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How AT&T and Verizon Rip Off DSL Customers (arstechnica.com)
A new white paper written by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance finds that AT&T and Verizon are selling slow DSL internet to tens of millions of customers for the same price as fiber customers. These customers have no choice but to pay the rate AT&T and Verizon give them because no other service is offered in their area. Ars Technica reports: AT&T has been charging $60 a month to DSL customers for service between 6 and 10Mbps downstream and 0.6Mbps to 1Mbps upstream, the white paper notes, citing AT&T's advertised prices from July 2018. AT&T also charges $60 a month for 50Mbps and 75Mbps download tiers and even for fiber service with symmetrical upload and download speeds of 100Mbps. These are the regular rates after first-year discounts end, before any extra fees and taxes. Verizon similarly charges $65 a month for 100Mbps fiber service (including a $10 router charge), and $63 or $64 a month for DSL service that provides download speeds between 1.5Mbps and 15Mbps, the white paper says. The price is this high partly "because Verizon ADSL service at any speed requires paying separately for a landline telephone account." [...] The NDIA calls the practice of charging identical prices for wildly different speeds "tier flattening." It affects both urban and rural customers who live in areas where AT&T and Verizon haven't upgraded networks because they face no competition, because the upgrades wouldn't result in higher profits, or both. These customers end up using "the oldest, slowest legacy infrastructure," while paying much higher per-megabit prices than other Internet users.
...a country with less people than an average US city spread over quite large land area, three different providers are competing who gets to offer gigabit fiber for your street / condo - because whoever gets to build the fiber "last mile" for your area gets money from all those customers going forward as it is unlikely multiple providers build it for same building and "wholesale" prices - using one provider's physical fiber to use another provider's ISP services is not really price competitive at the moment, tho there are regulatory talk about making this happen, so say Telia builds fiber to a condo, Elisa or DNA could still offer ISP services to everyone in that condo while paying "wholesale" cost of operating the underying fiber to Telia.
DSL is something you use only if you live in a sad place where fiber hasn't quite gotten to yet (getting rarer every year). Copper wiring is actively being dismantled and replaced by fiber in most places and by LTE in really remote places (think individual houses or small groups of houses built miles from anything else and any summer cottages in the forest)
Actual "trunk" fiber networks are effectively triple-built - Elisa, Telia and DNA all have their own fiber networks across the country and they are busy covering even suburb houses, street by street. Sure, the initial build-out to an individual house costs a bit (gotta have that backhoe to set the fiber from the street to the building) but it is an one-time fee and probably improves the value of the property at least as much as it costs.
I'm paying 39e/ month for 1000Mbit down, 100Mbit up.
Competition is good.
So, lul DSL for $60.
If these providers were really treating me so incredibly unfairly, why wouldn't another option naturally emerge?
Because even if a competitor could get permits, the moment they announced plans for a roll-out your speeds would go up, prices go down, the network would start getting upgrades and by the time the new network was ready most people would be too lazy to switch so the imagined profits wouldn't be there anymore. Basically people aren't spiteful enough to switch over past poor price-performance and reward the company who (re-)booted the competition. And the competitors knows this, so they don't try in the first place. Also they have high-profit areas of their own, basically if you start killing my profits in one area I'll start killing your profits in some other area. So there's a high incentive to come to some sort of informal understanding.
That's why most threats to them come from outside players that don't have a market to lose like municipal broadband, Starlink etc. otherwise they're happy to serve you slow DSL until the cows come home. The other big incentive would be government bids, but I've read a surprisingly large number of "we gave the ISPs money, but they didn't roll out broadband like they're supposed to" stories that to me makes no sense. It's not hard to create "no cure, no pay" contracts, daily fines for non-compliance and yet it seems no agreement has teeth and whoever wrote them is either incompetent or corrupt. Maybe if New York kicks Charter out for real it'll get better, but why go the nuclear option and get a new deal that won't be honored when you could have had a running financial penalty.
The county my cabin is in here in Norway made a rather simple bid: Fiber available to all permanent residents in the county, cabins are optional, what's your bid? It took three years, 120 km worth of digs and now it's done, from no cable, no fiber just shitty DSL to 70%+ signing up for fiber. Population density of county is ~35/km^2 same as Alabama or Missouri, nothing that qualifies as a town just rural population and yet the fiber roll-out is done. Median speed here in Norway is now 45.8 Mbit and up 45.4% YoY due to small revolutions like these. Granted, fiber doesn't work everywhere but it can work many places if you just make the jump. It's a lot more profitable to just cash in on old copper though...
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