How is this not investigated as an antitrust violation?
North America has some of the highest telecom prices in the world with some of the slowest speeds and worst service. There's clearly something very wrong with the market.
North America has some of the highest telecom prices in the world with some of the slowest speeds and worst service. There's clearly something very wrong with the market.
I had this phone service for about 12 years. It was horrible. When the phone rang, the DSL would stop working. When I ended calls, the DSL would stop working. There was so much static on the line I could barely talk/hear others. But it grew worse and started impacting my ability to work from home after COVID.
Verizon said they could "roll a truck" to my house in about two months if I agreed to pay several hundred dollars upfront. I told them no. I had had enough. I ported my phone number to Consumer Cellular and use 4G for Internet access now. It's faster, $30 cheaper each month and much more reliable although I do limit my use as it has a 35 GB per month cap and "may" slow down if I go over that. I wonder, would it slow down more than Verizon's 1.5Mbit?
I'm still Waiting on Elon and Starlink to save us.
What leads you to believe Elon's internet will, in any way, be pro consumer? Tesla certainly isn't, and their customer service is not good.
Telcos (usually) do an OK job when there's a competing cable company, and vice versa, but when it's just one offering, there's often low reliability, low speed or both. This is most often in rural areas, where Starlink should be viable.
Some urban areas do fall into the same single provider, low quality offering, and Starlink won't be viable there.
Frontier doesn’t offer slow DSL to rural areas because they’re rolling in cash from having no competitors. And when they lose customers to Starlink, it’s going to make their subscriber revenue to infrastructure expenditure ratio even worse.
Now if there's a viable competitor, it's a choice between spending the money to keep customers or not spending the money and losing the customers over time. Terrestrial networking can easily beat Starlink on bandwidth, availability, latency, jitter, etc, all the quality metrics (except portability), but only if the terrestrial network makes the effort.
Telcos have the ability to quickly roll out new networks when they're inspired. AT&T ran fiber to the home (GPON) in several markets within about 18 months when Google Fiber announced they were entering those markets (which they then decided not to). Telcos have an army of people (many consultants) who can run outdoor wiring and do home installation, they have easy access to poles, and (mostly) a decent database of addresses and line lengths to get multifiber lines factory manufactured to roll out with minimal field splicing.
And that's the hard way; things like better remote terminal equipment and/or backhaul don't require a lot of capital or labor individually (but may in aggregate), or just more adaptive DSL speed profiles just developer labor and configuration pushes. I could probably get 50% more downstream speed and 2-3x my upstream speed, but my ISP has inflexible speed profiles; that's probably not the issue for people on 1.5 M dsl, but it's got to be an issue for some.
Their bad service is not the result of a lack of competition, it's a lack of a profitable business model. It is simply more expensive to connect 1 customer with a mile of wire than it is to connect 100 or 1000 customers with a mile of wire. I don't think there's any way to solve this problem without subsidization of rural internet.
They actually do. The reason they’re going bankrupt is because competitors have started showing up due to the Connect America Fund causing them to lose customers in droves.
Simultaneously they took funds themselves and didn’t bother using them to upgrade infrastructure.
Source: previous frontier customer who couldn’t leave fast enough. Also convinced every single neighbor to do the same, even the ones who thought it was “fine” and wanted to be “loyal”.
The Connect America Fund is also known as the "universal service high-cost program"
My parents live an hour out of our city (2 with traffic) and their service is around 3Mbps and it has just slowly degraded over the time they've lived there and been left behind by ISPs. They do have a great view of the sky though for their connectivity issues. I love the night sky there and soon I hope to love it even more knowing that its no longer a frustrating trade off for them.
Rural broadband and satellite providers are the ones looking to be disrupted with their low speeds, low data caps and high costs.
Maybe Starlink won't be perfect, but the bar is lower than you can even imagine.
How is Tesla not pro-consumer? Genuinely curious. My thoughts as a non-customer are that they have blazed the trail for normalizing EVs. Without Tesla, the Porsche Taycan likely wouldn't exist, Rivian wouldn't exist in the same way, and electric vehicles altogether would probably be in the same place they were 10 years ago.
Even if their product isn't the best, at least it's an option, which leads to more competition, which in my eyes seems to be pro-consumer.
I can’t believe it. I paid an equivalent of couple dollars per month for that 15 years ago in Eastern Europe.
Canada is an easier example because it’s essentially serviced by 3 companies who then lease out to the smaller “competitors”: for rural areas some people have the choice of either DSL over oxidized above-ground lines or tower-to-dish internet where the tower is daisy-chained from another tower or from it’s own oxidized lines. There is no cell coverage at all, and poor phone service. If someone in an area like that wants internet the company says that ~”the cost of the service must cover all the infrastructure and maintenance” and then they base that cost on only a few percent of people actually using it. In that way it’s hard to argue against “well, it costs us $1500/mo to provide service to 10 users, so we’re losing money when we charge a ‘reasonable’ $120”. But what’s really happening is that people in those areas are bandwidth starved, signing up for anyone who can provide decent service, and signing up in bulk while the company oversubscribes. It’s easy for them to still show losses publicly, but on the back end they are collecting government subsidies and using free capital to extend the network as far as they can.
Just make sure you place the dish in a location with zero obstructions.
50-180mbps down and 24-40ms latency. ~25mbps up.
But it is good news that Pville is in a served area now. Where did you find a prairie in Pville?
