Actually that is not true at all. It is clear you haven't dealt much with medical billing and medical insurance on the other side of the window. The reason costs for paying by cash/no insurance are so high is not because of dead beats coming in through the ER. It is because the "original" costs are used to justify to insurance companies why hospitals and doctors should be paid more, because they are "discounting" the service to the insurance company, so they can get that insurance companies business and be one of their official doctors or hospitals. Dead beats are actually a small percentage of the amount of billables that a hospital or doctor has.
This absolutely stupid because there is actually less overhead and less paperwork dealing with someone who pays cash. Yet the guy who is willing to pay cash upfront or cash the second he leaves the hospital, he pays double sometimes triple what the insurance companies pay. That is complete crap, but that is how it works.
So when you say the uninsured cost an average of $3,000 (or whatever the amount is) per ER visit. Realize that that number is wildly inflated by the hospital compared to what they would have received from an insurance company for the exact same services.
Don't believe me? Call up your local hospital and ask them for a price on a procedure without insurance paying by cash. Call them back a few days later and ask them the cost of the same procedure with your insurance company, tell them you need to know the amount charged because you have a ceiling on your policy. If you don't tell them that they will tell you not to worry about it and tell you what your co-pay is. You will see there is a huge difference in the amount the hospital actually gets between the two.
Yep and those end-of-life costs which are the highest is exactly where the government is now asking doctors to help them drop the costs. They want doctors to talk with patients every year about end-of-life management in health care. The government is pushing doctors to help them lower costs by watching the level and amount of services offered at this most expensive health care moment. This is a very bad thing. They are putting doctors in a bad spot where they have to do what is best for their patient and at the same time not piss off the government. I don't see any of this ending well at all. I see this as the government saying, wink wink nudge nudge, tell them not go for the heroic life saving methods or any of the expensive stuff, just paint it like they are going with dignity. This is a terrible position for the government to put doctors in, and the government should be ashamed of themselves. So in a way this could be a form of death panels.
In socialize medicine you absolutely have death panels. You have to ration health care because you only have so much money each year. So you can't always give everyone everything they want or need. So you have to decide who gets what treatments and how many of them. So by not offering certain services to some people because the money just isn't there, they are in fact letting some of them die because it is too expensive otherwise. This is a fact of limited money. Private insurance companies can go get loans if needed to tied them over. The government already spends more than they get and will hit the debit ceiling in a few months if it isn't raised, so the government borrowing money isn't exactly a realistic thing just for health care. Government run health care will be told to deal within their budget just like all other socialized medicine countries. If an insurance company won't pay for a procedure you can try and sue them to get it. You can't sue the government if they won't give you a procedure. So yes socialized medicine is also very much death panels.
No they shouldn't. It isn't his fault that they chose a different job that pays or is worth less than what he gets paid to do. Not everything is even or the same. People are not the same. I don't know where this idea came from that somehow everyone has to be made the same. That has never been what America has stood for since the beginning. You are promised life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Nowhere in there does it say you were promised a job, a house,health insurance, a family or any of these other things people somehow think are a right. You can pursue your happiness but the government isn't *REQUIRED* to give you whatever it takes to make you happy. You have to go out and work your ass off to get the things that make you happy. You can start your own company, take all the big risks, and then become rich. That is how it works in America.
You are not entitled to pull the rich down and steal from them because you think they make too much. They took huge risks that you wouldn't take. So they deserve the reward of those huge risks and hard work. This idea that most rich were given their money is complete crap. There are more millionaires who made their money in their own lifetime than those who were given their money. You want to be rich then figure out a service or widget to sell to the public and start your own company. Yes it's scary because you could completely fail and loose a lot of money, and you may not have insurance at first, and you don't just work 40 hours a week. Yep there is a lot of risk and whole lot of hard work, but there can be a lot of rewards as well if you do it right. Without risk there is no reward.
