Internet and TV providers get away with jacking up your bill | Hacker News Reader

Internet and TV providers get away with jacking up your bill

seattletimes.com

40 pointsthunderbong17 comments

We should never petrify ourselves into solving a particular public problem with either an entirely governmental solution or private solution. Instead society should leave opportunity available for the both, while picking a winner to support wholeheartedly. When that winner begins to abscond their duties, it is time to reconsider who the society is choosing. In this case, American society is stuck with large telecom corporations whose profit motive antagonizes Americans who want a fast, affordable Internet connection.

We should closely examine our policies. How do our current laws choose the large telecoms as winners? Rural telecom companies already receive $1.5B USD a year.[0] They argue they should be considered utilities like water and electricity, so then local governments will choose one of them as the winner of a bid and subsidize them even more.

30% of the 43 million Americans living in rural communities had Internet access less than 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up in 2018. We've been in the Internet age since AOL was snail mailing floppies. What have the telecom ISPs been doing this whole time? How much longer will they test our patience?

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/isps-want-to-be-...

Is there a reason why the US has never introduced Local Loop Unbundling?

For those unfamiliar the idea is to allow various providers to use the same shared ‘last mile’ to provide competition without the need for a bunch of connections to each property.

In the countries I’ve lived in that use it, it seemed to work quite well. Lots of options with varying levels of service and competitive pricing.

I don’t think this would do much to solve the US’ issues in rural areas or areas without decent infrastructure already. But it does seem like it would help in the areas currently lacking competition as described in the article.

NYC Mesh uses this approach.[0] They have "supernodes" shooting lasers across the city, which you can then receive with a dish on your roof, and these connect to an IXP. Payment is donation based, but their recommended donation is already more affordable than Spectrum (the dominant NYC ISP), and is billed per building, not per router, so becomes extremely cheap if you get your neighbors onboard. Installation is more complicated than plugging a router into a cable TV jack, but community volunteers are available to do installations. It's a remarkable example of the people taking power back into their own hands. On the subject of Spectrum I have nothing good to say.

But it stands to mention, this is in biggest metro in the United States, and an innovative tech hub at that. Rural Americans too often left in the dust in this regard. It is exasperating.

[0] https://www.nycmesh.net/

On France the law requires the fiber provider to share it with other operators.

Over they lay the fiber and provide the end user connector box, there is a 3 months period during which it is not possible to give offers to allow other operators to prepare their offer.

So often you get a bundle of the main three operators, but not always.

In my case (a dense city next to Paris) Orange provided the fiber and the only offer. I had to wait one, and then two years for the other ones show up.

They did. But only on copper facilities.

In the United States, they are called unbundled network elements or UNEs[1][2].

The ISP (either directly or through a nationwide aggregator[3] such as Covad, NorthPoint, or Rhythms) would purchase a UNE from the phone company, aggregate the data portion into a DSLAM[4], which would pass layer 2 back to the ISP’s network interconnect (to be bridged through the ISP’s router).

This was one of the things that made the early days of DSL feel so much more competitive from an end user perspective.

However, utilities were granted an exemption[5] as part of the National Broadband Plan from needing to unbundle on greenfield deployments (e.g. fiber to the home) to allow for “return on investment” and/or faster deployments.

This exemption fueled a somewhat perverse incentive of removing copper facilities during or immediately after a fiber installation[6].

Going further, lobbyists have long argued on behalf of their utilities that unbundling wasn't necessary because an end user has access to multiple "competitive" options[7], e.g. someone fed up with their local wireline phone monopoly can switch to cellular; or someone fed up with their local cable TV monopoly can switch to satellite.

This was codified as a final ruling[8] in February of this year. This puts the nail in the coffin for UNEs, or at least their viability for providing high speed broadband.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbundled_network_element

2: https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/7521154234.pdf

3: https://www.channelfutures.com/telephony-uc-collaboration/bu...

4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_subscriber_line_access...

5: https://www.cybertelecom.org/broadband/fiber.htm

6: https://seclists.org/nanog/2012/Mar/759

7: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-367363A1.pdf

8: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/01/08/2020-25...

Is a real pain - I live in an area of New York City where there is exactly one internet provider and they raise my bill by $5.99 every 4-6 months (slowed down a bit during pandemic). When I “cut the cord” my cable bill dropped from $160/m to $30/m but is now back to $80/m.

One "hack" I discovered not too long ago, is if you get "Internet only", there's not a penny of taxes.

But if you get "Internet + TV" even for the same price, there's like 25% extra in taxes and fees applied to the whole amount.

So even when they offer "TV for free" it turns out it costs an extra $15/month of these taxes+fees.

Until you sign up for AT&T Fiber what tacks on a $10 equipment fee that does allow taxes.

$127.72 seems a recipe for alienating customers. How long until a number of them realize that after 2 years of Starlink even the upfront one time $499 cost would be written off, if compared with these prices?

I'm definitely not a Musk fan, but competition is always good, and probably if enough users replied with their wallet, that would send quite a message.

I have a US phone bill and an NL one. My US phone bill with 3 phone payments and 3 lines is about $400 per month. The same in the NL is €100 a month.

I’d love to drop my US carrier, it’s just tricky because US banks are obsessed with SMS auth.

How are you paying $400 for 3 lines? I’m on T-Mobile’s most expensive plan (unlimited 5G) and it’s only $140 for 3 lines. The 3rd line is free.

Interesting. I’m on an old Sprint plan (now t-mobile). I’ll have to look at plans the next time I’m in the US!

It might be worth considering a MVNO such as Mint or USMobile - you can end up with monthly bills of around 30usd or less with unlimited call/text and considerable data allowance.

https://archive.is/oBBrR

Not much you can do about it =(

Governments and central banks get away with devaluing your currency.

That's why you hold assets, not currency.

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