Many cities are already making this illegal, hopefully Baltimore realizes how damaging this truly is for business.
I live in Baltimore. I pay $130 a month for an extremely unreliable high latency “DSL” connection from Comcast. There is no other reasonable option at my home. When I need a strong and reliable connection with low latency, I switch to tethering from my phone. The only thing that makes a wired connection preferable to the cell network is data quantity.
The number of hours I’ve spent on the phone with Comcast and with incompetent technicians is staggering. I am using my own modem, but am now also “renting” a modem from Comcast for $30/mo because they will not even attempt to provide any support for fixing their own network if you don’t use their spyware modem. So I plug it in whenever I decide to give it another go-around with their tech support in a futile attempt to get reliable service.
> You have to take into account the increase in profit every ISP has to make every year
Not profit every year, but _increase_ in profit every year.
A threat to commercial providers is a very good thing as it might force them to step up their game and provide even better access, if people realize they don’t need continuous access to streaming media to get by. More likely, they’ll just throw money at lawyers and politicians to get any competition shut down, but hope remains.
Do Habitat for Humanity stores put Home Depot out of business?
Do food banks put grocery stores out of business?
Does offering free water as a drink put bars out of business?
Same product category, very different markets.
In this case, 25 MBit/s is 25 Mbit/s there is no difference in service between a community ISP and a commercial/public company ISP except the price.
No difference except the price, really? So, you don't think any of the following are differences?
* What the provider is permitted to do with your data
* Whether there is a soft cap on usage before throttling begins
* How aggressively they do traffic shaping
* What you're allowed or not allowed to do as per the terms of service (e.g. run a server)
and so on.
It seems like you're hand-waving away a ton of stuff and dismissing it as unimportant.
My uncle worked for a community organized ISP and you cannot imagine the amount of corruption. Basically a race to the bottom with slave laborer (ehm, volunteers) who don't even know how to provide proper service with trivial things like data caps, etc.
States like Maryland really need to pass right to assemble laws so that citizens can organize on commercial ISPs without fear of their internet being collectivized by a bunch of cultural marxists.