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US Broadband: Still No ISP Choice For Many, Especially at Higher Speeds (arstechnica.com)
Despite things getting better with adoption -- however slow -- of Google Fiber in several regions of the United States, the broadband market has gotten slightly less competitive since 2013, says a new report from the FCC. The report adds that, as a result, Americans still have little choice of high-speed broadband providers (PDF). From an ArsTechnica report: At the FCC's 25Mbps download/3Mbps upload broadband standard, there are no ISPs at all in 30 percent of developed census blocks and only one offering service that fast in 48 percent of the blocks. About 55 percent of census blocks have no 100Mbps/10Mbps providers, and only about 10 percent have multiple options at that speed. At the 10Mbps/1Mbps threshold -- which captures slower DSL technology in addition to cable and fiber -- about 90 percent of census blocks have at least two providers. These numbers exclude satellite, which is available nearly everywhere but has high latency and often low data caps. Even these numbers overstate the amount of competition, because an ISP might offer service to only part of a census block. The percentage of households with choice is thus even lower.
Should they expand? Expanding into an area with no high speed internet is more profitable than competing with an existing one.
There's a good reason for this - broadband infrastructure is crazy expensive to build. Some of the incumbents received big government subsidies to build their systems, but those days are gone and new companies can't compete. If they stole customers from the incumbents everyone would go bankrupt because nobody can afford to build these systems and only pick up a fraction of the homes passed as customers. We need to have the government build the infrastructure once, and then lease space on it to any ISP who wants to compete. It's the only way that makes any sense and the only way that will ever allow any form of competition in this space.
And the reasons cannot be more obvious. I needn't say anything more.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Most of North Georgia has one provider - Windstream. Between regular days-long (yes, days-long) outages, slow crappy DSLAMs and high prices, it's like a third-world here for internet.
With Google Fiber coming to areas in Utah, it's interesting to see Comcast start to push heavy contracts but at a discounted price. I think they want to make sure that people are at least locked in from changing to Google Fiber for a couple of years. Seems like a last-ditch effort to protect market share in the face of an obviously much superior competitor.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
Competing for two million customers in Queens (where there is one existing provider) would be much more profitable than expanding to underserved areas of New York state, such as parts of Hamilton County. Most underserved areas are underserved precisely BECAUSE they are unprofitable.
However, it's ILLEGAL to compete by bringing faster service to Queens. The franchise board assigns each neighborhood to a single provider. The map of assigned providers is gerrymandered in weird ways, too. A company might be allowed to serve 110th street and 112th street, but not 111rh.
as in this foul year of our lord 2016 bandwidth is apparently as limited as rations during the great war, Ive a few tips to preserve what little interactivity many of us have with the internet.
1. use adblock and noscript to prevent wasteful and potentially dangerous content from hijacking your limited resources.
2. null-route known advertisement servers. in a traditional model of internet access, content is sponsored and supplemented with advertisements. However, due to Americas constrained bandwidth and limited access to choice of provider many will have to go without advertisements. These servers are simply too wasteful and prevent a timely rendering of normal content.
3. Use torrents as they maximize efficient and quick access to content. netflix may fail to properly render, and other streaming services may include advertising content thats simply too costly to render for american internet users. Whereas torrents can be downloaded and stored for repeat access without delay or cap.
4. Make sure to avoid cloud services that can require access to high bandwidth internet that might not be available in your market.
Good people go to bed earlier.
If you're providing only wireless service, that means cell towers and crowded radio spectrum. The phone companies are already doing this, so expanding from 3G to 4G to 5G is basically a hardware upgrade at designated points (unless someone tries WiMax 2.0).
Cable companies spent *decades* building out coax networks, and then 20 more years upgrading to digital cable (ie, fiber to area). Most fiber in use nowadays still goes over fiber that was laid down (or over paths that were originally built out) during the dot com era, the creation of which led to many of those companies' bankruptcy. Speaking of dot com, we tried the ILEC sells circuits to CO-provider which is resold by an ISP to provide consumer competition market and it collapsed along with everything else back then. (Thanks, COVAD.)
