A government monopoly is worse than a private one. At least with the private monopoly they don't have access to my wallet or paycheck. (Or worse, jail me for nonpayment of taxes.)
Congrats. Your behavior has now formed a new neural connection in my brain. Socialist (like Cappy Splendy) == Rude Asshole. Way to sell your product bud.
Not the same thing. Roads take-up tons and tons of space. A hairthin fiber optic takes up virtually no space, so you can run 10-20 dedicated lines to every neighborhood and thereby provide 10-20 different cable TV providers.
Also if we followed your view to its logical conclusion, all the car companies should be merged into one single unit, to avoid wasting resources. But then of course you would have a car manufacturer monopoly, which is inherently anti-liberty and should be avoided at all costs. Same applies to TV monopolies like Comcast.
>>>You seem to be forgetting we aren't talking about just TV channels, we are talking broadband access where communication works two way already.
Yes but you seem to be forgetting that Comcast and Cox and all the rest are not just providing internet. They already have their cable lines full of TV channels, from 50 upto 2000 megahertz. You can not simply overlap Cox TV on top of a Comcast cable - their respective channels would interfere with one another.
(shrug). I don't understand why you are having such a hard time understanding the meaning of the word "full". Or "preassigned spectrum". It's the same reason why you can't just turn on a transmitter and start sending signals over TV channels 2 through 51, or FM radio stations ~88-108 megahertz. The same restriction applies to Comcast's cable line.
Maybe you just live in the wrong state? In my state I can stick with Verizon, or I can switch my local service to AT&T or Sprint. I also have competition for my electricity and natural gas providers. Ironically this is a Democrat-run state.
>>>I think a monthly subscription is only fair if when the subscription ends you lose access to my music.
By this reasoning, all my previous employers should continue paying me a residual fee for the rest of my life, just because I created some schematics for them. (Or else return the schematic to me.) I don't understand why artists believe they have the right to eternal payments, when none of the rest of us workers have that right. We work; we get paid. When we get fired or laid-off, we stop getting paid, and the employer keeps what he paid for. The same should be true for songs and singers
>>>Part of it is that we look around and see silly things like roads
And roads are funded by gasoline tax NOT the compact disc tax, so your example is completely and totally irrelevant. Also I paid nearly $25,000 in taxes last year. That's equivalent to a new car every single year - that's an insane amount of taxation. It's equivalent to spending the first third of each year as an indentured servant to Uncle Sam. This is a revival of serfdom.
Your vision is nice, but I'll probably be dead before Cable channels like TNT or Spike give-up their exclusive rights to shows, and get replaced by your "video on demand" box. I'd honestly rather have the a la carte option NOW, so then I could subscribe to SyFy Channel for cheap, rather than for $65 a month.
>>>A La Catre != Cheaper. I don't know why people have this illusion. A $100 bundle would be replaced by $90 base plus $10 per channel
FALSE.
You are repeating the lies of the cable companies that are afraid of change. A $100 bundle would *remain* a $100 bundle. Nothing would change for you if that's what you want. All a la Carte would do is add a bottom-level tier for cheapass people like me who only want a few channels. In fact the companies that have this option, per mandate from local governments, are very reasonable - a flat $5 hookup fee plus $1 per channel. People who want the package deals still have them available for the same low price as everywhere else.
The natural gas company or electric company or water company are natural monopolies because it isn't practical to run 3 or 4 foot-wide pipes to every home. But cable TV isn't a natural monopoly. Neither is internet. You can easily bundle 10 companies/cables into less than half-a-foot diameter.
>>>Running coax or fibre or whatever costs a ton of money.
Oh well. Having twenty different car companies (Honda, Ford, Kia, Volkswagen, etc) is also an expensive endeavor, but we do it because the alternative of not having choice is far, far worse. Just ask the East Germans who were stuck with the Tribant monopoly. .
>>>Unless the companies are willing to operate at a massive loss for many years
Verizon doesn't seem to mind. They are laying-down FiOS all over the place, and going directly head-to-head against Comcast TV. And there are some towns that have both Comcast and Cox serving the neighborhoods, in direct competition with duplicated cables. This is what we need - more companies per neighborhood so people have choice.
