Charter charges more money for slower Internet on streets with no competition
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
All these mergers have been awful for consumers in the telecom space. My relatives in Europe are always shocked at how expensive service is for such mediocre setups.
Got new internet service at the office a few years back, and got a bundled 'phone number'. One of the guys at the office (coworking space) needed heavy fax so... we got him the line and a fax machine. 18 months later, he left, and... owed me money. I tried to cancel the phone line part, but was told it was "bundled", and the 'internet only' service was now $10 more than the old bundle service.
I called every 4-6 months to ask for the service to be removed and to get lower pricing. Nope. Nope. Nope.
A few months ago I called and explained the situation to the woman. I then said "fine - give me the higher price. I just don't care any more. Joe still owes me $500, and every time I see that stupid phone line on the bill, I think of Joe and I can't deal with that any more. Charge me more money so I don't have to think about Joe any more."
She laughed. A bit. Well... chuckled any way. "hang on, let me look up some stuff..." Silence. "Are you there?" I asked. "Yes, just give me a moment". More silence. I waited. And... started to play guitar. Just strummed a few chords.
She laughed again. "What's that?"
"I'm playing my own hold music, since you don't have any on your end".
I got a strong chuckle out of that.
"Any requests? Any favorite chords?"
"B".
So I played a B chord.
Then waited a bit longer.
"OK, I can get you back on the previous bundled price, but without the phone line any longer. Will there be anything else?"
SUCCESS! It just took 15 months of calling and a B chord.
Contract log-in to block price shopping/switching. Gouge existing customers & lower price for people switching. Low prices on website, but existing customers can't ever get those costs.
Very rigged economy. City level government often sells out to block competitors.
It has nothing to do with mergers. If there is 1 pipe/wire going into your house, and if the owner of that pipe/wire wants to extract as much out of you as they can, then you’re in the same position regardless of how big the owner of that pipe/wire is. Unless, of course, the government regulates it such as utilities.
...because the mergers eliminated their competition and loss-leader attacks on the market are still legal.
I think that's pretty scummy in ISPs case but wouldn't banning that also make it impossible for venture backed business to compete in established markets?
Then the big boys started excluding smaller providers, starving them like a gazelle with a broken leg until the hyenas of Larger Business swept them up. To be sure, there was also plain, MBA-style consolidation, but restricting peering prevented new independent providers from replacing them (yet another instance of Boomers pulling up the ladder after themselves).
They can make money with cheaper service. I just had a fixed $35 200Mbps plan with Optimum in an area with overpriced competition from Fios. Verizon would send their minimum wage sales drones out to personally plead with me to sign up for $80. The new $50 subsidy is going to ruin cheap internet by setting an inflated price floor. I would gladly take 20 Mbps service for $20 per month but that is never going to happen.
AT&T was only slightly less after the apparently mandatory monthly equipment fee, despite the fact that I own my cable modem. Right now I'm looking into EarthLink at "only" $68/mo for 35Mbps. As far as I can tell, cheap internet has already been ruined.
Also it's not like Verizon is your friend either; they just don't (yet) have any incentive to screw you.
These companies are apparently all run by greedy scum. I would much prefer if it were run by lazy greedy bureaucrats instead; at least then theoretically I can write a letter to my local legislators about it and complain at city hall.
Your absentee super or out-of-state landlady wouldn't be allowed to stand in the way of you getting hot water, why should they be able to get in the way of other utilities?
It's $75 now, by the way.
At least they don't have a bandwidth cap.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/charter-seeks-fc...
I can't even run from this. It's literally this or back to the stone age with AT&T DSL. These are my choices.
most people typically use 5-10 Mbps, so 200 Mbps can easily support 20 people and multiple households (who won’t all be online at the same time).
Mr Shannon says no.
Funny how legit competition makes them sit up and take notice...
At some point after that, Xfinity dropped their gigabit service level from $190 to $70/mo (IIRC).
In theory we have competition, but the alternatives are: Century Link 40Mbps DSL, or Rise Broadband terrestrial wireless (which hasn't proven a very good alternative for my coworkers).
I don’t care if I’m paying the “market rate” if I’m having to constantly argue on the phone about charges or to adjust my schedule to accommodate an 8 hour service window. Those negative consumer externalities wouldn’t exist (or would at least be far less frequent) if the market were more competitive.
Some streets are more expensive to dig on than others. Perhaps prices are higher and competition is lower there for that reason.
