Each time I see a NN post I'm generally too late and it's been run rampant with defenders of "light touch" regulation... no, just no. If the companies had competition, then, maybe. Sadly they're entrenched monopolies (and more are merging each day, further limiting choice). NN is the way to go.
Let's not forget, the monopoly exists because the FCC auctioned off the available frequency bands to these companies.
Let's not forget the US Govt blocked an attempted Sprint + T-Mobile merger to produce a viable third competitor in the space, ironically, in the name of competition.
We could have had a spread spectrum solution with open airwaves. We have with unlicensed WiFi frequency bands, and there's plenty of competition in that space. Well, at least until the FCC tries to meddle in that too.
https://www.wired.com/2016/03/way-go-fcc-now-manufacturers-l...
"Light touch"? Yes. How about "no touch" or just "get out". Everything the FCC touches turns to a pile of ash and ruin. Where's my fiber optics? It's almost 2018. I live in a metro area with more than 1M people. Where's my fiber optics? This is ridiculous.
Not sure what you mean here. T-Mobile's efforts in the last few years (the "uncarrier" marketing push, among other things), has cemented their position as the "third competitor" already (in part due to the failed AT&T buyout), and AT&T and Verizon have been forced to offer better plans to compete with T-Mo's offerings. I don't see how a Sprint merger is necessary or useful to the competitive landscape at this time.
What I mean is T-Mobile + Sprint is still third by customer count. And not really a close third.
If competition is a problem, then ideally, the government would either allow a real third competitor, or in absence of that, break up the bigger two. They blocked the former and did not pursue the latter.
>I don't see how a Sprint merger is necessary or useful to the competitive landscape at this time.
Spectrum. Combined, they would be a force to be reckoned with.
I don't know where you live, but in LA County I have as good (if not better) reception than Verizon.
I switched to T-Mobile (I think in 2013 or 2012) from Verizon and never looked back, in additional to good coverage the bill is always the same amount (it doesn't suspiciously grow month over month), they don't seem to make "mistakes" with my bill that cost me more, don't charge me if I go over quota (just slow down the access) and comes with free perks such as free texting and data even when traveling internationally.
The T-Mobile is actually considered a shitty (as treating consumers badly) service in Europe so I'm very glad that at least for now we do have competition and if T-Mobile will become too big, at least there might be a chance for Sprint to grow as well.
In my opinion Sprint right now is where T-Mobile was 5 years ago.
I send >30K SMS per day to the continental US and a large percentage of those receive replies. With the replies, I get carrier info.
For the entire US last week,
'Verizon','0.48' 'AT&T','0.31' 'T-Mobile','0.10' 'Sprint','0.09' 'Other','0.02'
For the entire US one week starting 5 years ago
'Verizon','0.46' 'AT&T','0.33' 'Sprint','0.08' 'Other','0.07' 'T-Mobile','0.06'
T-Mobile hasn't hurt Sprint. Sprint is basically in the same spot it was 5 years ago. AT&T and Verizon are also largely unchanged. The only action is in T-Mo eating up subscribers from the small carriers like cricket and metropcs.
T-Mo has eliminated all the smaller competition. The US gov did not create/preserve competition by blocking a Sprint+T-Mobile merger. Neither Sprint nor T-Mo alone are mounting a serious challenge to the big two.
I'm just not seeing how T-Mobile isn't already a force to be reckoned with, even without Sprint in the picture. They're certainly smaller by subscriber count than AT&T and Verizon, and have less spectrum to work with, but it doesn't seem like they're actually hurting for spectrum or that their lack of more spectrum is hurting their growth.
I would certainly like my phone (on T-Mo here) to work in some random out of the way places where my AT&T- and Verizon-using friends have service and I don't (though the instances of that drop in number constantly), but T-Mo's subscribers are still way more loyal than any other carrier's, and they keep on growing.
As for fiber—blame your municipality. I’m in a metro area of 200,000 and have two fiber providers.
That's a lot of municipalities to blame. The US won't stay competitive just because your small town has fat pipes.
Wat?
Do you even know how spectrum works? It's so trivial to dump RF hash out on 70cm/23cm that I don't think you have an appreciation of how horrible of an idea that is.
