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Can the US Actually Cultivate Local Competition in Broadband?
New submitter riskkeyesq writes with a link to a blog post from Dane Jasper, CEO of Sonic.net, about what Jasper sees as the deepest problem in the U.S. broadband market and the Internet in general:
"There are a number of threats to the Internet as a system for innovation, commerce and education today. They include net neutrality, the price of Internet access in America, performance, rural availability and privacy. But none of these are the root issue, they're just symptoms. The root cause of all of these symptoms is a disease: a lack of competition for consumer Internet access." Soft landings for former legislators, lobbyists disguised as regulators, hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber sitting unused, the sham that is the internet provider free market is keeping the US in a telecommunications third-world. What, exactly, can American citizens do about it?
One upshot, in Jasper's opinion (hardly disinterested, is his role at CEO at an ISP that draws praise from the EFF for its privacy policies) is this: "Today’s FCC should return to the roots of the Telecom Act, and reinforce the unbundling requirements, assuring that they are again technology neutral. This will create an investment ladder to facilities for competitive carriers, opening access to build out and serve areas that are beyond our reach today."
What does Bennett Haselton think about this? I can't form an opinion until he weighs in. He's a frequent contributor.
Give both access to their current cable network. Watch service improve and prices drop.
The only real solution is to split the last-mile provider from the ISP, and make the last-mile provider a utility.
Competition in the last-mile is infeasable, but connecting customers at a CO to the internet is a much more competition-friendly possibility.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Will they? No. Why ask a question you already know the answer to?
AND unbundle services.
Let the competition be local.
Don't you mean what could have American citizens done about it? The answer was right in front of their noses. It's not complicated people.. You're only confusing yourselves with all your silly philosophies.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
RE: Subject line
Don't ask... It's a mystery to me too..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Funny how libertarian Slashdot is quickly to criticize the government, but when it comes to ISPs they become trustbusters.
You either:
- own the cables.
- provide internet access to consumers.
- sell content.
exclusively. No combinations allowed.
Due to a well known law of headlines I'd reply No, but if you copy Europe the answer will be Yes. In this case Europe has the advantage of a fragmented market. Different countries, different languages, different operators and different regulations led to competition. No pan-European monopolist.
I don't know if this is widespread (I think it is) but where I live (Italy) unbundling is mandatory and we have new operators using the cables of the former monopolist. In some areas the former monopolist is using the cables of newer companies. There are at least three different fiber networks, unfortunately not particularly fast. 100 Mb/s download and 10 Mb/s upload is the norm for fiber (ADSL goes up to 20 or 30 Mbps with the usual caveats of that technology). I got the feeling that the operators agreed to settle on that and save some money. Fiber was at 10/10 Mb/s 14 years ago. Competiion is never enough.
So, I don't recommend breaking up the US and switching to lots of different languages :-) but maybe you might break down your monopolists, create operators at state level and force unbundling. I read what happened to the Baby Bells and it seems that it worked well for a while. Do it again and by 2020 you'll evaluate what happened and adapt the legislation.
Same way the ideal gas situation of FCC doing its stuff and the invisible hand of the free market doing its stuff and presto you got fantastic internet speed at the low low price of 9.99$ a month. The real gas situation is, all these companies raking money hand over fist lobby the politicians, the FCC, create misinformation campaign and they continue to exploit their customer base. Pressure builds till some disruptive technology comes in, cherry picks the customers and they leave in droves.
One possibility: It could be cell phone companies stringing up fiber up to street corner pillar boxes, and do the last 100 yards over the air with WiFi or a femto-cell network or something. The only true advantage the cable/phone ISPs have is the actual wire to different parts of the home via cat5 cable. But most homes use a router and use WiFi anyway. Someone could run fiber up to street corner pillar boxes, install a WiFi router per customer and cherry pick lots of customers who don't need more than a few WiFi devices. Wireless in the loop is quite well known and is actually deployed in many parts of India and Africa. My old prof Ashok has been talking about it for a long time.
But there could be other such technologies that peel of some serious segments of the captive market of the cable giants. Cable giants too would not sit idle. They would be the first to spot the threat and possibly buy these companies, or adjust their prices in different markets to keep these dogs chomping at their heels just out of reach. Somehow or the other, where such technologies are viable prices would come down. Where it is not viable, the customers would be at the mercy of these corporations
FedEx and UPS are not serving 80% of the country (by area, probably 10% by population). But at least they get US Postal Service. But the current generation of ISPs are suing to make sure government does not provide an alternative even to the market they don't want to serve.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
First step: Make providers publish their prices on a government web site, and actually charge those prices. Have big fines for charging more. That would help prevent over-billing.
