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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.
Longest book ever written.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
AT&T is doing this across even the country's largest cities, even in densely populated majority Democratic voting areas. The very premise of the story you're telling yourself to feel better is entirely false.
Yep. Some people seem to think they can have EVERYTHING.
Nope.
No sig today...
If the world is round how come satellite signals are always available? Shouldn't they go in and out of visibility if the world was round? My satellite TV always works as does my so called GPS. Explain that!
Wake up you sheep.
We know the planet is round because FSM created it in the shape of a holy meatball, all hail his noodly appendage.
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Why wouldn't they rip you off when they have zero competition and no incentive to make the service better. They're even trying to ramp it up with getting rid of net neutrality but don't worry the free market will solve it, right?
Wanna buy a shirt?
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And so-called "governments" ... which are actually corporate oligarchy traitors in "for the people" skin ... are criminals too, if they allow it.
That's the one thing every libertarian needs to remember: When corporations talk about "freedom", they talk about their freedom to take away the freedom of the market, turn it into a monopoly, and take away your freedom with it. And if they don't, they'll be driven off the market by the corporation that does. ... we just usually expect it to also mean the freedom from the harm of others.
We all love freedom; yes, communist socialists too
(Fun bonus fact: If you truly understand all those -isms, their natural ideal end state is actually the same! So in a perfect world, libertarians, capitalists, democrats, socialists, communists, etc, could all happily live together with zero compromises. They just try to get there via different utterly unrealistic ways that completely fail to understand human nature. And that's where they are ridiculed. ;)
Because it costs a metric ton of money to start a new ISP when you have to lay down cable as well. If you are allowed to at all, that depends on the local government, which curiously often thinks that one provider is enough and that they don't want many cables in their ground. The cynic in me would say that the campaign contributions of certain ISPs have something to do with it. You might have heard about communities that tried to establish a WiFi based alternative, only to have it shot down by the local government.
So, there's no need to get government involved. It already is.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The issue is bandwidth is dirt cheap. Go sign up for any VPN provider where you end up paying $3-5 a month for unlimited transfers. That tells you EXACTLY how much the bandwidth actually costs. Everything else in the cost of a service like cable/dsl. is the cost of doing business and the cost of maintaining the last mile(s) infrastructure.
I currently have an account with private internet access and tunnel all of my home connection though it. I paid for two years up front and my 100% unlimited transfers though the VPN cost me a whopping $3 a month. I regularly transfer 200-300GB a month though this VPN session per the stats on my router.
Bandwidth costs nearly nothing, its paying for the infrastructure on the poles, the techs, CSRs and all the other overhead of business and of course profit that makes your internet connection cost what it does.
If PIA can sell unlimited data through the VPN for $3 a month, pay their hosting, bandwidth, support costs and I am assuming they still make a profit, then you really know the actual data costs next to nothing
Because ISPs sign exclusivity agreements for an area. You can't even legally compete against them.
Yeah, and what will happen, when that one company *does* own your last mile? Guess what...
Yeah... have fun with your very individualized monopolies!
There are only two groups that should own the last mile:
You...
Or your city.
In Germany, we had the problem, that the last mile was owned by the ex-state Telekom, which got "privatized" (which is another word for what Mussolini originally coined as "fascism"). So to avoid a monopoly, they forced the Telekom to pass competitors' data through at the net cost price. Actually, the EU did, and even punished Germany, when the government failed to comply properly due to the Telekom still being in their old boys' club.
This drove down prices massively!
Nowadays, we see a growing number of companies laying their own fiber to the home. Yes, right next to the Telekom one. They even use the same construction crew and hole, from what I have seen. This is because the net needs to be modernized every x years anyway. Especially if there was no fiber there at all. So somebody would have to dig and put new wires there anyway. And the companies bet on that them being the first ones will also give them advantages. (Which, it my city, it did. They had fiber, many years before the Telekom, and are known for their high-quality network.)
