Comcast Has Always Opposed Internet Freedom
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Those are my options, so I'm stuck with Comcast.
It's amazing what a difference competition makes; I pay the same price today ($40/mo) for 50 Mbps from RCN as I did a month ago for 3 Mbps from Comcast. Regulation cannot come soon enough; we as a tech community must do all we can to oust that corporate capitalist tool Ajit Pai from the FCC.
Federal regulation trumping (or not, as it were) state xxxxxxxxxx [edit out "regulation"; I meant to type "legislation"] that had been purchased and manipulated by large, private ISP's (the Bell babies, Comcast et al.) to eliminate competition.
Note further that those big ISP's often secured substantial (i.e. enormous) tax breaks and other incentives, in return for agreeing to "universal broadband deployment" in the relevant state/community's service area. They have almost universally reneged on their side of these agreements, sometimes e.g. lobbying the state legislature to let them out of their side of the agreement almost before the ink is dry on their signature to it.
Going back in time, early trunk capacity was to a significant extent government built and government owned. There wouldn't have been an "Internet" without the Feds. And, once opened up, they kept access on a rather equal footing. This might not have all been "codified" regulation -- though I guess that and/or a set of "operating rules" grew somewhat organically. But it certainly controlled and set precedent.
So, both presently and in the past, "regulation" has actually fostered competition.
And yeah, the corporate lawyer is a giant tool. Quelle surprise!
As long as you can download 20+GB/hour you can get multiple HD streams faster than you can watch them and not much else needs that kind of bandwidth.
Sonic can't give me more than 15mbps, ditto AT&T. LMI is dialup, Pax is dialup. I own my own home, so I can't get Webpass.
Comcast can get away with shit like this because people realistically have no other options. I am damnned in to paying such an evil company thousands of dollars a year because of their monopoly and the supposed "free market" party passes laws and pushes policy to further entrench the status quo. It is maddening.
Wireless is also potentially an option.
The original cable companies were community antenna television (CATV) providers. They would find high ground with good signal reception, or make it with antenna masts, and send an amplified signal to their subscribers. The service was relatively cheap and very desirable in areas where putting up your own antenna wasn't useful. Towns easily granted licenses to their local companies to put up wire on the telephone poles.
The first added services were satellite channel reception and local channel insertion. These cost little to add.
Then pay channels were invented - HBO among the first. In order to differentiate non-subscribers from subscribers, the cable companies came up with a clever idea: they would add a transmission to each pay channel that would interfere with the signal. Subscribers would get a notch filter that would cut out the interference.
It was easy when you only had one channel to block or allow, but handling several meant multiple filters. It was much cheaper to maintain a few sets of multiple-filter enabling devices than to customize them for every subscriber, and that's where tiers of channels originally came from.
All of these things were handled by more or less local companies, and towns and cities didn't have a problem handing them pole access. But the companies consolidated into larger franchises, 800 becoming 20 or so companies covering populations of a million or more subscribers each and 82 much smaller businesses. The top five have about 235 million people in their coverage zones. The next five cover 43 million. And the next ten have about 15.
Now, once you have wired infrastructure covering that number of people, coupled with a tradition of granting local monopoly access to the wires, you get to hire lawyers and lobbyists who convince legislatures to make your traditional de factor monopoly a de jure monopoly.
So that's how we got here.
What can we do? Mostly what we have to do is to make net neutrality and infrastructure reform a priority for our state legislators and congressional reps and senators. Talk to them about your concerns. With Republicans, concentrate on arguments about enabling small business innovation and improving the economy. With Democrats, use arguments about freedom and consumer rights. Talk to your neighbors. Nobody wants a high cable bill, and the only way to lower it is to break the monopoly.
You have to pay a lot to get those wires to the places where you want them to go, but they don't interfere with each other. You can double capacity along a link by doubling the number of wires. (Or fibers, or continuous waveguide metamaterials, or whatever.)