Choosing your cable tv should be just like choosing your car: multiple brands available.
>>>If Comcast can add me as a customer, then the same bandwidth could be handed over to another company in the server room for some fee.
As I already explained, Comcast doesn't add bandwidth. The bandwidth is fixed. Comcast's cable acts the same as the radio waves, where everyone in a neighborhood gets the same channel 2, same channel 3, same channel 4, and so on.
Put another way:
Let's imagine we live next door to one another. I sign-up for Comcast's service for TV channel 2 to 70, and you sign-up for channels 2 to 70 from Cox. How the hell are you supposed to broadcast those two separate Comcast/Cox services on the same cable *when they occupy they same frequency space*??? It isn't possible. (It's just the same as you cannot have two FM 100.1 stations in the same town.)
The way you talk reminds me of when I was teaching Physics 101, and one of my students kept insisting that an electric car could roll forever if you attached a generator to the rear wheel, and kept charging the battery (i.e. perpetual motion). He could not understand basic principles, and even when I tried to explain about frictional losses, the student kept insisting I didn't know what I was talking about. And I see the exact-same with you.
You don't seem to understand that Comcast and Cox can not both be broadcasting at the same time. You can't have Comcast channel 2 and Cox channel 2 both operating on the same cable. You can not multiplex television signals.
>>>No Comedy Central, no TBS, no TNT, no Spike, no MTV and friends (I don't watch em a lot, but they are part of a basic package to me), no ESPN, no Discovery, etc. >>>
No great loss, no great loss, no great loss. Even when I go on business travel and have those channels I don't ever watch them. Comedy used to be good back when they played Benny Hill, Monty Python, and other classics, but not anymore. TBS/TNT/Spike are mostly reruns of shows I've already seen. MTV/VH1 is a joke since they stopped playing music; ESPN doesn't interest me because I don't like sports; and Discovery Channel often reruns its shows (like Deadliest Catch) on PBS which I get free.
The only channels I really watch when I'm traveling are SyFy, TCM*, and the news stations. To me cable's just a vast wasteland that I don't need, and if I did buy it, the $20 Family Plan would be just fine.
* * Stupid local Comcast charges $5 extra to get this channel - so the total bill would be $70 per month.
Who the heck cares? My State already has this "check your vote online" deal, and I didn't even bother to look it up when I got home. I don't honestly believe that if my choice McCain had won, anything would be any better. So what's it matter whether my vote was counted or not.
I have this novel idea that we should follow the KISS principle. Take a piece of paper. Circle your guy. Toss it into a box. Count the ballots by hand. Keep. It. Simple.
>>>If it was actually full they couldn't add new customers, new channels, or new services without laying their own cable each time
Spoken like a man who doesn't understand radio spectrum. They aren't adding new channels. They are taking the existing 6 megahertz-wide channels, converting them from analog-to-digital, and then squeezing 8-10 SD channels into the same space. If you don't believe me, then just look at the cable spectrum for yourself - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_cable_television_frequencies
Now you tell me - after seeing that chart - where would Comcast make room to carry a competitor like Cox or Time-Warner cable? It ain't there. I'm telling you as one engineer to another - there is No More Room on that cable.
>>>If it was actually full they couldn't add new customers, new channels, or new services without laying their own cable each time, all of which they do all the time. >>>
Spoken like a man who doesn't understand radio spectrum. They are taking the existing 6 megahertz-wide channels, converting them from analog-to-digital, and then squeezing 10 SD channels into the same space. If you don't believe me, then just look at the cable spectrum for yourself - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_cable_television_frequencies
Now you tell me - after seeing that chart. Where the hell would Comcast make room to carry a competitor like Cox or Time-Warner cable? It ain't there. I'm telling you as one engineer to another - there is No More Room on that cable.
I don't know what's so horrible about that? I think it's a good deal for $20. The only thing missing which I would want is SyFy but I can get their original programming off the dot-com site. (shrug). It's called sacrificing so you don't go bankrupt, which is what would happen if I paid Comcast's nutso $65/month charge.
