Towns want Verizon investigated for abandoning networks through neglect
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
This article however touches on an issue unique to Verizon, which is they're letting their copper plant rot in the field, as a way to force customers off of it (the railroads did much the same thing with passenger service in the early 50's) when Frontier has bought a former GTE/Verizon area, they usually have to hire a bunch more in the way of field techs, and spend millions on OSP upgrades and repairs - to the point that additional FiOS expansion in the immediate future is unfeasible due to cost.
The future is going to have a mix of wireline and wireless - and some of it will still be copper, I still believe the best architecture for the future is FTTN (fiber to the node) with a node every block (or 3-400 yards) allowing for sub 1000 ft loops. I still think this offers the best price/performance ratio.
FTTN Makes the most sense in dense and semi dense urban and suburban areas - FTTH/P makes more sense in very rural places, I'm seeing movement on FTTP by CenturyLink, Frontier seems very interested in expanding its existing FTTH footprint, but is not doing so yet.
My Jersey house must be one of the lucky ones, because I've had FIOS there since about 2009. I can see why the towns are upset, they were promised fiber and now Verizon is bullshitting them with broadband cellular.
As for my PA house. I had asked a tech a few years ago when FIOS would be available here, and his response was "never". I didn't take him at his word, but I'm still getting weekly mailings from Verizon for their 'high speed DSL'.
Does the College itself get a government/academic feed or do academic institutions have to rely on local commercial providers?
UK has janet and UKERNA.
https://www.jisc.ac.uk/network
To overcome the limitations of our domestic ADSL (6 km from exchange over solid aluminium wire voice circuit) I sometimes run queries over an RDP session to my College PC.
Fun hearsay, it was said that for a period in 98/99, West Halls dorm was one of the largest usage of broadband in the country.
I also had to swallow my pride and go over to Comcast.
When Frontier asked me why I was cancelling my account, I said: "because you haven't upgraded my DSL speed since 1997, and now you've told me you never will." That operator didn't even bother trying to get me to stay after I gave that reason.
Edit: I see you were responding to the immediate parent, not me. Oops.
Interestingly, one of the early techs put a TDR on the line and found I needed a new drop cable (the cable from the pole to the house). He put the order in. A few hours later a line guy shows up and says "yeah, we're not going to do that." Basically, he said it would cost them $2,000 to put in a new drop cable and he didn't have the authority for that. The next tech that came out basically told me between a wink and a nod that I should have a "tree trimming accident" where the drop cable was "accidentally" severed. I was too chicken to do it. I switched to Comcast and got 10x the speed, for about 2x the price.
The internet providers are just as bad as the railroads. The have too much power to control which towns and cities thrive in the modern world.
In a way you've got to hand it to them. Everyone hates them, and yet they remain one of the most viable players, nationwide.
On Verizon failing to meet its obligations to a city:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/06/verizon-ordered-to-f...
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/06/22-years-after-veriz...
On Verizon letting their copper landline decay:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/why-ve...
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/07/verizon-let-us-insta...
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/09/verizon-union-see...
I really hate that they're the best service in my area, because I think they're scum. But then, I think all the major telcos are scum.
The solution is decentralization through mesh networks.
REAL competition.
That said, although obviously the government can show up with guns wherever they want and tap whatever they want, I suspect the legal situation would be much different if we're looking at government-owned infrastructure vs. privately owned infrastructure.
If we can provide a mesh network that is as effective as older topologies but cheaper, the problem is solved, period.
If we break up ISPs into smaller ISPs, then we have to maintain that solution, as giant companies are constantly lobbying government to allow them to re-establish monopolistic practices. History tells us anti-monopolistic policies don't last. The split and re-merging of phone companies happened in under a decade. Glass-Steagall worked for a long time, but finally died.
I have no argument that there are major technical hurdles to clear before we can have mesh networks, but once those hurdles are cleared, the power is decentralized into the hands of individuals. Individuals can join together to force through legislation, but the power remains centralized in government, and maintaining that is extremely difficult.
To be clear, I give money to the EFF and I've called my congressmen on issues like net neutrality: I don't mean to downplay the importance of these efforts. But these are temporary solutions, workarounds to the problem, rather than solutions.
Personally, I would love to see some sort of decentralization.
I think the downvotes are because the poster basically handwaved a complex problem by saying that THE solution is mesh networks.
I play video games, and I can't imagine what the latency would be like over a mesh network. So many hops, so many pieces of questionable cheap home hardware handling my data...
