Time Warner Cable trying to make municipal fiber illegal in North Carolina
innovationpolicy.org
innovationpolicy.org
From 1995-2000, their only option was dialup. 56k dialup was offered but the quality of the phone lines in the area only allowed for 26k - 28k at best.
Sometime around 2000 or 2001, "broadband" finally moved to the area. However, they can not get DSL or Cable. They have a wireless ISP (radio installed on the house, receives signal from a tower.)
They get about 1mpbs down and about 10% packet loss. Last night I was battling 35% packet loss while trying to do some work.
Parts of the county do have DSL and Cable. A guy who lives about 10 houses up from my dad has Time Warner broadband. He's had it for 10 years and loves it. My parent's can't get it, however, because they're just over the county line and apparently this county has some sort of exclusivity agreement with another small/local cable company.
That small cable company does have broadband, but only to small/select area of the county, and they don't seem to have any interest in heading out this way.
I really don't even know what to do to help them anymore as far as connectivity goes. I just know that it annoys them.
Anyway, the point of my little tirade is: It angers me to see possible additional imposed limitations to an area which already struggles to have anything to begin with.
The guy lives about 1/2 mile away and there's quite a bit of trees in the way.
Have a few meetings, invite your local cable representative to talk about "options". (They always send a guy to tell you how committed they are, how many new places they hooked up last year, and how your neighborhood is just too rural to serve at this time.) Once you get a T1 somewhere with a big antenna, they'll freak.
This is mostly an old, poor, mill town -- except all of the mills have long since gone away.
You pretty much described exactly the kinds of things they say. When I first called on my parent's behalf in 2008, I was told it would be 2010. In 2010 I was told "maybe 2011." Here we are in 2011 and they still have no answer for me.
Bell South apparently doesn't have a DSLAM near by... though my sister has DSL and lives about 6 miles from my parents.
They're pretty much at the county line, so I think this has caused them to end up in a "no man's land".
Time Warner can't come that last 1/4 mi and the other cable company doesn't care to come out this far.
900mhz seems to be the way to go.
edit Just stumbled across this article online, written about someone in the same county: http://www.internetforeveryone.org/americaoffline/nc/day5
Similar situation here - Comcast provides service to the entire area with a few exceptions, such as my neighbor and I. The cable service stops 150 feet up the road at the next closest neighbor, and for five years they have declined to extend the line. According to my neighbor, last time he called Comcast they offered to run the line if he covered the $9K or so cost.
Though there are many technology workers here, the area has limited Internet access providers, primarily BellSouth DSL and Time Warner cable, both of which have higher prices, yet offer less bandwidth compated to providers in other regions.
For example, Comcast advertises (in Santa Clara, CA) 15 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up (w/PowerBoost) for $42.95 per month, after a six-month intro of $19.99.
By comparison, Time Warner Cable offers only 10 Mbps down, 512 Kbps up for $64.90 per month, after a six-month intro of $39.90/month. Two-thirds the bandwidth for 1.5x the cost, nevermind that I can't even get higher speed if I wanted to.
DSL is even worse. I can't get BellSouth's website to tell me what DSL options are available at my address, but att.com advertises 6 Mbps DSL for $42.95 per month after a 12-month intro of $24.95. AT&T U-verse is not yet available to me either.
Now look what Wilson, NC, 60 miles to the east, offers to its residents:
http://www.greenlightnc.com/about/internet/
10 Mbps symmetric service for $35/month up to 100 Mbps symmetric for $150/month.
More about what's going on at http://savencbb.wordpress.com/
A fellow HNer/friend mentioned this: https://epbfi.com/internet/
Chattanooga TN offering 1gbps service for $350/mo.
I have no clue about this particular case, but I've been involved in other municipal fiber projects, and big telcos (plural, not just one) routinely tried to stop or sabotage these projects, often surreptitiously. As far as they're concerned, you're encroaching on their territory. It's complete crap. It happens all over the country.
A commenter below mentions that they thought the headline was editorialized heavily or plain wrong. Again, I have no clue about this particular case, but these corporations work in underhanded ways.
FCC response, in the end, was that monopolies were O.K. if there were two technologies, a 'duopoly' of DSL and Cable.
I agree with some of the statements, we shouldn't have municipal fiber networks where it doesn't make sense. On the other hand, I've had stellar experience with locally owned and operated broadband networks in other states, and I don't think we need a bill to make that illegal. A few bad examples doesn't mean we need a law to prohibit it in the future.
It doesn't sound like this makes it illegal. It sounds like it makes it illegal for municipalities to engage in anticompetitive practices, or what we'd call anticompetitive practices if they weren't a government. That's not the same thing.
I have no opinion on the bill itself. I found the article thought-provoking, but being libertarian I'm still inclined to say that a municipality shouldn't be running a business like that. Not even because it'll give bad service to the customers necessarily, but also because a municipality just shouldn't have to deal with a case where it builds out millions of dollars of infrastructure and then can't recoup the costs because its business analysis was crappy. Society has solid, tested mechanisms for dealing with that when companies go wrong and have to go under, it's a lot harder for a municipality. They shouldn't be engaging in that sort of risky behavior, even as I'm not sure I want to ban it.
Even in states where energy production is free-market/deregulated, with consumers choosing which power generators to buy from at market rates, the actual lines over which the power flows are either government-owned or quasi-governmental, because competition for provision of power lines doesn't work particularly well.