As for my Free TV via antenna, I said I got 45 channels. Here's a breakdown:
The 8 major english networks (ABC,CBS,NBC, FOX,CW,ION,MyNetTV, PBS) plus 3 spanish nets (Univision, Telemundo, Telefutura), and a bunch of digital subchannel networks: Wellness, AccuWeather, this movie channel, Universal Sports, PBSinfo, PBSclassic, MiND, LinkTV, GlobalTV, NBC Plus weather, PBSkids, 24 Hour News, Family channel, Shopping, IONlife, Kids, Worship, and a couple independent stations.
>>>That's why they should be force to lease their lines out to other companies at some reasonable (let's face it: regulated) cost.
Comcast can't lease space they don't have. The coaxial cable is already full from 50 megahertz upto 5000 megahertz. If another competitor like Cox Cable wants to enter this neighborhood, they will HAVE to lay another line. There's simply no oom for Comcast to share the line with Cox.
(1) The price goes up because the cable channels keep demanding more money. At one time channels asked for about 25 cents per home, and collected that money from Comcast, Dish, Directv, and so on. In today's world some channels like CNN or FOX News still only ask for 25 cents, but other channels like Sci-Fi, TNT, ABCfamily, and Disney are demanding 90 cents per subscriber, with the most-expensive channel ESPN charging $3/subscriber.
Therefore since these cable channels are demanding more fees, our monthly bills also go up.
(2) I'd say Dish and Directv are competing more with cable than one another. Dish now offers service for a mere $20 a month, plus $5 if you want locals, which is a darn good deal. Certainly better than what Comcast would charge me (~$65).
(3) I actually have neither of these. I get my TV for free via antenna (about 45 channels total), plus $15 internet for video-on-demand.
>>>The real issue here is that building infrastructure like this requires such a huge amount of capital that it's a natural monopoly.
I hear this argument a lot, and I don't buy it. First off running fiber optics doesn't require a lot of space. It's not like the natural gas or water lines which require a lot of bulk space (1-2 feet in diameter). A fiber optic is just a few millimeters. Therefore it should be possible to have overlapping companies serving cable tv/internet, just the same as we have AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, Cingular overlapping one another to provide cell service.
This is not a natural monopoly. It's a man-made monopoly and it needs to be revoked, so consumers will have the power of choice returned to them.
Would that work? After all most European countries have multi-party systems, but these parliaments pay even LESS attention to their constituents than our Republicrat leaders do. Although I'd like to see Libertarians and Greens in power I doubt anything would change.
>>>when the Cable Modem Termination System you're hooked-up to - along with up to 15,000 other Comcast subscribers - gets congested, and your traffic is somehow identified as being responsible. >>>
This part I find disturbing. What if it's prime-time and all 15000 people decided to watch Heroes. Meanwhile I've decided to watch *both* Heroes and CSI, but Comcast doesn't like that so I get throttled. Why should I be targeted for restriction? This is a case of everybody being at fault, not just one person.
In Comcast's view you're not supposed to be bit-torrenting.
Or watching videos for that matter. If you want TV, they expect you to signup for their cable service. Although I detest this company, I have to admit they are making a lot of smart moves (for their benefit, not ours). What better way to preserve your TV monopoly then to effectively cutoff using hulu.com or scifi.com or other video sites as a substitute?
Well at least your 800k line is faster than my 50k dialup. Although not as cheap (I pay $7/month).
>>>A residential cable/dsl service is far far cheaper and is contractually not obligated to provide consistent speeds, only burst speeds
This is why I only got the 750k service. I knew if I signed-up for 6,000k service I probably wouldn't get that speed most of the time, so why bother paying twice-as-much for little improvement?
The other thing we need in this country is A La Carte, where you can pay a base fee of $5 plus $1 for every extra channel you desire. (Or if you prefer, stick with the current package deal.)
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A government monopoly is worse than a private one. At least with the private monopoly they don't have access to my wallet or paycheck. (Or worse, jail me for nonpayment of taxes.)