You will end up with a random geographic distribution of radios with different capabilities. The number of network hops will be reduced because, as with skip lists, you find a path to high capacity station, then skip longs distances, then find the final recipient.
In practice this would be difficult to deploy (Can you legally give high power stations? What about RF safety of higher power stations?), but I think the idea is neat.
1. Neither can anyone, because we don't have examples of large-scale usage of mesh networks, and the amount of research that has gone into mesh networks is nowhere near as extensive as exists with ISPs. There's no reason to assume that mesh networks will always have higher latency, especially in places where i.e. Comcast is choking connections.
2. The small-scale mesh networks which already exist are demonstrably adequate for many, many use-cases. Mesh networks which handle text and image web browsing, email, instant messaging, are still extremely useful even if they have trouble handling streaming video and video games.
My other concern is, why should they pick up the tab for maintaining connections on an obsolete system if the new one will serve the area?
In rural and low-income areas, Verizon wants to let the old copper infrastructure rot, but they are uninterested in building out a real replacement. Instead, they push low-margin customers to grossly inferior wireless services.
LTE is great for when folks are out and about, but at home or work, even a halfway decent DSL line beats it. Fiber kills it across the board.
What causes this obligation?
Verizon predecessor New Jersey Bell agreed to the statewide broadband buildout in a 1993 agreement with the state. In exchange for a different form of price regulation that would allow the company to make more money, "Verizon agreed to upgrade its network to provide broadband to every Verizon New Jersey business and residential customer, school, and library for 100 percent of its service territory," according to the state's Division of Rate Counsel.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/verizon-led-massi...
This is supposed to provide a higher level of service to the consumer/citizen of the area that makes the agreement, while also meaning telecoms don't waste their massive upfront costs by having no customers. It's supposed to provide the same impetus to improve service as competition. In practice, you get this kind of nonsense.
I assumed we were talking about ^^^.
I'm not being pedantic about the distinction. If you're of a libertarian bent, there is a big difference between legal and de-facto monopolists.
I assume part of the takeover/merger that happened also merged the previous responsibilities.
It's probably a requirement for building fiber to commercial or government locations if a customer is willing to pay. Stuff that Telecom's do, it's just very expensive.
They also counter advertised against MCI, founded as Microwave Communications, Inc., on the basis of their using fiber and MCI still using a lot of microwave. From http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/sprint-corp... E.g.:
"In a spirited demonstration of the obsolescence of the microwave networks operated by AT&T and MCI, US Sprint blew up one of the last of its own microwave towers in February 1988."
I remember seeing a print add at the time with a picture of the controlled demolition in progress.
I'm willing to bet 50 bucks, the so called expert is misinterpreting the contract or statements by Verizon.
Telecom providers work with government bodies to place and access poles via eminent domain. Even with cellphones similar considerations exist for the placement of towers. Providers can work directly with private landowners but performing all such negotiations individually is not feasible.
Thus in exchange for the State of New Jersey supporting Verizon there are complimentary obligations for Verizon in return.
They're also obligated to provide you with non-VoIP (marketed under things like the Verizon Freedom package) phone service over fiber. The service is implemented much better, and since it's legally phone service, is obligated to meet a certain quality standard and be fixed in a certain length of time if it breaks.
In any case, it really does piss me off to see how far the telecom market has sunk. A lot of these companies have never gotten over the monopoly mindset, and really do nothing other than hold themselves back in every way possible. It's times like these, I kinda want to go buy one of these markets Verizon has effectively abandoned, and put the whole industry to shame.
The Google Fiber experiment has proven that if you put the whole (US) industry to shame in an incredibly public way that gets covered multiple times by just about every news outlet in the country... that it will have no effect at all on the entrenched players (except perhaps causing them to lower their prices in the areas you serve in order, I suppose, to harm your income).
However, you also weren't allowed to so much as provide your own telephone until AT&T was forced to allow it by the government. And phone service, especially outside of a small local area, was shockingly expensive for a very long time. (Yes, some of this is because of technology but AT&T also had little incentive and little interest in cutting rates absent competition.)
For the short video version, cue Lily Tomlin:
We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.
And then you'd have to find the public will to spend around 200B to run FTTH everywhere.
At this point, I'm not sure that's possible...
My wife had elective surgery- I had a high deductible plan at the time with an HSA account. When we asked what the total cost would be, the quote was ~$1100. The total bills that came to us were well over three times that. There is no real recourse for this, we wrote letters, called governing agencies in our area and were nearly sent to collections before I just paid for it.