We should hold the parents of the kid responsible who decided to have a kid and couldn't afford all the costs of actually having a kid. Just because you decided to have a kid doesn't mean I should have to pay for your kid. It doesn't take a village to raise a kid, it takes parents who are willing to sacrifice for their kids, and who are involved in every aspect of their child's life. I know sacrifice is an evil word these days, and no one wants to do it because it's hard. If you can't be bothered to keep up with everything your kid is doing, then don't have kids. Don't make the rest of us pay because you can't be bothered or because you think it is too hard. If you can't or don't want to deal with kids then don't have kids. It's real simple. Take some personal responsibility people.
Orphans have insurance or get medical care from private charities and doctors who donate their services to charity run orphanages. This idea that orphans don't get help is a myth. They get more help than you could ever imagine. I have seen it first hand, not something I read somewhere. I know of several charity run orphanages that get huge amounts of money donated to them to keep the running properly, and no they don't get any government money either. These orphanages run just fine and are actually great places for the kids. Many have grown up there and come back and donated because of how they changed their lives for the better. An example of how private sector does just as well if not better than the government does.
It is not compassion when you steal from me by threat of violence, forcing me to pay for you or your kids when I may or may not want to do that. That is theft by threat of violence by the government. Pay your taxes to deal with these people who don't pay or we will throw you in jail. This government charity has got to stop. People already give more to private charities that do far more for the poor than the government ever does or could. The depth and breath of private charity services is amazing once you start looking at all the different options out there. Not to mention the fact that private charities manage their money far better than the government ever has. The government has never been able to do anything better than what the private sector does. This is even true in charities.
The moral of the story is that we don't need the government to take care of us. That
He does pay his way because the people who make the roads have set an amount that he should contribute each year in the form of taxes and he pays that in order to use the roads. So he is paying exactly what the road makers tell him he should pay. It is even more directly true when you talk about toll roads. If he paid for the entire road he could tell people piss off and make your own road like I did. That isn't practical so one company, the state/city, owns all the roads and charges everyone a percentage/price to use them. The same exact thing is true for fire, police, water, electric, and just about everything else. So he is paying his way. We all pay for it in some form or fashion. All that stuff isn't free/no cost. How do you figure that he isn't paying his way? Anything else you need explained to you?
I swear that is one of the most illogical arguments I have heard in awhile.
Yea got to love government rationed health care. It is rationed because there is only so much to spend on it each year, it has a budget. It isn't infinite money to spend on health care every year. I would hope at some point they say that you can't get any more health care so others can get some, rather than do without because a few people are hogging it. That gets you long waiting lists for the really expensive treatments and surgeries. Does the government handle all medical research in socialized medicine? I can't imagine too many companies wanting to do research when the government tells them how much they are going to get paid for a new drug or new medical device or whatever. Since the government is the only one buying the services they can then set the prices for what they pay suppliers.
Doesn't sound like the best possible system out there to me.
I thought NASA was at one point worried that two different cycles of the sun were going to hit at the same time. I also thought they had been saying that the low cycle was unusually long. Which made them worry about how far it could snap back in the other direction. Kind of like a rubber band or how no tremors for long periods make earthquakes worse because they don't let off that energy and instead store it and suddenly release it.
That is because of the monopolies on the last mile. Telcos and Cable companies have fought like hell to keep everyone else out of the last mile, and you can see what it has done for America. You can thank your city and state governments for that. They have the power to seriously open up the last mile but have failed in that task, and chose to side with the monopolies who make large campaign donations.
Deployment to all American's is going to be a major issue for the FCC until they unlock the last mile. That is the largest hurtle for competition at the local level. An ISP can already choose from dozens of backbone providers and play them off each other for better pricing. The same is not true at the local level. Once the last mile is unlock for real in a solid tangible way, then you will see real serious competition and prices dropping.
There is no technical reason that every house in America, no matter where they are, couldn't have access to broadband Internet. It is possible for everyone in all but maybe the most remote mountain towns to get broadband. It isn't really so much an issue of affordability either. As a former ISP owner I went to a lot of really small towns that the big guys wouldn't go anywhere near at the time, and made it work and made a profit at it. It wasn't the obscene amounts of profits the telcos and cable companies like though. The big issue is the right of ways, or truly open last mile.
