Report: Most Americans have no real choice in internet providers
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ISP investments, profits and pricing would all get regulated by the municipality. Performance is monitored and guaranteed.
I've lived in many, many apartments in NYC and each building has only ever had one choice -- Spectrum (was Time Warner) or Optimum. And it's always the same -- it's $24.99-39.99 at first, then after a year it's jacked up to $49.99-54.99, then another year up to $69.99.
It used to be you'd call to threaten to cancel and they'd re-lower it. But they haven't agreed to do that for over 3 years now -- they'll just let you cancel. They know you don't have a choice.
ISP's are so obviously by now a utility like water, gas and electric. Why aren't we treating them that way?
Who do you think gave them these monopolies in the first place?
Even when it's not legally a "monopoly", it's a collusion among the most powerful corporations and their revolving-door regulators that allow continued exploitation of the public.
Planet Money - Small America vs Big Internet https://www.npr.org/transcripts/865908114
ISPs are more like Ma Bell than a free market while they keep getting exclusivity agreements from localities
Nothing wrong with a system where the infrastructure is a regulated utility and ISPs can use it. Just don't assume it will be better or cheaper than it is today. There's no reason to believe that infrastructure won't cost you $100+ per month before you buy service on top of it. Or that it will be more widely available than today.
Or, alternately, ISPs could continue to own the infrastructure but be required to allow other ISPs to rent or pay for passage on their last mile infrastructure.
That seems to be the greatest point of contention smaller ISPs have. Getting a backbone connection seems relatively easy, but duplicating the existing telephone pole cabling and drops into people's houses seems to be very capital intensive.
There's no reason for every ISP to have their own cables on telephone lines. Unless I'm fundamentally misunderstanding how those connections work (which is very possible).
A regular diet of TechDirt[0] on the subject, going back many years, tells quite a story.
What do you suggest it looks like for us to not accept this?
Acceptance is the default. People, by and large, often do not have the experience of holding ideals of which to give up on that do not in one way or another map onto their experiences in a way suggesting they are living in-line with their ideals.
What I would like is for you guys to at least say this, instead of all the tiresome "freedom" stuff. Acceptance is the first step.
It's an infrastructure game.
If I need to build new fiber/cable/whatever to X homes to get N% * X new subscribers, then those costs & profits have to amortize out to at least 0. And most of the time they dont.
We tried to fix this for electric power by separating transmission from distribution ("deregulating") and allowing consumers to have a choice.
There is conflicting evidence as to whether or not this actually lowered prices for consumers.
For internet services, bandwidth is essentially free for providers (for typical usage), so the main costs involved are infrastructure upkeep & customer support. Cable TV distribution & phone/security services typically subsidize these costs too.
Municipal broadband is a nice idea, but it takes a unique set of circumstances for it to work. Consider how many other municipal infrastructure services are 100% run by your city/county.
Maybe there's a different approach. The federal government wants to prevent Huawei from deploying telecom equipment in the US. Maybe we should look at a top-down approach to internet infrastructure funding, the same way we do with highways and schools. If they want to set the rules, they should put up the money to do so. But then again, look at the poor state of our bridges and tunnels...
What's abundantly clear is that telecommunications services are an essential piece of infrastructure for modern commerce. COVID eliminated any doubt whatsoever about this fact. So how do we make sure it's funded well, but also run efficiently? It's not a trivial question by any means.
Where I live, my electric, water, sewer and gas services are directly run by the city. Trash and recycling are billed through the city but operated by a vendor. They're great. I would love to have internet service through them, and the fact that this town above all hasn't managed to do that is ridiculous.
If "unique set of circumstances" means "not getting snowed under by lawsuits from major ISPs", then yes, this is true. But that's the government's fault for letting ISPs get away with such tactics.
> Consider how many other municipal infrastructure services are 100% run by your city/county.
Consider how many would be if the government would stop favoring major ISPs.
I suggest you dig a little deeper and find out where these services actually come from in your community.
For most part US doesn't have functional government to manage these things properly.
The devil is really in the detail for that sort of term. Movements are probably held back by the cynical (and realistic) observation that "change the regulation" was the strategy that was tried in healthcare and made the situation worse. Somehow.
Instead of 'bad' regulation like heavy handed regulations of 'investments, profits and pricing', there should be 'good' regulation to improve competition without direct market intervention.
Running small ISP is extremely simple, i started one (non-profit) while studying a university. Why this does not happen in US?
Politically untenable in this climate. There's a certain subset of the population who will claim that any type of regulation they disagree with is communism, and those currently in power have no problem boosting those voices to prevent ISPs from being regulated.