I don't know if they have to offer their fiber to the Telekom too, if they are the only ones there. It might well be.
We still have a sad state in rural areas though. As other companies don't dare to built there. In this aspect, they could learn a bit from you northern countries.
... I pay $70 for 1Gbps symmetrical. It is really staggering how countries like the US or Germany are unable to get reasonably fast Internet to everybody at a reasonable price. Apparently, everybody there is so convinced they are firmly in the leadership position, that they will not wake up until it is far too late to salvage anything of their former position.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The backhaul bandwidth is only a tiny fraction of the cost to provide service, most of the cost is providing and maintaining the physical line so it doesn't cost significantly less for an ISP to provide a 2mb DSL service than it does to provide fibre assuming the infrastructure is already in place.
If anything, providing DSL might cost more because the infrastructure is older and more likely to suffer problems.
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Please do tell me about all the numerous locations you're deploying broadband capable of greater than 1 megabit upload speed or 18 megabit download. Please also note any new fiber deployments whatsoever.
Fail. Markets do not work when there are high obstacles to entry. In that case, they devolve into monopolies, as the example at hand nicely shows. Capitalism has to be regulated, because it rewards those of unlimited egoism, and they are destroyers, not builders.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This one should be easy: anywhere in the US, in any of the 20 largest cities, point out a single new residential fiber deployment.
If these providers were really treating me so incredibly unfairly, why wouldnâ(TM)t another option naturally emerge?
In a perfect market yes. Internet service providers are not a perfect market. In fact they are usually a text book example of an imperfect market created through a process of public spending and government granted oligopolies. That's if you're lucky. Quite often you're faced with an outright monopoly.
Hasnt that always been the cycle of technology? Someone does something poorly and then someone else can do it better and make lots of money.
Someone tried. Look how much Google fibre spent only to achieve nothing. This isn't some startup creating an app.
two words: "Geostationary orbit"
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/b...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
You can't have a free market in telecom due to the countless number of government regulations - from restrictions in frequencies, to regulation on how to install cables under the road, and so on and so on. The few telecom providers out there have profited big from relations with the government and those regulations are making sure nobody can challenge their position. Obviously, those companies have nothing against government regulation when it suits them, but they will invoke the free market each time a regulation doesn't suit them.
Around here it's been going on pretty much since the influx of new users made the Slashdot Effect into a thing and provided the free publicity to make the site even more mainstream (e.g. the advent of the GNAA, Goatse, etc. trolls), although it's definitely ramped up significantly of late (and also over on Soylent, for that matter). The "official" date is September 1993 though, and that was definitely a turning point for the Internet as a whole and made the '92 newbies look positively refined; at least most of them took the time to learn the rules of the road. Good times...
What amazes me is that, apparently, some of them are presumably so sad as to not only have nothing better to do, but are are also deciding to do this over less than 1Mb/s upstreams that they are paying $60/mo for. I guess it you can't realistically play Fortnite/PUBG or get decent framerates on your porn then you've got to get your online jollies from somewhere.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
It is you that is misguided to think that you can be happy with what you have.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
how it works here is that no ISP owns the cable or does the cable work. it is another company that takes care of the cables and ISPs can then use these cables to provide internet to their customers, ofcourse ISPs need to pay the cable company for using it.
same story for electricity etc.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
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...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This isn't true.
Almost all areas have at least two ISPs, the telephone company and the cable company.
People keep arguing the latter has "exclusive monopoly rights" granted by the local governments, but that's not true either. That might have been true for a decade or two when the company started up, but since then those agreements have been invalidated.
But even if they did have monopoly rights, it wouldn't matter, because the monopoly was on cable TV, not on ISP services. Not even the old, obsolete, exclusive franchise agreements would have prevented new ISPs from setting up in any area.
The reality is that there usually just two ISPs in any area for a simple reason: they both already have infrastructure, whereas any new ISP is going to have to lay cable. And laying cable is phenomenally expensive.