When you need to double capacity along a wireless link, you need to either come up with a 2x better coding regime -- and those don't happen all that conveniently -- or you need to have access to twice the frequency range that you had before. Since the FCC hasn't given up on that part of their regulation, it's going to cost you quite a bit to have that license.
Now, the next time you need to double, you have the same choice...
Absent a major regulatory change not likely before 2020, I expect a fire-sale or give-away of licensed frequencies, all going to major incumbent players.
Why? To build a telecom, you need billions in capital. To raise that much capital, you need shareholders with deep pockets. If you do very well with those investments and threaten the big telecoms, they'll just buy you out. Those investors with deep pockets will be happy to sell for a profit.
Let's compare Comcast (30 million subscribers) with a local cable operator (and let's say it's a co-op with 50,000 subscribers):
If Comcast wants to upgrade from DOCSIS3 to DOCSIS3.1, they have to come up with an upgrade / migration plan for probably 3 or 4 different configurations of their CMTS platform. Let's say this costs $10 million per platform, so $40 million overall. Spread across 30 million customers, that works out to about $1.25 per customer.
If the local co-op wants to upgrade from DOCSIS3 to DOCSIS3.1, they have to come up with one migration plan for their single CMTS platform (this includes things like lab equipment, etc because you absolutely have to test and tweak this stuff). But the local co-op probably doesn't have a bunch of on-staff CMTS integration experts, so they have to hire an integrator at probably 1.5x the cost Comcast would pay. $15 million across 50,000 subscribers is $300 per subscriber.
Tell a co-op board that they have a choice: a one-time $300 fee across all the customers to cover the upgrade, raise prices by $10/mo, or accept a buyout offer from Comcast who will perform the upgrade for free. And this is just for one component of the system. Costs are simply higher across the board, and that has to get passed along to customers.
Scale matters in telecom. A lot. A lot of the investment is in non-variable costs, or at least costs that scale logarithmically to number of customers rather than linearly. Comcast/AT&T/Verizon can afford to undercut any smaller competitors because their scale enables a cost structure with much lower overhead maintenance costs.
Not directly so, no. If anything they get taxed very heavily because they are an easy target (because they can't pick up and leave.
Some argue that some local governments signed exclusivity deals, which can be considered an indirect subsidy. But that was usually only one side of the quid pro quo. In exchange, the cable company had to wire up poor neighborhoods, submit themselves to price regulation, etc. But exclusive deals were banned before cable internet was even invented.
Very many lower cost lower orbit satellites.
The plan is to double the amount of active satellites in orbit (4425 new satellites) in the next few years, resulting in half of all satellites being SpaceX internet satellites that cost an order of magnitude less than current satellites.
The new plan is to use a large number of satellites in LEO, with receivers able to switch to whichever are currently in view. Lower orbits are cheaper, and latency should have a better lower bound.
For the past few years I have subscribed to DSL, just to avoid feeding Comcast. Comcast/Cable Internet should be regulated like a utility.
They have been one of the larger IPv6 deployments, which is good for the network. That being said, they have always wanted to use "Qos" to bias some traffic against others.
I really think that the answer here is non-profit carriers providing fiber to everything. As long as carriers can compete in the content space they are going to have a monetary incentive to screw people.
For many this is not a problem. But if you have a router with WMM (WiFi QoS) enabled, the above setting destroys your connection quality, since inbound data takes a back seat to basically anything on the airwaves. I had to start stripping DSCP off of incoming packets to regain any semblance of a functioning internet connection.
And of course Comcast doesn't care about this, it combined with their bufferbloat problems just serve as a means to convince subscribers that the really need to upgrade to some $100/mo package to be able to browse Facebook…
The weird thing is that the constitution actually tasks the Postal Service with interstate messaging. They even have local offices where they could issue smartcards/hardware tokens for authentication. It's more likely that I will grow wings and fly away, but they would be in a great position to build a national content agnostic network.
Does this really add value to the discussion?