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Verizon and New Jersey Agree 4G Service Equivalent to Broadband Internet
An anonymous reader writes with news that Verizon and New Jersey regulators have reached a deal releasing Verizon from their obligation to have brought 45Mbps broadband to all NJ residents by 2010. Instead, 4G wireless service is considered sufficient. From the article:
"2010 came and went and a number of rural parts of the state are still living with dial-up or subpar DSL. And even though the original deal was made in the days of modems and CompuServe, its crafters had the foresight to define broadband as 45Mbps, which is actually higher than many Verizon broadband customers receive today. ... In spite of that, and the thousands of legitimate complaints from actual New Jersey residents, the BPU voted unanimously yesterday to approve a deal with Verizon ... According to the Bergen Record, Verizon will no longer be obligated to provide broadband to residents if they have access to broadband service from cable TV providers or wireless 4G service. ... Residents who happen to live in areas not served by cable or wireless broadband can petition Verizon for service, but can only get broadband if at least 35 people in a single census tract each agree to sign contracts for a minimum of one year and pay $100 deposits."
So how long until the BPU commissioners get their nice cushy jobs as lobbyists for Verizon or a Verizon supported trade group?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
People get the government that they voted for. If they are upset, they need to regard and blame their neighbours.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
sign me up. i can get more than that many neighbors to agree to those terms. alas, we don't even have that option. we'd pay many times more for the chance.
it's all relative.
1. Deregulate ...
2.
3. Profit!
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Customers, have the responsibility to know what they want and be willing to shop somewhere else.
Consumers open wide and ingest whatever is shoved down there throats.
Then of course there is New Jersey. I can't help you with that.
If you have a contract that says you need to install fiber/cable, how the fuck is NOT installing fiber/cable fraud?
...now with more corruption!
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
will be a bunch of cynical comments about this being just the way it is
but there are countries like canada and the nordic countries that, while not perfect, do a much better job of keeping money out of politics than the usa
cynicism is common, but i don't like it because people use it to think they have to lie down and accept this sort of legalized corruption
in many ways, i think the cynicism is worse than the malicious corporations. because there's always people who are robbing you in this world. you have defend yourself and fight them. but what can you say about people who roll over and take the abuse?
we don't have to accept it
and we start by changing the lame cynical attitudes out there
that might be you
that might mean speaking up when you hear cynicism and people snickering or nodding in agreement with it
for speaking up and say wallowing in mindless cynicism is a form of accepting the abuse and is part of the problem, you may get ridiculed and flak for that. but think about what kind of mindset is mocking you, and take it as a point of pride
we have to be the solution here. all of us. i didn't say it was easy. but i and many others are not going to continue to accept this, and i would hope more people would join us
start by losing the cynicism
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
For all the wrong reasons. Spread your cheeks NJ.
Salut,
Jacques
And New Jersey, I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.
Verizon was given a shit load of cash in tax breaks, rate hikes, etc in return for providing 45Mb broadband to all state residents.
Not one single Cellular network in the United States offers TRUE 4g.
What they offer is relabeled, bastardized 3g+ (4G LTE is an enhanced 3G - long term evolution standard, it is not by definition 4g)
Look at the specs.
Verizon isn't out of the woods just yet, they actually have to bring in TRUE 4G first.
Good on New Jersey for forcing them to upgrade their networks :)
Since when has the definition of broadband been so high in the US. Last I knew it was still officially classified as anything faster than ISDN. Got 1Mbps down on your DSL link? Enjoy that sweet broadband citizen.
It seems most likely that such an impossibly high target (for US infrastructure) was purposely snuck in by industry lobbyists to make it more likely to be waived in the future.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
It isn't quite as good as people think with regards to money and politics, and certainly not with regards to the Internet. Canada's 'net speeds vs costs do not compare all that well to the US's.
Canada is a very nice (if cold) country that I visit every summer (I'm a dual citizen) but it isn't the utopia some Americans seem to think it is.
If Verizon Wireless is the only option for broadband in your area, I would hate to see the bill for a family of four that uses Netflix. How about downloading a 13GB patch for a single game? Can these people send their bills to the state for reimbursement?