If cities did their own fiber networks and sold access to everyone that would help a lot. Plus selling network access would give them another revenue/profit stream. All they have to do is maintain the buried fiber, which generally isn't that great of an expense. You could then blast narrow & focused wireless to the houses out in the country and hop-scotch around the rural parts of a county that way without too much of an issue or really all that much of serious cost. Counties/cities could even handle the wireless part and make it part of the network connection they sell to anyone. It's again an issue of right of ways, that cities would have far less of a problem over coming.
Yes and there all kinds of tricks you can do to help bring down the traffic level going off network to a lower level. Transparent web caching, transparent audio and video caching, getting CDNs to co-locate on your network. The more content you can get closer to the customer facing edge of the network the better the network will perform, and the better the customer experience.
There are other tricks you can do, but that is starting to get in to the area of actual network consulting that I do.;)
There is no hard and fast number that you can use. It entirely depends on your customers usage habits. Typically you can start at a 20:1 or 30:1 and see what your traffic levels look like at peak times, and then go from there, leaving yourself a small unused overhead (I used to try and leave about 10-20% never used for just in case) in case of any sudden strangeness, or flash traffic, or hot streaming events that come up. If your traffic levels are peaked and staying slammed for hours at a time then it is way past time to upgrade and get more/bigger connections from a backbone provider.
It also helps to target your advertising to various groups to spread out your peak times. Target businesses/telecommuters for more day time traffic. Target retired people for afternoon traffic. Home users for at night. Things like that. So you are spreading your user base out and not having every single customer hit at the 6-11pm time frame.
There is more to managing an ISP network than just making sure bits move around.
You might want to know that large percentage of the core Internet services are controlled by US companies, and thus can be controlled by the US government. Want a.net,.com,.org,.us domain? Yep get that from the US. Want an IP block? Better talk with ARIN the US company. Only 3 of the root DNS servers are not owned/run by American companies and could be replaced easily. The US has huge control over the Internet, that not all countries like, but considering it was basically invented in the US that is the breaks. So if the FCC begins to regulate things, depending on what they do, they absolutely could end up regulating the Internet and effecting everyone world wide.
Which is exactly the reason the FCC needs a hands off policy when it comes to the Internet itself. They could and probably will do more harm than good.
What do you think interconnectivity agreements are between the backbone providers? Why would setting up an ISP be any different than that? Your issue is a non-existent one that is easily dealt with.
If you truly open the last mile, then this will become a complete non-issue. Since the last mile is really what is killing competition, and the fact that the telcos and cable companies have their monopolies there with the right of ways. Open that up to anyone and you won't ever have to legislate what ISPs can and can't do. The market will take care of things just like it should. Cities should build their own fiber network to every business and every house in their town, then sell access to the fiber network to anyone who wants to buy. That will instantly remove any possible problem.
The problem isn't de-regulation. The problem is regulation at the last mile by cities and states. No one can compete with these companies because they control the last mile with an iron fist. They pay huge campaign contributions to the politicians and make sure their lobbyists are always there to make sure no one ever messes with their monopoly at the local level. If we hadn't given AT&T a monopoly for 100+ years we wouldn't have this mess. If cities hadn't given cable companies their monopolies for 40+ years we wouldn't be in this mess either. Right of ways are always going to be the most expensive part of the equation. When you lock other companies out of them, you will never have real competition.
You clearly didn't pay attention or learn the history of the telephone company. The reason the government gave a monopoly to AT&T was because there were dozens and dozens of different phone companies and none of them could talk with each other and none of them would work it out so that they could talk with each other. Because of this and because the government wanted to be able to call from state to state. They setup AT&T as government sanctioned monopoly that no one could compete with. Just like the postal system used to be a government protected monopoly.
The more you have regulations the more it costs businesses to make sure they are complying with all regulations. Thus costs are increased. So they are spending money making sure they are in compliance when they could be spending it on other things. Also if you end up fighting for your slice of the bandwidth on the Internet then there is less incentive for people to innovate because see the artificial barriers are too high to bother.
