FCC Reaches Out to Collect Consumer Broadband Availability Experiences
fcc.gov
fcc.gov
I use Google Webpass (a microwave radio link). The speed is 100Mbps, and the service is phenomenal. I've had one outage in 3 years, only lasting about 6 hours. I had switched to RCN for about a month, as they had advertised 300Mbps for a cheaper price. The speed in tests was about that high (and actually even higher), but I was getting a lot of buffering when streaming videos, that made the service much worse.
For example "Fees & taxes" could be up to a third of your bill, and often they cannot quote the dollar amounts during initial contact.
This is particularly egregious when many fees are purely from the company itself, but worded to sound like taxes/government originating.
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jsvine/net-neutrality-f...
Starlink from SpaceX was just made available through a partnership with a state agency and it’s obvious that DSLs days are numbered. RDOF is also stretching the reach of cable and fiber broadband to areas previously only serviced by the telephone company.
The thing that occurred to me however is that many people don’t maintain dial tone at home, and once DSL alternatives are available I’m curious what the telephone companies going to do with all of this infrastructure and zero customers. As far as I know somebody’s on the hook to make telecom available to every home, does RDOF move that responsibility to the organization receiving the funding for Internet?
Local government would run the fibre network and terminate everything to a central POP (or several). They're responsible to maintain the physical network and ensure every connection can obtain the minimum speed and latency standard. This could even be cable/DSL/wireless, so long as the minimum speed is hit. They can contract this out, but it's largely irrelevant to the consumer.
At the POP is where ISPs take over and provide the upstream connection to the actual internet, and this is who the consumer pays. The ISPs can compete based on whatever combination of price, speed, transfer limits and/or add-on services they choose.
The scariest thing you can say to me is "we're the government and we're going to run your fiber" when almost all of my local municipally run services are barely functioning.
In my city, we have wooden sewers in some place over a hundred years old, gas pipes blowing up city blocks, streets which collapse into sink holes, and now you say "oh the government should surely get involved?". Preposterous.
Where I live (Montgomery County, MD), the county municipal services are far, far superior to what the private folks do, whether it's refuse collection, leaf removal, or snow removal. I can't speak to their efficiency though since I haven't scrutinized the budgets.
If you want another big-city infrastructure example from the US, look at Empire City Subway. This is a company which has exclusive franchise from NYC to maintain a network of underground conduit in Manhattan, which they can use for their parent company (Verizon) but must also sell access to any other carrier who needs it.
I could imagine a similar approach that actually extends to the residential consumer. I live in a building which has FiOS in the street, but the landlord doesn't care to provide access to Verizon to wire the building, so I'm stuck with the legacy cable provider (which is far worse). If by law all buildings connected to a common utility-scale fiber network and I was simply buying transit from my ISP, I'd be much happier.
Very generous words. I lived in a building once where the landlord flat out told me that we can only have Comcast because they paid him. Obviously, YMMV. In my experience it was more malicious than simply not caring.
The problems of speed, transfer limits, and add on services are wholly created by incumbent ISPs, and no, we don't need the dinosaur business model competing to perpetuate them.
I've started to wonder if everybody should even be wired. Starlink is about to show us all that rural internet is better served with satellites than wires. In doing so, they'll show that 20 years of taxes paid to the government that the government paid to big broadband companies to build rural internet that big businesses just pocketed for profit - it was all a total waste. Not just a waste because the broadband companies are greedy bastards but also a waste because wires are the wrong way to connect rural areas. Another demonstration that government involvement in technology leads to extremely expensive and wasteful investments in the wrong places. And you want it to be a utility?
[1] - https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/requests/new?tic...
[2] - https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/requests/new?tic...
Of course, there is nothing stopping local governments from forcing broadband into new construction... It just isn't on the same level as water / sewer / electricity.
Zero electricity invites excessive use of open flame, creating fire hazard. It is at least part of why going off-grid is difficult unless you are deep in the country in s state that isn't too hostile to it.
It could be used for safety, but at the individual level, not at the community level.
[1] - https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/#/ [Use the pulldown menu to enter an address]
https://www.att.com/internet/dsl/
The FCC site also claims that Cruzio fixed wireless is an option but I'm not even in their coverage area.
The FCC was also hindered by the majority Democratic position that regulation of monopolies is a dangerous precedent and that positive economic incentives will work to encourage policy objectives.
It's never 20 years too late to adopt the reasonable position that Internet-connected bandwidth is a prerequisite for participation in the current economic and civic life of first-world economies.
We don't run roads to only those who support the present dominate political party, nor should we do the same for internet connectivity.
Expecting rational behavior from irrational beginnings doesn’t work well in my experience.
Latency generally in the hundreds of ms because their network was so congested any traffic leaving it was a joke. Netflix was literally the only thing that worked for content (sometimes) and I'd assume that only worked through a combination of excellent bandwidth management on the part of Netflix and a caching server somewhere local on the Frontier network.
My dial-up in the 90s was better from a reliability and consistency perspective. I ended up having to install mosh on all of my systems because SSH sessions would timeout so frequently on Frontier's garbage network.
https://www.fcc.gov/document/rosenworcel-establishes-broadba...
I called Comcast to cancel my Internet and was surprised their retention deals currently do not match what I have with T-Mobile 5G. In time im sure they will and finally have to compete.
- Synchronous internet connections.
- IRS+SBA support for research/grants/development for new smaller, smarter, faster ISPs. Additional emphasis security and decentralization.
- Removal and ban of any laws that hinder/outlaw small businesses, municipality, city, town, school/universities, or states from starting their own ISPs. [Comcast+ATT have lobbied heavily in making sure bills have been passed in most states banning municipalities from starting their own ISP.]
I also think a concept of inflation should be added to speed minimums to bake progress into the law.
See the 'Share your broadband experience' button