Free market capitalism is far from what we have in almost every service-based industry in my experience, and companies fight tooth and nail to ensure it stays that way.
That sounds like an opportunity, no? If I were a hospital, I'd start providing cost guarantees to my patients and their insurers.
In fact, some of that is already starting to happen with capitated payment systems. Instead of paying for each procedure, a hospitals get a fixed amount per patient per year. If they can keep costs low, they keep the difference. If they can't, they take a loss.
It's important to remember a lot of healthcare providers are hamstrung by current regulations as well. Even just to start a new hospital, you need to get a "certificate of need" from your state.
Healthcare is far from a free market in the US.
Why? Healthcare consumers are largely price insensitive. They currently have no incentive to 'shop around' and reward lower priced providers.
We are only starting to see innovative service providers that are trying to change this.[0]
[0]http://www.npr.org/2015/10/09/447098694/why-most-people-don-...
Same for free-market solutions, especially in an industry with enormous barriers to entry like the telecom world.
> There is no reason to pay $1,500 for an MRI when there is another place across town willing to do it for $500.
Good luck getting a quote for a medical procedure in the US. Hospitals frequently can't tell if you if insurance will even cover a surgical procedure until the day before, let alone what the price will be (and said price will vary from insurance company to insurance company, and patient to patient).
The place across town might have shitty radiologists, too. A patient is unlikely to have any access to evaluate that aspect.
If you go to a mechanic, and get a quote for your auto repair, in most cases that quote is the maximum amount you can be required to pay. To charge more, or to add on services you did not request, would trigger consumer protection laws against deceptive business practices.
If you go to a physician's practice, and get a quote for your human repair, first off, congratulations are in order for getting any number at all prior to service. But unfortunately, that number that you got is pure coprographitto, and it won't be the upper limit on what you pay.
It's much like those e-commerce deals where you can't see the sale price of an item until you add it to your shopping cart. Except in this case, you don't see the price under after you buy the item. And the sale price has a negative discount, meaning you actually paid more for it. You can't meaningfully comparison shop under those conditions.
This is why those high-deductible plus healthcare savings account plans intended to spur comparison shopping cause people to simply forego treatment altogether instead. The only price people can really be sure of is that not going to the doctor at all costs $0 now out of pocket. Going to any doctor can range from "I can actually afford this," to "healthy and bankrupt beats rich and dead, I guess."
First, it's the higher of the per-person fee of $695/adult, $347.50/child, to a maximum of $2,085 or 2.5% of income up to the average annual price of a bronze plan on the exchange ($2,448 in 2014). Not "plus", and there are sensible caps.
https://www.healthcare.gov/fees/fee-for-not-being-covered/
Second, that's the price of not having insurance. You can have insurance and not see a doctor (and this is a fairly common choice for folks with a sky-high deductible).
Why should everyone need to individually comparison shop for every medical procedure? Why do two places in the same geographic area have a 3x price discrepancy? Shouldn't I be able to just get an MRI without having to worry that my doctor, or other medical provider, is ripping me off?
Because determining the cost basis for medical procedures isn't all that easy. It's not hard to figure out what the MRI machine costs, but how about the physician and nurses? How about the building? They do a lot more than just MRIs at these hospitals/clinics. From what I've heard from people working in hospitals, the hospitals themselves have no idea what their procedure costs actually are.
What they do instead is charge as much as they can for each procedure and hope they turn a profit at the end of the year.
When I was in the ER last (knife accident in the kitchen) I asked the front desk lady if they could bill me through an honest coding service. I even offered to pay extra for an error-free bill. Didn't prevent them from tacking on the tetanus shot I never got.
If I were a patient, I'd go for the $500 MRI and pay $100 out of pocket instead of $300.
Most expensive brain MRI is $5,560. Least expensive $218. Both in NYC.
Most people can access out of network providers. If you're paying 10% in-network, the $5,560 MRI is $556. If you're paying 50% out-of-network, the $218 MRI is $109.
The problem is price transparency and aligned incentives to take advantage of different prices.
-are the enough more people to justify the loss of profit
-that sounds like socialism you filthy altruist and we the board of directors will have none of that.
granted both of those presume that this hypothetical hospital is being governed by a profit motive which isn't always the case but one of the things you see argued fairly commonly on HN is that insurance hiding the cost of medicine has allowed hospitals to jack up rates because the insurance companies can bear higher costs than any individual consumer... which if true and not a correlation/causation error does imply that a profit motive is at play here.