Don't get me wrong; I don't trust the broadband providers to do anything but try to extract maximum revenue from their customers. But I also don't immediately trust too-simple explanations that confirm my biases. The story here is more complicated than just moustache-twirling greedy corporations.
Anyway, all of that is preamble to point out that if you order service from Charter within one of those pockets of non-city-so-no-TDS-service-yet, you will pay a higher price than your neighbors on all sides of you that are in the city (and hence in the TDS service area). That points to, yes, it is monopoly-power-moustache-twirling greed on Charter's part here. Or alternately you could just say the lower prices at the neighbors is competition doing it's magic.
I may not ever use (or need to use) Starlink, but I hope it levels the playing field by providing competition where there currently is none.
T-Mobile is currently targeting areas where they have excess capacity, but their capacity will be growing a lot over the next year or two as they launch a lot of new mid-band spectrum. Verizon is also looking to launch new mid-band capacity, however that will probably be a couple years behind given that the spectrum isn't currently free and the fact that Verizon's new spectrum will require more towers for coverage. Still, wireless companies are looking at a lot of new capacity and looking to expand into home internet.
Sometimes it's about the technology coming together at the right time to offer a new product. Think about the original iPod. Before then, MP3 players were either sad 32MB players that could only handle 10 songs or large and heavy boxes that weighed a pound and couldn't fit in a pocket. Then the 1" hard-drive came around and Apple shipped the iPod. Without the 1" hard drive, Apple couldn't offer a light-weight, pocketable music player with a 1,000 song capacity.
Likewise, without new mid-band spectrum and new 5G technologies, it's very hard for wireless carriers to offer home internet without data caps. However, those new technologies come around and all of a sudden it opens new opportunities. T-Mobile has already started to use some of that new capacity. Their base plans include 100GB of premium data (deprioritized when the network is busy after that) and their new MAX plans have unlimited premium data (never deprioritized).
The industry will be working toward home internet over the next 5 years, but it is a reality today for a lot of customers and that will start growing quickly.
I have a colleague living in the northern California wilderness who maintains a point-to-point wifi antenna at the top of a 300' redwood tree because he needs to use a WISP rather than an LTE provider to get uncapped data. I just looked at these plans and they look like a dream come true for him.
DSL will become the antique thing since you can't go much more than 50 MBit/s outside of urban areas with short distances due to piss poor old cables, while DOCSIS can already deliver 10 GBit/s over way longer distances because the shielded cable allows way more effective transmission.
Upgrades (aka splitting the trunk to provide more bandwidth to the customers on one branch) are relatively easy to do, whereas upgrading 5G capacity is a legal hellhole - you need permits, pay rent to whomever's house you're setting up the cell, and the base station and antenna hardware is expensive.
Don't get me wrong, 5G will be extremely useful for rural areas as it's way cheaper to build out than wiring up houses with DSL/cable... but where there is cable (and the cable is somewhat-ish affordable), people will choose cable over 5G.
I think you may be surprised. In my old area, people are leaving Comcast in droves for T-Mobile's 5G service, not because it's all that much better or all that much cheaper, but because they've been taking it from Comcast for two decades now and they finally have an opportunity to show their displeasure.
Verizon has also announced that it's looking to cover 50M households with home broadband in 2024. While not as ambitious as T-Mobile, that's still around 40% of households getting new home broadband competition.
I'm less confident that coax will go the way of POTS. DOCSIS 3.0, 3.1, and 4.0 can offer pretty decent speeds and the networks are already built. I think the coming competition will push DOCSIS-based systems to actually offer better service. Comcast can and does offer gigabit service today, but they tend to charge a lot for it as a premium service.
While I'm very bullish about wireless home internet (especially as carriers deploy mid-band spectrum with T-Mobile leading the way in 2021 and Verizon and AT&T following in the 2022-2024 time-frame), I think we're still going to see certain limitations with wireless. I don't think that will matter to most people. Most people just want to be able to stream video, Zoom, etc. They don't need gigabit speeds. Heck, 5 HD video streams can fit into 25Mbps. Even if wireless home internet won't be a great option for some power-users, the fact that it will be an option for so many people will make it a lot harder for cable companies to be mean to their customers.
I think it's also likely that a lot of people will end up seeing 2-3 wireless broadband options given that there are three wireless carriers.
Maybe you live in a Fios area so you feel like there is competition. I wish I lived in a Fios area. For so many people, wireless home internet means getting another competitor (or another 2 or 3 new competitors). I have access to Verizon DSL at 3Mbps. I can't leave my cable company for that. I could leave my cable company for wireless home internet in the 25-300Mbps range.
