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Verizon About To End Construction of Its Fiber Network
WheezyJoe writes: If you've been holding out hope that FiOS would rescue you from your local cable monopoly, it's probably time to give up. Making good on their statements five years ago, Verizon announced this week it is nearing "the end" of its fiber construction and is reducing wireline capital expenditures while spending more on wireless.
The expense of replacing old copper lines with fiber has allegedly led Verizon to stop building in new regions and to complete wiring up the areas where it had already begun. The fiber network was profitable, but nowhere near as profitable as their wireless network. So, if Verizon hasn't started in your neighborhood by now, they never will, and you'd best ignore all those ads for FiOS.
The expense of replacing old copper lines with fiber has allegedly led Verizon to stop building in new regions and to complete wiring up the areas where it had already begun. The fiber network was profitable, but nowhere near as profitable as their wireless network. So, if Verizon hasn't started in your neighborhood by now, they never will, and you'd best ignore all those ads for FiOS.
I have Comcast and FIOS available in my area. Unless I want to bundle and get crap cable TV (eff that noise), then it's SIGNIFICANTLY more expensive to get FIOS just for internet.
The free market strikes again!
You put FIOS 2 blocks away and stopped. Suck a dick.
Yup, FiOS isn't as profitable because users won't tolerate overage charges or massive throttling on wired connections but they'll bend over when it comes to wireless. Even though their wireless connections are NOWHERE near as good as wired connections.
Yet in even some of the poorest countries you can get 20Mbit connections with no cap for less money than you pay in the US.
Doesn't hurt that they can charge per GB on the wireless while that isn't an accepted standard practice on wires.....
Or threats of regulation have frightened away those with the skills and capital to build more networks.
That is in fact exactly what the article says. While the profit margin on FiOS is apparently 4.4%, the wireless side had a 23.5% profit margin. While those numbers are heavily encrusted with bullshit, they do show the relative value of the technologies to Verizon.
I read the internet for the articles.
I'm certain that I've read on Slashdot that given how much the ISPs charge, providing high-speed Internet service is this *huge* cash cow that the Internet providers milk for all its worth.
But now we're finding out that it's not financially worth-while for them to even construct the cash-cow?
This doesn't bode well. Surely it can't be that building and servicing the infrastructure for high-speed Internet is simply bloody expensive compared to revenues?
Citation, please, because Akamai's State of the Internet mostly disagrees with you.
They're going to say they've stopped, wait for local municipalities to take care of it themselves, then pop back up and say, "Actually, we want to provide service in this area anyway - you need to give up your infrastructure to us cause FREE MARKET!"
I agree! We should pass a law and force them! It's not fair that the guy the next block over has fios, and I don't!
When Verizon de-wired my neighborhood to put in fiber, the number of internet options I had went from about 8 to about 2 (Verizon & Cox). I could be wrong, but my understanding at the time was that when the court put the squash on the baby bell monopolies, companies like Verizon had to share their copper going to your home with competitors. The court action however did not mandate that they had to share their fiber. Once the fiber went in, the equipment that made it possible for an alternate telecom company to sell you DSL service was removed.
I know that DSL sucks in comparison to FIOS or even cable, but new technologies exist today that supposedly close the bandwidth gap over copper. Even if I had to endure crappy speeds over conventional DSL, just ask me if I feel that it would have been worth it to have seen a future where the multiple companies found on sites like dslreports.com competed to offer me higher speeds at lower prices sans the monopolistic/duopolistic practices of companies like Cox, Comcast, and Verizon.
Yeah, ask me and I'll tell you: HELL YEAH!
We paid for the fiber with surcharges in our phone bills in the 80's through the 00's -- we just never got the fiber, and the companies pocketed the cash. Money's good, if you can get it.
I tried out Fios for a while, but I have to say, I wasn't that impressed. The service went out from time to time, and YouTube and Netflix wouldn't play worth a damn. Also, they really trick you with their advertisements of low prices. Sure, the prices look good, but then you can't use your own hardware and you have to rent their proprietary hardware, which adds considerably to your service cost. And then you find out that those good prices were only intro prices and then they jack up your rates sky high.
I cancelled Verizon and went with the local cable company, if that tells you anything about Fios!
