Telecom Industry Is Mad Because the FCC Might Examine High Broadband Prices
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Our local ISP, EPB Fiber (available to every. single. electricity. customer), is incredible. Synchronus 300/300, 1gps/1gps, 20gps/20gps... plus they just released the first qubit-capable fiber connections [I don't know/use this].
When they say "$57.99 per month," that's EXACTLY what appears on monthly invoices — including all taxes! And the product is revered for good reason(s).
It's SO GOOD that our state (Tennessee) has actually blocked other municipalities from implementing similar municipal fiber ISPs — and prevents EPB from offering fiber to customers outside of their electricity-supplying jurisdiction.
Asking new arrivals "Why'd you move here," you'll often find tech-types listing "The Internets" within Top5 reasons.
https://epb.com/outage-and-storm-center/energy-outages/
If you get your power via Chattanooga's Electric Power Board (even out in the sticks!) you can get 1gps+ synchronous fiber.
I am currently looking for land (to build upon) and without EPBfiber, I will not even consider purchasing.
Welcome, new neighbor(s).
My place in WNC is, sadly, just outside Blue Ridge EMC's footprint. Pay $100/m for 100/4 cable. The billboard on US-129 proclaiming "Big City Speeds & Performance, Small-Town Personal Service" irks me every time I pass by because the service is every bit as shitty as that slogan made me expect.
[1] https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...
"Privatize profits, subsidize losses." —My neighbor Tennesseans (when I used to live on Lookout).
Blocking public services that naturally have a pricing advantage over private businesses because they're supported by tax dollars. Like if you're gonna drag Republicans for not living up to their free market ideals this really isn't what you should point to.
People said the same thing when they opposed the public option in the '00's and the rationale was the same. "Competing" with government services is just roundabout price controls. I'm zero percent opposed to such things when the market fails to sort itself out but I can see why strict free market adherents wouldn't be on board.
That's the stated rationale. The actual reason is that the entirety of Republican economic ideology revolves around the idea that the government isn't capable of providing better service than private companies and municipal broadband shows this to be a complete lie.
I'm also fairly sure that most Republicans would not mind if municipal broadband were run - and competed on - commercial terms.
However, if it's funded by municipal bonds that are backed by general obligation (i.e. all taxpayers subsidize, whether they use the service or not) then that seems obviously a problem to me. Even if they're revenue bonds, they're still implicitly subsidized by tax treatment.
Oh'shucks, meself. /s
Again, for the people in the back!
BRING BACK RANK-CHOICE VOTING (To Tennessee, specifically!)
When your power disconnect here (without explanation), somebody from the power company shows up within the hour (to figure out why, then replace any broken hardware). But this is rare, as the "auto switchers" can typically reroute blackouts, restoring service usually within seconds.
If the state constitution doesn’t say otherwise, the legislature can just pass a law saying municipalities can’t get into the internet business and that’s that. This comes up a lot with liberal cities in conservative states.
BUT, since I received electricity from the city's Electric Power Board... 20gbs syncronous internets was available for $299/month (all taxes included). Being a mere mortal, I settled for the 0.3gbs (300mb, synchronous, exactly $57.99/mo.) fiber, which allowed me to run a bitcoin node maintaining 100+ <9ms connections.
In the middle of a national forest, "out in the sticks."
However, Tennessee is WAY more OLD MONEY CORRUPT than Texas [even with Mr. Paxton back in his seat] good-ole-boys could ever dream up.
¢¢
Yup, I live in another city that has a setup like this (Conway, AR of all places). Ours even goes a little further than EPB though.
Electricity, Water, Sewer, Trash, Cable, Phone, Internet (already fiber for recent builds, upgrading all to it currently) all through one company that's owned by the city...it's amazing.
One bill a month, and my bill is ~300/mo for all services including 1Gb/s fiber. Plus the other aspects of it. Tech support is someone sitting downtown, power outages are fixed in record time... just so much is right with the model.
At least we got fiber, finally. It isn't state-run but it is a local telecom, the price is reasonable, the service is incredible and the uptime is great. I still get letters occasionally from Spectrum begging me to come back and their PROMOTIONAL PRICE is $10 more per month than my 600 parallel, for slower service. Absolutely brain-dead, I'm not entirely sure the marketing people for cable companies are still living in our reality. Why would you even bother sending these out? Who in their right mind is going to pay more money for worse service to possibly the single greatest and most widely known avatar for corporate avarice, the cable company?
