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Trump's FCC Votes To Allow Broadband Rate Hikes Will Deprive More Public Schools From Getting Internet Access (theoutline.com)
The FCC voted on Thursday to approve a controversial plan to deregulate the $45 billion market for business-to-business broadband, also known as Business Data Services (BDS), by eliminating price caps that make internet access more affordable for thousands of small businesses, schools, libraries and hospitals. The Outline adds: The price caps were designed to keep phone and, later, broadband, access cheap for community institutions like schools, hospitals, libraries, and small businesses. Now, there will be no limit. A spokesperson for the trade association Incompas, which advocates for competition among communications providers, told The Outline that the increase is expected to be at least 25 percent across the board. Low-income schools already don't have enough money; according to a report last year in The Atlantic, schools in high-poverty districts, where the property taxes are lower, spend 15.6 percent less per student than schools in low-poverty districts. If internet costs go up by 25 percent, it may make more sense to cut that budget item, or, for schools that still don't have internet, never add it at all. Add it to the list of things that well-funded schools in already-rich neighborhoods get that schools in low-income neighborhoods don't. New textbooks. Gyms. Advanced Placement classes that let students earn college credits. Computers. Internet access.
I can feel America returning to greatness at breakneck pace...
Trump is very consistent and clear in whom he serves and it's not the working class. Once again, making money for his friends at the expense of us all. Wonder what's next in his mad run to basically allow infinite inflation of essential services. (And yes, the Internet is basically an essential service, like electricity: you can "live" without it, but getting what we consider essential services because a challenge without it)
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
In our area, the broadband providers are required to provide internet access to schools (both public and private) and libraries for FREE as part of the agreements with the municipality. Sounds like the other municipalities need to do a better job of negotiating.
Most schools give lip service to spending money on reducing class sizes and getting Internet access. But when it comes to replacing the football field, the money can always be found for new football fields. When my parents retired to Sacramento in the mid-1990's, my father drove me around the county. He pointed out all the schools that didn't have money to reduce class sizes (the Internet was still "new" back then) but had the money to build a new football field. If one school was replacing their football field, all the schools had to replace their football field. Can't have schools lagging in important priorities.
Actually.. the markets work when there is sufficient competition to drive down costs... But basically as we continue to consolidate... (in most cases, there is only ONE provider of service in a given area), there is ZERO competition (or zero meaningful competition). And in today's tech landscape, its not like internet is a "toy" that can be easily dismissed unlike say "cable TV" in which there are over the air options (for now). Basically the landscape is coming back to the old "ma bell" days of "this is the price, and suck it because where else will you go"?
God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board -- Mark Twain Look for http://Thebar.steelbeachca
President Trump is right to reevaluate, and clean up where necessary, regulation that has caused disruptions to economic markets.
It's well known at this point that price caps cause market distortions, which directly lead to a non-optimal allocation of resources.
When I hear about things like "high-poverty districts", these are usually formed because of price caps (on the price of rent) or some other market-distorting regulation that has prevented the investment that would otherwise take place from taking place in these areas.
Let's take rent control as a simple example. Imposing these distortions removes the incentive for landlords to maintain and improve their properties. When this happens, the wealthier people eventually move away to better properties, leaving only the impoverished who can't move. They often can't, or don't, pay rent, which again hurts the landlords. The landlords who do remain will become slumlords. Others will just abandon their properties, or worse, destroy them to collect at least some insurance reimbursement. The end result is that "high-poverty districts" form, and stay like that until the economic distortion that caused them to be formed is removed.
Another example is minimum wage floors. These make it prohibitive for businesses to start, and make it harder for existing businesses to continue remaining viable. These also help create "high-poverty districts", because there are fewer jobs than there naturally would be if labor didn't need to be paid artificially high wages.
Given how we universally see price caps and wage floors causing severe and disruptive economic distortions everywhere else, there's no reason to expect broadband Internet to be any different. Price caps there are no doubt leading to all sorts of market inefficiencies, and these can't be cleared up overnight. The pain being felt in the short term would be thanks to imposing these caps in the first place, and causing the economic distortions that now have to be undone.