As for Sprint and Tmobile, they are both "viable" competitors, whatever that means.
I don't agree with you on this. A merger is never good for a consumer. I'm actually very glad it turned out this way. The purchase of T-Mobile by AT&T was also blocked and as an result of this T-mobile received $3B which they promptly invested to improve their infrastructure.
Now T-Mobile is a viable competitor to AT&T and Verizon and we still have extra choice which is Sprint.
Airwaves are the scarcest resources in the planet. There are only so few of them and they are fairly limited by the law of physics. The mobile network is already running at physics capacity.
That's the question you need to ask:
1. Your city council - they are the ones who are blocking or making it very difficult for others to access city's ROW which are needed
2. Ask the old lady across the street. I'm sure at some point she was displeased at the idea of someone digging the street.
Source: Spent years in the telecom trenches trying to roll out fiber in 50 meter increments.
Has anyone heard if Google is considering restarting Fiber? I was always under the impression that they hope the implied competition was enough. It had seemed to be working. But then it was squashed.
oh and $66 for the base package cable internet package (for me), way too much.
Having lived in an area that had Pacific Gas & Electric, who has infrastructure so old and decrepit that it literally exploded and destroyed part of a town, i'm not so sure that I want my internet access being treated like a utility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion
also, their amazingly out of control prices, rolling blackouts, etc.
Seeing people say that they want the internet treated like a utility kind of scare me.
just like our copper wire infrastructure has done.
yet the telcos/etc will collect billions from us and the government and will build nothing. :/
Lack of NN is an immediate problem. We must fix that. If we don't, we lose, and we might not be able to win the bigger fight, against monopolization, for a very long time.
You can't align the stars in a straighter line than Google. And yet, they gave up. Why?
At this point, I'm rooting for SpaceX's Starlink. At least they have a chance, and a history of fantastic achievements. I trust them to follow through more than Google.
Google Fiber ultimately wasn't executed well (with fiber being installed and sitting dormant for ~1 year post installation in many areas). Had Google looked at how other ISPs operate, their ROI would've been much improved and they'd have significantly more customers today.
That said, NN is more a political issue at this point and that's Google's kryptonite.
Comcast also offers special rates for lower income households. Good PR. But it also does play to Google's objectives. I would think.
Not only is city-by-city approval painful, it is also slow. Think how long it takes a city council to approve an apartment building. Now thing how long it will take them to approve a city-wide project like installing fiber lines.
Look at the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fiber It's a list of cities. Each one of which had to individually approve Google Fiber.
This is why there is no competition for broadband.
Comparatively, Centurylink will have salespeople knocking on peoples doors two weeks after running fiber, with installs occurring a few days later.
Installing fiber is damn expensive. It is a hugely capital-intensive business. A sword is constantly hanging over your head as the entrenched monopolies can cut prices to $10/month at any moment in any market where you are laying fiber (trivial when they are bringing in $100/mo per customer where they are the only choice).
The only reasonable solution for natural monopolies is a regulated utility or government-owned infrastructure. Electrical choice is often done via the former, roads and water are examples of the latter.
In either case one entity should lay fiber to every home, then charge $cost + $expected_future_capital_contribution (and +7% profit if a regulated utility). Any ISP that wants to compete puts in the order and the fiber owner routes a drop to their equipment at the local CO.
Some great new technology enables 10Gbps? Not a problem - your ISP owns the ONT and can swap it out. The utility only maintains the fiber, which unlike copper doesn't have water-infiltration or degradation problems.
Even though I have sonic fiber in SF it is actually a waste: on the poles in front of my house there are three completely duplicated pieces of communications infrastructure: copper phone lines, copper cable lines, and sonic fiber. If ATT ever bothers to install fiber then I'll have duplicate fiber lines. That is a deadweight loss for basically no benefit and only enables 2-3 competitors rather than potentially 20 or 30.
No system is perfect and free markets are simply terrible at handling natural monopolies.
That's not correct. Installing fiber is extremely cheap. DWDM prisms are cheap. Long range 10G optics is dirt cheap.