Why aren't we treating that way? Because they are still so new relative to other utilities and for the most part a large number of people don't find the internet as useful as people in our fields do. You would be damn well surprised how many families there are where only the kids see value in the net.
There was one, it was called Net Neutrality...
How old are users on here?
I'm talking exclusively about pricing and profits.
Totally different things. How old are you?
Now let us compare to business connection. One would think a business has “options” - they are someone who can’t be toyed with. Even their rates are not cheaper! I am talking about price/mbps or price/TB . I don’t think you can get a business connection for less than $100 - yes, you get static IP. We (at home) expect the same “reliability” as a business.
We can cut it down to $50, may be, if we did muni internet. But it won’t become $20
I'm a bit curious as to whether the speed cap is due to old hardware or what exactly since much faster speeds seem to be common now, but I also never do anything that makes me wish my internet was faster.
I am content.
Regulation should instead focus on ensuring that consumers have multiple choices, as is the case in other countries.
(The microwave service you mention, Starry, sadly isn't in my area yet, but HN will be delighted to hear that their microwave relays use Rust internally in embedded context.)
Elevation of orbit is 35,768,000 meters [1], and light moves at ~300,000,000 meters per second.
[1] https://www.hughes.com/resources/press-releases/echostar-xix...
Politicians paid for by the incumbents.
Not everywhere though:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Telecommunication_Open_In...
* https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/what-...
Some areas have so few possible customers per mile that a fiber build by the incumbent provider would not break even for decades even with an 80% take rate by every building passed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
> A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors. This frequently occurs in industries where capital costs predominate, creating economies of scale that are large in relation to the size of the market; examples include public utilities such as water services and electricity.[1] Natural monopolies were recognized as potential sources of market failure as early as the 19th century; John Stuart Mill advocated government regulation to make them serve the public good.
... and suffice it to say, I agree wit John Stuart Mill.
There is no real way "untie" this hand in this case. The regulatory pseudo-markets that governments impose are often presented as "deregulation" but they aren't that. They're just a different kind of regulation. However, both companies and politicians put forward the claim that these pseudo-markets make their players "private enterprise" and so-absolved from responsibility to the public but that's a self-serving fiction.
This is no more "opening up to the free market" than if someone owns some land and a regulator says "you have to allow other people's cattle to graze here and must charge what we consider a fair price".
--> This isn't to say free markets are the best or that we should unregulated natural monopolies in the name of private property. Rather, regulatory pseudo-markets often wind-up just as shams to allow effective monopolies without implied responsibility to the public that a regulated monopoly has.
Separate the last mile pipe provider/operator (infrastructure) from the service providers. All service providers compete across that pipe. Traditional ISPs, niche providers, etc. I may choose 5 of them as a consumer.
It does necessitate an open, multi-tenant architecture. Let's invest there rather than investing in trying to implement a new regulatory scheme.
I'd rather everyone have great internet access at a fair price and let the companies battle it out for a smaller piece of the pie. Consumers win.
That may be true for DSL, but for new infrastructure, you could have local fiber to the nearest meet-me room, and it's then your ISP's responsibility to light up that fiber. Fiber is capable enough that the limits on performance and service will absolutely be the ISP and the equipment you hook up.
in a fiber scenario for example, different service providers could may customize various packages which include capabilities such as:
+ security + IoT + education + VPN + content
many of the above could have consumer and/or business flavors...
That sounds like regulation to me.
T-Mobile actually offers a home router with Ethernet out, they got accepted into the beta about 6 months ago and it's been a godsend.
Android phones can be configured to present themselves to PCs as a USB ethernet device, and you can then set up some iptables rules to make your PC a router for a wired LAN.
There are also Wi-Fi to Ethernet converters on Amazon, but this solution is kind of hacky.
It's also possible to use some home routers 'in reverse,' to bridge a wifi signal to wired ethernet. Devices on the wired segment will be stuck in a double-NAT situation, however.
$80/mo for Local ISP DSL - 10 Mbps down, <1 up
OR
$100/mo for LTE hot spot for $100+/mo. 25 MBps down, 5Mbps up with data caps and throttling.
The local ISP says they're installing fiber but they're only installing it where the federal government subsidizes or completely funds it.
Internet is a utility. Most people also don't have a choice in who they get electric, water, gas, etc. from.
It's unfortunate that internet service quality is so varied from location to location, but utilities tend to form natural monopolies.
You're missing the crucial difference. Public utilities are supervised by the public.
I have municipal fiber, which is not common, so I guess that's a fair point.