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Not that Akamai's State of the Internet is worth a damn anyway, with the throttled shit we have to deal with in the nordic countries. Seriously, Akamai is crap here. Steam, Limelight Networks etc etc, I can max out my 100/100 connection. If it's Akamai, it slows down to like 20Mbit/s.
Right...if you read the first article you would know this has been in the planning for quite a while. Keep believing and spewing the telecom PR...
It's okay Verizon, your remaining time to have any effect on market is limited.
With Title II all but in the bag, we'll see an explosion of Google Fiber, then Google Wide-Area Wireless for cell-phones to use, and your wireless spectrum won't be worth shit either.
Verizon, you are quickly becoming insignificant, closely followed by AT&T and Comcast.
But with FiOS over Concrap, you won't have to deal with Concrap. Yes, both will screw you over in the end. I would rather be screwed by the lesser of the 2 evils. I am still sore from the screwing Concrap gave me...
That is in fact exactly what the article says. While the profit margin on FiOS is apparently 4.4%, the wireless side had a 23.5% profit margin. While those numbers are heavily encrusted with bullshit, they do show the relative value of the technologies to Verizon.
This will bite them in the ass eventually, if not sooner. Verizon refuses to be price and feature compeditive on wireless. They are coming under pressure from increased wireless competition. The duopoly between Verizon and AT&T isn't such a duopoly anymore- there are lots of wireless players.
I have heard very few complaints from people about the fiber service aside from "it isn't available in my area". It is a lot easier to maintain a monopoly on fiber lines compared to wireless.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I feel sorry for all of you south of the border. Verizon was, without exception, the worst telco I ever dealt with as far as internet goes. When Canada was rolling out DSL and cable like crazy, Verizon in Delaware was offering up 28.8 dial-up. No options. No choices. That's all you could get. You couldn't even use a 56K modem because they used the high compression voice codecs on their lines, and you couldn't get a data line. You couldn't even get ISDN if you were willing to pay for it. :(
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Verizon is off the hook? Who is going to answer for that? Well rip me off! http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... Verizon has been getting breaks since this was first signed in early nineties. HP advises 4,000 -> 5,000 (excess charges and tax breaks) per houshold paid to Vz? This rolls up to the Board of public Utilities for letting them off the hook. Time for a BridgeGate scandal check here. We have a very anti-competitive environment, where each carrier must have a handshake-certified regional monopoly in many towns. Comcast, Optimum, and Verizon seem to have cut the state into mico-monopolies, while the rest of the world is passing us by. Are our taxes too low? Nope!
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
Ok. so this wont be repealed, and the i's are crossed and the T's are dotted, so no one broke the law, so... how about we push them to fulfill the promise they made, but do it wirelessly? Put wireless access points on each home, and tie our home networks into it. SO they find physical plant expensive - oops - I am SURE they can get us 45 Mbps to each house over wireless!
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
Long back Google had a April Fool posting about toilet net. That idea is fundamentally sound. The municipality can run fiber optic cables in storm water drains. It won't cost as much as it is costing Verizon to dig up and bury the cable. But you won't get it. They have the state law makers in their pockets.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
There's technically FiOS in my city already, but that doesn't mean I've actually been able to get it either in my current building or the building I lived in before that, nor do I know anyone who has it, so it was already clear they didn't give one crap about doing anything with FiOS other than advertising the crap out of it. Which I seriously don't get - where's the profit in spending a jillion dollars on something that everyone would be happy to pay you for, but you aren't letting them?
I mean, yes, Verizon is an awful company that would do the world a favor by dying in a fire (or at least it would if the result were competition over the ashes, rather than, as is probably more likely, just giving Comcast even *more* of a stranglehold...), but regardless, FiOS would (probably?) be better than the crap internet we have from them now.
after the way they gouge us on wireless. I'd much rather someone else did the fiber.
but they Fiber network rock shit and network response time hovers around 7-9ms and thats really good, lets put it another way, its like siting in a data center.
No you misread. FiOS isn't AS profitable, it's profitable. Someone without a conflict of interest, willing to compete with wireless, could set up a business and make money, give good service, employ people and return value to an investor. Verizon won't, they see it as a cannibalizing their wireless market.
This is an example of all that is wrong with telecom.
These Corporations fuck over their own interests and future to play childish games. It's ironic.