> Even though I have sonic fiber in SF it is actually a waste: on the poles in front of my house there are three completely duplicated pieces of communications infrastructure: copper phone lines, copper cable lines, and sonic fiber. If ATT ever bothers to install fiber then I'll have duplicate fiber lines. That is a deadweight loss for basically no benefit and only enables 2-3 competitors rather than potentially 20 or 30.
And this "we want perfection", ladies and gentlemen, is why you are not getting telecom competition.
My impression is that Fiber's implied competition only worked in cities where Google got pretty far along. Prices in other cities don't seem to be affected.
Without a law mandating neutrality, no ISP is going to ignore the possibility of making extra money selling preferred bandwidth. Maybe they wait until the uproar dies down, but no doubt they'll look into it eventually.
Yes, but so what? There is no chance we're going to get meaningful competition among Internet providers in the USA.
So you can choose an imperfect but helpful solution that exists today, or a perfect theoretical solution that doesn't and won't.
Or. You can "accept" NN in the short term knowing it's going to cause a negative reaction in the market. That tension will build, the market will become more aware, and then demand the problem be addressed and solved.
The point is, the current solution being proposed by so many actual keep the powerful status quo intact. They win either way. Is that a win for the rest of us? I think not.
> And 15 percent of households earning more than $100,000 are mobile-only, versus 6 percent in 2013.
These are households who can easily afford wired broadband. But a growing number of people simply find wireless to be fast enough and place a high value on mobility.
5G wireless is going to make wired broadband obsolete, and also solve the competition problem. Unlike laying fiber, it's easy to have several different competing 5G networks in the same place. Once you get above about 100 mbps (and LTE-A is already there in some places), the mobility advantage is going to totally dominate any incremental improvement in speed for 80% of people.
You realize that the more wireless you have the more fiber backhaul you need with the towers and fiber everywhere?
That's an entirely normal level of competition for the economy at large. In smart phones, in contrast, Android has 82% of the market, Apple has 18% of the market, and Windows is well under 0.5%. In search engines, Google has about 2/3 of the market, Microsoft has about 1/4, and Yahoo has a bit over 10% (but they use Microsoft's back-end). In soft drinks, Coca Cola has 42%, Pepsi has 27%, and Dr. Pepper Snapple has 17%. In parcel service, UPS has about half the market, FedEx about 30%, and the Postal Service about 15%.
2. AT&T DID block Facetime, and wanted to allow access only on special plans.
3. The magic of the free market and competition did not step them
4. Special regulations about not blocking third party apps could have stopped them.
This issue is always framed as some lofty philosophical debate about "free market vs. regulation!!!" by companies.
In reality its perfectly clear that neither extreme works or even exists currently, just a precarious balance we as consumers have to protect that companies are always trying to erode.
This is not "whataboutism." People who think that search or smart phones shouldn't be regulated, I think, generally have a notion of how awful government regulation can be. So they say that we should only do it when the concentration, and thus the potential for abuse, exceeds a certain, high, threshold. Their view is that the threshold is not exceeded in smart phones, or search, or parcels. This is, I think, a really common view. Under that view, it's relevant that the market concentration in cellular is comparable to those other industries.
Imagine if criminal law worked this way, where nobody could be punished unless everyone that violated a law was punished....
If Google started manipulating search in a way that really hurt and people did not have recourse, great regulate the f* out of them. Same goes for smart phones.
Its not inconsistent because my guiding principle is not "enough competition/too much concentration in this industry or not?", it is "are their behaviors significantly hurting consumers or not".
Sprint owns Boost Mobile, Virgin Wireless in the UD
AT&T owns Cricket Wireless
T-mobile owns MetroPCS
After official complaints lodged with the FCC. Also, this was during the time period of the 2010 open internet order[0] and the 2014 court case[1], where ISPs and the FCC thought that the FCC had the authority to enforce "no blocking" violations.
So, saying "without Net Neutrality rules in place" is incorrect.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_Open_Internet_Order_2010
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Communications_Inc._v....
The carriers deployed proxy infrastructure to inspect and control traffic and were definately experimenting with limiting apps deemed disruptive in the 2013-2014 timeframe. If you had an app that generated lots of small packets in a short period of time, you’d run into it on some networks.