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Comcast, Charter Dominate US; Telcos 'Abandoned Rural America,' Report Says (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comcast is the only choice for 30 million Americans when it comes to broadband speeds of at least 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream, the report says. Charter Communications is the only choice for 38 million Americans. Combined, Comcast and Charter offer service in the majority of the U.S., with almost no overlap. Yet many Americans are even worse off, living in areas where DSL is the best option. AT&T, Verizon, and other telcos still provide only sub-broadband speeds over copper wires throughout huge parts of their territories. The telcos have mostly avoided upgrading their copper networks to fiber -- except in areas where they face competition from cable companies. These details are in "Profiles of Monopoly: Big Cable and Telecom," a report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR). The full report should be available at this link today. "The broadband market is broken," the report's conclusion states. "Comcast and Charter maintain a monopoly over 68 million people. Some 48 million households (about 122 million people) subscribe to these cable companies, whereas the four largest telecom companies combined have far fewer subscribers -- only 31.6 million households (about 80.3 million people). The large telecom companies have largely abandoned rural America -- their DSL networks overwhelmingly do not support broadband speeds -- despite years of federal subsidies and many state grant programs."
In b4: "No, you don't understand, we don't have real capitalism yet, it's not perfect, we must copy the true scottish model".
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
and it's to bad the Comcast cable tv sucks lowest bit rates and there internet is capped.
Cheating bastards. They need their loopholes closed NOW.
We've had this story in the news in one form or another for a decade. Why hasn't something been done?
This is one of those areas where I advocate for more government involvement. Allow cities/counties to build out their own local infrastructure, and allow regional ISPs to then piggyback on it ( for a maintenance fee ) and provide services.
Internet access ranks up there with utilities anymore, so let's start treating it as such.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Broadband is broken, we have known this for YEARS.
The problem is that we have GOVERNMENT regulation preventing competition (Franchise Agreements) and until we figure out a way to get out of them, and allow for more competition over the last mile, we're going to be stuck with ever increasing government rules and regulations trying to fix the problem of government's own making.
My solution, is fairly simple, yet radical. The Local Municipality owns and operates the LAST mile itself (like a road), then the problem will remain. There are ways to bring competition to the marketplace, allowing consumers to choose who their provider, rather than the one size fits all approach government tends to bring.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The Trump administration will say this report is fake news and claim, fasely, that America has the best broadband.
Touch-Once-Make-Ready will get put in to place at a national level and we soon find "the big boys" interfering with local competition by "damaging" lines.
Either way we're screwed.
...they've still managed to suckle at the teat provided by the Federal Universal Service Fee
This is why AC posting should not be a thing.
They know the upside is typically cleaner air and open spaces while the downside is limited internet access and other amenities found in cities and towns.
If they want better internet they should move to where it exists.
Hey look, a homophobic comment from a progressive/liberal.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I think taxpayers have plowed something like $4B into rural broadband, it is time for Ajit to call Comcast and Charter and ask for a refund. $2B each.
Or, municipalities could just grow their own, oh wait, they can't, every time they try Comcast and Charter sue them.
...in the majority of the U.S., with almost no overlap. Yet many Americans are even worse off...
Like most of Ars' articles these days, this shit is so badly written that if I'd have turned this shit in the eighth grade, I'd have been lucky to get a fucking B-.
Sadly, most other sites are even worse.
despite years of federal subsidies and many state grant programs.
But if you just give us some more money, we'll get Right On That. Oh, did we mention our last contribution to your election campaign?
I was an AT&T customer 2 decades ago. I had ISDN at home (work paid, dial-up was just too slow) and they were rolling out Pronto, their higher-speed system in my area "in 6 months or so." After calling like every 6 months, I gave up after 5 years.
I now (different house) have Comcast Business Internet, 30MBit. It works, no caps, I can call and get an actual tech in 30-60 seconds that can speak bits and DHCP. It's great, but I'm sure I'm paying for it.
Before that I had AT&T DSL at 1.5Mbit with caps. It was funny, they charged me for going over my monthly limit which I did every month -- at a cheaper rate than my normal monthly bill. Instead of being a penalty for me, it was almost a bonus.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
This is actually a perfect example of government regulation run amok.