The problem comes down to spectrum, how much power you can push across that spectrum, and how you share that spectrum with other devices. The more bandwidth you have available, the more power you can send across it, and the fewer devices you have sharing it, the higher your information rate between a sender and receiver.
5G, in theory, brings a lot of spectrum to the table, so they can talk about, say 1 Gb/s or 10 Gb/s connections. The problem is, you've got to find a way to share that among users. Sharing spectrum is never a 1/n process because of inefficiencies, so you end up with a bit under 1/n speed for n users.
Meanwhile, cables might have less spectrum, but you can push comparatively more power through them, but more crucially, everyone gets their own connection and there's much less noise. So, more aggregate bandwidth across cables than over the air.
This is all very handwavy, so if someone would like to put some numbers to this and/or fix any mistakes I made, please have at it.
Technically, everyone on the same cable node shares the same spectrum (typically targeting 200-500 subscribers.) Which is effectively 1GHz at the moment, a decent chunk of which is dedicated to TV.
But certainly there's less noise, neighboring nodes effectively don't interfere with each other, and nodes can be made arbitrarily dense.
Also:
> Dampier found that Charter offers 200Mbps service for $50 a month "[i]n neighborhoods where Spectrum enjoys a broadband monopoly." Charter charges $70 for 400Mbps service in those same competition-free neighborhoods.
Honestly, even the lower-end prices are not great. In France you can easily get 2Gbps for $60 / month.
> Honestly, even the lower-end prices are not great. In France you can easily get 2Gbps for $60 / month.
Broadband is extremely dependent on geography and the city.
In many places in the US (my city included) it's easy to get gigabit broadband for similar prices.
I have friends in remote areas who would be happy to have even reliable 10Mbit at this point, but their properties are so isolated that it's prohibitively expensive for anyone to run infrastructure out to service their sparse neighborhoods.
cries in German
In France I can get gasoline for $7 dollar a gallon. So save a bit on internet spend on different item and feel superior because EU is the best?
Ideally, there would be 0% tax on gas, since it is one of the most essential things in the economy.
Infrastructure is dependent on gas because we let gas be cheap. If we seriously want to curtail climate change, we need to rip the band-aid off.
I do feel EU is the best and the pricy internet connections in the USA are probably a hidden fine for the sin of using strange units.
Sent from a train that does not require gallons.
(I hope I sounded as annoying as possible)
I'm sure there are significant regional differences within Europe, of course.
I hope the train network will improve, or at least not degrade.
I like being able to go to work by train every day, and I also like being able to finish my day job in the south east of France and be able to reach north west by 11 PM, doing my stuff or sleeping during the trip, and planning to do this only a few days before.
Strange units, as opposed to strange languages.
Since language is far more important than measurement, the French should obviously abandon their entirely unnecessary national language and adopt either English, Spanish or Mandarin as a logical standardization improvement. As French will continue to perpetually decline in importance and use globally, I propose that French is a failed language and it would be wise of France to get out in front of that unstoppable trend and drop their national language sooner than later.
Overall English is clearly the best choice as a standard, as it will be adopted by more people this century than any other language as the global population swells toward 10 billion. Mandarin would be a solid second choice, however China's population will rapidly contract and the globe isn't in a hurry to adopt Mandarin given it's particularly difficult to learn.
The vast inefficiency of Europe having and intentionally maintaining three dozen major languages is of course silly. Approximately half of the people in Europe can't communicate with eachother effectively because they share no common language. It's a very backwards approach.
One might suggest that people can speak multiple languages and that that resolves the matter (it doesn't, the vast inefficiency of time, money & effort dedicated to maintaining failed non-English languages remains). However in that vein, it turns out you can utilize multiple measurement systems as well, as the US very commonly also uses the metric system where it matters to do so.
The sole reasonable counter argument, the language-is-culture argument, applies exactly the same for non scientifically critical measurement references in the US. For example using yards, or feet which are tightly bound to US culture (from media to sports to history to routine conversation).
But we can do nothing about its pronounciation. Sorry. A catastrophe. Nothing that can be fixed.
Spanish is very regular in its pronounciation, so let's use that instead of English's. Or German, actually it might make more sense to use it for pronouncing English, a germanic language.
As for the vocabulary, I'm fine if we keep English's. It's ours anyway.
We still have alternate ISPs that the above two have to share their last mile infrastructure with, and mine has no-BS pricing and policies so I stick with them. But a friend who does play the game routinely gets his internet access cheaper.
Rogers is really offering heavy discounts in streets where Bell has just installed their fiber-to-the-home stuff.