The high barriers to entry in the Internet business are totally artificial created by the existing monopolies, the cities and the states. Setting up an ISP is not particularly expensive. Getting through the last mile due to regulations and an unwillingness to open the last mile to serious competition is the problem. Cities are regularly restricting companies from laying any new cable, and the states aren't forcing the cities to change that. The states aren't forcing the telcos to open up the last mile either. That is how Independent ISPs have ended up screwed over the last number of years. Combined with monopolies playing games with pricing and using the other side of the house to prop up their Internet side, and the massive amounts of campaign donations to keep things exactly they way they are. Combined with threats of pulling out or the sky falling if others are allowed to compete with them openly and honestly. I have seen these tactics first hand.
I think you may have gotten off the train at the wrong place. Sesame Street was programmed by a large number of educators and psychologists. There is/was very little left or right leaning with it. It was government money that paid for most of it for a long time.
Fox News isn't the only channel to have that problem. There are many shows on cable that look like they should be news shows but in fact are opinion shows. MSNBC does this, and a few CNN shows have had this issue.
The FCC absolute does want to control the Internet. This is just their flag plant to say that they are the governmental regulating body that will control and regulate the Internet. They have said this repeatedly. I'm not sure where you have been for the last few years.
Wow are you really that ignorant? It is true free markets that do a better job at keeping companies in check. The problem is that the US government, courts, and companies have so rigged the system that it isn't anything close to a free market anymore.
In a true free market companies disclose all risks associated with their product and make pricing clear. Consumers are then able to make informed decisions about how much risk they are willing to take and at what price.
For example ISPs don't disclose what SPAM filter they are using, they don't disclose the type of traffic shaping they are doing, they don't always clearly disclose how much traffic you are allowed per month, they don't always disclose how much true bandwidth you will actually end up with once everything is hooked up. This all lead to market uncertainties.
Here is a simpler example. Airline A has no security, other than every pilot and stewardess carry a gun, and their average ticket price is $100. Airline B strip searches everyone and X-rays every bag 5 times, and their average ticket price is $500. Now you get to choose are you willing to take the risks of a lower price but less security or more security at a higher price. The choice is yours.
The problem is in the market you have issues like the Ford Pinto. It wasn't an issue of poor engineering, which I think it did have. It was an issue of undisclosed risks. Consumers were not aware of all risks associated with the car so they were not able to make an informed decision about the car. That is why there were lawsuits, not because they didn't spend $20 more for a different gas tank. Every car has different risks, the issue is did the company disclose all the risks so the consumer can make an informed choice about which one to buy based on price and how much risk they are willing to accept.
Same thing is true with the Internet. If anyone can get cable/wire to the last mile, and everyone discloses everything about their service, then absolutely the market is better, than the government, at keeping things under control and driving prices down.
If the city and state governments would actually really seriously and honesty open up the last mile to real competition, and keep long term monopolies from leveraging their status to run everyone else out of business, like they already have. Then absolutely I would prefer companies control the Internet rather than the government. Government control is just asking for it be screwed up. True free markets that aren't influenced by monopoly companies, and all information about the product is revealed to consumers before purchase, are the best way to run things. This lets companies compete against each other and the consumer to choose who they want to support with their money.
This monopoly protection for the telcos was done by the federal government a 100+ years ago. The cable companies got their monopolies from city governments about 40+ years ago. So both are long term monopolies that have absolutely no intentions of allowing the last mile to be open to real competition. Thus the issue of like 10 ISPs that like 90% of the US use. Yes there was suppose to be competition at the last mile a number of years back, but both telcos and cable companies lobbied hard to the states and cities to shut that down, and created fake grassroots groups to leave them alone. They basically told the cities and states that the independent ISPs had no clue what they were doing and if they opened up the last mile it would be a completely nightmare and nothing would ever work right again. They then dumped tons of money in to campaign funds, and the story quietly went away.
And every time the FCC tries to rule over the Internet it gets struck down by the courts or by Congress. Yea their track record for the Internet is so awesome.