Half of people don't have a landline--growing each year. Among those, many get their service via cable companies or VOIP. In 10 years there might not be any need for a functional landline telephone system.
And since the cost of such a system is mostly fixed, not variable, the less people use it, the more it costs per customer. Which only drives the cost up.
Only a fool would spend good money updating this stuff.
Offering cellular is unacceptable. If they can't put in fiber, they need to maintain the copper.
(source: comcast took three weeks to fix the internet in our apartment before we just terminated our plan and switched to another provider - lucky use we weren't fucked into only having a single option - spent a week trying to survive on phone internet before putting in the work to do tethering)
Remember, Verizon doesn't get exclusive franchise rights to fiber or ISP service. When Verizon rolled out FIOS to areas it thought were going to be most profitable, they ended up not making nearly as much as they thought they would. Turns out people stuck with the cable company. FIOS only get 40% of people in FIOS coverage to actually sign up.
That's why they stopped their FIOS expansion. It was barely profitable in the easy and rich areas. No way is it going to be profitable in poor and rural areas.
In fact, we've always had to subsidize rural and poor areas. The deal was originally that AT&T--which split into the current AT&T and Verizon,etc.--got to have exclusive telephone rights in exchange for making sure everyone got a connection. AT&T was legally entitled to a certain profit margin.
Now governments are expecting the same sorts of benefits without giving Verizon and AT&T the same sort quid pro quo. And they are finding out that nobody is going to build a new fiber network to rural and poor areas.
In fact, Google Fiber is capitalizing on it. The biggest concession Google gets before deploying Fiber, is that they can pick and choose which neighborhoods get Fiber. So they can cherry pick profitable customers.
I think one great compromise is providing LTE coverage without tyrannical data caps. There is no reason to data cap traffic during non-peak periods. And you don't need to tether a phone, there are wifi routers that work on LTE.
So, I have an honest question about this: why is fiber so much more expensive than copper? Is it just that the boxes the ends are bigger and more expensive? I've always heard that digging up land and running wires is nasty, but if that's the case, how were phone lines ever profitable without costing $100 a month?
> I think one great compromise is providing LTE coverage without tyrannical data caps. There is no reason to data cap traffic during non-peak periods. And you don't need to tether a phone, there are wifi routers that work on LTE.
I think that I'd like to make a modification there - I can agree on capping _bandwidth_ during peak periods. _Total transfer quantity_ should never be capped ever. Unless a significant portion of the cost of an internet connection is caused by a difference in expenses running the hardware at 75% utilization instead of 50% utilization, which I kind of doubt is the case. I also don't know if we'd ever get it; the wireless providers love claiming that they're out of capacity and can't even support bigger pictures on imgur, much less people shoving Windows Update through their networks.
That said, yes, an uncapped LTE modem with wifi router and some quality-of-service guarantees would be an excellent compromise.
http://www.elvispresleymusic.com.au/pictures/1973-april-2-ph...
They did give benefits. PA, NJ, and NYC gave Verizon (or predecessors) tax breaks and lighter regulation 20+ years ago in exchange for stringing fiber everywhere. Now the deadlines have passed, and places where you'd reasonably expect residential-grade fiber service to be don't have it.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kushnick/verizon-pennsyl...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131012/02124724852/decad...
Well, boo hoo for them. If it's not profitable, they shouldn't have signed the contract in the first place. They can't just shirk their contractual obligations because it's financially inconvenient; that's why their called 'obligations', not 'optionals'.
Let's all pretend they didn't just run fiber in the areas they needed it for cell towers and ignored everything else. And as for profitability - it's a long-term investment. If they're laying the right fiber, it will last them a LONG time without needing to be replaced.
> In 10 years there might not be any need for a functional landline telephone system.
That's fine, but this is today, and we're not there yet.
>That's fine, but this is today, and we're not there yet.
But that is the issue. Maintaining a network like that requires longterm capital investment. Verizon can't rent a network for 10 years. If you expect Verizon to operate a service will be gone in ten years, then they have to depreciate the assets over that period. Which increases the price.
Oftentimes, the state has paid for it. In my home state, Verizon-then-GTE was given tax breaks and cash payments to build a rural broadband system. It has not come anywhere close to completing that task, but now it pleads poverty and dumps the crappy copper infrastructure on Frontier.