School: We can't afford the higher prices for internet access.
Verizon/Comcast: What if we keep the old price and Abraham Lincoln High becomes Abraham Lincoln High (sponsored by Verizon/Comcast)? And the gym is now called the Verizon/Comcast Center. And if you could include our company in your math problems, that would be great.
School: That's a little much, isn't it?
Verizon/Comcast: You could always go without internet.
School: Shit.
This is what everybody wanted right? right!?
If by "everybody" you mean 46.1% of the popular vote (to Hillary's 48.2%), then sure.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Trump the new Robber Baron, taking from the poor and giving to the already rich.
so much for his promises on the campaign trail....
But he's gonna build that wall so everything will be all right.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
The property business was getting too complex. So now it's clearer to invest in properties where the good neighborhood will mean prospective owners will care that their children have internet access on their school.
its going up by a 25%, not a quarter.
Example (I can't speak for all schools).. but in NY, a medium sized HS pays approx. 210K annually for Internet access and support. (based on today's rates.. that number should be, based on market rate, closer to 300-350K). (smaller schools will pay less (depending on region and bandwidth), and larger schools pay more.).
210,000 x 25% = 262,500 (or 52K more).. Now in the grand scheme of things... that may not SOUND like a lot, but 52K on a small (and increasingly smaller) budget means schools have some very hard choices.. (drop it in favour of other programs which may make it less effective for today's student, etc...). And keep in mind, with no cap, prices CAN go as high as they want (of course there is a point of you "kill the host").. but making them bleed to death is not going to benefit anyone either (but remember, they don't like public schools.. so none of this is really surprising)..
Put in charge of education, someone that wants to see public education gone.
Deprive it of federal funds
Use the FCC to remove pricing caps which allow for more expense (notice, available funds have gone down).
Use the decline in quality as "proof" of why public schools should be abandoned..
Rinse and repeat until the problem goes away on its own.. or parents (en mass) vote to eliminate it.
God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board -- Mark Twain Look for http://Thebar.steelbeachca
Kids don't need internet. They will have great new jobs working in the revived coal mines.
We'll have to check back in a few months and see if the prices actually rise or not...but those price caps were put in place for a reason and I doubt much has changed in terms of ISP competition since they were, so I know where I'm placing my bets.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Remember the times? The 60s? 70s?
I thought it was [16|17|18|19]50's that made America great?
This is what everybody wanted right? right!?
Hmm. I sometimes wonder. Nobody I know admits to voting for him. In the deeply Red state of Alaska.
That's not precisely true. The couple of maniacs that run around with their beat up pickups festooned with NRA and Sarah Palin bumper stickers will still admit to it, but no one else.
I wonder what happened?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Hmm. I sometimes wonder. Nobody I know admits to voting for him. ...I wonder what happened?
Reality.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Verizon could issue more stock to bring in more money, just like Tesla does.
As a technology director for a public K-12 school, I'm very concerned about what I'm reading in the headline. But the "article" is an extremely biased report, citing just as equally biased an article, and neither article really gives me a clue as to what's going on here.
So, let's start at the source: Here is the actual FCC draft order specific to this change. Now, in the course of working on and completing E-Rate filings with the USAC to receive reimbursement for internet and network services for our school district, I've read a few 60-70 page FCC reports before. They're not fun, but they're necessary. That being said, I'm about 20 pages in, and already I'm disturbed. Here's why:
FCC reports that I've read in the past are boring, dry reads, but at least they're factual and unbiased. Not so with this one. Three sentences in, and we get this: "The FCC has historically subjected the provision of business data services by incumbent local exchange carriers (LECs) to price regulations." And the spin continues..."eases the regulatory burdens"; "spur entry, innovation and competition in the vibrant business data services market"; "competition is robust and vigorous in the markets." And this is still just the first page. The draft order is littered with biased political spin, something that has not been present in my reading of previous FCC draft orders. Because of this, I can't even depend on a government document to give me an unbiased report of the rationale behind the decision, nor can I depend on it to help me determine what the consequences of the decision will be. So, I'll have to create my own... here goes.