Congrats. Your behavior has now formed a new neural connection in my brain. Socialist (like Cappy Splendy) == Rude Asshole. Way to sell your product bud.
Not the same thing. Roads take-up tons and tons of space. A hairthin fiber optic takes up virtually no space, so you can run 10-20 dedicated lines to every neighborhood and thereby provide 10-20 different cable TV providers.
Also if we followed your view to its logical conclusion, all the car companies should be merged into one single unit, to avoid wasting resources. But then of course you would have a car manufacturer monopoly, which is inherently anti-liberty and should be avoided at all costs. Same applies to TV monopolies like Comcast.
>>>You seem to be forgetting we aren't talking about just TV channels, we are talking broadband access where communication works two way already.
Yes but you seem to be forgetting that Comcast and Cox and all the rest are not just providing internet. They already have their cable lines full of TV channels, from 50 upto 2000 megahertz. You can not simply overlap Cox TV on top of a Comcast cable - their respective channels would interfere with one another.
(shrug). I don't understand why you are having such a hard time understanding the meaning of the word "full". Or "preassigned spectrum". It's the same reason why you can't just turn on a transmitter and start sending signals over TV channels 2 through 51, or FM radio stations ~88-108 megahertz. The same restriction applies to Comcast's cable line.
Maybe you just live in the wrong state? In my state I can stick with Verizon, or I can switch my local service to AT&T or Sprint. I also have competition for my electricity and natural gas providers. Ironically this is a Democrat-run state.
>>>I think a monthly subscription is only fair if when the subscription ends you lose access to my music.
By this reasoning, all my previous employers should continue paying me a residual fee for the rest of my life, just because I created some schematics for them. (Or else return the schematic to me.) I don't understand why artists believe they have the right to eternal payments, when none of the rest of us workers have that right. We work; we get paid. When we get fired or laid-off, we stop getting paid, and the employer keeps what he paid for. The same should be true for songs and singers
>>>Part of it is that we look around and see silly things like roads
And roads are funded by gasoline tax NOT the compact disc tax, so your example is completely and totally irrelevant. Also I paid nearly $25,000 in taxes last year. That's equivalent to a new car every single year - that's an insane amount of taxation. It's equivalent to spending the first third of each year as an indentured servant to Uncle Sam. This is a revival of serfdom.
Your vision is nice, but I'll probably be dead before Cable channels like TNT or Spike give-up their exclusive rights to shows, and get replaced by your "video on demand" box. I'd honestly rather have the a la carte option NOW, so then I could subscribe to SyFy Channel for cheap, rather than for $65 a month.
>>>A La Catre != Cheaper. I don't know why people have this illusion. A $100 bundle would be replaced by $90 base plus $10 per channel
FALSE.
You are repeating the lies of the cable companies that are afraid of change. A $100 bundle would *remain* a $100 bundle. Nothing would change for you if that's what you want. All a la Carte would do is add a bottom-level tier for cheapass people like me who only want a few channels. In fact the companies that have this option, per mandate from local governments, are very reasonable - a flat $5 hookup fee plus $1 per channel. People who want the package deals still have them available for the same low price as everywhere else.
Well said.
The natural gas company or electric company or water company are natural monopolies because it isn't practical to run 3 or 4 foot-wide pipes to every home. But cable TV isn't a natural monopoly. Neither is internet. You can easily bundle 10 companies/cables into less than half-a-foot diameter.
>>>Running coax or fibre or whatever costs a ton of money.
Oh well. Having twenty different car companies (Honda, Ford, Kia, Volkswagen, etc) is also an expensive endeavor, but we do it because the alternative of not having choice is far, far worse. Just ask the East Germans who were stuck with the Tribant monopoly.
.
>>>Unless the companies are willing to operate at a massive loss for many years
Verizon doesn't seem to mind. They are laying-down FiOS all over the place, and going directly head-to-head against Comcast TV. And there are some towns that have both Comcast and Cox serving the neighborhoods, in direct competition with duplicated cables. This is what we need - more companies per neighborhood so people have choice.
Choosing your cable tv should be just like choosing your car: multiple brands available.