There is VZ and ATT, and then there is Sprint and T-Mo.
I've had all four in my area, and VZ by far has the best coverage. It isn't even close. I curently have T-Mo and the speed is much better, but coverage much worse than ATT and VZ. I'll give up a bit of coverage for better speeds.
As for Fiber vs Cable vs Wireless, Fiber will win on raw speed every time. The issue is the cost for last mile, and always will be. Which is why I recommend that Municipalities start looking at building out their own infrastructure and offering CONTENT/INTERNET providers the opportunity to compete for the last mile customers.
Right now, there is no competition, only franchise agreements that limit competition.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
FiOS is expensive, but then so is cable and at least you get what you pay for with FiOS. If Google fiber or Muni Fiber came to my area I would almost certainly switch, but as it is I feel lucky to at least get good service if I'm going to be paying out the ass.
I read the internet for the articles.
Its funny how Verizon blocked google fiber in lots of california and now they are ending their fiber, hopefully google and other companies find a way around this.
I'm guessing they know something about the new net neutrality rules being drafted and that wireless is either being excluded or will have loopholes. Especially given that the head of the FCC used to be a lobbyist for them.
Why lay fiber at all when you can gouge wireless?
Why do it? Because they received fucking Federal tax money to do it, that's why.
But instead, they illegally plowed their Federal money into wireless infrastructure.
This has been an issue for a long time now. Consult EFF about it.
... I have a prepaid unlimited plan that I pay about 25 dollars a month for which is about half what most people seem to be paying.
I've seen that you can pay as little as 80 dollars a year for 2000 minutes. Many people don't spend a lot of time on the cell phone and 2000 minutes for a whole year is lots.
If you talk even less then that, tmobile has a plan for 3 dollars a month but you only get 30 minutes a month.
Personally, this is where the whole thing needs to go. Bill me for what I use.
Unlimited plans are nice in theory but they are really just lazy. Yes, I have one right now because I'm too lazy to switch to the 80 dollar a year program. That would just about take care of me. Anyway, anyone paying 50 or more a month for a phone is being silly.
Yes, they're doing their whole mobile internet thing but how worth it is it for most of us? The two things I notice people do on their mobile plans that NEED mobile plans are google maps and website searches. In the case of google maps, get an good offline map program on your smartphone. It is really just as good if not better and it works anywhere. As to web searches... that can suck but free wifi is everywhere. Everywhere I go, there is free wifi. I link to that wifi, visit the website, and then turn off the WiFi radio again. This is not something I would pay 25 dollars a month to get anywhere internet. Who cares.
And yeah, there are some people that that is worth it for but for most people it is not. People are getting murdered on their cellphone bills when we really should just be paying about 25 to 10 to 3 dollars a month for this crap.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The last thing we have, in this country filled with government sponsored monopolies and the "last mile problem", is a proper capitalist free market. The severe amount of government interference is precisely why we DON'T have any choice, why you'll only have one provider for copper wire service and one provider for FiOS (if you have FiOS at all), and why Verizon and Comcast are the most hated companies in the country.
You are an irrational idiot. You ignore the obvious problem, that government interference prevents a proper free marketplace. Then you blame the crappy service you get and the high prices you pay on the very free market THAT YOU DON'T HAVE.
http://blogs.reuters.com/jackshafer/2014/02/19/whos-afraid-of-comcast
STFU
VZ never rolled out fiber to all of Rhode Island. The tiniest state in the country doesn't have complete coverage. Why? Because the poors live in rural RI.
They certainly didn't seem very "frightened" of the government when they received tax breaks and incentives to build out the network, did they?
FISO is fantastic!
Verizon customer service sucks balls.
In my neighborhood fiber and cable are both 110 Mbit, so there may some competition issues around pricing, but you aren't missing anything in terms of tech or speed.
Then you can stop overcharging for STBs and allow us to purchase them outright then!
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
it always was a bit iffy that v stopped expansion at same time as rumours of g trialing their fibre system "leaked" and that the day after g announce further plans for moving into moving data as well as looking at data, v kill it dead.
Right now, there is no competition, only franchise agreements that limit competition.
It's not the few percent franchise fee that limits competition, it's the knowledge that a second franchisee for the same function would be splitting the available market and nobody would make a profit without raising prices -- and reducing the overall market.