Your first sentence somewhat saves the post from your subject line. It should be remembered that Comcast already was split up. Last year, half the company was called Time Warner. Comcast has bought lots of cable operators and they sucked when they were seperate. They sucked because they could - each little company had a government franchise over a particular area, an enforced monopoly ensuring no competition. If they were split like the baby Bells were formed from ma Bell, we'd have exactly the same situation that we had five years ago.
What's needed is competitive pressure to improve service and lower rates. An obvious mechanism to do this is to forbid cities from making it effectively illegal to compete. That can be seen as equal protection - the laws of the ciry of Houston government shouldn't establish Comcast as the only provider allowed to build a network, forbidding competition from over builders. Unlike a forced split, that's also consistent with principles of freedom.
Until recently, there was the practical problem of the economics of building a competing coax network. Few companies wanted to risk spending millions building where Comcast already has a network in place. There is a unique opportunity right now, though, as all-fiber networks begin to replace the cable plant. Competitive overbuilders can sometimes build their own fiber network at a lower cost than Comcast's bureaucracy can replace the Comcast cable network with fiber. That means we're in a time period right now where smaller, better, newer companies can and will compete directly with Comcast , where state and city governments allow them to.
Not as long as my city gov keeps on signing exclusive deals with comcast with 0 input from those paying their salaries.
they were split up and then spent 20 years buying up the Baby Bells until they were right back where they started. There's an amusing video from the dailyshow of it how it happened that I can't seem to find right now. Corps can take a longer view then we can :(
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Legally, only one ILEC is allowed to run copper pairs to my property. They have no interested in upgrading their plant.
They have a protected monopoly.
In many jurisdictions, only one cable company can put coax in the ground.
They have a protected monopoly.
IP protections, like copyright, are a government protected monopoly.
Frequency allocations, overseen by the FCC, are a government protected monopoly.
Access Easements on private property for incumbent wire owners (e.g. the cable company can put a truck or a box on your property if they like) are a government grant of special privilege.
Given all of the government collusion with the current infrastructure, asking if government can address its own problems seems a bit silly. Of course it could. It could stop enabling all of the stuff it currently enables, for one.
If you try to factor the residential broadband problem into an OSI-type layer model, perhaps what makes sense is to limit vertical integration.
E.g. if there is physical plant, IP transit, content delivery, and content production, it would be problematic to allow, for instance, SONY, to own all 4 of those layers in some specific area.
Ideally there would be robust competition at each layer.
Another action the government could take would be to stop approving merger/consolidation deals that have the net effect of consolidating layers and/or markets in such a way that overall marketplace competition suffers.
In some communities, public utility ownership of layer 1 (physical plant) would make a lot of sense and would be voter supported. In others, it wouldn't, and wouldn't. Both models are worth trying.
As you go up the stack, there are lots of opportunities for different business models. Community owned IP transit? Why not? This is, in some regards, the case at current internet peering points. The members co-own the exchanges. It is in some respects like the agricultural co-ops that are so common in rural America - the land of rugged individualists.
People are, after all, not opposed to working in groups when they like the group and when the cooperation makes sense (as opposed to being coercive in nature)
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
STOP GIVING OUT CABLE MONOPOLIES.
That's really all you have to do. There is no competition in most markets because competition is banned by government decree.
I live in a town with two cable companies. Actually, I live 5 miles out of town. Both cable companies have fiber optic networks here, both have great customer service, high speeds, low prices, etc.
The city I lived in previously had granted a monopoly to Charter. Charter has a coax network, lousy customer service, low speeds, high prices, etc.
Cable + DSL is not a meaningful competition, so having 2 monopolies is not the way to go. Stop granting cable monopolies and you will have competition.
P.S. Both companies have fully developed fiber networks in the ground (and on poles in some places) so don't try claiming that the monopoly is necessary for physical reasons. It isn't.
See that "Preview" button?
You mean the solution isnt to ask the federal government to solve our specifically local problems that were created by local politicians that were enabled by the fact that we don't get involved in our own local politics?
"His name was James Damore."
Or that fact that right-wing Americans (most of us) don't want the government up in their business? Unless of course it's in their own personal interest to have them up in their business?