Then perhaps more local authorities should form Internet utilities:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband
It's a thing in many places:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Telecommunication_Open_In...
* https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/what-...
Unless you are in one of the 22 US states that have restrictions on it:
* https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...
The public infrastructure provides ISO Layer 1/2 connectivity, and let the Free Market™ compete at Level 3.
There was even an entire account on the cities subreddit named CitynameFiberBad lmao
What are the citizens' concern(s)?
The Ars article is interesting: the place is in Ammon, Idaho, where they label themselves as right-leaning, small government. That would be the stereotypical place to not do such a project.
Wait, you don’t get to choose who your electricity and gas provider is either ?
Here we get to choose from literally dozens of providers. Same goes for internet. I can choose from 13 different ISPs at my address on fiber alone.
I thought the US believed in competition and free markets ?
There are places where there are multiple fiber lines leading to one's home. I don't know about 13, but I've used to live in a place where there were 6 different providers, each with their fiber or copper (sharing the communal conduits, so it did not require constant digging to bury every single line).
Solve the inability of new providers to get to the market, and incentivize settlements to provide conduits as an utility. If any regulations are needed - it's the regulations that nullify the exclusivity agreements.
That is already proven to work in many countries that have started late (esp. post-Soviet countries) and haven't had those ancient monopolies dragging them down. What else is proven, is that no matter how hard one tries to regulate an utility, it would suck, because there's absolutely no incentive for them to improve (unless they're forced to). Competition naturally forces to stay put all the time (you screw up - your customers are gone), regulation does not - just keeping it conforming to the regulations - i.e. tolerable, just above the bottom line (customers won't go anywhere).
In the same way I don’t have 13 fiber lines to my home. There is just 1 fiber from my home to a PoP. The company that owns that fiber is obligated to provide a level playing field, open access to anyone. They don’t actually operate an ISP, they simply rent out the fiber and rack space in the PoPs to the ISPs.
Some smaller ISPs may simply piggy-back on the equipment of larger ISPs and resell part of their capacity. Others install their own equipment and only pay a fixed price for each customers fiber + rent for the rack space they use. Neighborhood PoPs are connected to city PoPs which are then connected to whatever backhaul network your ISP has. Same applies here, you can either rent capacity from someone else or just pay for the dark fiber and run your own network.
You can be a pure ‘paper’ provider and simply resell someone else’s stuff, or you can only rent the dark fibers and PoP space and do everything yourself, or anything in between.
You can also transition from one to the other. My current ISP started out by reselling bandwidth, but after a few years they started converting to using their own network and equipment, one city at a time. That’s how they were able to provide gbit service before anyone else.
For example, I live in Iowa, which is a huge wind energy state. Most of the wind farms are actually owned by out of state electric companies though. I'm sure the electricity actually gets used in the strictest sense right here next to the wind mills, but it gets credited to people hundreds of miles away.
The wind farm up by where I grew up is actually owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority [1], despite being no where near Tennessee.
But in that case there is no competition. They buy on the wholesale market, but since they have a monopoly there is no incentive for them to lower the prices they charge to the customer. Here there is aggressive competition on price.
Our provider is technically a non-profit electric cooperative [1]. Maybe it's dumb, but being from a rural area, I've always been big on cooperatives.
How does this work? Is it similar to all the various wireless providers that are actually just resellers for the people who own the actual infrastructure? I don't understand how you could choose to get electric or natural gas from someone else when there is a physical line that comes to your residence.
I’d bounce between EarthLink and TWC to get new customer bonuses. EarthLink was cheaper ($25 iirc vs $45 several years ago) but slower.
Differences:
Media is DOCSIS, DSL or Optical fiber
Providers have differences in facilities and services, differences:
- Plain internet vs. user-selectable filters (i.e. SMTP protection, SMB protection, content filters at the ISP level)
- VoIP options
- IPTV options
- Connectivity options (i.e. auto failover to LTE or special managed hardware)
- Addressing options (single IP, multiple IP, routed subnet if you want)
So you might find yourself wanting an all-in-one package over DOCSIS using the coax cable media, which is a common choice (at least before fiber rollout). Or you may like very fast internet in your own control, so you'd take fiber with no bundled stuff. Costs about the same as the other option.
Other things like having HD or 4K broadcasts may limit your choices, not all providers have all channels available in all formats, and not all kinds of media support all kinds of bitrates. So for non-cable (non-DOCSIS) you'd not be able to use 4k with DSL for more than 2 IPTV receivers.