While there may be a few people in an area who would actually start buying services from the new competitor because they aren't the existing company, they aren't enough to cover the fixed costs of running a second cable company in that area. If one cable company has 50% saturation (half the available consumers), then a second company can plan on splitting that number with the existing company and you can't profit if you have only 25% saturation. Not without raising rates. The fixed costs for plant as services are just too high.
since they'll be removing the $5/mo surcharges for building out FiOS right?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
lets get the Gov't to enforce the law. It's our Government. I never said we trusted it. I don't trust fire, but I use it to cook my food.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It is the beginning of the end!
Which is funny, because Verizon's own CEO said that FiOS increased revenue as people were more likely to purchase more services with FiOS, plus support costs are cheaper, plus lower long-term upgrade costs.
Toilet Net - I heard it was just a series of tubes that carry filth :^)
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
i have fios. it is coax cable on the street. then on the post near my house it is split into fiber. the fiber goes to my place into a very big box, with two Verizon emblazoned power supplies! and become cable again to a cable modem...
the only explanation i have for this insanity is that if they advertised it as cable, i, who only pay for internet, would be allowed by law to have access to basic cable channels unencrypted. so they do this turnduckey of cables just to avoid it, and force me to pay $20/mo for basic cable.
and the only explanation i have for them dropping it is either that nobody pays that 20, like me. or that they finally got rid of the laws that force them to provide free unencrypted basic cable for cable internet customers.
Someone could. Someone could get past the legal and financial barriers. Secure capital to build an infrastructure, and keep their investors from bailing when the incumbents apply legal and other challenges.
Silence is a state of mime.
Why roll out fiber to the curb when 5G will deal with high speed internet.
Open up those unserved (or even served) areas to municipal fiber, google fiber, Comcrap, AT&T, or Bob's Bait Shop and Networking.
That is the lamest excuse I have ever heard. I guess Adam Smith was wrong, competition is not good.
Time for Verizon to split off the the wired portion of the company, or a regulator to do it for them.
Looks like one big party no longer has an argument against it.
The free market strikes again!
Let's not forget the billions in tax breaks and incentives that the telcos got in return for a promise to make sure everyone got broadband, no matter where they lived.
But will they be punished? Well, look at campaign contributions and make up your own mind.
There is no free market when Verizon is granted an anti-competitive monopoly on property-owners' easements and given tax breaks for infrastructure that equal more than Verizon pays for infrastructure. Verizon needs to be held accountable for their failure to live up to taxpayer promises. They are hardly a private company.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
This is EXACTLY why we need municipal/government internet. and they shoul lose ALL of they subsudies they get to expand the phone network (FUSF fees included)
I guess Adam Smith was wrong, competition is not good.
Competition is great. For the customer. For awhile. Not so good for the businesses that are competing. Perhaps you've heard of the term "dumping"? That's when a "competitor" can afford to sell below cost just to drive his competition out of business. Great for the customer, until the competition goes away and prices go back up.
We used to have a great small local magazine shop in this town. Borders moved in. They had books and magazines and a coffee shop and ... all in one place. The local shop was driven out of business. Bad for them. Then Borders lost the competition with B&N (and Amazon) and they have now gone away. It's an hour drive to the closest full-service shop. This competition turned out just great for the local shop, Borders, and the customers in this town, didn't it?
Before you lecture me on how I should have shopped at the local dealer to support them, I did, and it wasn't enough to keep them alive.
Cable companies aren't like Borders. People don't buy services from more than one cable company at a time and if they aren't cable customers by now they likely won't become one just because competition moves in. At best, a new cable company can split the existing customer base. That's not enough to cover the fixed costs for plant, and certainly not enough to provide return on investment for over-building the existing system. The incumbent has a significant advantage because he's likely paid off a lot of the investment in the plant and equipment and can cut his prices to keep the new guy from making any money at all. Yes, that's good for the customer, except the customers of the new guy, and only as long as it takes for the new guy to give up and go away.
I bet Adam Smith would have understood that. I bet he'd understand when a company does a business plan and sees that there is no money to be made from competing in a limited, existing marketplace with high startup costs. I bet he'd understand why it takes a company the size of Google to do that kind of thing, and even then they're not rushing into the market.