There are things that can help such as local governments helping new ISPs have access to existing poles to hang wires from, rather than forcing them to bury it, but poles aren't everywhere, and those poles often belong to companies that have no desire to allow third parties access.
The other problem is it's easier for telecoms and cable operators to market their services. There used to be WISPs in my area, offering point to point WiMAX service. They disappeared. Why? Presumably because everyone had heard of AT&T and Comcast, they were already customers of both, whereas the WISPs would have had to do a major advertising campaign just to get noticed. Meanwhile AT&T and Comcast can simply ask you whether you want internet service whenever you move in to a new home and call them to get your TV or telephone hooked up. The WISPs you'd have to contact separately.
There are plenty of people who think the solution is "more competition" as if someone can just wave their wand and bring forth millions of miles of fiber optic cable. It's not that easy.
Even Google can't do it. Google. Think about that.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Doesn't really matter what company is in your area. We are offered 10Mbps DSL in our neighborhood, but when you contact them about it you are informed that you will only get 4Mbps at max due to proximity to a substation, oh and by the way it will still be $50/month but we are so gracious to you that your prices won't change for 24 months. That is their selling point. "We won't raise prices on you."
don't tell the truth. Even worse they don't tell the sales personal that they are doing the lying.
Calling bullshit. The cost of a mini dslam is lower than ever. The problem is that they will not spend money in advance of demand. I've been a sysadmin for a ISP for 11 years and before that worked at two others. I have to say we offer speeds in excess of anything the local telco does. Since their phone product is now voip they have no advantage over us at all. Their highest speed is slower than our lowest. They tell people around here the opposite. They will never be punished for it. If they didn't deceive people they couldn't make a sell. The local telco has been given around 100million in the past five years and have spent virtually nothing on infrastructure. If it wasn't for the welfare they receive I wouldn't care how shitty they are. Give us 10 million and we would hook up double our current subscriber list.
Speed is reality and we sell what we advertise.
No, this is not true at all. Major cities have those two options. Smaller cities/towns do not have cable (people get satellite TV, and yes they could get satellite internet if they want to pay even more for high latency and slower speeds but that's not real broadband).
And even where there ought to be two options, often there isn't. The last place I lived -- which was actually a fairly dense suburb of the capitol of California -- Comcast was my only option because AT&T declared the neighborhood oversubscribed and refused to offer DSL service. And where I currently live, also, Comcast is my only option -- AT&T doesn't explain why, but I just checked their website and verified they still won't offer me DSL.
This space intentionally left blank
I have DSL and yes, it's about $60 once you add in regular phone service, all the fees and taxes and caller ID. I've looked into switching to fiber many times and always, it's difficult to get it for under $100 a month once the teaser rate expires. Currently, Verizon offers fiber internet with no phone for $40 a month plus $10 for a modem, plus unspecified fees and taxes, so let's say $60, but that's only for 1 year, after which they won't tell you what it costs even in the fine print!
So? Why do you assume that Internet access prices should be somehow related to rate? There are plenty of good reasons why Internet access through DSL might actually be more expensive than fiber access.
The vast majority of the countty (land-wise, not necessarily population-wise) only has DSL, if there is even that available. Indeed, where I live I only have CenturyLink DSL available. My vacation home also has CenturyLink DSL available, and the network there is oversaturated, leaving me with sub-1.5-megabit service with no other options. And guess what? The 10-megabit service and the service below 1.5 megabit cost the same.
If the world is round how come satellite signals are always available? Shouldn't they go in and out of visibility if the world was round? My satellite TV always works as does my so called GPS. Explain that!
Wake up you sheep.
We know the planet is round because FSM created it in the shape of a holy meatball, all hail his noodly appendage.
