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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

I miss the days of competing ISPs. I remember having Speakeasy for my DSL back in the early 2000s and being impressed at the range of services they offered and relatively high speeds they offered for less than what Verizon wanted to charge for a DSL line. Usenet, a shell server, personal webhosting, a POTS phone bank you could use as a backup when you were on the road.

But the limitations of DSL meant they couldn't compete with FiOS. And since FiOS didn't have to deal with grandfathered common carrier laws Verizon wasn't forced to share and they have not. Amazingly, even though the customer service headaches are incredible, you can get a reasonably fast line for not too much money (100Mbit for $35/month) on FiOS. Probably because we have some competition from cable modems. Of course you can't get IPv6 on there, because Verizon's most advanced network ever doesn't support it.

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FIOS wasn't actually why that market segment died; it was due to the FCC decision to re-classify DSL [0]. This was in response to a lawsuit resolved a few months earlier that did the same for cable internet connections. [1]

By re-classifying both cable and DSL as Title 1, rather than Title 2, that meant that they were no longer common carriers, and could kick all the competing ISPs off their network. This is why it seemed that most of the third-party providers went away nearly overnight.

[0]: https://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-changes-dsl-classification/

[1]" https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/technology/cable-wins-int...

> The phone companies say that the ruling will free up more of their resources to improve their broadband services, although at least one FCC commissioner says he will be watching to see if that's really the case.

> ISPs such as EarthLink, which already have a hard time competing on price, may still negotiate access contracts with the phone companies but are looking for alternative ways to deliver their services.

EarthLink sold the next year to Windstream for $673 million in an all-stock transaction. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/dial-...

Three years later... Windstream unloads legacy EarthLink internet assets for $330M https://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/windstream-unloads-leg...

And Speakeasy to Covad.

Looks like I got out just in time. Verizon's DSL options were notoriously overpriced and slow in my area, and I seriously doubt they got any better once they weren't forced to compete anymore.

Is that what happened? Makes sense. Back in 1999-ish I was a software programmer for a regional ISP. We served the San Francisco-San Jose-Monterey-San Luis Obispo areas. We did dial-up, DSL, ISDN, T-1, 3, OC, wireless (certain areas). We also had a data center and offered a lot of so-called “cloud” services, before it was a buzzword. We did a lot of cool things. But after I left it seemed like the company died when the big ISPs took over.

And since FiOS didn't have to deal with grandfathered common carrier laws Verizon wasn't forced to share and they have not.

While that is true, most of the Bay Area is Pacbell/AT&T territory. GTE/Verizon had a few zipcodes in Marin and I think some in the South Bay but that was it. FiOS is unobtainable for most of the Bay Area.

Of course you can't get IPv6 on there, because Verizon's most advanced network ever doesn't support it.

This is true with Sonic's fiber network too.

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