So, the fact remains, it isn't the few percent skimmed from the cable companies in franchise fees that prevents competition. It's the ability to predict a negative return on investment for any new competitor, especially for the first few years, that keeps them from wasting their time and money.
If you disagree, you are free to dump a few million into competing with Comcast in our fair city and prove me wrong. I doubt I'd switch service to a start-up with no track record, but show me your list of services and we'll see.
"The fiber network was profitable, but nowhere near as profitable as their wireless network"
Faster connection with 4G just means you'll hit the bandwidth cap faster and pay Verizon for content that should be free.
I think you missed the "unlimited 4g" bit.
I think it's appropriate, yet again, to link to the following video (Warning: Very NSFW...) regarding this all:
The World's First *HONEST* Cable Company
Wireless sucks balls overall right at the moment. LTE is better than what went before it, but it doesn't even remotely compare to the 100/100 link FiOS offers right at the moment.
I did. Oops. Still.... that can't be cheap. And I can think of a certain wireless provider that offered unlimited service only to force everyone out of those plans later. I don't trust Verizon any more than AT&T.
Verizon would rather install the 4G Bucket (LTE Internet Installed) on the side of your residence and charge you an insane amount of money. Verizon also wants out of the DSL business.
It wasn't competition from a direct competitor that drove Borders out of town, it was a technological revolution. Ask youself if you would be better off riding round in a horse-pulled buggy, or in a car. Your argument above applies directly.
But yeah, there are natural monopolies. That's why we have regulated utilities, such as PG&E.
The cable and phone companies benefitted from sweatheart deals to install their connections in cities, yet they would scream in outrage at the prospect of a new competitor getting a similar sweatheart deal to bring in service.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
What free market? By local government decree, Verizon is the only company allowed to offer POTS (plain old telephone service) in the areas it covers. If the local governments would embrace the free market and allow anyone with a credible proposal and business plan to lay down fiber in public easements and offer service (instead of just the anointed monopoly phone, cable, and electric company), Verizon's incentive to not upgrade its copper wires to fiber would evaporate overnight.
This is actually a perfect example of how government interference in the market initially done with the best of intentions (you don't want a zillion unsightly wires being laid down in easements, so the government decides which companies may do it) can quickly morph into a corrupt scheme where the government protects the monopolies in exchange for kickbacks (in the last city I lived in, the city asked cable companies how much they were willing to pay the city per home wired up, and awarded the monopoly to the highest bid).
Except it isn't the free market. Here in Seattle even the companies that are granted monopolies can't often install or upgrade equipment because of the city's Director's Rules. Google for "seattle director's rules internet" and you'll see more than 16 million results! My old roommate worked for CenturyLink (the phone monopoly here) about five years ago, and she personally saw these rules block DSL for over 20,000 homes. I'm sure that number is in the hundreds of thousands for the area. Most of those residents have no other options other than POTS lines since Comcast, which has the cable monopoly for most of the city, doesn't, or can't, offer service to much of the city. I manage IT for a company that owns several chains of restaurants in the PNW, and dial-up is often the best we can do at most of our locations. Seattle is most certainly not a free market.
So we will continue to add more wireless receivers, where in the cities, people are literally bathed in this junk. Will Americans ever wake up to the link between immune system depletion and wireless technology - cell phones, computers, etc...? There are countries that have made it illegal for children to use cell phones because the waves cause health problems. It will be interesting to see the 30 year studies on cell phone users, but I don't think we will ever see any of these studies in America.
We used to have a great small local magazine shop in this town. Borders moved in. They had books and magazines and a coffee shop and ... all in one place. The local shop was driven out of business. Bad for them. Then Borders lost the competition with B&N (and Amazon) and they have now gone away. It's an hour drive to the closest full-service shop. This competition turned out just great for the local shop, Borders, and the customers in this town, didn't it?
(Shrug) The same thing would have happened to the local shop, with or without Borders. I wouldn't trade Amazon for all of the Mom & Pop outfits, Borders, and B&N combined. The marked worked exactly how it is supposed to work, and the best competitor won.
Let's hope for a fiber replacement from Verizon then. Without all the things I hate about FiOS. Like the throttling. 144p videos are cool and nostalgic, but I'd like at least 360p, please without going VPN.
