives - their profit is the same either way. In Compete.net tried the same thing, shareholders would be in an uproar and their CEO would soon be sharing a jail cell with Bernie.
We've already paid for high speed internet using the existing infrastructure. The telcos and cable cos have to get the permission of various entities from state and federal agencies, sometimes they got huge tax breaks to improvements. New Jersey was supposed to have fiber to the home of everyone by 2010 if I recall. currently it's up to 300 billion that taxpayers have paid and hasn't been delivered. We want better internet speed start calling your congress critters and ask them where our money has gone.
I would argue this may be one of the largest reasons why we don't have more ISPs starting up any more. Now that the majority of people who have access to any kind of high speed connection have cable modem options it is incredibly difficult for anyone else to compete. For most homes, if there are options the options are cable or DSL. In most markets if you want to go DSL you have to contact your phone company to get the line set up, and then select an ISP. If you want a cable modem instead you have just one company to call. People will, in most cases, opt for the easier route of just one company.
Unless a new company can deliver a product on their own - without requiring the consumer to contact the phone (or any other utility) company - at a competitive price point, they will have an enormously hard time competing with cable. There is a reason why cable has become the largest ISP in the country in a rather short amount of time.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The same argument can be made for Electricity, cars, and society. GASP! What did people do before they had other people to depend on?! Why we lived in small warring clans.
Sounds great! Have fun!
Absolutely: http://slashdot.org/comments.p... + http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Indeed it was 1973-1974 that it was .40 ($2 / minute).
In 1980, the rate was $2.17 ($6.18 in today's money) for a five-minute call, or $1.23 / minute.
http://transition.fcc.gov/Bure...
In 1950, it was was just over $5 / minute, inflation adjusted.
That's like saying the US didn't need railroads either. Before the Ttranscontinental, there were 3 basic ways to travel between the east and west coasts. 1) Overland. Time: almost 6 months at first, then down to 4 months as the trails improved. Might not make it if attacked by Indians, or you became ill with cholera, or you took a wrong turn and ended up lost and dying of thirst in a desert, or trapped and starving and frozen in a snowed shut mountain pass. 2) Take ship around the southern tip of South America. Time: 4 months. Safer than overland, but still somewhat risky, uncomfortable, and more expensive. 3) Take ship to Panama, cross, then continue on another ship. Time: 1 month, if lucky and there was a ship wih room on the other side. The Transcontinental took 1 week. Also, the army had to maintain and man forts all over the west, at great expense, to protect citizens from Indians. Took too long to travel, they had to be near at hand. When the railroad came and "annihilated space and time", the forts were no longer useful and were quickly abandoned.
Like the railroads did, the Internet saves huge amounts of time and money. The phone system can't gather and deliver data at any efficiently remotely approaching the Internet. Call brokers to check commodity prices, are you mad? Takes many hours to check everywhere by phone, by which time some prices would change. Instead, what farmers did was simply not check everywhere, they would only check a few local dealers. And as for snail mail, please. Same day delivery is fantastic, for goods. But for information, it is hopelessly outclassed.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
How many different electrical companies can you use? How many different gas companies?
Want more ISP's? Lower the regulation bar on them to help reduce the startup cost. Why can't I just bring in a good line and then plop a powerful wifi point on my roof and then get with my neighbors in a co-op? FCC Part 15, that's why
Back in the dialup era tiny ISPs were everywhere. It wasn't just market aggregation that did them in was existing pots and cable operators started noticing they were leaving $$$ on the table and began leveraging their existing last mile infrastructure to provide Internet service.
Today the only ones left are heavily value added service/business oriented or serve rural communities with wireless where likes of Comcast sees no profit in entering. I have personally heard from several wireless ISPs where Comcast comes to town and they lose huge numbers of subs literally overnight.
The only workable solution is to provide an open last mile where anyone who wants to provide service has the opportunity on a fair and equitable basis to do so.