But we could forbid the laws preventing cities from running their own. My city ran fiber back in the '90's but before they were able to act on it, the state passed a law that cities couldn't be internet providers. The law specified that individual cities could opt out of the law by passing a ballot referendum in which residents of the city vote to opt out of the law. We did that a couple years ago by a solid margin (Something like 80% I forget exactly.) The work crews were just going through marking power lines and stuff last week in preparation to start laying fiber to houses. Already Comcast and Centurylink seem to be scrambling to try to keep customers here. Other cities in the area are also scurrying to jump on that bandwagon as they're concerned they're going to use businesses and residents to mine. The benefits in the few cities around the USA that have done this are clear enough that it's obvious the anti-competitive laws are holding the market back.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I don't care who does it. It just has to be done, and if somebody has to step because the locals won't handle it, all the better. Screw the complainers.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Competitive overbuilders can sometimes build their own fiber network at a lower cost than Comcast's bureaucracy can replace the Comcast cable network with fiber.
This is true, but even at half the cost it still takes a *lot* of capital.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
And how exactly are you going to have more sway than a couple of multi-billion dollar conglomerates?
but I pay $70/mo for good internet (that's just Internet, no TV/Phone).
The problem with relying on Fiber to save us is the same one we have with Oil & Gas right now. By the time competition is viable we're already paying so much that it impacts our overall Standard of Living ($4/gallon gas anyone?); and by then the monopolists have such massive war chests they can start off a price war the newbies can't hope to win ($2.50/gallon gas anyone?).
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There's a reason we gave out cable monopolies. It was too expensive to build out the infrastructure w/o a guaranteed profit and we're too frightened of the gov't to just make it a public works project. It's either monopolies or figuring out how to counteract 50+ years of cold war propaganda about the evils of socialism...
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I honestly think everyone should be putting more time and energy toward this rather than having the FCC enforce net neutrality. It will be much trickier for conservatives to preach their free market line against something that is so obiously designed to open up competition. What gets me every time is when people say "Deregulate broadband and it will increase competition!". I have never once seen someone spout this line and offer a single detail about how this is supposed to work. Do they seriously expect every house and building to have multiple fiber connections built out to them? Google Fiber has also been a double-edged sword in that it has made these same people say "Google did it so that means others will!". I don't even need to point out everything that is wrong with that idea.
What do you expect from US oligarchs and corporate executives?
They vacation together with Russian oligarchs and Saudi families. Kids go to the same Swiss schools.
Do you think they give damn about rural America and availability of broadband?
I don't care who does it. It just has to be done, and if somebody has to step because the locals won't handle it, all the better.
Going to be rude here because you deserve it. You are the fucking locals.
What you are saying is that you wont fucking handle it, so someone else better handle it for you, and you dont care one bit who gets hurt in the process of you not handling your own shit.
"His name was James Damore."
I've heard many stories of successful municipality competitors to major ISPs, but they got sued because the state should not be allowed to compete with monopolies. In fact no one can compete with monopolies because they are the ones who can afford legislation to write the rules. You have more than one problem here. One: The politicians are corrupt because of campaign contributions makes them bribed and in someone's pocket (or they won't get elected). Two: You have a system with no competition.
God spoke to me
Can the US Actually Cultivate Local Competition in Broadband? One can not really ask that question with the "pay for hire" congress we currently have in office. The politicians will promis ANYTHING to get in office and then it's the one with the most money who gets the vote. "One man one vote" not really - The most money gets the vote! One must get politicians who listen to their constituents and votes what they want. That won't happen while the major billion dollar corp. can BUY the vote they want! How do we get that to happen, forbid any politician accepting money for himself, his corp. , re-election committee or any other related entity. That won't happen while the current politicians are in office. A Contential Congress made of of all the also-rans who wanted to get into office and make changes. Otherwise "continue dreaming"?!?!?
Your first sentence ignores the problem itself. When telecoms are split up, the wide region once covered by one is cut up into areas still each serviced by one company. It's the monopolies that make problems, and nothing has happened to change that.
First things first, assets purchased with tax dollars should belong to the citizens. Municipal governments should manage access to taxpayer-funded infrastructure, and it's a little late to worry about socialism because the fiber sitting unused was bought and paid for by the people as it is. Municipal governments must then have strict rules to ensure that access to the fiber fosters competition and eschews favoritism. Neither business size nor the amount of money the business has or spends on anything should be factors; only whether the business has equipment that can use the infrastructure and the ability to reach consumers.
Why are we focusing on coax? See, that's just a symptom of the real problem with all this recent lobbyist activity: cable television is dying, so the cable companies want to commandeer the Internet and make it work the way cable did. The problem is that what makes the Internet so useful is that it *doesn't* work like cable. I can study a new programming language at the same time as I play the ABC Song for my child, and I don't have to pay somebody not responsible for that content in order to access it.
