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Comcast's Incompetence, Lack of Broadband May Force Developer To Sell Home
BUL2294 writes Consumerist has an article about a homeowner in Kitsap County, Washington who is unable to get broadband service. Due to inaccurate broadband availability websites, Comcast's corporate incompetence, CenturyLink's refusal to add new customers in his area, and Washington state's restrictions on municipal broadband, the owner may be left with no option but to sell his house 2 months after he bought it, since he works from home as a software developer. To add insult to injury, BroadbandMaps.gov says he has 10 broadband options in his zip code, some of which are not applicable to his address, have exorbitant costs (e.g. wireless), or are for municipal providers that are prevented from doing business with him by state law. Yet, Comcast insists in filings that "the broadband marketplace is more competitive than ever." As someone who had Comcast call to cancel on the day of my closing (two days before my scheduled install) because they didn't offer service to my house after all, I can sympathize.
The free and rational market wins again!
Maybe he shoulda talked to the people he bought the house from instead of level 1 sales drone. Hell, even looking at the house he should have seen if there was coax in place or not.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Dude lives in the middle of nowhere. There's nothing wrong with Comcast not offering him service, there's something wrong with them claiming they did when they didn't.
Additionally, the homeowner should have been more diligent that his home in the middle of nowhere, with no cable box, would actually have cable.
Internet over 4G really isn't that expensive, and that's what he uses now. I'm surprised that doesn't work for him.
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can you write into the house buying contract, the requirement for inet connectivity?
I know, no one does that; but maybe it needs to be done, from now on.
in my area, at least, comcast is a per month basis; so if a house sale was hinging on this, I guess I could -install- comcast, verify it in the empty house (sigh) and then move forward with the purchase.
sounds like a drag - and if the market is a seller's market, then your request is probably going to kick you out of the running (unless your offer is that much higher than the rest).
--
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It seems like the end game is peer-to-peer wireless.
Let's be clear on whose responsibility is whose. No one is forcing this guy to do *anything* and it's kind of a stretch to say that Comcast is forcing him to move out of his house. He bought and wants to live in a certain house, that has not yet been clearly shown to have internet service. Comcast is incompetent, and it's his choice on what to do about it.
The issue is not that he has to move out, it's that he doesn't have many cost effective options to get fast internet at his house. But he hasn't even exhausted all his options. Has he looked into contracting to extend a line tap? Has he tried satellite? Phone? Any other options? Many people and businesses operate in far more remote places where they manage to get connectivity.
Much as I hate Comcast, have a sense of objectivity here...
Seth’s work requires that he have a VPN connection. Unfortunately, the latency on satellite broadband is so high that most residential-level service providers won’t guarantee that customers can access VPNs. So satellite might get TV and some Internet into Seth’s home, but not into his home office. Thus, strike ViaSat from the above list.
That is an absolutely absurd statement. I am a software engineer and have no broadband where I live. We knew years ago when we purchased the land it would be awhile before broadband came to us. I can do about 90% of my work over satellite. Latency is 650ms-750ms on average through VPN connectivity. There is minimal packet loss. Putty is annoying but still usable. VNC and X are unusable over satellite, I'll grant that - here's an alternative, use remote desktop into a Windows box and use X or VNC from the Windows box to whatever box you need to get into. Skype and most forms of screensharing work fine. Some of the AJAX heavy stuff does get annoying, remote into the Windows box as a workaround and pull it up in the browser there. For the 10% of my job where satellite won't cut it, I'll turn my cell phone into a hotspot and use the 3G/LTE signal from it. What exactly is the problem here that's forcing him to sell the home?
The comment about the broadband map is indeed correct. We were listed for years as having broadband. We didn't have it. Getting the broadmap map updated is not easy. It took a lot of discussion (and voting) with local county commissioners but finally happened. Lo and behold, we had a small teclo interested in deploying fiber to our area because, hey, they realized we are underseved and there's a significant business opportunity for them. ETA for fiber deployment - this summer. Thank you rtmc.net and local constituents for raising your voice to county commissioners.
For those curious, there are a few high-income neighborhoods with large lots that makes it worthwhile for the small telco to deploy fiber in an otherwise mostly rural area. They are not deploying everywhere - we were told there needed to be 1 customer every 1000 feet to make the business case.
I know, I would have called every cable company, a team of twenty engineers, my local senator... Hell I would have spent a good 7 months researching if the house I was going to move into had broadband! In fact, I better make sure the house has pipes too... I wonder how much it costs to dig out around the whole foundation and make sure the entire thing is sitting level? Screw it, better just demo the entire house in case anything is wrong and build it from scratch... anything less is your own fault for being a 'trustafarian', right?
I can't fucking stand kids on the internet anymore.
Glad their marketing works on you, the infrastructure is identical between their Cable and Business divisions.
Don't recall him saying much about the infrastructure, it was more about the service - the simple fact is that the service is very different between the two tiers, which is really more important - I don't care if the network is amazingly fast, if it's fast enough that's fine. But I do care VERY VERY MUCH if it's out during the day and need a rapid, informed response on the other end of the support line to figure out why there is an outage.
Also not sure why a 'Developer' would be qualified to judge the quality of an ISP.
That's because a develop who works a lot at home is also a sysadmin. They probably have a few systems, they probably know a lot more about networking than some guy just trying to get cable.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If wired broadband internet is a critical feature of any house you buy, verify before you buy.
What verification steps can you possibly take beyond what he did? Hack into their computers to determine if there really had been service at that address?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Yes, the middle of nowhere. (I live in Kitsap County as well.) That average is misleading because most of the people are concentrated in one of three major 'metro' areas, much of the county is low density or practically empty. (And he lives in one of the low density areas, in an area which county residents regard as being 'backwoods'.)
Internet over 4G really isn't that expensive
In what way is $5 per GB not "that expensive"?
It is very cheap in comparison to the cost of selling his house.
But they're already there. The maps site says there are a lot of internet services. All but two are "too expensive", but the map site doesn't rate service by cost, just availability.
By that measure, there is 100% gigabit coverage in the united states by virtue of the fact that all you have to do is run your own fiber (or pay someone to do it) to the nearest backbone location, and the owner of that blockhouse will be happy to jack you in (for a gigantic monthly fee). Where there is money, it can and will be done. The only question is how much money.
The point of the FCC regulations is that there should be broadband access for *all* Americans, not just the ones that can afford to lay out $1M in upfront costs and $10k / month... Sites like the broadband finder sites are there for one of two reasons: A political entity trying to demonstrate that they are in fact getting the broadband that they were elected / appointed to create, or by industry leaders wishing to demonstrate why there is no need for further regulation / and or that industry regulation is being met.
I've used that same site, and according to it, there are 7 providers in my area. Of those, two are 4G wireless at $5 / gigabyte, my bill last month would have been $935. 2 are DSL which meet the old definition of broadband at 1.8 Mbit. 1 is Time Warner that offers up to 75 Mbit, but has only ever been able to get 50 working where I am. 1 is Verizon Fios, which cant seem to figure out where my house is (those people are idiots). They would be great for my needs, but cant figure out how to get the signal from their fiber (that runs less than 30 feet from my house), to my house. and 1 is a provider that services a county 20 miles away, The county I live in has over 4,000 residents per sq mile, and I am in one of the more densely populated parts of the county.
The FCC needs to change their measure of availability to include cost / GB, uptime, and cost per Gb. They should only be allowed to say that an area has coverage if it has 99% uptime, 10 Mb, and costs less than $100 / month. reasonable usage (which in this age has to include about 2 hours of netflix / day). I would say that 150GB is not unreasonable usage per month.
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