These are government-granted monopolies. The local governments select a single cable and single phone company to service their area, and prohibit other companies from offering services. Giving the selected companies leeway to treat their customers like crap, while extorting huge sums of money from them for the service, and also extorting money from innocent third parties like Netflix.
This is not surprising considering these guys lobby the government to consider broadband deployments acceptable at 50% of a large swath of an area. Really, the entire system is broken, not just the telecom industry but the way we do business altogether in America.
I live 20 miles from the apple headquarters in silicon valley and can not get broadband to my house. I would bet that the majority of people who cant get broadband live less then 20 miles from the nearest available broadband but for one reason or another (topography) can not. Telcos could fix these blind spots but wonâ(TM)t unless forced.
USDA Rural development has given telecos $7,174,003,266 in subsidies and grants between 2009 and 2016.
If representatives allocated tax payer money, and telecos spent it. Then they are on the hook to follow through and do it. Doesn't matter if you personally don't like that people live far away from city centers.
No doubt broadband speed is muted badly in rural areas. I know people who only have a Wireless ISP option and speed is 3mbps down 1mbps up. Hardly what I consider broadband speed. Satellite is probably the only real good option besides using a cellular access point. Obviously cable does not want to run cable to such spread out potential for customers. Ironically telephone customers could have benefited from all that fiber buried years ago if the telcos had only realized the potential.
I live in a fairly rural town- 20 square miles, 4,300 people- and Comcast's cable modem service is fine. I'd prefer to pay less, but $93 a month for internet service that's fast enough to stream is adequate. They respond to the occasional service call well enough; I've no complaints.
The only theoretical competition is the telephone company, however, and they're pretty broke. DSL service is terrible- few houses live close enough to the central switch to make it possible- and they just don't have the money to lay fiber everywhere. Sure, they're doing it in chunks here or there, but I've been here for seven years and they're finally installing fiber a couple streets over.
I can see how the telco is in a bind. The area was sold off by verizon a few years ago and the buyout was leveraged. The phone company is in the poor position of competing against comcast phone service, VOIP, and cell phones. They do some TV bundling with satellite providers but it's a tough business. Basically they need to roll out fiber to keep money coming in, but they need money coming in to roll out fiber because they've already borrowed to the hilt.
Now that I'm checking as I write this comment, the telco has been purchased by another company.... so we'll see what happens!
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I'm tired of articles and statistics with speeds that make no logical sense.
From the governments own legal mumbo jumbo (47 USC 1302)
"The term âoeadvanced telecommunications capabilityâ is defined, without regard to any transmission media or technology, as high-speed, switched, broadband telecommunications capability that enables users to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications using any technology."
Notice in the description there is no preference of any kind expressed as to directionality. The phrase used is "originate and receive"... not receive only or primarily receive. If 3mbit up is able to do ALL of these things then why the asymmetry? Why is 3mbit good enough for upstream but 25mbit required for down?
Definitions seem awfully specific to the properties of Cable Internet with high downstream and crappy upstream just high enough down to discount much DSL and fixed wireless yet still remain crappy enough to excuse Cable Internet failure to provide acceptable upstream rates.
Personally I would gladly trade in my 150/5 service for 10/10 any day. I don't consider 3mbit up good enough. Others may be happy with 1000/1. Everyone has different needs and value judgments and people can argue all day about what baseline should be. Yet whatever that is should be determined based on objective metrics that fit the characteristics of underlying definition not picking winners and losers by deliberately selecting whatever intentionally fits profile of cable based broadband.
should any of those rural counties wish to create their own broadband services Comcast will be happy to send in lawyers to point out that there are state laws explicitly prohibiting municipal broadband services in there area. I mean, "abandoned" implies they'd be left alone...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Can't handle the banter, soyboy?
3 to 5 down and .4 up is the only option unless you live in a major city. Its freaking unbearable and downright uncivilized!
We are basically still cave men here.
20 miles is pretty far, that's alot of wire.
Cheap storage VM.
Le vin et les aliments sont magnifique
Let's get our priorities right!!
Without AC posting, plenty of us would be too afraid of losing our jobs to say what we really think.
Yeah, morons use it too. But if you only hear from those who, under whatever system is in place, are not afraid to speak, then you will only hear what is *safe* to be said.
A federal 'Your Service Sucks Tax"
love is just extroverted narcissism
ArsTech went waaaay downhill after the original creator sold it off. Like so many places I could name...