It's not all about coax. That's only one piece of the overall situation, and we should begin by treating public property as public anyway. Telecoms should never have been given both tax dollars to build infrastructure and ownership of that infrastructure. That's worse than socialism; it's a national socialism/communism hybrid. Let's call it national communism. We don't need it. Not one American who wasn't in the legislature or White House agreed to give those crooks a free gift. Why the hell should we gift companies who only take from us and never give back?
Okay, if you prefer, I can kill off the yahoos that vote against me. So, should I form up a militia to battle the corrupt sheriff so I can bury some internet tubing on my street? Personally I wouldn't care for the resulting property damage. If some bigger muscle can come in to keep the peace, then that's what should be done. In the same fashion of the "War of Northern Aggression". The lawyers have no place here... I'm not interested in infantile philosophizing by a bunch of crazy baldheads that are only stealing stealing my tax money and the morons who vote for them. I only want to see the work done.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The easiest way to increase competition in monopolistic settings is to encourage/enforce self-competition. Who is Microsoft's most difficult competition? Previous versions of its own software! Similarly, if net neutrality unhappily fails, then ISP have to offer both plans with audited kickback differences only affecting pricing.
Net neutrality is misunderstood by both sides. There is no "fast lane" -- everything travels as fast as possible. The only way ICS to implement a non-neutral net is to buffer/drop certain selected packets at times of congestion. That shunts them to the "slow lane", perpetrating a systematic fraud (viiolating promised "best efforts" for benefit) upon both ISP customers and upstream providers.
Deregulation supports the growth of duopoly. In an unregulated market, unless one competitor grows fast enough to buy out everybody, 2 1/2 competitors will result: 2 that split most of the market and are de facto in collusion, and a collection of small fry that added together may equal the smaller of of the big boys. That's effectively what we have now: cable (to a first approximation, Comcast once the TW merger goes through, which it will) and phone (ATT+Verizon, including Uverse and FIOS variants) pretty much own the market and do not compete on price (though cable commonly has somewhat better speed), and everybody else is irrelevant at a national scale. It gets worse at the local level where monopolies are commonly supported by local franchises, whether legal or not.
Follow GOOG, if they can't embrace, extend and deploy broadband beyond testbed, realworld deployment in very select environments? Who thinks they are smarter, richer and better positioned to profit on fibre to the belly.
More like you can build a new 1gb fiber network from nothing for about 1/5th the entire price Comcast pays to upgrade their cable network.
Something has to change, undeniable dillema
a dial-up connection is a burden that no one should bear
Constant over-legislation numbs me
but I can't get broadband any other way.
26Kbps is not enough, I need more
going faster keeps me satisified
i don't want it, i just need it
to breath, to feel, to know I'm alive.
Browser deep inside the internet
Show me that you hear me and don't throttle my connection
Relax, turn around and take my http request.
I can help you change
bored moments into pleasure
Say the word and we'll be
streaming Netflix all day
Stuttering and buffering
Rate hikes and throttling
Deep within your wallet
Till you can no longer afford to pay
26Kbps is not enough, I need more
going faster keeps me satisified
i don't want it, i just need it
to breath, to feel, to know I'm alive.
Knuckle deep inside your paycheck
This may hurt a little but, screw you, you don't need food
Relax. Slip away
Something kinda sad about
The way that things have come to be
Desensitized to everything
What became of the FCC?
It takes 20 minutes to load google
How can I use this terrible connection?
I'll keep refreshing
Till I see something
Browser deep inside the internet
Show me that you hear me and don't throttle my connection
TOR Node deep inside the internet
Relax, turn around and take my http request.
Competition in broadband? Nope! The big entrenched players sure don't want that. They will tell the FCC that too. Lower bandwidth, net non-neutrality, and ever increasing prices! That's how the big players like the internet. Extremely poor, expensive customer service is part of that, along with week-long "you wait all week while we decide what time in that week to drop by and perform whatever service you are begging (and paying us through the nose) for". Competition? Never!
Guys how many times are you going to have to rediscover that natural monopolies stifle competition before you acknowledge it...?
I mean, it wouldn't be a big deal if this was one of those adages designed to fool people who can't add, like 'trickle down economics" for example... but this one has simple mathematical proofs that any engineer should be able to get their head around.
Please. Start applying the same math to economics as you use for network topology, eh?
Interstate commerce clause on communications networks allowing small operators to run their own cable to someone's door with ONLY vital regulation and AT COST taxes.