>>>If Comcast can add me as a customer, then the same bandwidth could be handed over to another company in the server room for some fee.
As I already explained, Comcast doesn't add bandwidth. The bandwidth is fixed. Comcast's cable acts the same as the radio waves, where everyone in a neighborhood gets the same channel 2, same channel 3, same channel 4, and so on.
Put another way:
Let's imagine we live next door to one another. I sign-up for Comcast's service for TV channel 2 to 70, and you sign-up for channels 2 to 70 from Cox. How the hell are you supposed to broadcast those two separate Comcast/Cox services on the same cable *when they occupy they same frequency space*??? It isn't possible. (It's just the same as you cannot have two FM 100.1 stations in the same town.)
The way you talk reminds me of when I was teaching Physics 101, and one of my students kept insisting that an electric car could roll forever if you attached a generator to the rear wheel, and kept charging the battery (i.e. perpetual motion). He could not understand basic principles, and even when I tried to explain about frictional losses, the student kept insisting I didn't know what I was talking about. And I see the exact-same with you.
You don't seem to understand that Comcast and Cox can not both be broadcasting at the same time.
You can't have Comcast channel 2 and Cox channel 2 both operating on the same cable.
You can not multiplex television signals.
>>>No Comedy Central, no TBS, no TNT, no Spike, no MTV and friends (I don't watch em a lot, but they are part of a basic package to me), no ESPN, no Discovery, etc.
>>>
No great loss, no great loss, no great loss. Even when I go on business travel and have those channels I don't ever watch them. Comedy used to be good back when they played Benny Hill, Monty Python, and other classics, but not anymore. TBS/TNT/Spike are mostly reruns of shows I've already seen. MTV/VH1 is a joke since they stopped playing music; ESPN doesn't interest me because I don't like sports; and Discovery Channel often reruns its shows (like Deadliest Catch) on PBS which I get free.
The only channels I really watch when I'm traveling are SyFy, TCM*, and the news stations. To me cable's just a vast wasteland that I don't need, and if I did buy it, the $20 Family Plan would be just fine.
*
* Stupid local Comcast charges $5 extra to get this channel - so the total bill would be $70 per month.
Who the heck cares? My State already has this "check your vote online" deal, and I didn't even bother to look it up when I got home. I don't honestly believe that if my choice McCain had won, anything would be any better. So what's it matter whether my vote was counted or not.
I have this novel idea that we should follow the KISS principle. Take a piece of paper. Circle your guy. Toss it into a box. Count the ballots by hand. Keep. It. Simple.
Ooops....
>>>If it was actually full they couldn't add new customers, new channels, or new services without laying their own cable each time
Spoken like a man who doesn't understand radio spectrum. They aren't adding new channels. They are taking the existing 6 megahertz-wide channels, converting them from analog-to-digital, and then squeezing 8-10 SD channels into the same space. If you don't believe me, then just look at the cable spectrum for yourself - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_cable_television_frequencies
Now you tell me - after seeing that chart - where would Comcast make room to carry a competitor like Cox or Time-Warner cable? It ain't there. I'm telling you as one engineer to another - there is No More Room on that cable.
>>>If it was actually full they couldn't add new customers, new channels, or new services without laying their own cable each time, all of which they do all the time.
>>>
Spoken like a man who doesn't understand radio spectrum. They are taking the existing 6 megahertz-wide channels, converting them from analog-to-digital, and then squeezing 10 SD channels into the same space. If you don't believe me, then just look at the cable spectrum for yourself - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_cable_television_frequencies
Now you tell me - after seeing that chart. Where the hell would Comcast make room to carry a competitor like Cox or Time-Warner cable? It ain't there. I'm telling you as one engineer to another - there is No More Room on that cable.
>>>For their hilarious 'Family' package:
I don't know what's so horrible about that? I think it's a good deal for $20. The only thing missing which I would want is SyFy but I can get their original programming off the dot-com site. (shrug). It's called sacrificing so you don't go bankrupt, which is what would happen if I paid Comcast's nutso $65/month charge.
