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Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

I'd rather have two providers that offers 25Mbps than one that offers 100Mbps. I don't need 100, or even 50. But Comcast has been jacking up their prices, along with increasing the minimum speed available, for years. They respond to government regulations like these. I'm now paying 2x what I used to (from $25 to $50/mo), and getting 2x the speed. But I don't want to be forced to buy 2x the speed (or even faster, as this proposal would require).

I would much rather have the govt provide incentives for there to be more than one provider. I live in the heart of SV (Menlo Park), and Comcast is the only option. 5G is not well-served where I live, and the pricing is also not competitive. We need more competition, not more redefinition of "broadband".

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Bear in mind that connection speed sold “up to xx mbps” is largely irrelevant to the actual cost of service. It’s just the sales model that most ISPs have adopted over the last few decades when bandwidth really was constrained. Comcast’s costs are its people, truck rolls, equipment and infrastructure outlay, and advertising.

Convincing or requiring you to pay double for 2x the speed is just the way they can increase cash flow.

Ideal world would be seeing the laws preventing municipally owned ISPs struck down. I'd also like the see the right of ways municipally owned as well, to better facilitate competition with new providers.

> I would much rather have the govt provide incentives for there to be more than one provider.

In the UK, ISPs are forced to lease their last-mile lines to anyone who wants to provide internet service. This results in a decent amount of competition.

The US did that. But only with copper. And so the telcos just ripped out all the copper. There's not too much left.

What is your definition of copper? Almost everywhere I’ve ever lived, the only broadband internet available was provided using coax cable.

Phone lines, DSL, ADSL

Exactly. Parent meant copper home phone lines (at least ADSL could run there, not as good but still).

POTS. ILECS were required for a while (still are?) to sell access to their central office DSLAMs. For a hot moment in the early 00s there was a fair bit of competition for DSL service (at least in the Bay Area).

If memory serves – as technology moved on to higher speed DSL that worked over shorter distances (and required more RTs as a result) legislation stayed the same. Essentially the only things that ILECS were required to provide access to were outdated products that nobody wants. Sonic finally shut down their resold AT&T ADSL (G.DMT) service this year in large part because it was so unpopular. They still offer ADSL2/VDSL2 service out of their own DSLAMs as well as fiber and resold AT&T whatever (not sure how that came about).

> ILECS were required for a while (still are?) to sell access to their central office DSLAMs.

It was just the copper, not the DSLAM access. What you could do is buy colo space at the CO and install your own DSLAM, and the ILEC was required to cross connect the copper to your cage. What you did from there was your business, as was all of the CPE.

I worked at a CLEC for 10 years during the good times. Even set up a few of our colos myself back in the day. I still think we (the US government) should have kept going and required incumbents to lease access to any last-mile wiring technology. It should be part of the price for enjoying what amounts to a government-sanctioned monopoly. Even better, just make the last-mile network a regulated utility like water & electric.

Ah, even better haha.

Agreed that the FCC should've continued requiring open access. However I'd go further and say that much of the infrastructure should be state owned and leased to private companies.

Or outlaw exclusive franchise agreements, require timely access to utility poles, etc. Regulate like an electric company? Well I'm from California and given how bad our electric companies are and how toothless the state regulator is I'm not sure how much of an improvement that would be.

If, say, Comcast had to lease their last mile, why wouldn’t they charge an arm and a leg to whoever was trying to sell internet? I don’t see how this would bring prices down meaningfully.

It's all solvable, as other countries example shows.

I assume regulation would set the price. AFAIK that's what we did with copper when we created CLECs.

The law says they must lease to themselves at the same cost.

You can practically regulate how this works by determining cost and markup. I mean most places have one power company for example and they aren't simply allowed to charge you whatever they please.

In fact this was done years ago successfully. It was discontinued so cable companies could make greater profit.

Yeah we have MVNOs that do this for mobile. But it can't currently compete with wired internet on price, and we apparently don't require it for cable internet.

ISP customer service is never fun, but my problem is not really with who picks up the phone. It's with the physical network that's provisioned for my neighborhood and the way it's maintained. The lessee has no more power over this than I do, only now I can get stuck in customer-service hell between two different companies instead of two different departments.

Would two providers solve anything? There are 3 cell phone companies and they’re all virtually the same price.

In my area, the arrival of 5g home wireless providers caused some fast downshifts in price by att and spectrum, albeit for introductory pricing.

Do you think the price would be the same if two of them were eliminated? I guarantee you the price would go up.

Also, there are MVNOs. You can get cell service much cheaper if you don't go with the big 3, and the quality is basically the same.

> and Comcast is the only option.

This is by design. Utility service regulation in the US is famously corrupt.

The system is working exactly as intended.

Internet access should now be close to too cheap to meter, yet it is a nice cash cow that can be milked, so the regulators have an arrangement with the highest bidder.

The US does not have the rule of law.