That is, they should only have to deal with regulation that is actually needed. Basic common sense stuff that is obvious. Short of that... none.
As to the taxes, they should only have to pay their share of REASONABLE expenses the cities go through to provide them conduit/pole space for their cables. Those expenses must not exceed costs and those costs cannot be taken to absurd extents.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Sadly the US is stuck in old doctrines which seem to be impossible to push aside. There is simply no reason that in the more populated areas we can not have several cables running to each home or apartment so that the occupant has a choice between unrelated content providers and service providers. There was never any good reason to restrain competition and the public has paid through the nose for this stupidity.
Many other nonsense doctrines are also doing us harm. The notion that the US has a free market is blatantly absurd. Then we have this richest in the world identity crises. The US is far from being the richest nation in the world and our standard of living is lower than several other nations as well. We also have a doctrine of growth. Many politicians rant about the need for so-called growth. The truth is that growth is a horror story and it leaves massive wreckage in its wake. Look at Detroit. Detroit used to be the growth center of the American universe. Look at northern New Jersey. It is like the rotten arm pit of America. They had plenty of growth. Look at Miami,Fl.. Miami used to be a desirable place to live. Growth turned Miami into a sewer with absurd crime problems, unreasonable pollution levels, ethnic and racial strife, a poor educational system, a perpetual traffic jamb, and a devastating elimination of wild life and flora. So- called growth has turned Miami into a horror story.
I see this all the time in submissions on Slashdot, when people talk about personal experience with ISPs in their local areas. Few people want to mention *where the hell they are* when they comment. Why are so many people afraid to mention where they are from? Post anonymously if you're so afraid of being identified, but without a location, your story is far, FAR less useful!
If we knew what city you are talking about, we'd be able to find out more information about what happened and how the citizenry overcame the state law. That is a compelling story that should be known, so that others can attempt to duplicate the effort. You even state that "few cities around the USA that have done this": come on, man! If you're one of them, shout out your success story! Name the city, let us find out more!
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
> Telecoms should never have been given both tax dollars to build infrastructure and ownership of that infrastructure.
Absolutely agreed. The extent to which that has occurred has been VASTLY overstated by people with a particular political agenda, but most people can agree it did happen to some extent and it shouldn't have.
> it's a little late to worry about socialism because the fiber sitting unused was bought and paid for by the people as it is.
It's not too late. You _can_ have politicians trying to run an ISP, or you could get the taxpayers their money back buy selling the failing fiber operations to an ISP who has proven they can provide good service like Wide Open West. That gets rid of the socialism issue. So there are at least two ways to go, it's a matter of which is the best course of action.
One can decide the best course of action based on which one best serves a preconceived political ideology, or one can look at the experience of cities who have tried each approach. You can advocate for the agenda you grew up believing, or you can advocate for what actually works, what will get god results for you and your neighbors. I don't know about you, but baed on where I grew up, what my parents said, etc., as a child I believed in Ronald Reagan and the tooth fairy. It sounds like you probably believed in Bill Clinton and the tooth fairy. Later, you may have believed in Barak Obama or Bush II. Either way, our beliefs may have been mistaken.
Broadband speeds leave ours in the dust. Why? Because actual competition. How? Because the government has inserted itself as a competitor ISP--something the business party here would never allow. But clearly, an FCC with a former cable lobbyist at its head doesn't care about the profiting of cable companies? Give me a break
And you'll see billboards competing like crazy, all thanks to Google Fiber.
As long as you require all areas to have the same level of service at the same price regardless of the actual operating costs within a given area you will never create competition or alternatives. This is precisely the risk of making broadband a government regulated "utility". Basically the result will be more of "the phone company" or "the power company" in terms of bureaucracy and lack of service rather than "more of Silicon Valley" or "more of South Korea broadband".
No, US cannot.
Not because there are no ways to do it.. there are plenty. It's a pure corruption issue. There is no political will to do *anything* to reign in the abuses of the corporate oligarchy. None. Because 99% of people in politics are completely bought and paid for by the giant corporations that make up that oligarchy. It's pointless and stupid to even ask the question.
Our "political leadership" does as it is bidden by their corporate masters, and pay no attention to what is best for the population. For the simple reason that it is impossible to build a functional democratic political system on top of an authoritarian economic system. Economic power beats political power in any endgame.
When "regulators" and "Industry insiders" play the "revolving door jobs game", no, there's no legitimate oversight ever.. and we do ourselves a disservice by pretending that the system "works" in any way. It doesn't.
What we need to do is figure out how to fix *that*, not blather about nonsense that ignores the functional realities.