Hell, Ohrmazd doesn't even post there anymore.
"Yet many Americans are even worse off, living in areas where DSL is the best option. AT&T, Verizon, and other telcos still provide only sub-broadband speeds over copper wires throughout huge parts of their territories. The telcos have mostly avoided upgrading their copper networks to fiber -- except in areas where they face competition from cable companies."
This is literally happening in metropolitan areas. I would love for the cable company to extend cable 1/10 of a mile.
Let me turn this into a coherent sentence for you:
It's too bad that Comcast cable tv sucks. The lowest bit rates and their internet is capped.
In the recent past, whenever a story would come up here about how poor the broadband service is in America, there would be posters here proclaiming "Fiber? Feh! Luddites stuck in the 20th Century! America is far ahead in wireless broadband which totally superior in every way!". But thus far (with 70 posts) there is not one of these wireless corporate shills around.
Perhaps it is because TFA is not pointing the superior service and pricing in many other countries. That is what often seemed to trigger the trollish claims of US wireless being "more advanced" and superior to fiber.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
DBS (Direct Broadcast Satellite services) provide rural America with HDTV and High-Speed slow-ping Internet services... this is vital to farms and large yard houses out in the midwest where cable doesn't reach well.
The problem is the restrictions on installing wires/cables in the ground. High-quality service would be available everywhere If anyone who wanted to could install in-ground wires/fiber/cable along public right-of-ways.
The requirements/limitations should be as few as possible.
Something along the lines of:
* To trench, if equipment is 50HP, must carry $100,000 liability insurance at the time. If over 50HP, $1 mill liability insurance is required.
* $150 fee to the state or town to register a Cable Installer Number
* Must attach small plastic labels with the Cable Installer Number every 25'
* Wires/Fiber/Cable diameter cannot exceed 3/8"
* State or town road crews are not responsible for notifying you of work impacting your cables, nor for cutting them
* To trench across a road, the cut in the road-surface must be 5/8" width, and may only be performed between 7:05pm and 8:55pm Tue through Thu. The cuts in the road surface must be sealed with suitable road repair material designed to last at least 10 years.
* Ownership can be claimed of any abandoned (both ends disconnected for a year) cable/fiber by paying $150 to the state or town to take ownership of it.
Net neutrality accomplishes NOTHING. I mean nothing. It is a true red herring that is taking us away from the real issue: that of basically unregulated monopolies controlling America's broadband.
/. and the net in general to quit listening to the idiots that push the net neutrality red herring and fight to get REAL broadband.
These companies have absolutely NO reason to upgrade. They have monopolies that allow them massive profits. Comcast is small compared to Disney. Disney is in massive number of different businesses all over the world. Comcast only services about 1/10 of America. Thats it. And yet, Comcast competes against disney to buy whatever business they want.
What is needed is to destroy the monopolies. We need to have them compete against each other. In addition, we need to allow all local gov to compete against these companies if they want to. Right now, the GOP has pushed a number of laws that prohibits that, but it really makes sense that fiber to the home be owned by the closest gov (city, county or possibly state), while services are provided by a number of competing companies. If Comcast or Charter wish to go into an area and run their own fiber, let them. The same is true of any of the RBOCs, or CLECs. BUT, regardless, they have to provide open services. IOW, other companies can offer TV, internet, etc over the same fiber.
It is time for ppl on
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Hell yeah bro you corrected someone online i bet youre a blast irl
So says the guy that responds to someone who corrected someone on the internet.
So says the new guy with a 7 digit user id. I pretty much always post anonymously these days for various reasons, but I've been around here for the past 18 years or so. I've got a 5 digit userid. You learn to accept the good with the bad that goes with anonymous posting. Please learn about the cutlure of the place before you go suggesting changing it. If you don't want to read garbage, read /. at +2 or whatever.
Why is wanting to have your cock and balls sucked on homophobic? What if the poster is in fact homosexual and really wants their cock and balls sucked by the poster as some sort of fantasy of having a political opponent give them oral sex? Why are you assuming so much about the sexual orientation of the poster? Hmm?
ISP bad. Silicon Valley good.
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.
"If they want better internet they should move to where it exists." - And contribute to further pollution, traffic and overcrowding of large cities? I don't see how that helps at all. Besides, this is classic blaming the victim reasoning. The problem is not that I chose to live in a rural area. The problem is that the broadband monopolies did not live up to their end of the bargain.