You really do need cable/light pipes as no other viable/competitive solution exists. There is simply not enough bandwidth in wireless/sat to address anything more than rural communities.
An obvious case of market failure. We need new laws and regulations so that the caring, omni-scient and selfless government officials help the would-be newcomers deal with the existing laws and regulations.
Better yet, let's have a single-payer ISP...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Brick & Mortor [sic] at their local bank. Many still do it this way today given the security nightmare that online banking has suffered recently.
May or may not be. Often times, any bank security breach is from a user, not from the system. In other words, both client or the employee causes the security breach to the system ( http://money.msn.com/saving-mo... ). Many who use the online banking understand the convenience they get plus the time saving. As long as they properly use it (i.e. http://nakedsecurity.sophos.co... ), the security stuff would never be an issue.
Again, a trip to the lawyer's office...
I agree that the legal forms should be done via a person/lawyer. However, there are other applications/forms that you could simply fill in via the Internet rather than write/fill in a physical form. It is much more convenience, faster, and could be cheaper (no envelope and stamp). And one thing I feel that it is very convenient to use the Internet is to file/submit tax return!
That's why God invented schools...
School nowadays require students to submit/accept their work via the Internet/Intranet. It is a lot more convenience and It is NOT only for MOOC style which to me is still in at immature state. Therefore, giving out assignment/homework via hand out or on the board is much less convenient to both teachers and students. The Internet is there, why not utilize it?
NOAA Weather Radio...
I have no comment on this one because I do not check for the weather. However, on one note about "radio" in your comment, many people nowadays do NOT listen to their radio box but rather listen to the "Internet radio" instead. See the word "Internet"?
Phone call to broker...
May or may not get the information quickly. Also, those people would need to check on the INTERNET. Or do you think they need to call another person to get the answer for you? So why would you go through the middle man if you can get it directly?
USPS/ UPS/ FedEx Same Day Delivery...
Not unless you need the document (regardless certified or prototype) within an hour and you need to deliver across the country. Also, these carrier do NOT GUARANTEE that your document will be delivered on the "same day." There are many cases already that they cannot do what they advertised. Most documents nowadays are in digital format. If it does not need real signature on it or certified, why spend money on carrier and time for delivery? Physical delivery is NOT what Internet is for. Maybe you are still stuck in the hard copied world.
Overall, the Internet has been absorbed into the society long enough to be a part of the society; especially in the 1st world countries. I would not reject the idea of its necessity due to its benefits. I will wait and see how it evolves. I am quite sure that it will be one of utility that human will need to live on.
A company that gives it's money away, goes away, if it doesn't have a special position protected by the government.
Of course, even with special government protection, if you give half a billion dollars to your executives and their friends, the company may eventually run out government favors.
Nobody NEEDS indoor plumbing; there is nothing happening in there that can't be accomplished elsewhere.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
> If you were correct in your analogy we would not have our current stagnation. At present, Compete.net decides
At present, Compete.net does not exist. ISPs have government granted monopolies. That's true of both telephone company providers and cable providers.
> We still need ... regulation to keep the playing field open
Regulation is why it's closed. You don't solve a problem by doubling up on what caused the problem.
It's illegal, in most areas, to compete. Just remove that regulation against competition- so simple. In some places it's less obvious that competition is illegal. In New York, for example, the city government grants monopolies on a NEIGHBORHOOD basis, there is a map of where each company is allowed to provide service. So you see two companies providing service a few blocks from each other, but neither is allowed to cross the street into the other's territory.
what happened to all the mom & pop ISP's that existed in the early 90's?
http://www.hevanet.com
http://www.rdrop.com/
Places like the above. Or did they only ever exist in the Portland Oregon area? I'd sure like to see a national list of smaller ISP's.
In the US it may have just leveled the playing field but we decided best to give it out to the highest bidder.
Just kidding, those guys are the devil. But don't forget - Comcast Corporation is a person, too. Wouldn't want to limit their free speech (even if it does drown out everyone else's.)