Exactly, you've never seen a perfectly round meatball, which is why his divine pastaness made the earth an oblate spheroid.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I have AT&T DSL, but no phone service. It took some work, but it's called "standalone" or "naked DSL". However, I also have a "business class" line, and five static IPs, that I pay $95 a month for. It's a rip-off; but at my apartment "someone" long ago went into the coax junction boxes and cut the cables off at the top of the pipe. It's rumored this happened at the same time AT&T was given an exclusive contract to this complex many years ago. They no longer have that here, but the apartment complex won't pay to replace all the lines.
Watch a few YouTube videos. Take you favorite conspiracy theory as the topic. Then come again and tell me that it should be taken as granted that anything that's completely insane can only be meant as a joke.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If the world is round how come satellite signals are always available? Shouldn't they go in and out of visibility if the world was round? My satellite TV always works as does my so called GPS. Explain that!
Wake up you sheep.
We know the planet is round because FSM created it in the shape of a holy meatball, all hail his noodly appendage.
Exactly, you've never seen a perfectly round meatball, which is why his divine pastaness made the earth an oblate spheroid.
There exists the holiest of holy meatballs whos bumps and ridges match exactly that of the earth. When this is found surely it will usher in a new age of tomato based sauces for our glorious meatballs.
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Well, given that Alabama is 312 KM wide by 436 KM long, and Missouri is, oh, 441 by 453, both very rough approximations, but still, population density is meaningless without also knowing total area.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
We're actually post-post-modern now. I think just calling it post-truth will suffice, as facts (relative or otherwise) are no longer important to a large number of people.
Steam is awesome, they always have games on sale!
#DeleteFacebook
I am not sure that is an accurate statement, most of the Republican areas are rural (by USA landmass) and served by DSL. Think farmers and small town American. States like North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, etc....
Trump tried to help rural Republicans with broadband, but only has so much power:
https://motherboard.vice.com/e...
Population overdensity is just stupid on all levels. Fiber is our way out of this mess by de-centralizing a lot of our employment. It's cheaper for everyone. Digging in the dirt is cheaper than pounding concrete to upgrade lines.
both already have infrastructure, whereas any new ISP is going to have to lay cable.
It's worse than that. Any large enough ISP can just undercut them on price and force the new provider out of business. Then they can buy up all the new infrastructure that was built for way below cost in the bankruptcy sale.
And as long as that "free market" option is open to big companies that can afford to bleed money in one area to preserve profits overall, there will never be competition.
The EU is a lot more likely to stop big companies from putting pressure to squeeze out the little guy. If I went and started laying fiber in my town, the incumbent ISPs would price me out of the market until I went under. They are so large that they can afford to.
What do you want? A company to run a fiber line to your (remote) vacation home? I don't know why people complain about this. If you live in a a rural area, or vacation there, you can't expect fiber. You might not even have sewage hookups. Ridiculous.
The idea that the "invisible hand of the free market" fixes everything includes several assumptions. When one or more of those assumptions doesn't hold, you no longer get the optimal solution that the theory says you should.
In this case, the invalid assumption is that there is no significant barrier to entry.
Everyone in Canada pays $60 for 10Mbps.
:)
...but seriously, this isn't far from the truth.
Even with.... "competition"
I pay $40/month for 25/2 from AT&T (DSL), cancel at the end of the 1-year agreement, then $30/month (after fees) for 25/5 from Comcast (Cable) for a year and cycle back and forth between the two each year. They both suck but there are zero competitors in Northern Illinois. The only actual hope for a competitor will be 5G from a cellular data provider, assuming they charge a reasonable fee (LOL.)
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
What exactly did these people expect living away from cities/hubs/high pop areas?
I'm sure they thought that the government funding that was given to the telcos to build out their networks and provide broadband (by the FCC's definition) in rural areas would have been used to... well.. provide broadband (by the FCC's definition) in rural areas.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Of course we didn't need a white paper to find this out. Are you new here?