Local Exchange Carrier (LEC) price regulations have been there historically specifically to protect subscribers from LECs that had monopoly or near-monopoly controls over their service regions. Most regions throughout the United States historically were not served by competitive broadband providers. Recently, this has begun to change, where some communities now have competitive service providers come in, giving subscribers a choice. The FCC began to look into this issue back in 2012, before Trump. According to the report, "In December 2012, the Commission released the Data Collection Order FNPRM, to collect data, analyze how competition, “whether actual or potential, affects prices, controlling for all other factors that affect prices,” and “determine what barriers inhibit investment and delay competition, including regulatory barriers." By not controlling pricing, the FCC claims in its report that LECs will no longer be limited entry into a potential market, where capped rates would not allow for a sufficient recovery of the investment necessary to build into a new market area.
But, here's the flaw in their reasoning: trenching fiber costs a lot of money. A lot. If service provider A already has fiber, service provider B is not going to install fiber if it does not believe that it can earn back their investment in a reasonable amount of time. Even if prices are artificially inflated by provider A, just because they can, if provider B tries to compete and trenches their own fiber network, both A and B know that A can lower its rates to a competitive level to drive out provider B. So, B has no incentive to trench, leaving A with the monopoly.
The easiest solution: make internet a utility. It's silly to think that it's a smart idea to run multiple fiber lines to a building. (I should know; our school has two of them, and both are dark.) It would be just as silly to have multiple electric taps, or multiple water pipes. But, that's not happening anytime
I'm just going to point out that the public schools in poor districts who supposedly "never got Internet yet" OR are supposedly in real need of reduced cost Internet broadband because they can't afford to pay the "going rate" for it are, indeed, PUBLIC schools.
When you hear about our failing school systems and those pushing to allow tax dollars to fund sending their kids to private alternatives via a voucher system of some sort -- this is a good example of why. Any government run public school that's so bad off, it still hasn't even obtained Internet access is a FAILURE. It doesn't need subsidized broadband to fix it. It need to be completely gutted and overhauled! Tax dollars pay for everything it does already. If that's not sufficient to pay its bills for things like its Internet connection, then it's not really viable.
Ruining kids' lives in order to collect pension checks seems to be a high priority for government schools these days.
As if private and/or religious schools don't have their own set of problems.
To be accurate, the cost increase is for Special Access Lines. This just covers the transport portion of the cost, and it's only for areas that aren't already served by existing infrastructure.
As an example, if you're in an area that there is no form of existing infrastructure to reach your site at the desired data rate, like some place remote enough that existing copper won't support even T1s, then the telco is allowed to charge it as a special access line. If the service is already in the region, nope, standard rates apply, telco is not allowed to charge Special Access rates. So let's say the special access line itself costs $300 a month. And the actual internet service on top of that is $200 a month for whatever you've contracted for. Now the line cost is estimated to go up by 25%, so from $300 to $375, but the service itself hasn't changed, so the total is now $575. That works out to about a 9% increase overall, not the 25% across the board doomsday scenario described above.
Also note this only applies to the incumbent ILEC, AFAIK there has never been any such restriction on cable cos, etc. They wanna charge three arms and twice as many matching legs to run coax 5' to 'reach' a new site, it's always been allowed.
The Bell System wasn't "deregulated", it was broken up by anti-trust REGULATIONS because it was a monopoly. Long-distance prices decreased and local service fees increased.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Installing fiber isn't that expensive. I live in a semi-rural area several miles outside of the nearest small town, and 25 miles from the nearest big town, ~50 miles from a city, and ~100 miles from a major metro area. And I have three fiber pedestals near my house, from two different cable companies.
If you don't have two cable plants in your area you either have a political problem, or an opportunity.