I just.got.a.Virgin.Mobile Samsung S3 that gets 4G, and yes, it is comparable to WiFi speeds. It is much faster than 3G, maybe 10X?? And.since right.now I don't need WiFi for my laptop as much, this will work (for my current needs).
So I guess Verizon isn't going to give back all the money New Jersey residents handed them in order to build out broadband.....time to litigate.
What good is 45Mbps when you hit your monthly cap in just under 12 minutes, and then get charged $1.50 per minute of full-rate data after that?
When compared to AT&T, Verizon wired, Comcast, and TW, the cost for wireless "broadband" (even capped at 250GB/mo) is astronomincal, running over $1000 per month.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
There's no technical reason that good LTE coverage isn't going to give you a broadband experience. I've got 50/10 meg VDSL2, and three-bar LTE coverage provides similar downstream and way more upstream.
The problem, then, isn't the technology itself. The problem is the 1GB data cap and $15/GB overage fees. My VDSL2 connection comes with 300GB of data, on an LTE connection that'd cost me $4,500 a month. At those prices, even if LTE is capable of acting as broadband, you can't use it as such.
We're all going to end up driving Lada while they drive Mercedes.
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And it's only 100 times more expensive.
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Don't feed it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I'm getting really tired of this shitty argument. We currently have a system in which rich people and corporations can donate nearly unlimited amounts of money to all political candidates, essentially buying them all out and you insist that the problem is with the voters. When every candidate is bought, there is no one left representing US! Stop acting like there is always a perfect candidate and somehow we pick the wrong one 100% of the time.
If anyone has a shitty argument it is you. Votes are politics true currency, money is just a tool to influence voters in order to get their *vote*.
A 1% has *one* vote. A 99% has *one* vote. The 99% have the power but they squander it, to believe otherwise is to be a denier of reality like climate deniers, to let politics blind oneself to reality.
Look at the two most powerful lobbying groups in the country, the AARP and the NRA. They have so much power not because of political campaign contribution but because ***their members show up on election day*** highly motivated to vote based on a single issue. Their opponents often fail to understand this, think it is simply political contributions, and in the NRA case raise huge amounts of money for anti-gun groups and then fail and fail again.
Politicians value votes beyond all other things. It is votes that put them into office and keep them in office. The secondary nature of money is easily illustrated. No amount of money spent on TV and web ads by Bloomberg will convince NRA member to vote in favor of restricting guns. No amount of money spent on TV and web ads by the Koch brothers will convince Occupy Wall Street members to vote against banking restrictions. Only the ignorant or ambivalent voter is persuaded.
To deny that the real issue is the ignorant/ambivalent voter is to doom one's efforts at reform. Only when the 99% insists on politicians representing their interests, and voting out those who do not, will politicians change their behavior. Reelections communicates to politicians that their actions are OK with voters.
Voters *are* communicating to politicians that it is OK to cash in. Until *voters" say otherwise nothing will change. Don't fool yourself into thinking otherwise.
And even though the original deal was made in the days of modems and CompuServe, its crafters had the foresight to define broadband as 45Mbps
Not really. If you read what Verizon agreed to it was "up to 45 Mbps". Which obviously means nothing. If you can watch video they met their obligation. I don't think the agreement mentions anything about a cap either.
So, ma & pa down on the farm, are suppose to pay for overprice 4G service?
Might as well give up trying to watch netflix, amazon or do anything useful!
There is some (relatively) good news on the rural front... there's enough competition among Sat providers to give Verizon and such a very hard incentive to drop their costs. Even though most sat providers (Dish, HughesNet, etc) only provide around 7-10Mbps, they've started bringing down the prices just to keep ahead of the competition (for example, not even a year ago, it used to cost around $100+/mo just to get a 5Mbps connection from HughesNet with a ridiculously low bandwidth cap. - own it's dropped to $60/mo for 10Mbps and no cap, $45/mo for the same from Dish ($30/mo if you already have their TV service), etc.
Now consider that in the some rural areas, *if you could get DSL*, you would pay a mint to get DSL installed plus $70/mo for 3Mbps from CenturyStink. If you were really lucky, you could get cable Internet (but you had to live in a small-to-mid-sized town to get that). The only advantage DSL had was that you could game on it, but that was about it.