But if this white paper convinces one legislator that something needs to change, then great... that's at least a small accomplishment, one that common sense has failed to provide.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
There is a cable provider and there is a dsl provider. No fiber is available. There are 5G wireless providers starting to penetrate the area, but where I am there is as yet no line of sight. LTE wireless is spotty right where I am. I've been paying as much for a slow DSL line as backup to the cable for my business needs and I need it so rarely that I'm ready to finally pull it. My need for backup for those rare times is finally lower, and LTE coverage is at least sufficient to meet that occasional need. HOWEVER: Until recently I would definitely have considered my area one of those where Fiber was deliberately delayed due to lack of competition.
My state did try to force Verizon to put fiber to every home. They said they won't permit any fiber with a commitment to doing the whole state in a certain time frame. Verizon promptly sold their telephony business in my state to a smaller provider and left. Now we have crappy land line service and still no fiber.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
For similar reasons, I don't see a big need for 4k video either.
The biggest draw of UHD (e.g. 4K video) is dynamic range, not resolution. The difference between HDR and non-HDR video and images on an HDR display is noticeable from any reasonable distance, on any size display.
Your limited use case for internet blinds you to the realities of that market, as well.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
The reason they are comparable is because the value of the line is fixed. The bulk of the cost is in the sales/support/line maintenance and generally speaking it's a lot cheaper to maintain a brand new fiber network than an aging copper one. It's a rip off in that it's too much for internet overall but not if you're comparing them to each other.
At this point I'd settle for CenturyLink improving its own network. Right now they have so many subscribers that they aren't accepting more, and aren't upgrading existing customers. That's the sort of situation where, if there weren't a monopoly in the region, that a company would actually invest to fill the void. But there is a monopoly in the region and the company has done the math. It's more cost-effective to invest nothing (beyond occasional maintenance when something breaks) than to put in the money to improve the network for existing customers, even when improving the network might result in 200 or so new customers.
The problem is an utter lack of competition. There's no need to improve the service, because consumers have no other options. Even in the towns around here, there are only two options - DSL and cable. I'm not sure what the solution is, but one thing is clear - letting these big corporations have their monopolies on service leads only to consumers getting screwed.
Where do you live? I've been saying for decades that this should be the case everywhere. Separate the companies that provide last-mile wiring from the companies that provide services over those wires, and it will end up being the only regulation the entire industry would ever need. By the way, greetings from one four-digit user to another :)
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That is capitalism, stop complaining about your own comfort and complain about capitalism if you have a problem.
Laying infrastructure is not free or even cheap. Here are other everyday things you pay more for because you live outside of a large metro:
-gas
-groceries (milk, eggs, everything)
-hardware supplies
If you are so outraged at the DSL pricing scheme the list of non-everyday things will make you faint.
This is indistinguishable from believing that socialism works to the benefit of the worker class.
ps -- Alex Jones is entertaining for short periods of time, just like CNN, for the same reasons, though the content varies.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
availability of adequate internet access a part of the lease
Lease. There's a part of your problem. It's going to be difficult to get a broadband provider to make investments to capture customers with a high turn over rate.
But it's not a bad idea. In my neighborhood, we were facing a refusal by Verizon to run DSL. And they would screw with any CLECs trying to lease lines. Reason: They had a 'no compete' agreement with Comcast. Verizon didn't offer broadband and Comcast (although they offered in in a three-way package) would not provide phone service. And throttle VoIP providers they caught on their system.
The solution was to have a word with some real estate agents. Lack of decent broadband could result in property being devalued in the neighborhood. Particularly to home buyers living within spitting distance of Microsoft. Within a couple of years, Verizon changed policy and installed fiber in the area.
You just need to find a better connected set of crooks than the telecoms to fight for your side.
Have gnu, will travel.
yep, I live in a small town 1 ISP $130 for 50mbs.
"Republitards don't have to live in the boonies. I"
Wow. Just wow.
Let's see if Band 71 solves any of this.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
And as long as that "free market" option is open to big companies that can afford to bleed money in one area to preserve profits overall, there will never be competition.
That "free market" option is illegal, and has been for very nearly 130 years. The Sherman Antitrust Act has been the law of the land since 1890, and reducing prices specifically to drive out a competitor is explicitly illegal.