Some providers come with extra on-site support in the package, like someone who will set it up, check that it works with your computer, setup your email if you still have ISP-bound email for some reason, and do your WiFi with extra access points (no repeater!) as needed. Others may be cheap and have no default service like that included and you then have the option to buy it on-demand at a higher price.
[1] https://muninetworks.org/content/open-access
* AT&T's DSL service ($40/mo for 10Mb down / 1Mb up), served on copper phone wires
* Comcast's cable service ($30/mo for 20 Mb down / 2 Mb up, plus $10/mo equipment rental fee), served on coax
- Elisa: Cable 50M 32.90 €/mo, 100M 39.90 €/mo, 1000M 56.90 €/mo.
- Telia: DSL/LTE hybrid 50M 31.90 €/mo, 100M 34.90 €/mo.
- DNA: FTTB 100M 9.90 €/mo, plus ~5 €/mo/dwelling the building ~co-op pays which gets a base level of IIRC 50M "free" for everyone.*
And cellular options (all unlimited, special offers omitted, mid speed tiers omitted):
- Elisa: 100M 27.90 €/mo, 1000M 44.90 €/mo
- Telia: 100M 24.90 €/mo, 1000M 44.90 €/mo
- DNA: 100M 24.90 €/mo, 1000M 44.90 €/mo
* (rant: theoretically they also have/had 1000M 39.90 €/mo but they seem incapable of provisioning that to me after the old ISP's corporate acquisition, even after multiple times of "we have manually provisioned it for you now" and "we will upgrade our switches next month/quarter to allow auto-provisioning" - luckily I still have grandfathered 250M from old ISP times so I'm not stuck to 100M)
But it should be noted that the municipalities are typically who are granting a local monopoly over the existing lines to the ISP and preventing someone else from coming in and laying their own new cables down.
The profit margin of the large cable companies reflect that. They're pretty much middle of the pack for the S&P 500. It's a capital intensive and relatively low margin business.
Look at Google Fiber. They had cities falling over themselves to get it and huge consumer demand. Ultimately they abandoned it because it doesn't make enough money.
We can get 940Mbps down/35Mbps up w/ 1.25TB cap and mid level cable TV from Cox for.. wait for it $270/month. O_o
Currently I get 150Mbps down/5Mbps up + mid level cable TV... $130/month. It’s fast enough for work, but feels so expensive.
an smb-class wireless router will let you segment neighbors into their own isolated vlan, and with mesh/repeaters, you can cover a fairly large area.
I could probably reach two of my neighbors (two shared walls), but not more without better equipment. Actually, because of how our construction is, I could probably do a 3-way mesh router setup and put one node in each place.
I had an acquaintance who wanted to start a company flashing a custom OpenWRT image onto Linksys routers, he added a little captive portal with billing through Stripe so he could collect the neighbor's portion.
Your comment reminded me to go check and see if he ever decided to go through with it.
I recall looking into this a long time ago, certainly could do it, but recall some terms and conditions that prohibited it maybe.
The other thing is even with all that bandwidth, there is the 1.25TB monthly bandwidth cap, which is one way I think they limit scenarios like this.
Good idea though thanks for suggesting it.
They take advantage of this to charge $75/month for plain broadband Internet service, which is about 50% more than the average Internet service (including Verizon FIOS) costs in the nearby area.
Just sayin'.
It isn’t. It’s the same old, rinse and repeated. America’s evolution of the free market capitalism experiment has failed and became a plutocracy. That doesn’t mean free market as a whole doesn’t work but it means our version of its evolution has failed for a bunch of different reasons some more illogical and childish than others.
The question is the same always too. How and when do we recognize it and start rebuilding it in a radically new way. Does it take a civil war? A world one? Does it take 99% poverty? Or does it just take for China to fail so we can’t have our mind numbing $5 electronics to keep us entertained.
How do we all (myself included) become citizens of a nation again and not consumers in a luxury work camp who are kept pacified?
Put bluntly, American democracy is nowhere near as effective at protecting the interests of the American public as the American public has been made to believe. [0]
Internet access is merely a symptom of a deeper American problem and cannot be fixed without fixing the deeper problems with American governance.
[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...
Where are you located? Even my grandparents in Northern Ontario have some 5 or so options, and not just skins of the Big 3.
I checked 8 providers when I lived in Kingston.
For cell phone, you are right.
A couple providers are through satellite and such in rural areas and in those cases it's typically even worse since the service truly sucks while costing much, and they're in no rush to do anything about it when there are issues on the line. And I'm not even talking about middle-of-nowhere stuff, just places north of Sudbury for example.
One is still limited to the limits of the underlying technology (e.g., copper distance with DSL), but it's better than nothing IMHO.