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Actually that is not true at all. It is clear you haven't dealt much with medical billing and medical insurance on the other side of the window. The reason costs for paying by cash/no insurance are so high is not because of dead beats coming in through the ER. It is because the "original" costs are used to justify to insurance companies why hospitals and doctors should be paid more, because they are "discounting" the service to the insurance company, so they can get that insurance companies business and be one of their official doctors or hospitals. Dead beats are actually a small percentage of the amount of billables that a hospital or doctor has.
This absolutely stupid because there is actually less overhead and less paperwork dealing with someone who pays cash. Yet the guy who is willing to pay cash upfront or cash the second he leaves the hospital, he pays double sometimes triple what the insurance companies pay. That is complete crap, but that is how it works.
So when you say the uninsured cost an average of $3,000 (or whatever the amount is) per ER visit. Realize that that number is wildly inflated by the hospital compared to what they would have received from an insurance company for the exact same services.
Don't believe me? Call up your local hospital and ask them for a price on a procedure without insurance paying by cash. Call them back a few days later and ask them the cost of the same procedure with your insurance company, tell them you need to know the amount charged because you have a ceiling on your policy. If you don't tell them that they will tell you not to worry about it and tell you what your co-pay is. You will see there is a huge difference in the amount the hospital actually gets between the two.
Yep and those end-of-life costs which are the highest is exactly where the government is now asking doctors to help them drop the costs. They want doctors to talk with patients every year about end-of-life management in health care. The government is pushing doctors to help them lower costs by watching the level and amount of services offered at this most expensive health care moment. This is a very bad thing. They are putting doctors in a bad spot where they have to do what is best for their patient and at the same time not piss off the government. I don't see any of this ending well at all. I see this as the government saying, wink wink nudge nudge, tell them not go for the heroic life saving methods or any of the expensive stuff, just paint it like they are going with dignity. This is a terrible position for the government to put doctors in, and the government should be ashamed of themselves. So in a way this could be a form of death panels.
In socialize medicine you absolutely have death panels. You have to ration health care because you only have so much money each year. So you can't always give everyone everything they want or need. So you have to decide who gets what treatments and how many of them. So by not offering certain services to some people because the money just isn't there, they are in fact letting some of them die because it is too expensive otherwise. This is a fact of limited money. Private insurance companies can go get loans if needed to tied them over. The government already spends more than they get and will hit the debit ceiling in a few months if it isn't raised, so the government borrowing money isn't exactly a realistic thing just for health care. Government run health care will be told to deal within their budget just like all other socialized medicine countries. If an insurance company won't pay for a procedure you can try and sue them to get it. You can't sue the government if they won't give you a procedure. So yes socialized medicine is also very much death panels.
No they shouldn't. It isn't his fault that they chose a different job that pays or is worth less than what he gets paid to do. Not everything is even or the same. People are not the same. I don't know where this idea came from that somehow everyone has to be made the same. That has never been what America has stood for since the beginning. You are promised life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Nowhere in there does it say you were promised a job, a house,health insurance, a family or any of these other things people somehow think are a right. You can pursue your happiness but the government isn't *REQUIRED* to give you whatever it takes to make you happy. You have to go out and work your ass off to get the things that make you happy. You can start your own company, take all the big risks, and then become rich. That is how it works in America.
You are not entitled to pull the rich down and steal from them because you think they make too much. They took huge risks that you wouldn't take. So they deserve the reward of those huge risks and hard work. This idea that most rich were given their money is complete crap. There are more millionaires who made their money in their own lifetime than those who were given their money. You want to be rich then figure out a service or widget to sell to the public and start your own company. Yes it's scary because you could completely fail and loose a lot of money, and you may not have insurance at first, and you don't just work 40 hours a week. Yep there is a lot of risk and whole lot of hard work, but there can be a lot of rewards as well if you do it right. Without risk there is no reward.
We should hold the parents of the kid responsible who decided to have a kid and couldn't afford all the costs of actually having a kid. Just because you decided to have a kid doesn't mean I should have to pay for your kid. It doesn't take a village to raise a kid, it takes parents who are willing to sacrifice for their kids, and who are involved in every aspect of their child's life. I know sacrifice is an evil word these days, and no one wants to do it because it's hard. If you can't be bothered to keep up with everything your kid is doing, then don't have kids. Don't make the rest of us pay because you can't be bothered or because you think it is too hard. If you can't or don't want to deal with kids then don't have kids. It's real simple. Take some personal responsibility people.