Regardless of the pros/cons though, municipal experimentation in this area seems the least problematic to me. If the federal government or even a state is doing something, it's hard to escape and covers a large area. If a town is doing something, and people don't like it, it's much easier to just avoid that town. If some strategies clearly end up working much better than others, we'll be able to see which towns succeed in their strategies and which fail. Municipalities are also somewhat more constrained in their ability to waste unlimited taxpayer money, due to a mixture of fewer taxes they're allowed to levy, and the fact that people can just move to another town if things get too onerous.
The reason why I'm not in a hurry to ban it is that I'm actually not upset to see people experience the consequences of their actions. It inevitably happens anyhow and trying to legislate it away has the usual problems that arise when you try to legislate an impossibility.
I suppose I shouldn't have used the dreaded l-word; we say nearly the same thing but you wouldn't know it from the karma outcome.
Furthermore, as soon as you get a local monopoly on internet access, you are only one city council decision away from local censorship. After all, he who pays gets to call the shots ("Porn on the tax-paid internet? No way! Think of the children.")
You are aware that this article is about a bill, written by Time-Warner, to ban municipalities from competing with them, right?
The article completely ignores Greenlight (http://www.greenlightnc.com/) -- the successful municipal broadband network in Wilson, NC that has been battling TW in the courts. To me, it appears the bill is aimed directly at Greenlight.
BTW I live in Raleigh, I pay TWC $105 per month for business class service: 10/2 with 5 static IPs. (I get roughly 7/1. They won't prorate for the missing bits.)
[The bill] seeks to ensure that cities, who function in the dual role of regulator and competitor in such markets, don’t abuse their regulatory power to privilege themselves with respect to their competitors. [...] The bills require municipal broadband operators play by the same rules and regulations that apply to commercial operators, to refrain from cross-subsidizing their networks by raiding other kitties, to price at cost or above, and to allow fair access to rights of way.
Say what you want about Time Warner being out there, pushing any bill, but let's at least judge the bill by it's actual content.
Municipal broadband operators shouldn't have to "play fair". Broadband access is a natural monopoly, and a municipality offering quality service should not be bound by the same obligations as a profit-making enterprise.
If the city and its residents believe that broadband is worth funding, via any method they choose to do so, that should absolutely be their right regardless of what TWC and their lobbyists think.
The fact that you agree with the editorializing is irrelevant.
It basically stops a community from providing broadband as part of the basic city services (like fire, police).
Neither of these statements make sense.
First, regarding the "natural monopoly", I just can't understand why you'd say that. You've offered no supporting argument. So I'll just point out that, 30 years ago, ATT said exactly the same thing. But we've come a long way from there, virtually all of it good. Why would you want to run your broadband access under the same ideas that gave us the evil old phone monopoly?
I don't understand why you'd think that a government-run service should have special privileges over a corporation. I would say the other way around, because the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and all that. Plus there's the dismal track record of other governmental efforts. Take sports stadiums, for example. Giving public education huge benefits in that business certainly hasn't delivered better outcomes.
Government run services already have tons of special privileges corporations don't. Try not paying your taxes and see what happens. Regardless, it is my opinion (and I'd believe the article writers would agree with me) that infrastructure is something that is inherently in the public interest and therefore best managed by the public (through government.) You don't drive on four separate interstate systems, you don't have eighteen sets of phone lines running into your house, and you don't have 4 sets of power cables either.
By this idiot "argument", government should go back to the 1950s through 1970s and start nationalizing railroads, power companies, and oil companies again. How did that work out again?
On the one hand, you are talking about a program to privatize a previously-public program. That has nothing to do with the question of whether public entities should enter markets that are already serviced by corporate entities.
Indeed, if anything, it seems to me that your example argues against government getting into business, because of the danger of it being corrupted or subverted, as in your example.
The brownouts a couple years back were because the State deregulated only one side of the market, leaving the sellers of electricity in an untenable position. Essentially, they had to compete to sell on the one hand, but were forbidden from competition on the purchasing side. The problem was entirely (and it's not often one can point a finger at one single cause, but here it is) the fault of ham-fisted State regulation.
The federal rail system is not inexpensive, it's heavily subsidized. Don't start with the per-passenger-mile comparison to highways, because it's wrong: the study failed to account for capital cost in the railway, while counting for it against roads. On the topic of rail, the network of rail in the US was subsidized and built using eminent domain -- yet all of those railroads failed or were merged into others. The one exception, the one railroad that stood on its own without federal strongarming others into supporting it, is the only one that managed to survive until the present day.
Particularly it should sell them to different car companies and arrange for them to have a monopoly. So the interstate is usable by anyone who pays but the local roads are GM only and the off ramp where you work is owned by Toyota.
Why do you think AT&T has basically remerged back together (with the exception of the RBOCs that make up Verizon) after it was broken up?
If you don't understand economies of scale or network effects, why are you commenting on this post?
Ahem. Network effects refer to the network, not to the individual provider. As a customer of Verizon, for example, I can participate in the same network that ATT customers use. My ISP is PennTeleData, and I'm fairly confident that this is not the way you're moving your data. Yet we still manage to mutually benefit from network effects.
Economies of scale are a positive effect of larger entities. But this is weighed against by the dinosaur effect, shall we say, that prevents them from changing business methods or products in an agile fashion. Or perhaps you believe that Microsoft should be the only maker of software?
Judging the bill by its actual content, a more honest version of the bill would simply be a full ban on municipal networks.
As for the bill itself - I don't see why any regulatory body or bill should tell a business how much they can charge, government or otherwise.
If the government is our ISP, do we have any hope of avoiding the scrutiny of government?
At least the government is in theory suppose to look after your best interests, corporations have no such requirement. Either way the best solution is maintaining strict privacy laws with monitoring and oversight by the free press and well funded and respected organisations such as a better funded EFF.