Like... someone in their offices is clueless that the competition is very real in my area and that they need to empower/train their customer service reps to actually offer discounts to stay.
Regardless we've been able to keep low prices just by actually switching. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they never get the idea to collude with each other.
To be fair, that should be (and probably is) illegal, although good luck enforcing it if they're smart enough to maintain plausible deniability.
The product is called "Fibe" but their lowest plan is 10 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up? What on earth type of optics even offers that?
https://mobilesyrup.com/2020/06/12/telus-shaw-lawsuit-mislea...
* No data caps / usage-based pricing
* No termination fees
* No cable modem fees
These three points were a requirement of their merger and expires in May 2023. We need to stop allowing these mergers to happen, they are not good for the consumer in the long term.
At home at least the speeds is OK and the monthly fee is manageable (not the best). But having to pay AT&T to rent their device annoys the heck out of me.
You can see the details for that here: http://dryden.ny.us/information/dryden-municipal-broadband-s...
It's unfortunate that many states have passed legislation to block municipal internet. Corporations such as Spectrum, Comcast, etc. should not have that sort of lobbying power, but yet, here we are.
Wow, and that's still a better deal than I can get from monopoly Comcast Xfinity service in Baltimore, where I pay $80/month for 100Mbps.
You read that right. I am paying substantially more than the monopoly rip-off price in this article, and have no broadband choice but comcast...
* Everyone is NATed. There's no option to upgrade to a dedicated IP address if this is a problem. STUN works, but some things don't. Nintendo Switch online play doesn't work and I haven't dug in to figure out why. They know it doesn't work and have said that they won't fix it.
* They intercept all (UDP/53) DNS queries. You can change your DNS servers and it won't make a difference because they will spoof 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1 or whatever in response. They'll even spoof root servers, so you can get strange things like a "root server" serving you an A record for pages.github.com.
* Of course there is no IPv6 support.
* Everyone is on the same ESSID with the same PSK. I suspect someone could sniff their neighbors' traffic if they were motivated enough.
It would be nice to have some competition here.
I've been watching market prices for ages, spent years as a broadband reseller. I've yet to see (or read about) an instance where wireline operators considered mobile data to be meaningful competition.
That said, I think that's often used as an excuse to not invest in wired infrastructure which should be dramatically superior, but often simply isn't.
Wired monopoly-based ~50Mbps service had no meaningful competition - until wireless modest-activation ~500Mbps is individually available at comparable cost.
You haven't seen it because it wasn't here. As of a few months hence, it's here. Only reason I haven't dropped local wired service for Starlink is I get a substantial discount on the former; I'm looking for any excuse to switch.
5G is unavailable in my area, so I haven't been able to see plans. Are there data limits? Throttling after a certain amount?
When we moved, I went with 8Mbps DSL instead of dealing with Comcast again. This was theoretically much slower than the 25Mbps Comcast we'd had but since this was during the network neutrality wars it was actually faster for Netflix since they weren't throttling it.
We later bought a house in a neighborhood with Comcast, RCN, and FIOS (the rollout halted just south of us). Unsurprisingly, all 3 deliver great service to our neighbors — and Comcast and Verizon customers a few blocks away have reported that they are given worse service and higher prices because it's _very_ clearly known that their options are take it or leave it.
TWC Internet was pretty good here, at least they were technically competent. The field service people were pretty good too. But our bill was slightly different every month. Never got any explanation for that. Eventually, Internet-only was over $100 for 300/20. The only competition was AT&T, but their data cap would have doubled our bill.
Then Google came to town. Real competition. 1G/1G for $70. With their new config I didn't have to mess with their VLANs, and finally got IPv6. Of course we swapped out the Fiber Box for our own router immediately (an ER-4), and a year on haven't had a single outage -- although sometimes have to work on battery backup because Duke Energy...
Spectrum 1Gig: $110/month
WOW! 1Gig: $65/month
AT&T 1Gb Fiber: $60/month
Guess which one I have?
But none of that is what bothers me. What bothers me is that they don’t even deliver on their promise. Most of the time I am silently downgraded to the “standard” high speed service which is 300mbps.
I’m usually not a fan of government intervention, but in the case of ISPs in the US, there’s a desperate need for more oversight.
I suppose I will have to pay, because my base feeling is anything but Charter.
https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/t-mobiles-60-home-interne...
If you think we have a free market in the US for telecom (or medicine, or a lot of other things), I have a monopoly to sell you.
That's how a company is "supposed" to act in a free market, right? They have all the only supply, and can thus "should" charge whatever the market on that street can bear.