The city near me has a political problem. The cable company I get my fiber connection from has their plans drawn up and investment secured to go into that city. They want to invest millions of dollars to install a totally parallel cable plant there, but the politicians keep blocking it, letting the current cable company maintain their monopoly - and charging residents about 50% more than what I'm paying.
What is your problem? Do you need to turn out the crooks on your city council? Or do you need to find investors so that you can build your own fiber ISP?
Because your line about it being too expensive to install a second system is absolute bullshit. That is the bullshit excuse that people use when they want to deflect attention away from their government granted monopoly, and no offense, but people like you repeating it without checking it out critically is not helping anyone.
See that "Preview" button?
As the Department Store of Edumercation said, "Who needs wirrless?"
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I voted for him. I got what I wanted too. I got a SC Justice appointed, maybe one or two more on the way, and Hillary Clinton isn't appointing any of those. I have to admit that I thought we'd have sent Trump packing for Pence by now but otherwise I'm great with it. This is hilarious and I'm starting to think that I hope this show gets renewed for another 4 seasons. Funniest 91 days on TV I can remember in a long time.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Not to worry. Once all the school vouchers are issued nobody (that matters) is going to be attending that school anyway right?
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Installing fiber isn't that expensive. I live in a semi-rural area several miles outside of the nearest small town, and 25 miles from the nearest big town, ~50 miles from a city, and ~100 miles from a major metro area. And I have three fiber pedestals near my house, from two different cable companies.
Nice anecdote. By the way, have you ever trenched fiber for a local telecom? It's not cheap. Two minutes of Google searching gave me this neat data. A couple installs in Florida ran about $10,000 per mile back in 2013. Let's use that as a base cost. Wikipedia then tells me that Google needed 4,000 miles of fiber to setup in San Antonio. So, $40 million dollars, just for one city. And if there already was one or two other providers there offering services, able to price-cut their services to maintain their subscriber base, that would give me even less reason to start breaking ground.
I've spoken with two different telecoms about their fiber install over the last five years. Both of them say that there's a substantial initial investment, just to develop a core community of subscribers, which then provides the profits necessary to branch out into neighboring territories, especially in rural areas. (Both teleco's said that rural areas don't turn a profit. The urban areas subsidize the costs.)
No, it is expensive.
It may surprise you to know this, AC, but:
- A "medium sized" high school may be 2000 students, 100ish staff. So that's 2100 people accessing a network. A 2100 person business isn't going to have one 20 mbps line. Heck, nowadays a 20 mbps line can be barely adequate for family use -- one HD youtube stream can consume 4.5 mbps alone. You are going to bring that to its knees if you have 2100 people sharing it.
- Students access web sites like wikipedia, news sites and other curriculum related sites. These are by no means text based websites. Any professional site is going to be loading up a lot more than text.
- Students taking programming or web design classes are largely using the same tools, sites, resources and references that professional programmers and web designers use. They aren't teaching BASIC and Logo on Commodores and Apple IIs with floppies or tape drive anymore. Kids are learning Java, Photoshop, etc and are looking up problems on Stack Overflow and such.
- Plenty of curriculum-related apps are cloud-based. My daughter's school uses iPads and they are an essential part of the curriculum. She can access assignments, grades, calendars, etc all from her tablet (and as her parents, we can, too). I don't know how much those apps consume but even 20-30 kids in a classroom are going to be hitting a server somewhere.
- OP also included "support". How much is your salary? How many users do you support? How much do switches, routers, wifi access points that will support 2100 users cost? How long do they last before they need an upgrade? It's not like they throw up a Linksys and call it a day. It's also not something you can expect a teacher or admin assistant to do, as there are security and privacy issues that need to be maintained, in addition to web filtering for appropriate sites, etc.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...then we should pay for it through publicly raised taxes and published budgets. Then at least it's visible and transparent.
Subsidizing schools by setting price ceilings only obscures the issue and transfers the cost on the ISP's shareholders, employees, and other customers. I don't see why any of them should pay extra to support schools.