I'll give you an example. Where I live every lot is zoned at one acre minimum. Less than 5 miles away some developer is building a subdivision with thousands of houses shoehorned one beside the other. I choose not to live in an HOA managed neighborhood where the next house is 10 feet from my lot line. The HOA is getting high speed broadband while the acre dwellers are left to fend for ourselves. Luckily, I have a fixed wireless provider that provides about 25MB/sec and that's good enough for Netflix. But I can't get Gigabit speed because Cox Communications won't expand the service to the "rural" area - 5 miles away.
As others have pointed out, the TelCos have been granted this virtual Oligopoly in part because they agreed to service rural areas. They have not held up to their end of the bargain and our governments appear to do nothing about it. Yet another example of a problem caused expressly by our elected officials.
apple doesnt care where you live.
Uh, I don't?
I merely meant that in this rare instance, I don't advocate for a free market solution, but rather more government involvement ( as previously specified ).
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
This is one of those areas where I advocate for more government involvement. Allow cities/counties to build out their own local infrastructure, and allow regional ISPs to then piggyback on it ( for a maintenance fee ) and provide services.
Internet access ranks up there with utilities anymore, so let's start treating it as such.
They're getting what they voted for.
Then again, that's what small government voters do, they're against government entitlements, regulations and handouts--except when they're the ones getting the money.
As for internet access being a right--nothing in the Constitution about it being a right.
I'm asking this as a serious question.
We have similar problems here in Germany where "outlandish"areas have less connectivity (albeit at a laughable scale compared to the US). Upping infrastructure isn't that easy here for the simple reason that many areas are developed already which means tearing up existing infrastructure to upgrade the old. Very annoying and expensive.
Anyway, what I'm actually asking is this: do we all have to be able to stream game of thrones at 4hd at the same time or could it be that 6mbit DSL might be enough for most regular households? I've basically be happy with what's available for me as a privat Person ever sind DSL came along and replace ISDN in the 90ies. Yeah, remember that? *That* was slow. Everything above a stable 5mbit for 1-2 people online at the same time is luxury IMHO.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The problem is the same for rural areas worldwide, not just in the US.
And there's also a lack of redundancy so that whenever there's a natural disturbance it can cause a lot of headache. A small wildfire taking out one site can cause a number of links to go down and effectively kill a much larger area than what the wildfire actually impacts.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
This. His name was Brendan Eich.
There are millions of people who CANNOT load your damned web p-ages in less than an hour when they are loaded with videos (and video ads) that autoplay and tons of images and scripts etc.
There are MILLIONS of people for whom installing software via the web is ABSOLUTELY NOT superior to a CDROM or DVDROM and Installing a Linux that wants to auto-fetch lots of packages and patches via the web is an insane week-long nightmare that crashes out if even a single error occurs.
There are millions of people for whom "it's in the cloud" means: "The developer is a mind-numbed moron and world-class jerk who is completely unconcerned with his users"
Far too many developers of all things computer-related who have come of age in the internet era and live in big cities have seemingly no concept of the fact that computing used to be perfectly OK with NO internet connection at all, and huge numbers of people even today do not have an always-on high-speed net connection. Pretending these millions of people do not exist is a small part of what put Trump into the White House - and NO, the answer is NOT socialized internet access [facepalm].
I seem to remember when my (small) city got cable back in 2001 or so. I'd been reading about DSL and cable a few years before that and desperately wanted either one. My impression back then was always that DSL was only slightly slower than cable, but dependent on your distance from the phone company.
And thankfully now we can get way faster internet and I'm no longer a 15 year old thinking about online gaming and ...videos.
I just scheduled AT&T fiber to be installed next week. I've been limping on 12Mbps U-verse for several years after Comcast's outages after every rainstorm made me swear off ever giving them another penny. The new service will be 100 Mbps for the same price as U-verse and no installation fee.
The only reason that AT&T even bothered to run fiber through the local neighborhoods was that our state-based cellular company, CSpire, has been running fiber in small towns and cities across the state and finally offered "wireless fiber" to our neighborhood at comparable speeds and competitive prices to Comcast's internet. A month after the announcement, AT&T had crews marking underground utilities and four months later had fiber run to of all the neighborhoods.