Cable companies are relative unregulated (as far as prices, services, and support are concerned) while telephone companies are more regulated. This makes sense as cable started as a pure luxury. The problem is that once the Internet came around, most of the investment occurred in cable companies and not telephone companies.
I think the U.S. telecomm market is experiencing market confusion. Comcast is a cable company that offers phone service over its cables. Verizon is a telephone company that ran fiber and started offering telephone service. Telephone companies have avoided upgrading to fiber (in Verizon's defense, some communities wanted to keep copper in case of power outage). Both claim internet access is an "information service".
One solution is to subsidize common carriers (with requirements they provide unlimited bandwidth, net neutrality, etc.) while refusing any government support for non-common carriers. This avoids a fight over regulations.
The only other method is vertical and horizontal industry separation. Verizon can't run both a wireless and wired network. Comcast is broken up between movie production, cable, and internet. One company owns the physical network while third parties sell services over it (like MVNOs).
After deployment FiOS isn't any more expensive than the alternatives. It's more about how they're regulated and how many competitors there are.
I live in a rental apartment in a small town in Sweden. The building owner installed fiber to every apartment and I now have a choice of 8 ISPs. I can get 1 Gbps symmetrical for $80 a month. I currently pay $28 a month for 100/10 Mbps. This is the basically the norm here in Sweden, unless you live in rural areas. But even single-family homes miles from the nearest neighbour sometimes get fiber, because electrical utilities pull fiber when replacing old electrical grids. And then you have a choice which ISP to connect to. We call this "black fiber" and this really is the perfect solution to the last-mile-problem. The utility or building owner own and maintain the hardware but bit-shuffling is done by ISPs independently. It really isn't that hard.
Here in KC we gave Sprint a huge chunk of prime real estate (for FREE, with no property taxes either) & gave them other huge incentives to move the HQ here & create X,000 jobs.
Of course they never created those jobs, their KC HQ is nearly empty (as i hear most of their other "headquarters" around the country are) and nobody has uttered a peep about taking that land back, or even charging them taxes.
These schemes almost never pan out, i wish municipalities would stop falling for them.
That is the free market at work. What do you think happens when the libertarians get their way and the FCC, FDA, OSHA, and EPA get abolished? They stay gone forever and the market has perfect competition? Of course not. The richest incumbent companies buy some lawmakers again, and bring those agencies back with new names and even more rules favorable to the incumbent companies than we have today.
The only permanent solution to regulatory capture is the extinction of humanity. Otherwise, all we the voters and politicians can ever do is fight a holding action against it. Believing anything else is as much a libertarian fantasy as a worker's utopia is a communist fantasy.
Removing government interference isn't the fix. Fixing the regulations as best as we can, even knowing the solutions are still flawed, is the best option we have.
Yes, that sweet Swedish internet, discussed before on Slashdot, from an article on the Motley Fool called How Come My ISP Won't Increase Internet Speed and Lower My Bill, Like They Do in Sweden?
I read an estimate that it would take $140 billion to bring something like google fiber to the whole country. We've wasted $1 trillion on the F35 and another trillion on Iraq. $140B to do something useful seems reasonable.
Yes more revenue, but still not as profitable. The problem is that it also costs them more to provide more services even when bundled. Whearas with wireless they can provide all the same services but charge significantly more to actually provide it.
As USA had initially led the charge along the path to the internet of things (ugghhh I hate how that sounds), we have to consider that the cost needs to drop and the service needs to improve. This is accomplished by customer service -and- increased efficiency and developing technology rather than just propagating the status quo. At my home, there is only one option for Internet, even though another ISP (has a V in the name) offers High Speed Internet that is -up to- 3 Mbps - in this day and age - thats BROKEN... Around the planet costs and service are way better. This seems a transgression of public trust. The Board of public utilities throws up its hands and professes it has no control over which provider provides what, but, how will this change/improvement come to be? Who is the consumer advocate that can get the ISPs to modernize? Google seems to be trying, but the rest of them are self absorbed and not going to budge on their good thing.. their ... Triple play Hoax. The phone used to be copper lines, and was truly 24/7, but now its VOIP. Get Ooma and be done with it. Anyways... Who is going to lead the charge on modernization, and get things moving?