Orphans have insurance or get medical care from private charities and doctors who donate their services to charity run orphanages. This idea that orphans don't get help is a myth. They get more help than you could ever imagine. I have seen it first hand, not something I read somewhere. I know of several charity run orphanages that get huge amounts of money donated to them to keep the running properly, and no they don't get any government money either. These orphanages run just fine and are actually great places for the kids. Many have grown up there and come back and donated because of how they changed their lives for the better. An example of how private sector does just as well if not better than the government does.
It is not compassion when you steal from me by threat of violence, forcing me to pay for you or your kids when I may or may not want to do that. That is theft by threat of violence by the government. Pay your taxes to deal with these people who don't pay or we will throw you in jail. This government charity has got to stop. People already give more to private charities that do far more for the poor than the government ever does or could. The depth and breath of private charity services is amazing once you start looking at all the different options out there. Not to mention the fact that private charities manage their money far better than the government ever has. The government has never been able to do anything better than what the private sector does. This is even true in charities.
The moral of the story is that we don't need the government to take care of us. That
He does pay his way because the people who make the roads have set an amount that he should contribute each year in the form of taxes and he pays that in order to use the roads. So he is paying exactly what the road makers tell him he should pay. It is even more directly true when you talk about toll roads. If he paid for the entire road he could tell people piss off and make your own road like I did. That isn't practical so one company, the state/city, owns all the roads and charges everyone a percentage/price to use them. The same exact thing is true for fire, police, water, electric, and just about everything else. So he is paying his way. We all pay for it in some form or fashion. All that stuff isn't free/no cost. How do you figure that he isn't paying his way? Anything else you need explained to you?
I swear that is one of the most illogical arguments I have heard in awhile.
Yea got to love government rationed health care. It is rationed because there is only so much to spend on it each year, it has a budget. It isn't infinite money to spend on health care every year. I would hope at some point they say that you can't get any more health care so others can get some, rather than do without because a few people are hogging it. That gets you long waiting lists for the really expensive treatments and surgeries. Does the government handle all medical research in socialized medicine? I can't imagine too many companies wanting to do research when the government tells them how much they are going to get paid for a new drug or new medical device or whatever. Since the government is the only one buying the services they can then set the prices for what they pay suppliers.
Doesn't sound like the best possible system out there to me.
I thought NASA was at one point worried that two different cycles of the sun were going to hit at the same time. I also thought they had been saying that the low cycle was unusually long. Which made them worry about how far it could snap back in the other direction. Kind of like a rubber band or how no tremors for long periods make earthquakes worse because they don't let off that energy and instead store it and suddenly release it.
As long as we don't have a repeat of 1859 then I am ok with whatever happens.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090902-1859-solar-storm.html
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/06may_carringtonflare/
Another storm like that in this modern electronic age would be a nightmare.
That is because of the monopolies on the last mile. Telcos and Cable companies have fought like hell to keep everyone else out of the last mile, and you can see what it has done for America. You can thank your city and state governments for that. They have the power to seriously open up the last mile but have failed in that task, and chose to side with the monopolies who make large campaign donations.
Deployment to all American's is going to be a major issue for the FCC until they unlock the last mile. That is the largest hurtle for competition at the local level. An ISP can already choose from dozens of backbone providers and play them off each other for better pricing. The same is not true at the local level. Once the last mile is unlock for real in a solid tangible way, then you will see real serious competition and prices dropping.
There is no technical reason that every house in America, no matter where they are, couldn't have access to broadband Internet. It is possible for everyone in all but maybe the most remote mountain towns to get broadband. It isn't really so much an issue of affordability either. As a former ISP owner I went to a lot of really small towns that the big guys wouldn't go anywhere near at the time, and made it work and made a profit at it. It wasn't the obscene amounts of profits the telcos and cable companies like though. The big issue is the right of ways, or truly open last mile.
