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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.
It isn't a free market if state laws restrict who can do business with whom. Remove those laws and the free market would push Comcast right out the door.
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.
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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.
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The problem are rate rules. The cable company is not allowed to charge more for cable runs to distant customers. Those rate rules mean that they can't charge more to recoup their investment for cable runs that are expensive to put in.
I was about 1000 ft from the nearest cable access after I built my house and the cable company wouldn't build out down my rural road for that reason.
The solution was simply to pay an installer to have my own line run.
It was expensive -- just under $3/foot, and there's no way a cable company is going to pay $3000 to hook up one customer for $30/month internet access. It will take years just to make back that $3000.
I was lucky to get someone at the company that could find a solution for me, but I don't think a typical customer service rep is going to bother.
Another problem are price controls.
Often the local franchise authority (set up by the city or state or county) sets prices for services.
If the price is set too low, then the cable company can't legally charge enough to pay for the infrastructure to reach certain customers, even if those customers are willing to pay more to get service.
Remove those laws and the free market would push Comcast right out the door.
Unfortunately, infrastructure doesn't work the same way as other businesses. Those laws are an impediment, but they're definitely not the thing that when removed will create a surge of new providers.
You proceed from a false assumption. Many cable companies (Comcast is one of them) hire other companies to do their cable runs.
So providers shouldn't provide services to black people, because they make poor customers when you make then eat in the alley?
Or phone and electric were built to serve all, even in a particular customer was served for a loss, so why do you think that Internet is less of a fundamental service than electricity or roads or water or phone?
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This. Hoarding of wealth. Keeping profits at the top. Bad for the economy, bad for everyone else but the people at the top.
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'.)
They were independent contractors hired by Comcast with a Contract requirement that they badge their trucks and wear Comcast shirts. Comcast supplies the materials, there is an advantage to labeled conduit in that people digging utility test holes can easily identify the owner.
Yes Liability insurance can be purchased, and probably even cover 90% of accidents. Large companies choose to hire independents because if the independent contractor makes a mistake the small company can declare bankruptcy and clear all the liability while Comcast isn't material affected. No for profit company of Comcast's size would EVER dig in a utility with their own forces. It's economic suicide and the insurance they would need to purchase to cover them for all possible incidents would be so prohibitively expensive to basically make it impossible to build anything at all.
I ran into a utility once where the costs for any contractor that dug up and cut the utility were about $46K per minute the line was out of service. This was a cross country fiber with multiple strands. At the time, splicing a single fiber required a clean room standards and about 6 hours of time to cut, polish and splice the strand. The line was literally in the middle of no where, as is frequently the case it's more likely to run into these types of utilities in rural areas. Consider the cost of a break that took out all the strands where the fastest response time would be about 2 hours and that's just to locate the break, determine how bad it is and dispatch the repair crew. Then the repair crew has to dig up the line, make clean cuts, setup a clean room tent around the break and then splice all the fibers. Though communication cables can have some of the highest repair costs there are plenty of other utilities that a break can trigger other catastrophic damage including the loss of life. What does it cost if you cut a gas line and you end up killing an entire family, how about a whole neighborhood of families? What about the costs if you cut a high pressure oil line, kill several people in the process and poison the land and water for several thousand people?
No, Comcast uses contractors for anything that requires digging, and I have no doubt it's company policy. They more than likely use their own forces to pull the cables once the conduit is installed but they do NOT dig anything with their own forces that's not an emergency (and I have big doubts they would even do it in emergency, they retain contracts for emergency work for that just like everyone else).
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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Actually, poor people can be extremely *profitable* customers, precisely because they have so few options available, they're often forced to obtain goods/services at *profoundly* higher total costs. Being poor is expensive. Someone with a SUV who makes $100k/year can buy Charmin Ultra by the pallet at Sam's Club for a fraction of what someone who lives in a poor neighborhood, doesn't own a car, and has to buy toilet paper by the single roll from 7-11 (because the nearest real grocery store is more than a mile away, and getting there by bus would probably take an hour each way when you factor in waiting times and infrequent service) ends up paying.
Ditto, for things like appliances. You & I can buy appliances somewhere like Costco & haul them home with help from a friend or two in somebody's pickup truck... and probably pay just a few hundred dollars for them. Someone living paycheck to paycheck, by contrast, might end up paying $2,400 for a $500 refrigerator because he can't afford $500 up front, but can (hopefully) scrape $25/week for 8 years (with substantial penalties & additional fees piled on top if his income falters at any point during those 8 years).
Even when you factor bad debt that never officially gets paid in full, the poor are staggeringly profitable because the seller has usually broken even on his hard wholesale costs by the third or fourth month, and everything past that point is pure gravy.