So aside from wireless upgrades, everything else requires a last mile physical path to homes. New homes can be built with whatever in an urban or suburban area, but existing homes outside of downtown cores, and rural homes of any type, don't justify additional, non-unified wireline build-outs for the cost. If you're hitting 25Mbps, you should ask yourself how much more you're willing to pay to go up to 50 or 100Mbps. Then, add in all of your neighbors and divide by the cost of the build-out. If the math doesn't work, you won't get it. If the math does work, a local provider should step in. If no one steps in, go to a bank and do it yourself and make a profit.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
It's not illegal at all - how do you think Verizon is rolling out FiOS? If you wanted to launch the Raymorris Cable Company, and deploy service in NYC, you could certainly do so, provided you (a) could show you had sufficient financial backing to be a viable concern, and (b) agreed to cover at least a large portion of the city, if not all, and weren't just going to cherry-pick affluent neighborhoods.
Gotta love the Randians and their inability to grasp the concept of natural monopoly.
The ISP stuff is less capital intensive, you just need permission to run cables out to a location
You're forgetting the "minor" step of actually running those cables. That "minor" step is why the incumbent has a natural monopoly and zero competition in most places.
However, it's ILLEGAL for franchise contracts to establish geographical monopolies, since the Telecommunication Act of 1996.
What the real problem is, is that installing wires takes millions of dollars, and modern capitalists can't invest that much capital without an ROI measured in quarters or their stock takes a dive. Thus we have Google (who has billions of dollars in spare change lying around) doing installs, and even then they're only doing it where they can get concessions on right-of-ways to keep the cost down.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Exactly this.
I get tired of hearing that $municipality has given a particular vendor a monopoly on cable TV/Internet. It simply isn't true. This has been illegal for 20 years, but still the myth persists.
Then how comes that we over here in socialist commie pinko Europe routinely get speeds in the 50/10 ballpark even in remote rural areas with like 10 huts, a church and a place to get wasted on the weekends?
When I read that the FCC considers 25/3 "broadband" I had to check whether the posting is current or whether the /. database barfed and smuggled a post from 1999 into the feed.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's not illegal at all - how do you think Verizon is rolling out FiOS? If you wanted to launch the Raymorris Cable Company, and deploy service in NYC, you could certainly do so, provided you (a) could show you had sufficient financial backing to be a viable concern, and (b) agreed to cover at least a large portion of the city, if not all, and weren't just going to cherry-pick affluent neighborhoods.
Oh, you mean like Google, who is being fought at every turn, by incumbent carriers as it seeks to expand into those underserved markets. I'll say it, Internet service is a utility. It should be treated as such and regulated as such. There a many ways to do this, some better than others. If we look at electricity, for example, the public utility model is demonstrably the best. The operators of the utility are beholden to the ratepayers/electorate, not stockholders, and that makes all the difference in the world.
This separation can also fix network neutrality issues without difficult to enforce regulations. If you are free to jump from ISP to ISP, you can change providers easily.
If you don't think this is viable, think about when we used to use dial-up. You bought your pipe from one company, and Internet access from another. If your ISP didn't treat you well, you simply dialed another provider via the independent pipe.
Sure, they're not exactly taking over, but they have helped expose some of the lies. For example, the ISPs would have us believe they're absolutely gutted that they can't possibly offer faster connections or raise their data caps even one iota or they'll go broke. Then as soon as Google announces their expansion into the area, the laws of physics change and they start offering an order of magnitude faster connections and triple the data limit.
Franchise agreements - look it up sometime. And yes established ISPs work against new ISPs from entering. Again look up Google and AT&T and Verizon. Moron.
The 1996 Act says that a city may not *unreasonably* grant *new* exclusive monopolies *if* the new competitor will be offering the exact same service under the exact same terms, and the new change will not impact (huge list of excuses).
A great example is New York City. One company has a franchise for one side of the street, the other gets the other side, with no overlap allowed.
The cable companies wrote into the law a huge number of number of ways to maintain exclusive monopolies. Here's one obvious and stupid example. The prohibition only applies if the competitor agrees to offer the same service as the existing service - TWC has the Sprout Channel, the potential competitor has Disney Junior; not the same service, it can be denied.