Mod parent up! Wireless opens up many doors for ISPs. Infrastructure is the biggest cost, and wireless infrastructure makes it possible for just about anyone to become a tier 3 ISP.
Want a neighborhood ISP? Fast and easy: just put a tripod on your roof with a couple sector 3.65Ghz APs, and connect it to a router with a fast backbone. Add more components to improve security, or whatever you want. It's not hard. My friend sold his rural ISP late last year, and he had just negotiated for a 500Mb/500Mb up/down backbone for $3k/month. Each month, they are getting about 10 new customers at $50-70/month. The last I heard, his customer count was about 900, and that was before he signed away financial responsibility in November 2013.
The guy started this company about eight years ago, and was just a network engineer at a hospital when he did. Yes, almost anyone can start an ISP.
I thought that's what a public library was for: to let people who don't pay for the luxury of Internet access at home access the Internet.
Don't Dutch public libraries offer Internet access to patrons?
schizo multiple personality disorder http://slashdot.org/comments.p... + Manic Depression http://slashdot.org/comments.p... however we normal people do.
You missed on education. Cuirrently at least some schools require that the students have internet access to get assignments. Possibly for other reasons, I don't have a kid in school now, but a friend does, and here daughter is required to get her school assignments over the internet. Actually over the javascript web. I didn't ask whether Flash was required.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
ISP's aren't utilities, they are a value-added service on top of data transit. Unfortunately in today's United States, it is mostly the case that those two roles are bundled such that you can't get one without the other.
A better arrangement, such as the one that exists in Britain and in New Zealand, is one where last mile data transit is treated as a utility and regulated, and ISPs purchase transit from the user to the ISP on an equal footing from the incumbent or alternative last mile providers. The reason this is a superior arrangement, is that providing non-overcommited last mile services is a cheap and easily achievable goal, where-as the definition of an unlimited ISP is vague and almost unachievable. By providing guaranteed bitrate data transit between users and their ISPs (which typically the ISP pays a modest flat rate for each customer), it allows ISPs to offer differential pricing to thier customers based on their usage and desire for services, and it allows for much more competition in the ISP space, as the cost of entry over a regulated data transit system is much lower than the cost of entry when an ISP needs to install the entire physical infrastructure to compete. Generally in NZ, the ISP pays a regulated fee (I believe it's ~$20NZ) per customer line to terminate at the PoP (the local exchange), and an additional fee (I believe it's ~$15NZ) per customer for backhaul to their premises if they don't have their own presence at the PoP. Currently in NZ they are building PON in all urban and most suburban areas that is set to be completed in 2015, and by 2016 regulations require non-discriminatory access to dark fiber at every PoP. This is set to give us all the advantages that would come from regulating ISPs, without all the downsides, which would likely kill most smaller ISPs by placing unrealistic peering expectations on them.
Nationwide open-access fiber networks seems like a much more utilitarian goal than some attempt to further control competition in ISPs by regulation.
As a side note, there exists many other things beside internet access that benefit from a regulated common transit network, VPLS, cable tv, power and gas monitoring, alarm monitoring etc.
Where does it say you have to provide ipv4 addresses to your customers? Just give them ipv6, that's the future anyways. Most people won't even notice.
I didn't get what you are saying at all.
We have "loser pays" around here. It works really well. Loser doesn't pay in cases where the suit actually had some merit. The judge generally orders who pay what. If someone is frivolously suing you for everything it's pretty easy to find defence lawyers who cost you nothing, as they will get their money from the suing party. You can sue me as much as you like. If I don't show up and the case is clearly frivolous you will lose. If my lawyer shows up and the case is frivolous you will end up paying for that lawyer.
How your example would really go.
If you crash your car to my house and show up with 500 lawyers I'll show up with one. If I win you'll pay for my house, and your own lawyers, and maybe for my lawyer, if the thing was clearly your fault (so much that everyone should have seen it was your fault).