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
The sweetheart deals should have been considered regulated utilities. But that would be socialism, or some other hysteria-inducing buzzword. Somehow it was obvious years ago that it would be inefficient to have multiple water companies with multiple sets of pipes, or multiple power companies with multiple sets of wires, so it became a monopoly - but regulated. By the time we got around to cable, the politics had changed - not the economic realities.
It wasn't competition from a direct competitor that drove Borders out of town, it was a technological revolution.
It was a technological "revolution" that allowed a company in Seattle, Washington to become a competitor with the Borders store in my town (and in all the other cities). If you want to claim that "competition is good" and then limit your definition to "competition that is only the same sized business located in the same city doing things the same way", you've lost all basis for your claim.
The cable and phone companies benefitted from sweatheart deals to install their connections in cities,
And a competitor can get those same "sweat" deals by signing a franchise agreement. That agreement will cost them a few percent of their revenue. That's not enough to stop them.
yet they would scream in outrage at the prospect of a new competitor getting a similar sweatheart deal to bring in service.
Of course they would. What they scream about is irrelevant. The grocery store on the corner isn't happy when another grocery store opens across the street, either. None of the grocery stores in town were happy when Walmart opened their grocery store here, and none of the general merchandise stores were happy when Walmart announced plans for a superstore here.
The marked worked exactly how it is supposed to work, and the best competitor won.
Really? I found it valuable to be able to browse the local shop to see what new magazines (or old ones I didn't know about) were available, to look inside to see what they contained. When I got interested in something, I could see what was available, and I could see covers that hinted that maybe I'd like to read what was inside. If I didn't see what I wanted, I could ask the owner and she'd help me find what I needed. In most cases, I'd walk out of the shop with what I wanted -- immediate delivery.
Compare this to Barnes and Noble (one of the "winners" in this competition.) I have an electronic subscription to a magazine. It is supposed to renew automatically, and they sent me an email a month ago telling me it would renew three weeks ago. So far, it hasn't renewed. I got the paper copy of the magazine, and BN touts that "nook magazines" are delivered before the paper versions are. I contacted support. They apologized that the most recent issue hadn't been put in my library and they'd look into it. I told them it was obvious why -- they hadn't renewed the subscription. They're still "looking into it" and it's been a week.
Even better, when the current issue is put in my library, since they've dropped their Windows Nook reader (without saying anything, it took a round of email with support to find out why it just wouldn't log in to their server) I now must rely on an Android app to download my copies, and then I can copy the file out of the app's content directory to put it where I want it to be. The only way to know which is the correct file is to look at the creation date, the name is unintelligible gibberish. Fortunately this magazine is DRM-free, so I don't have to go through the steps of uploading the file to my PC to remove the DRM and then redownload it to read it using my reader of choice.
Oh, this Nook App has the wonderful property that it shows only a few characters of the name of the content along with the cover. So, unless I know the cover image of the issue of the magazine I want to read, I get to see "Asimo ... 2015" as the identification. Which month? That info is contained only on the cover icon which is unreadable because it is so small. The "competitor" free app does much better, and B&N don't give a damn how hard it is to identify content.
So, when you say "the best competitor won", that's your opinion. It may be the opinion of many people, but it isn't a fact. What is more likely is that "the most convenient" or "the cheapest" competitor won, but that's not always "the best". Were it "the best", then why do people go to brick and mortar's to browse for things to buy before they buy online?
nt
How is it that competition (in this case, between ISPs) works everywhere except the US?
Countries like New Zealand have a whole heap of competition in the ISP market and nobody seems to be really suffering - and most of those ISPs are delivering services on either unbundled DSL or unbundled fiber (the latter of which is being built as part of a government project and I believe they are ahead of schedule on their buildout). The wholesale provider providing/building the DSL/Fiber networks is regulated and last time I checked, made a profit, and it also doesn't compete in the retail market or deal directly with the customers.
So, as someone from New Zealand currently living in the US where all the ISPs bitch and whine about fixed costs effectively preventing them from competing properly as you have in your diatribe? To them I say boo-fucking-hoo. Deal with it and stop acting like spoiled brats.
I don't think it's valid to use a couple of minor, specific, and temporary technical issues to condemn an entire trend.