Others have commented about shrinking school budgets. We're paying something north of 2.5x as much per student today versus 1970 (adjusted for inflation, e.g. here). I don't know where the money is going but it doesn't seem to be flowing down to the classroom. That's a good issue to get irate about but it has nothing to do with ISP pricing.
My daugher's school uses iPads for pretty much every subject. Twentyish kids in each class, 1000 in the school building (2 grades). Each kid has an iPad and it's connected to wifi when the kids are in class. Town has a population of 35K. The iPads are on all the time and used all day for every lesson. Our high school has about 2000 kids with iPads. Plus desktop computers and laptops used by the staff. We are not a wealthy district, either. We aren't dirt poor but we are not even top ten in the state for things like house prices / median income -- we are pretty much right on the median for the state.
Even at the level you suggest of simultaneous access (560), AC/OP's suggestion of a 20 Mbps cable modem shared would fall over, too. Not to mention putting in the infrastucture to provide wifi to each classroom and salary for network/IT admin.
So even in my example, not everyone is accessing simultaneously (much like a business) but my point still stands -- a 20 Mbps line might have been sufficient for a business 10-15 years ago but those days are long past. A school isn't going to have *exactly* the same demands as a 2000 person business but it's not going to have what would be considered crappy household Internet, either. Plus paying the people to run it. I'd expect people on Slashdot to understand that supporting a network with 2000+ users (or more if you support a whole district) plus desktops, laptops and tablets is not something someone can take on in their spare time and using 20 Mbps internet.
I don't know what the record for comma use in a short blurb is, but this must be close. Hopefully the FCC is getting a cut of that extra profit so they can hire an editor...
As someone who experienced the 70s, Ronald Reagan was elected based on convincing the voters that that economically the 70's were pretty damn bad.
I remember "Stagflation" and price controls because inflation was rampant.
It's exactly two dimes and a nickel. Has the penny dropped yet?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So because government regulations have distorted the market, we need to have yet another layer of government regulations to keep the market from being distorted? It's regulatory turtles all the way down.
Price caps = reduction in supply. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say because supply has been reduced, we need price caps. If anything, the economics argues for precisely the opposite. How do you expect competition to exist if there are price caps? With price caps, you're basically legislating reduced supply and competition only to provide the crappiest service possible for legislated price.
Don't even get me started on local government franchise monopolies....
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
So only 90% of Alaskans, then?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So.. this "balanced" article is claiming that removing price caps won't result in price increases because.. competition? If that was really the case then why would they care about the price caps in the first place -- they should already be well under them if competition was the driving force.
Never mind the fact that we're talking about one of the least competitive markets in the country. Sure critics "subdivide" the market -- based on the service areas defined by where those companies serve. Its not competition if Comcast is your only option in Memphis and Verizon is your only option in Nashville (and no I have no idea who serves those two cities in reality, its just an example. Pick whatever two districts you like as long as they're far enough apart that the nearest "competitor" isn't actually plausible competition. Shouldn't be too hard, especially if you head into smaller towns or rural areas.)
They really really struggled during The Great Recession. Come on people have a heart. Take pity on these poor souls, just look at their stock performance over the past 10 years:
Comcast
AT&T
We really should have a social safety net for these little guys. Whaddya say folks? Have a heart!
We'll make great pets
My article presented other sides. The original presented only one.
How is that not less biased? Please do explain to all of us how one is greater than two.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When voting becomes an online-only activity, guess which party stays in power.
OMG, really? Sounds like the same fallacy that suggests its an undue burden to have any kind of govt ID, but it's no problem whatsoever to show up to vote. Don't worry, if Trump doesn't stop the non-stop amateur hour stuff, you'll get the WH back in 2020. Repubs won't be able to run anyone against the incumbent president, so all the left has to do is not run Charles Manson, Elizabeth Warren or Hillary Clinton -- unless the administration starts explaining themselves, slow down the flip-flops, remember that just a bit over half the country voted for the other guy, and look up what spin means and why politicians should give a crap enough to use it (Republicans never tell their story well).
WHAT YEAR IS IT!?!
Seriously, what is going on?