If I had control over placement and such I think I could get a view without obstruction.
They still have calnet as a fallback network, but it's slow and has similar latency.
A hyperbole is an exaggerated statement or claim not meant to be taken literally.
A $half billion seemed like a lot of money back then.
Only the reduced number of landlines in use makes it rise more slowly.
In Russia such issues were just solved by adding some passive "splitter" device that supposedly filtered some of voice call from DSL data transfer. Every DSL ISP did it.
Elections cost money to run, someone has to pay for that, so allowing funding but forcing all the money coming into the system to come from the government makes it harder for private individual or group X to subvert it in a “I scratch your back here and you remember this later” way.
I suspect that first amendment will bar bans on advertising that would be necessary for this to be fully effective (without another amendment, of course), but a lot of progress is still possible without running afoul of 1A.
Mississippi changed the law to allow this, and gave out matching block grants to get the ball rolling, and has seen great results.
https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/how-coronavirus-stimulus-...
If we want to fix broadband and cellular, decouple utility pole ownership/permitting from retail providers.
In reductionist terms the real underlying reason for market failure is regulatory capture.
As to utility poles, a large number of poles are owned by power companies who by and large do not offer retail broadband services, so even here you are barking up the wrong tree.
That being said, there are issues with utility poles which need to be addressed. Efforts such as one touch make ready and the like are needed on a national level.
I think by "ownership" they mean monopolization of the poles due to agreements with the local govt to provide service in return for monopoly rights.
The parent to my original post identified a problem, but misdiagnosed the root cause and prescribed an incorrect solution.
As noted above a lot of poles are owned by power companies that do not offer broadband service. Furthermore exclusive franchises have not been permitted for a good while anymore.
Anybody with the correct permits can secure space on poles. This isn’t the issue. Part of the problems is how costs are assigned and how timely work progresses.
Who owns the pole isn’t the big issue.
This is almost exactly what happened in Britain.
The last mile telephone system is owned by Openreach, which is owned by British Telecom, but they're required to sell the things you'd actually want that system for at regulated wholesale prices to any outfit that wants to retail it.
So for example they'll sell you LLU (Local-loop Unbundled) service which means you can put data onto a copper cable between a home or business property and one of the thousands of physical telephone exchanges that used to house Strowger electro-mechanical switches when that's how telephones worked. You also get some footprint inside the exchange. How you make that into an ISP is your business, but unlike running cables to millions of houses, running fibre to a few thousand telephone exchanges is something a business might actually compete at and sure enough BT have competition for that part of the problem, at least outside the very rural areas.
Or if you're a small outfit and you don't want contracts to shove data over fibres around the country you can buy Wholesale Line Rental for a higher price and Openreach will deliver the bits from that copper cable to a single point elsewhere on the telephone network, then you just build your ISP at that location.
Since Openreach isn't allowed to sell retail products, the regulator mostly needs to make sure that it doesn't deliberately tweak these prices to benefit its owner, BT, which does sell retail products to consumers. For example maybe BT doesn't need Wholesale Line Rental, the regulator needs to make sure the price for it makes sense anyway as smaller ISPs would otherwise be run out of business.
Overall I'm very satisfied with the results. Britain's cable Internet is a monopoly instead (Virgin) but of course almost everywhere that can get cable has a telephone line, so at least they are competing with somebody. More than 95% of households could actually get Superfast broadband (ie 30Mbps or better if the WiFi wasn't in an upstairs bedroom connected via a 1970s bell wire phone extension)
but then fiber came along, and Verizon vs FCC (2002) slowly made it's way through courts, got to the supreme court, and the supreme court sided with Verizon, who said fiber was so fancy, so costly, so new, that they required a monopoly. the Supreme Court overruled Congress & upturned the Tecommimications Act & have fiber a local monopoly, and things in the US have been getting slowly worse ever since.
There are some additional requirements - I think in the early days you had to take a modem from BT and there’s a minimum commitment (used to be 18 months).
Went from shitty 256kbps ADSL to 1gps FTTH, with 2gbps and 4gbps options on the horizon.
The usual conservative suspects were complaining about interference with property rights, undermining investor confidence, unnecessary expenditure for the size of the nation, etc.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/telecom-ordered-to-open-...
None of the doom and gloom predictions came to pass.
And now, of course, everyone loves it, and our household monthly bandwidth used has gone from about 100-200GB to terabytes with all the streaming and Linux ISO downloading.
And the key weakneses were that the companies weren't restrucured, so retail could charge less than wholesale rates and corporate accounting would sort it out, that makes it really hard to compete; and even bigger was that access was only on a space avaialable basis, and new facilities (namely DSL remote terminals) were purpose built to provide desirable products to end users while minimizing space such that there was no requirement to provide competitive access since there was no space.
From accross the pond, OpenReach seems like a big success, and what we could have had, but didn't end up with.
National regulatory authorities may, in accordance with Article 68, impose obligations on undertakings to meet reasonable requests for access to, and use of, specific network elements and associated facilities, in situations where the national regulatory authorities consider that denial of access or unreasonable terms and conditions having a similar effect would hinder the emergence of a sustainable competitive market at the retail level, and would not be in the end-user’s interest.
I hope it stays the same in the UK now. This practice has also had similar positive development in the Netherlands.
Also because political donations.
>Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony,
They money is the big issue.
There is no real incentive to upgrade the network outside urban areas though, that's true.