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Cable Lobby Tries To Stop State Investigations Into Slow Broadband (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Broadband industry lobby groups want to stop individual states from investigating the speed claims made by Internet service providers, and they are citing the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules in their effort to hinder the state-level actions. The industry attempt to undercut state investigations comes a few months after New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman filed a lawsuit against Charter and its Time Warner Cable (TWC) subsidiary that claims the ISP defrauded and misled New Yorkers by promising Internet speeds the company knew it could not deliver. NCTA-The Internet & Television Association and USTelecom, lobby groups for the cable and telecom industries, last month petitioned the Federal Communications Commission for a declaratory ruling that would help ISPs defend themselves against state-level investigations. The FCC should declare that advertisements of speeds "up to" a certain level of megabits per second are consistent with federal law as long as ISPs meet their disclosure obligations under the net neutrality rules, the groups said. There should be a national standard enforced by the FCC instead of a state-by-state "patchwork of inconsistent requirements," they argue. Another cable lobby group, the American Cable Association (ACA), asked the FCC to approve the petition in a filing on Friday. An FCC ruling in favor of the petition wouldn't completely prevent states from filing lawsuits, but such a ruling would make it far more difficult for the states to protect consumers from false speed claims.
...we only have dialup. You know the story.
10 Gbps* for only $10/month and $100 hook-up fee
* Up to 10 Gbps
"Hey you promised 10 Gbps and now I've got no internet at all after I paid your hook-up fee."
"Sorry, sir. You should have read the terms more carefully."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
and they are citing the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules
In other words, they fought tooth and nail to stop or rollback net neutrality rules, but now want to cite those very same rules in an effort to force the federal government to take precedent over states.
And they wonder why they are consistently ranked at the bottom of customer satisfaction surveys.
So with Obama net neutrality not only did we not get non-prioritizations of traffic (actually net neutrality), which Verizon, T-Mobile, TWC and Charter still do - I should be more than comfortable streaming YouTube and Netflix on 20Mbps connections, we also didn't get anyone fixing their capacity problems as the lawsuits clearly show and now they get to hide behind the letter of the text AND keep their common carrier status?
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
The State Government isn't doing what you want them to do, lobbyists, the cure is to write out bigger checks.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Pay me $10 for UPTO 3 Lamborghinis.
Pay me $20 for UPTO ...
You want to advertise the term upto, you better demonstrate that number is a reasonable expectation for what you provide.
Otherwise, you are simply committing fraud.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
In commercial circles, the Commited Information Rate (CIR) is (or was) used to specify a transfer rate that the customer could always get. Its commited and not over subscribed. The model with Cable modems (and I guess FIOS etc) is not as easy to assure. Bandwidth is shared and .,. and the aggregate is what the ISP can, well, provide! So .. the CIR promise doesn't work when the service is overcommitted. But.. on super bowl day, will everyone be able to at a few Ultra high Def streams at the same time- or other hot news day for that matter. We all (ISP and users alike) need a new term that includes an expectation for minimal transfer rate, as well as a Peak Burst rate when its available. How about we call it CIR of 10 Mbps and a burst to 100 Mbps? Would that be acceptible to cable/Fios and end users?
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
It required ISPs to stop deliberately slowing down Netflix and Youtube unless they could double charge.
Which is why telco's spent $20 million buying Congressmen and Senators in this election cycle to kill it. They spent $20 million, because they can recoup that from their customers by selling access to them (which would simply be added to their bills indirectly).
I guess there's an election on because you're doing Obama talking points. I notice world leaders meeting Obama, and pushing back Trump meetings to afternoons, and all the Republicans obsessing about Obama.
IMHO, they should obsess over their own guy. He's not loyal to the USA, he won't think twice about screwing over them.
If a grocery store advertised 1kg of apples for say $2, but then when you bought some you discovered that you'd only been given 900g of apples, you would be within your rights to claim false advertising. If you could show that the same store consistently under-filled their bags of apples such that not one bag contained the advertised 1kg of fruit, that would be (close to) racketeering.
Yet telcos seem to think that because "complex stuff" [which isn't remotely complex, by the way], that this somehow exempts them from the obligation to advertise and charge fairly for their services.
It doesn't. They are crooks. They already use contention ratios of anything up to 50:1 to squeeze more revenue out of their existing cable infrastructure and now they want to hide what they are doing by being legally allowed to throttle bandwidth.
Crooks
...It is no different that the Auto manufacturers and MPG.. everything touts the maximum unachievable mileage.
Actually, every car I've ever owned I've been able to achieve more than the advertised highway MPG, well before the concept of hypermiling became popular, which I'm fairly certain if I adopted those tactics I could achieve it on a more consistent basis. When compared to ISPs, not even at 3AM could I consistently hit advertised speeds.
So lets make both advertized level with the penalty being the months payment ...
FCC needs to simply enforce a law that all ISPs should advertise a minimum speed and apply an SLA with a refund schedule for breaking the SLA. Maximum or "up to" speeds obviously don't mean jack shit anymore, and enforcing a minimum speed would more mirror how business-class services are enforced. Network congestion cannot be predicted, but enforcing a minimum standard would at least set expectations and force providers to maintain infrastructure to contracted levels.
they are lobbying to get rid of net neutrality.
The next day they are trying to use net neutrality as a shield against state-level laws.
This is corporate lobbying in a nutshell - they will both use and lobby against the exact same regulations depending on what is, today, most suitable to them.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
You thought, even for a moment, that a government legislation affecting the market would actually hurt big business? Why? Is that what you think usually happens?
Of course they fought it. It takes work and money to re-structure your company to compensate for new rules like that. However, in the end, any time you make more laws that restrict the freedom of buyers and sellers to freely exchange capital, somebody is going to try to use those rules to their advantage, and the winner will likely be the group with most capital and interest in directing that system. At the very least, the laws will create a further barrier to entry into the market, thus preventing competition, which is the one tool that would cause them to cater to their customers.
Expect to see more of this. At some point, people will get mad and they'll try to make more laws to stop this, and then these companies will re-structure to take advantage of those laws. At some point, people will get mad, and they'll convince the government to declare internet as a utility, and then these companies will gain government funding and become completely immune to customer complaints. What does customer satisfaction matter when there's no competition?
There are 10 commandments: 01)Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God 10)Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.Matt22:34-40
Where does the source file reside? I have symmetric 1Gbps fiber to my home.
Running speed tests I can hit 960-970Mbps. But on actual real downloads the numbers are much lower. Multiple connection download can hit close to limit, but a single connection will rarely hit over 100Mbps.
The connection to the local corporate office is usually at the specified speed unless it's a cable network that is massively oversubscribed.
But the ISPs are placing cache servers on their local network so things like Netflix, and downloads from Akamai are quick. But general access can be slower. What do you use for your measurement in these cases?
"The big companies want the FCC to regulate them." Oh, is that why we watched them struggle for years to argue that internet service isn't the FCC's jurisdiction? Comcast demanding that netflix specifically pay up for potential Level 3 cdn traffic, on top of wanting a "fast lane" as it's called, is absolutely the sort of shit that is within scope of concern for net neutrality.
if it's not enforced.
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Enforce a rule that they cannot advertise theoretical maximums any more. The new figure should be the guaranteed minimum speed. A far more useful figure. They can whine all they want, they deserve it due to their deceptive behavior.
Hope it feels good knowing that you're performing for free the shilling that telecos pay losers to perform on sites like this.