True competition from aggressive alternatives can make the difference. I'm fortunate that local government hasn't been very restrictive like some municipalities have been. Hopefully those regulators will hold providers' feet to the fire when they have agreements that unfairly restrict competition.
I just moved into a house 4 miles south of Longmont, CO which has gigabit fiber available to all residents. The best I could get was 1.5MB DSL from CenturyLink - if they even had a circuit available which they don't. I am now using an OTA microwave service which isn't too bad.
The telco and cable companies - Comcast included - have stopped any investment in wired communications as they are expecting to be decimated by 5G service before any investment would pay off.
What about those for whom satellite is the only option? Consider ViasSat2, the newest satellite offering, is at 17* off the horizon ... but if you live in hilly or forested areas, you don't have a chance. These folks can't get DSL because of a lifestyle choice that places the outside DSL signal range (w/o an appropriately placed $20,000 repeater), and cable can't be bothered to run cable to them.
This is NOT about requiring government intervention but about companies choosing to actually provide service to the underserved. And yet, cable providers' service records are rife with stories of bad service and frequent inexplicable outages.
Dumont is a perfect example. It is a small town in Oklahoma, and roughly 1 mile outside town you can't even find WIRED TELEPHONE SERVICE on some roads. Those roads have people living on them, who are forced to use Cell phones, and then must walk outside to find a signal.
I am not kidding.
And yet Congress keeps giving telco's money ($5,000,000,000!) in 1998 to provide high speed internet to Rural America! The telco's take the money, and Congress does nothing when the telco's then do nothing.
Do you even know what regulated mean?
How can you claim no regulation?
Internet access is no longer a luxury item that the few can tinker with in their free time. It's how we work, do business, shop, research, and perform a million different tasks.
It's usage more mirrors an electric, gas, or water supplier, rather than an ISP of the olden days. Competition is dead in many areas and dying in more. With M&A occurring at high rates, we can expect to see fewer and fewer alternatives in the future.
We're best off treating it as a utility, and remove the profiteering from the equation.
Based on tech advancement, I suspect that wireless/cell providers will start to eat up more wired business soon enough, as their speeds and reliability increase, while prices become more reasonable.
Aging cable infrastructure will eventually join land lines as antiquated and unneeded.
This affects my parents' house. Their only wired internet option is 3 Mbps AT&T DSL (AT&T claims it's only 1.5 Mbps but it provisions at 3). No cable lines. Luckily I managed to get them an unmetered, unthrottled LTE "hotspot" plan, so I have an LTE modem connected to their router. They get 15-30 Mbps through it despite a very poor signal (5x5 carrier, theoretical max of 37.5 Mbps), because literally no one else is on their sector of the tower.
The wireless industry has the potential to disrupt this, assuming they actually deploy with enough capacity and offer the plans. The plan I have them on is kind of a loophole through a reseller, so it's a bit challenging to get. Supposedly though this is a priority for a merged Sprint and T-Mobile, but they might just be saying that to get approval.
These companies are the perfect definition of communism, Soviet style.
I live 5 miles from the telco central office (Verizon), and they were charging $88 for the cheapest land line. Finally we got off that and use a $5 a month VoIP, but pay Spectrum for internet. We have never in the 44 years we've been here, had cable TV so we can't cut that cord - it runs our internet! Our other (sucky) option is satellite. That's it. DSL is "too far".
Here in NY they gave Spectrum 60 days to get the hell out and pass their customers on to someone else. Gonna get interesting.
Similar situation but this is in China. At home I have DSL connection of 6Mbps down and 2Mbps up because I live in a relatively old and empty community to warrant teleco to connect fiber into apartments here. (Most of my Chinese friends have at least 50Mbps two ways broadband at home)
I ended up buying one of those âoeunlimitedâ 4G plans and a 4G cell router. The plan costs about 20USD per month and now I get 50Mbps up&down. The only downside is that the âoeunlimitedâplan throttles after 40GB in a month, to about 8Mbps two-ways. Still faster than my old DSL connection though, so Iâ(TM)m okay with that.
Oooh, 5 digit user id says the AC. Well excuse me your highness. I've been reading /. since 2003 you d-bag. I know all about the culture of the place and I've always hated that AC's could constantly post stupid crap. I also don't give a flying f**k about how many digits your user id has you loser.