If you win, and the case wasn't clear, everyone pays for their own lawyers. If my house was built in the middle of a highway, and so it clearly was my fault, my best option would be to just admit guilt and pay for whatever damages the court orders, so keeping tha army of lawyers ever from showing up. Second best would be to just go to court, and the wait and see how much the judge would rule as "reasonable" lawyer fees for your lawyers. If the case didn't really need 500 lawyers he wouldn't order the loser to pay for them. It just doesn't work like that.
Bottom line: Loser pays, doesn't actually mean "Loser pays every time and without limits" it means: "If jusdge see stupid lawsuit, the one starting the whole mess will pay for the whole mess, defending your rights in a court of law is never too expensive, so you can't use lawsuits as a weapon". I think that is a good thing. The american "money wins every time" seems stupid. What kind of justice is that if you have to be able to afford it? Here even the poorest can sue, or be sued. The judges can just throw things out and order fines if someone is trying to game the system.
See Towerstream. A good ISP that installs faster than anyone else at a fraction of the cost, however not residential.
Obviously it because the business model doesn't have survivable margins to continuing funding.
Even if you get VC money you STILL need to become profitable in ~18 months. That's the benchmark with SV VCs for start-up money. It's hard to meet that benchmark even if you have a high margin business plan (my company does hardware which has a 200% margin and no VCs want to invest in us - we bootstrap and take money from China instead).
The cable industry has been the primary drag on broadband deployment through the United States because it has one nightmare these days: that the oligarchy of video propragandists once known as the the Television Industry will be rendered obsolete by low-cost video distribution from any point to any point.
This political monopoly is the main asset they trade when the time comes to get what they want from the government. They have sewn up the market for soapboxes and they want to keep it that way.
They have sleazy armies of blurmasters deployed throughout the standards-setting and franchise-granting spheres, and have insinuated to their Blurmaster General, Tom Wheeler, to head the FCC. They make it look like theory, but it's all practice.
Although your basic premise is correct, your conclusion is not. The cost of supporting a single carrier network is prohibitive except for companies that receive massive government subsidies. The last mile costs are the killer. With CPE costs the cost per home is still about $700. Assuming a generous 15% ROR and $80/month ARPU, it would still take 5 years to break even, and that does not account any reinvestment for upgrades. Most small companies cannot get $14 M in financing to pass 200K homes when the investors will not see a break-even point for at least 5 years. This problem is typically the deal-breaker.
We already have too many regulations preventing small companies from building broadband networks starting with the fees and regulations imposed by the FCC down to the communities. In fact most carriers are already treated like utilities which is why we only have 1 or 2 broadband providers in each market. Excessive franchise fees and demands by municipalities drive up costs. Pole attachment and construction permits and taxes also are inhibiting.
Incumbent carriers are not suing ISP out of existence; that statement is wrong. Incumbents will sue governments that try to provide broadband services based on laws that may exist in certain states. The incumbents recognize that governments can subsidize (think Obamacare) failing broadband enterprises with taxpayer funds. They rightfully contend that broadband access is not a service of the government. Also they know that if they don't have at least 40% of the market, then their business is unsustainable. Their services are typically regulated to a specific rate of return so their payback period is much longer for local investments. This is why you don't typically see them rushing out to build fiber to your homes. They are only trying to preserve their business, and their behavior is totally predictable and understandable.
The government, any government, should not be in the communications business. This industry should be left up to the private sector. Internet access is not a right despite the EU. The challenge is last-mile access. The business case does not work for single carrier networks unless investors could take a long-term look at the investments. I doubt that our financial market system will change so we have to look at other solutions. One solution is the open-access model where a single company or government build the "last-mile" fiber infrastructure then lease it out at non-discriminatory rates to any service provider. In this model, the fill rate is in excess of 65% that makes the break-even time easily less than 5 years and debt can be serviced in the mean-time. Anyone can then lease access to a home our business then provide the rest of the network to deliver any competitive services to customers. There will be 3 or more service providers which creates true competition. Most incumbents hate this idea because they have already built their networks and feel that they will be at a cost disadvantage. There are ways to appease their fears.