If cities did their own fiber networks and sold access to everyone that would help a lot. Plus selling network access would give them another revenue/profit stream. All they have to do is maintain the buried fiber, which generally isn't that great of an expense. You could then blast narrow & focused wireless to the houses out in the country and hop-scotch around the rural parts of a county that way without too much of an issue or really all that much of serious cost. Counties/cities could even handle the wireless part and make it part of the network connection they sell to anyone. It's again an issue of right of ways, that cities would have far less of a problem over coming.
Yes and there all kinds of tricks you can do to help bring down the traffic level going off network to a lower level. Transparent web caching, transparent audio and video caching, getting CDNs to co-locate on your network. The more content you can get closer to the customer facing edge of the network the better the network will perform, and the better the customer experience.
There are other tricks you can do, but that is starting to get in to the area of actual network consulting that I do. ;)
There is no hard and fast number that you can use. It entirely depends on your customers usage habits. Typically you can start at a 20:1 or 30:1 and see what your traffic levels look like at peak times, and then go from there, leaving yourself a small unused overhead (I used to try and leave about 10-20% never used for just in case) in case of any sudden strangeness, or flash traffic, or hot streaming events that come up. If your traffic levels are peaked and staying slammed for hours at a time then it is way past time to upgrade and get more/bigger connections from a backbone provider.
It also helps to target your advertising to various groups to spread out your peak times. Target businesses/telecommuters for more day time traffic. Target retired people for afternoon traffic. Home users for at night. Things like that. So you are spreading your user base out and not having every single customer hit at the 6-11pm time frame.
There is more to managing an ISP network than just making sure bits move around.
You might want to know that large percentage of the core Internet services are controlled by US companies, and thus can be controlled by the US government. Want a .net,.com,.org, .us domain? Yep get that from the US. Want an IP block? Better talk with ARIN the US company. Only 3 of the root DNS servers are not owned/run by American companies and could be replaced easily. The US has huge control over the Internet, that not all countries like, but considering it was basically invented in the US that is the breaks. So if the FCC begins to regulate things, depending on what they do, they absolutely could end up regulating the Internet and effecting everyone world wide.
Which is exactly the reason the FCC needs a hands off policy when it comes to the Internet itself. They could and probably will do more harm than good.
What do you think interconnectivity agreements are between the backbone providers? Why would setting up an ISP be any different than that? Your issue is a non-existent one that is easily dealt with.
If you truly open the last mile, then this will become a complete non-issue. Since the last mile is really what is killing competition, and the fact that the telcos and cable companies have their monopolies there with the right of ways. Open that up to anyone and you won't ever have to legislate what ISPs can and can't do. The market will take care of things just like it should. Cities should build their own fiber network to every business and every house in their town, then sell access to the fiber network to anyone who wants to buy. That will instantly remove any possible problem.
The problem isn't de-regulation. The problem is regulation at the last mile by cities and states. No one can compete with these companies because they control the last mile with an iron fist. They pay huge campaign contributions to the politicians and make sure their lobbyists are always there to make sure no one ever messes with their monopoly at the local level. If we hadn't given AT&T a monopoly for 100+ years we wouldn't have this mess. If cities hadn't given cable companies their monopolies for 40+ years we wouldn't be in this mess either. Right of ways are always going to be the most expensive part of the equation. When you lock other companies out of them, you will never have real competition.
You clearly didn't pay attention or learn the history of the telephone company. The reason the government gave a monopoly to AT&T was because there were dozens and dozens of different phone companies and none of them could talk with each other and none of them would work it out so that they could talk with each other. Because of this and because the government wanted to be able to call from state to state. They setup AT&T as government sanctioned monopoly that no one could compete with. Just like the postal system used to be a government protected monopoly.
The more you have regulations the more it costs businesses to make sure they are complying with all regulations. Thus costs are increased. So they are spending money making sure they are in compliance when they could be spending it on other things. Also if you end up fighting for your slice of the bandwidth on the Internet then there is less incentive for people to innovate because see the artificial barriers are too high to bother.