<s> I mean, it even creates a perfect opportunity for someone to come in and undercut Charter, amirite? </s>
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#:~:text=Ple....
Downvote and move on - comments like this feel like mob-mentality karma farming.
(1) A storm hits your area and destroys homes. Hardware stores ramp up prices way up, not because the cost of labor to produce them has increased, but to increase profits because everyone is in a bind and needs building supplies so they have a place to live. Libertarian Man will say "the demand will constrain prices", but it's not a question of constraint per se, but rather that prices are exorbitant (let's say it means the local populace will need to go into a lifetime of debt as a result).
(2) A loan shark is approached by someone who can't get a loan from a bank, but desperately needs one. The loan shark charges compound interest that keeps this person in debt for a lifetime. Some might say "we have usury laws for that", but it's not a question of law per se, but rather that desperation is being exploited to fleece the loaning party.
Now, in practice, the market may often be a relatively good mechanism for determining an approximate just price, but not always and maybe we just have to play this by ear and live with this kind of nonsense (the perfect is the enemy of the good). But let's not pretend the market is some magical force that guarantees the good. I say this as someone who prefers the free market (not unregulated, though) and recognizes both the benefits and how natural it is as opposed to something as dreadful, stifling, and inhuman as a centrally planned economy.
If you don't like this but believe in free markets, maybe think a bit more.
If you see nothing wrong with this and believe in free markets, then you are probably consistent.
2) I think the whole system breaks down when companies lobby for and receive special governmental protections, which incumbent ISPs have done in the US since before they even were ISPs (phone and cable TV providers).
I believe myself to be relatively consistent.
Clearly IMO you need regulations to deal with issues markets are not addressing. Again, the environment being the prime example.
My preference is for the government to intervene in other areas, e.g. capping prices on life-saving drug. In those instances I favor the simplest laws that achieve the desired result. My understanding is as laws become more complicated and harder to understand the more convoluted (and even bizarre) companies behave.
The problem is that it is really, really expensive to lay brand new fiber in most places.
If we had complete deregulation, the companies that already have the fiber laid would dominate. A competitor might look at a market, and see the price that the incumbent is charging and think they could provide the service for cheaper and still recover the cost of laying fiber. However, if they decided to actually start laying fiber, the incumbent would just lower prices and the new company would be unable to compete (since they have to recover the cost of laying fiber while the incumbent doesn't).
The only way for true competition in this market is to do what a lot of countries do... have regulations that say whoever lays fiber has to agree to rent it to competitors at reasonable prices. That way, you don't have to keep laying redundant fiber just to compete.
The free market would just lead to monopolies.
Do regulations force ISPs to make people pays more when there are no competitors around? Do regulations set the the price? Aren't duopolies a possible consequence of a free market?
Note that there are natural monopolies/oligopolies, which are the result of the nature of the market (eg need for scale) rather than legal lobbying.
The idea of "free market" giving the best outcome for buyers requires:
1) virtually infinite suppliers
2) virtually infinite customers
3) fully fungible product/service
4) fully rational and informed customers
In markets like ISP, real estate, water/electricity supply, wastewater/garbage/mail/roads the product or service is in no way fungible because is based on your location.
E.g. you cannot pay for an ISP in Germany and use it from San Francisco.
On top of that it's practically impossible to have a large numbers of suppliers in such markets.
Finally, providing mail/electricity/water/Internet to small and remote town is rarely profitable. You can have so-called "market failures" where market equilibrium does not serve customers at all, or at unaffordable prices.
This is why such services are provided by local governments in most countries or heavily regulated companies.
I am struggling to think of anything more fungible than electricity, and water, mail, and internet access follow closely.
Rather, the reason that competition is problematic in these areas is because they are natural monopolies:
As a home consumer you cannot switch from your current electricity provider to a cheaper one... that operates in a different continent.
The link you provided is spot on and does not contradict in any way what I wrote.
"Natural monopolies were recognized as potential sources of market failure as early as the 19th century"
Another good page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_market
Free markets plus regulatory capture (and/or collusion). Unless you're arguing that those additional constraints are inherent to free markets then I think there exist other viewpoints which allow one to be self-consistent.
I can understand that someone would want a free market but forbid collusions though.
But are collusions a cause for an ISP raising there prices when there are no competitors?
I think the argument is that collusions are one of a small number of reasons there aren't competitors. I.e., the act of raising prices in the absence of competition is all fine and dandy from a quasi-free market perspective, but there should be more competition.