I suspect that as more players get into the rural broadband game, the costs will drop even more while services go up... Sat/wireless ISP service is one of the few places where you can get a decent deal, and since there's no monopoly, they have to compete.
As for Verizon? I just saw their rural 4G offerings/plans, and quite frankly, Verizon can go eat a dick - 4G and Sat are almost equally laggy for gaming, so no advantage there. Maybe someday they'll figure out that they can't run the same scam as they do in the smartphone arena, but that day isn't today.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The only advantage DSL had was that you could game on it, but that was about it. [...] 4G and Sat are almost equally laggy for gaming
A high-latency connection works fine for games so long as they're turn-based instead of twitch-based. Moving also works, though I grant its impracticality for many.
But didn't MPAA head Chris Dodd fess up to quid pro quo in 2012?
Remove the limit of one vote per seat, and the resulting system is called approval voting. It appears to have fewer opportunities for insincere strategic voting than plurality. But does it have a counterpart to Duverger's law?
I like Canada a lot, have a lot of relatives there (hence the Canadian citizenship). I wouldn't mind living there, other than the cold.
However what with all that, I understand some of the downsides. There are things which aren't as good there as in the US (Internet is one of them in general, cellphone service another). There are some that are better. There are others that are kinda a wash, in that the problems are different than the problems in the US.
I find that people who have never been there, only been there only briefly, have a much rosier opinion of the situation in Canada than I do, or than my family that lives there does.
From that page: $120 per month for one-eighth of the cap that people used to deride Comcast for having
We need a universal service directive similar to the one that was in place for landline POTS telephones.
The Internet has become as essential today as telephone service was before it. Why shouldn't it be subject to the same rules?
And no, an expensive cellular data plan with a low cap is NOT an adequate substitute. If the providers want to argue that wireless service will suffice, then they need to make it compete on price and data volume with wired services.
Now I get it. The MPAA is trying to bring back the heyday of the Gingrich House when things like the No Electronic Theft Act, Copyright Term Extension Act, and Digital Millennium Copyright Act enjoyed wide enough bipartisan support to pass with voice vote.
Time to make New Jersey and Verizon pay us back the entirety of that $200 billion given nearly two decades ago.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
And it's only 100 times more expensive.
In fairness, only 7 times more expensive. The mean for residential fixed access broadband usage in Q1 2013 was 47.7 GB. A Verizon 4G LTE data access plan to satisfy this usage level would be $355/month. A Verizon Fios 15/5 Mpbs plan is $49.99/month.
If we want maximum progress and job growth then the entire US should have at least 1Gbps service. 40mbps is only a drop in the bucket. And why is it permitted that most people are prohibited from running servers on their home internet connection they often pay quite a bit for? This means that that wide open place you can still start a business without a ton of regulators landing on your head, the internet, is not accessible for the majority of people to legally take advantage of from their home! Instead they have to pay more to put it on Amazon EC2 or similarly or have someone else hosts it, often with more restrictions on what they can and cannot do.
We are headed into virtual reality, augmented reality, most everything wired up directly or indirectly. And they want to give someone a partial monopoly to leave people with service no better than 4G if that?
Last time German vehicles were tried en masse on the general direction of Sybiera they failed all and there were many casualties.
Funny +1
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But seven times as expensive is not what I'd call equal broadband access to everyone.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
RIght... still sounding a lot like Dow Constantine.
For those who don't know or care enough to look it up, he's the County Executive in King County, WA (contains Seattle, Redmond, and a whole lot of places that aren't Seattle or Redmond). He was recently pushing for higher sales tax and $60/vehicle annual license fee increase to continue subsidizing the ridiculously cheap bus routes that mostly serve Seattle and Redmond. Also a fan of toll roads (upwards of $5 to cross a bridge) and other shenanigans.
Nope. All $59.99 buys from Hughesnet is a 10/1Mbps connection, with 10GB of "anytime" data, and another 10GB of "bonus bytes" (which can only be used between 2AM and 6AM). Per month.
If that's not a cap, I'm not sure what is.
Kid-proof tablet..