Now if only the US Federal judiciary wasn't full of craven cowards for District Attorneys...
It's one of those things where there could always be an alternate explanation that would hold up in a weak court.
Paying $60/month for AT&T's 5mbps dsl. It's total garbage but I don't have any other options.
So your idea is to give more power and control to the politicians and bureaucrats who screwed it up the first few times, coincidentally benefiting their "friends" in the process.
Yeah, some people never learn, do they? Get back to us when Venezuela's experiment with nationalizing most of their major industries results in something other than destroying them and leaving people to starve.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Neither. Conditions in Finland are very different. There are no high obstacles to entry into this market there, for one thing.
But you seem to be pretty full of it, come to think of it, since you cannot see the obvious.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Plenty of us here know about Betteridge's Law and Godwin's Law, but not as many recall Poe's Law, which most certainly applies to this situation.
Not only that, but not all Internet access is made the same. Even among homes that have both cable and telephone lines, that doesn't mean broadband is available.
Part of the issue here is the FCC's ridiculous method for measuring broadband penetration (in fairness, this method pre-dates Pai, so I can't lay it at his feet). Rather than extrapolating from a representative, random sampling of homes or doing a full survey for each home address, ISPs self-report, on a per-county basis, where they provide broadband. For the purposes of the FCC's measurements, if anyone in the county is self-reported by the ISP as being offered broadband, everyone in the county is counted as having access to broadband. As such, those numbers are only useful for comparing against themselves from prior years (and even then, only questionably so), rather than as any sort of measurement of or reflection of reality.
According to their method of counting, I should have at least three broadband ISPs available to me at my home in my metropolitan area neighborhood, but, in practice, I only have one (Suddenlink cable). Frontier DSL's website suggests that they're available and offering broadband in my area, but in actually calling them up last year, the best they offered at my address was 3Mbps for $35/month. Likewise, the locally-operated WISP's service area stops just at the edge of my neighborhood, with no plans to expand into my neighborhood. They're having enough trouble keeping up with demand from the people outside the big neighborhoods, since, as you suggested, cable is not nearly as prolific as the GP seems to think, meaning that many of the people near me aren't even "fortunate" enough to have access to Suddenlink.
All I'm looking for are modest speeds (>20Mbps) with no data cap. I'll always go for the cheapest plan that offers that, but the cost of getting that plan from Suddenlink (again, the only ISP offering those speeds at my address) has nearly tripled in the last seven years, from $31/mo. 7 years ago to $80/mo. today, most of which happened once Suddenlink's speeds got fast enough to make DSL irrelevant, giving them the justification they needed to drop all pretense of competing.
The reason they don't offer DSL in your area is because they don't want to spend the cost of making it available there. Even though it uses existing phone lines, they still need to install special hardware every mile(?) or so to propagate the signal out to the next DSL switch or nearby customers. This is what I've heard at least.
That's ... basically what I said?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
HDR is not an image format, it refers to an image or video with an enhances color space and I was speaking specifically of video, as that is what the AC I was replying to had mentioned. Again, lack of education abounds.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
It makes sense that copper is generally less economic than fiber: copper is less durable than fiber. And, requires more repeaters.
I have had DSL in a few client locations and it is far more problematic than fiber, or cable.
Plus, Verizon, at least, intends to close their copper plants in the relatively near future.
Copper has become too expensive to maintain.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
That's Belgium, but i'm sure other EU countries have the same model.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
A few years back I dated a woman who lived well within the city limits of a major U.S. city but could only get sub-par DSL or cable internet. I lived about 10 blocks south and had AT&T's UVERSE available at speeds of 15mbps and up to 30 if I remember correctly. I contacted AT&T asking if and when her house might be able to get UVERSE, seeing how it was in the urban core, but always hit the run around answer of "someday". When the telcos have little to no competition, as is the case here, they're more than happy to have you sucking down minimal bandwidth for maximum prices.