The fiber infrastructure could be provided through a public/private partnership or entirely by a local government. I don't have problems with the government building infrastructure as long as it remains taxpayer neutral and separate like the post office. Also it should be up to local governments to decide how and if to build the infrastructure. Think of it like the roads. Local governments build roads, but all sorts of businesses pay to use the roads. I would prefer however that private companies get into the infrastructure business, because now the business case is acceptable. In either case, the model works. Australia and the U.K. have versions of it that are working. Google originally was going to go down this path until they hired people that wanted them to become a communications company.
"You barge into discussions with your off-topic hosts file nonsense" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 11, 2014 @09:51PM (#46731153) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
You said my "APK Hosts File Engine" is a virus/malware http://slashdot.org/comments.p... but it's EASILY PROVABLE it's not, right there in that link too.
Now PROVE YOUR FALSE ACCUSATION above: Show me a quote OR POST of me posting off topic on hosts where they did NOT apply... go for it!
---
You avoided backing up your accusation where YOU said I say you are Barbara, not Barbie = TomHudson (same person http://tech.slashdot.org/comme... , & sockpuppeteer like you) -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Funny you can't back up your "bluster" there either, lol...
---
Why, Lastly?
You're crackers! See here multiple personality disorder http://slashdot.org/comments.p... + manic depression http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
APK
P.S.=> So, THIS quote below is my policy on sockpuppeteers like you Zontar = TrollingForHostsFiles (your sockpuppetry):
"The only way to a achieve peace, is thru the ELIMINATION of those who would perpetuate war (sockpuppet masters like YOU, troll -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... ). THIS IS MY PROGRAMMING -> http://start64.com/index.php?o... & soon, I will be UNSTOPPABLE..." - Ultron 6 FROM -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Which quite obviously, I am, since none of you DOLTISH TROLLS are able to validly technically disprove my points on hosts enumerated in the link to my program above of how hosts give users of them more speed, security, reliability, & anonymity... period!
(Trolls like YOU that use sockpuppets http://slashdot.org/comments.p... (your sockpuppet "alterego" TrollingForHostsFiles) & TomHudson - Barbara, not Barbie too http://tech.slashdot.org/comme... before you)
... apk
"You barge into discussions with your off-topic hosts file nonsense" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 11, 2014 @09:51PM (#46731153) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
You said my "APK Hosts File Engine" is a virus/malware http://slashdot.org/comments.p... but it's EASILY PROVABLE it's not, right there in that link too.
Now PROVE YOUR FALSE ACCUSATION above: Show me a quote OR POST of me posting off topic on hosts where they did NOT apply... go for it!
---
You avoided backing up your accusation where YOU said I say you are Barbara, not Barbie = TomHudson (same person http://tech.slashdot.org/comme... , & sockpuppeteer like you) -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Funny you can't back up your "bluster" there either, lol...
---
Why, Lastly?
You're crackers! See here multiple personality disorder http://slashdot.org/comments.p... + manic depression http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
APK
P.S.=> So, THIS quote below is my policy on sockpuppeteers like you Zontar = TrollingForHostsFiles (your sockpuppetry):
"The only way to a achieve peace, is thru the ELIMINATION of those who would perpetuate war (sockpuppet masters like YOU, troll -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... ). THIS IS MY PROGRAMMING -> http://start64.com/index.php?o... & soon, I will be UNSTOPPABLE..." - Ultron 6 FROM -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Which quite obviously, I am, since none of you DOLTISH TROLLS are able to validly technically disprove my points on hosts enumerated in the link to my program above of how hosts give users of them more speed, security, reliability, & anonymity... period!
(Trolls like YOU that use sockpuppets http://slashdot.org/comments.p... (your sockpuppet "alterego" TrollingForHostsFiles) & TomHudson - Barbara, not Barbie too http://tech.slashdot.org/comme... before you)
... apkb