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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 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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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 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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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.
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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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.
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.
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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.