The high barriers to entry in the Internet business are totally artificial created by the existing monopolies, the cities and the states. Setting up an ISP is not particularly expensive. Getting through the last mile due to regulations and an unwillingness to open the last mile to serious competition is the problem. Cities are regularly restricting companies from laying any new cable, and the states aren't forcing the cities to change that. The states aren't forcing the telcos to open up the last mile either. That is how Independent ISPs have ended up screwed over the last number of years. Combined with monopolies playing games with pricing and using the other side of the house to prop up their Internet side, and the massive amounts of campaign donations to keep things exactly they way they are. Combined with threats of pulling out or the sky falling if others are allowed to compete with them openly and honestly. I have seen these tactics first hand.
I think you may have gotten off the train at the wrong place. Sesame Street was programmed by a large number of educators and psychologists. There is/was very little left or right leaning with it. It was government money that paid for most of it for a long time.
Fox News isn't the only channel to have that problem. There are many shows on cable that look like they should be news shows but in fact are opinion shows. MSNBC does this, and a few CNN shows have had this issue.
The FCC absolute does want to control the Internet. This is just their flag plant to say that they are the governmental regulating body that will control and regulate the Internet. They have said this repeatedly. I'm not sure where you have been for the last few years.
Wow are you really that ignorant? It is true free markets that do a better job at keeping companies in check. The problem is that the US government, courts, and companies have so rigged the system that it isn't anything close to a free market anymore.
In a true free market companies disclose all risks associated with their product and make pricing clear. Consumers are then able to make informed decisions about how much risk they are willing to take and at what price.
For example ISPs don't disclose what SPAM filter they are using, they don't disclose the type of traffic shaping they are doing, they don't always clearly disclose how much traffic you are allowed per month, they don't always disclose how much true bandwidth you will actually end up with once everything is hooked up. This all lead to market uncertainties.
Here is a simpler example. Airline A has no security, other than every pilot and stewardess carry a gun, and their average ticket price is $100. Airline B strip searches everyone and X-rays every bag 5 times, and their average ticket price is $500. Now you get to choose are you willing to take the risks of a lower price but less security or more security at a higher price. The choice is yours.
The problem is in the market you have issues like the Ford Pinto. It wasn't an issue of poor engineering, which I think it did have. It was an issue of undisclosed risks. Consumers were not aware of all risks associated with the car so they were not able to make an informed decision about the car. That is why there were lawsuits, not because they didn't spend $20 more for a different gas tank. Every car has different risks, the issue is did the company disclose all the risks so the consumer can make an informed choice about which one to buy based on price and how much risk they are willing to accept.
Same thing is true with the Internet. If anyone can get cable/wire to the last mile, and everyone discloses everything about their service, then absolutely the market is better, than the government, at keeping things under control and driving prices down.
If the city and state governments would actually really seriously and honesty open up the last mile to real competition, and keep long term monopolies from leveraging their status to run everyone else out of business, like they already have. Then absolutely I would prefer companies control the Internet rather than the government. Government control is just asking for it be screwed up. True free markets that aren't influenced by monopoly companies, and all information about the product is revealed to consumers before purchase, are the best way to run things. This lets companies compete against each other and the consumer to choose who they want to support with their money.
This monopoly protection for the telcos was done by the federal government a 100+ years ago. The cable companies got their monopolies from city governments about 40+ years ago. So both are long term monopolies that have absolutely no intentions of allowing the last mile to be open to real competition. Thus the issue of like 10 ISPs that like 90% of the US use. Yes there was suppose to be competition at the last mile a number of years back, but both telcos and cable companies lobbied hard to the states and cities to shut that down, and created fake grassroots groups to leave them alone. They basically told the cities and states that the independent ISPs had no clue what they were doing and if they opened up the last mile it would be a completely nightmare and nothing would ever work right again. They then dumped tons of money in to campaign funds, and the story quietly went away.
And every time the FCC tries to rule over the Internet it gets struck down by the courts or by Congress. Yea their track record for the Internet is so awesome.
Big ISPs already shut out other players. Just look at the fact that most Internet users are using 1 of 10 different ISPs. That is hardly competition.