You might be eligible for ATT [gigabit] fiber? Could be worth a shot. (Unless you're in far-east Menlo)

IME the fiber service is faster more reliable than Comcast, but AT&T support is the absolute worst, super incompetent (across the entire company, not just U-verse internet).

It's fine as long as you don't need any support and don't try to deactivate anything, but if your account gets messed up it can literally take a dozen calls and 20+ hours of being on the phone to get seemingly simple issues resolved. </rant>

The Comcast ATT duopoly is pretty atrocious. Given the regulatory climate, how can a new player even succesfully enter into the market?

> (Unless you're in far-east Menlo)

Unless they're in far-east Menlo or like 99.99999% of the rest of the world. While bay area folks are certainly heavily-represented here, the commenters come from all corners of the globe.

They were simply replying to the parent post, which specifically mentioned Menlo park :)

One trick for better AT&T support here on the Peninsula may be to sign up through Sonic instead of directly with AT&T. In some areas like SF, Sonic runs their own fiber, in others they are an AT&T reseller - with the wrinkle that Sonic handles all support with their own local staff. I have been told that they have better insight and connections into the internal AT&T systems than AT&T's own support team. I haven't had much need for support, so I can't vouch for that, but it wouldn't surprise me.

I'm in Flood Triangle (between Menlo Oaks and 101), and AT&T ran fiber though our neighborhoods last year.

I had good Comcast service, at least after I reported some intermittent outages and they finally sent someone out to test the connection and he said "I'm surprised you're getting any service at all! Your drop has been spliced a few times. I'm calling my buddy with a bucket truck and we will run you a new drop."

(A "drop" is the cable that connects your home to the main cable line.)

After that it was solid. Had gigabit downloads, but uploads were limited to 30 megabit. Comcast is in a bind here, as they built out their infrastructure in an era of "on-demand television" where download speed was the important thing and upload was just a simple control channel. So they have hardware filters everywhere to separate the upload and download frequencies, and naturally they gave more spectrum to the downloads.

In my work I often need to upload large files of 15GB or more. So when AT&T came through I signed up and it is a huge difference: ten minutes to upload one of those files instead of two hours (with people waiting on it).

> One trick for better AT&T support here on the Peninsula may be to sign up through Sonic instead of directly with AT&T. In some areas like SF, Sonic runs their own fiber, in others they are an AT&T reseller - with the wrinkle that Sonic handles all support with their own local staff. I have been told that they have better insight and connections into the internal AT&T systems than AT&T's own support team. I haven't had much need for support, so I can't vouch for that, but it wouldn't surprise me.

My experience buying DSL from Sonic about a decade ago in San Francisco is that if you run into a problem with AT&T equipment (e.g. lines upstream from the point where POTS enters your building) you're just done because Sonic won't actually get AT&T to fix their stuff. I was never able to get more than 1Mbps down and eventually just quit and switched to Comcast.

Like the other person who replied: hard disagree.

When I first tried to get Sonic ADSL in San Francisco there was a multiplexer on the line (no 56k, no DSL). Lots and lots and lots of calls with Sonic later and they threw their hands up and told me to deal with AT&T myself. In the end what worked was going into the PacBell/SBC/AT&T direct support forum on dslreports.com and having one of those techs prod the bitchy bell into disconnecting the multiplexer. Nothing I've seen since then suggests that Sonic has any more sway over AT&T these days. In fact if you get the resold AT&T service from Sonic you still have to rent the AT&T dongle and use the AT&T DNS servers.

I'm far-west, which isn't served by ATT. There actually is an upstart in the area, Atherton Fiber. [1] But they don't serve my area either.

1: https://almanacnews.com/news/2022/07/05/new-internet-provide...

Atherton Fiber is a local institution, a true old-school ISP in the finest tradition, but with modern technology.

I live very close to their service area in Lindenwood, and I remember walking down Ringwood a few years ago when they were stringing fiber on the poles and I stopped and asked them, "Hey! I live just a few blocks over that way. You must have a few hundred extra feet of fiber you could sneak over to me?"

They knew I was kidding, but seemed like nice people.

Hang in there, my friend, someone will get you fibered up soon.

"soon" :-/

Even though much of the tech was invented and developed in the Bay Area, we're often among the last ones to receive the rollouts.

Living the fiber dream is a game changer, that sweet symmetric gigabit.

have you considered looking into the 5g home offerings from Verizon and TMobile? In my area Spectrum was having a fine time jacking up rates unfettered and laughing at me when I asked to reduce them. I switched to Verizon 5G Home and when I called Spectrum to cancel, they practically begged me to stay (edit: I didn't) and have now adjusted their rates to match Vzw/Tmo; of course these reduced rates are only good for one year because they are Spectrum, and there is no cure.

Where I live, there is neither Verizon or T-Mobile service, unfortunately. This is a stone's throw from Stanford; I cannot understand how we only have cell provider that works at our house. Fortunately there are MVNOs, so we're not stuck paying AT&T pricing for mobile.

>I don't need 100

Idk, downloading games at multiple MB/s is pretty sweet.

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