As for my Free TV via antenna, I said I got 45 channels. Here's a breakdown:
The 8 major english networks (ABC,CBS,NBC, FOX,CW,ION,MyNetTV, PBS) plus 3 spanish nets (Univision, Telemundo, Telefutura), and a bunch of digital subchannel networks: Wellness, AccuWeather, this movie channel, Universal Sports, PBSinfo, PBSclassic, MiND, LinkTV, GlobalTV, NBC Plus weather, PBSkids, 24 Hour News, Family channel, Shopping, IONlife, Kids, Worship, and a couple independent stations.
>>>That's why they should be force to lease their lines out to other companies at some reasonable (let's face it: regulated) cost.
Comcast can't lease space they don't have. The coaxial cable is already full from 50 megahertz upto 5000 megahertz. If another competitor like Cox Cable wants to enter this neighborhood, they will HAVE to lay another line. There's simply no oom for Comcast to share the line with Cox.
(1) The price goes up because the cable channels keep demanding more money. At one time channels asked for about 25 cents per home, and collected that money from Comcast, Dish, Directv, and so on. In today's world some channels like CNN or FOX News still only ask for 25 cents, but other channels like Sci-Fi, TNT, ABCfamily, and Disney are demanding 90 cents per subscriber, with the most-expensive channel ESPN charging $3/subscriber.
Therefore since these cable channels are demanding more fees, our monthly bills also go up.
(2) I'd say Dish and Directv are competing more with cable than one another. Dish now offers service for a mere $20 a month, plus $5 if you want locals, which is a darn good deal. Certainly better than what Comcast would charge me (~$65).
(3) I actually have neither of these. I get my TV for free via antenna (about 45 channels total), plus $15 internet for video-on-demand.
>>>The real issue here is that building infrastructure like this requires such a huge amount of capital that it's a natural monopoly.
I hear this argument a lot, and I don't buy it. First off running fiber optics doesn't require a lot of space. It's not like the natural gas or water lines which require a lot of bulk space (1-2 feet in diameter). A fiber optic is just a few millimeters. Therefore it should be possible to have overlapping companies serving cable tv/internet, just the same as we have AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, Cingular overlapping one another to provide cell service.
This is not a natural monopoly. It's a man-made monopoly and it needs to be revoked, so consumers will have the power of choice returned to them.
(blinks)
(puts ice cream back in fridge)
Would that work? After all most European countries have multi-party systems, but these parliaments pay even LESS attention to their constituents than our Republicrat leaders do. Although I'd like to see Libertarians and Greens in power I doubt anything would change.
>>>when the Cable Modem Termination System you're hooked-up to - along with up to 15,000 other Comcast subscribers - gets congested, and your traffic is somehow identified as being responsible.
>>>
This part I find disturbing. What if it's prime-time and all 15000 people decided to watch Heroes. Meanwhile I've decided to watch *both* Heroes and CSI, but Comcast doesn't like that so I get throttled. Why should I be targeted for restriction? This is a case of everybody being at fault, not just one person.
>>>Too bad it is hard to manage all that when you are seeding 30 torrents
No it isn't. If you have a 10 Mbit/s line, set the overall throttle to 6.9 Mbit/s max download (~860 KB/s).
In Comcast's view you're not supposed to be bit-torrenting.
Or watching videos for that matter. If you want TV, they expect you to signup for their cable service. Although I detest this company, I have to admit they are making a lot of smart moves (for their benefit, not ours). What better way to preserve your TV monopoly then to effectively cutoff using hulu.com or scifi.com or other video sites as a substitute?
Well at least your 800k line is faster than my 50k dialup. Although not as cheap (I pay $7/month).
>>>A residential cable/dsl service is far far cheaper and is contractually not obligated to provide consistent speeds, only burst speeds
This is why I only got the 750k service. I knew if I signed-up for 6,000k service I probably wouldn't get that speed most of the time, so why bother paying twice-as-much for little improvement?
The other thing we need in this country is A La Carte, where you can pay a base fee of $5 plus $1 for every extra channel you desire. (Or if you prefer, stick with the current package deal.)