I don't know a single person in my area who still has cable internet if fiber is available to them. Spectrum must be hemorrhaging customers.
Edit: and if it isn't obvious, yeah I'm a cord cutter too, though tbh there was never a cord in my life to cut. I haven't had cable since I moved out of my parents house, and if not for semi-frequent hotel stays for work, I'd not be exposed to television at all. And said minimal exposure lets me verify that I'm missing absolutely nothing by not having the idiot box in my home. I cannot comprehend people who pay up to the range of hundreds of dollars a month to have a firehose of ads and mediocre bullshit pointed at their faces as a recreational activity. Not gonna yuck someones yum, you like what you like, but it ain't for me and I truly cannot understand why anyone wants it at all, certainly not enough to spend that kind of money on it.
GP said they live in Arkansas.
I enjoy reminding these typically-babyboomers that Medicaid Part D (subsidized prescriptions) is "about as socialist as it gets" — they get low-priced medications, after largely having paid [relatively] nothing in to this "entitlement." Why have they paid almost nothing in to Part D? Because Part D is relatively new, thus passing the costs of medicine on to younger generations/taxpayers.
I highly recommend, for better understanding your neighbors (of any age), that you read "A Generation of Sociopaths" — chocked full of statistics to help everybody see why we commoners need "socialism," or whatever they want to call it... BECAUSE IT MAKES LIVING BEARABLE, LESS EXPENSIVE, AND GD you cannot make up their lifetimes of hypocrasies.
That said, what do they say when you point this stuff out? I've been attending local city meetings for a bit now, and when confronted with this stuff, they don't change their minds, they just double and triple down, get even angrier, and screech even louder about MUH FREEDOM.
I don't even get angry, I'm just like, explaining how society works (pooling of resources so people can get what they need) and they absolutely melt the fuck down! It's crazy!
My best local friend is twice my age (late-30's VS late-70's); former landlord, he married a rich girl from The Mountain, and is himself a blue-collar-raised Veteran [drafted, no less]; he is essentially the only "receptive" elderly person I've met, his wife vitriolic at the idea/concept of providing any of the same benefits as her own generation (The Silent Generation) received.
I will just quote Her, instead of trying to generalize:
"Nobody wants to be 'the last one' at the party — then you have to clean up all the mess!" —80's, female member of local Patriarchy™.
Also her: "What should we last few members of my generation do, then; just DIE?!?" Me: "Well, you could start by not complaining about the minimal taxes you pay on ownership of hundreds of acres of undeveloped land. Or, stop cashing your social security checks, which you clearly do not need." Her: "but I EARNED that."
Narrator: No, she did not. She inherited it from Daddy, over sixty years ago.
I actually submitted a ticket/request to Spectrum, with essentially the exact same question once. Surprisingly, they called me back and interviewed me about "What it would take to sign up for their service?"
When I described what I get from my local city fiber service, they acted like "price" and "reliability" and "decent customer service" were all impossible requests — as if EPB didn't exist. I'm not sure if feigned, or actual, ignorance was at play.
Regardless, I did not switch over, and they didn't lower their prices. Still get advertising, and am often left wondering "why do they even bother?!"
I do know a few elderly folks, despite also having EPBfiber (local city-supplied), maintain other services as "backup" or "for the email address they've always used from @comcast." No amount of reasoning will resolve this, so the cable internet lines still get maintained along city-provided-fiber routes.
I mean, I'm sure the calls are monitored and them openly acknowledging that their service sucks ass and is more expensive than their competitors would have them fired more or less immediately, but I am shocked they were ready to even send one of their reps your way knowing damn well they had no leg to stand on to actually make a sale. Like why even waste the time?
Idk man, these dinosaur companies are a trip and their internal machinations are endlessly fascinating. Corporate bureaucracy (at least when it isn't actively making my life worse) is always an interesting topic to discuss.
My last semi-corporate gig, a performance review indicated "[ProllyInfamous] uses too much profanity." I responded verbally by informing them that "from now on I'll stop 'giving a shit,' and instead will start 'giving a hoot'." The owner's complaining wife was NOT thrilled. [I know "I AM fucking difficult"].
I canceled my service after several years due to a negative customer service experience, which I explained was the primary reason I was cancelling. Never was I asked about the incident... only more offers and promotions.
It's very clear that the only time they care is when your actual money is on the line. Before that, everyone is shackled by whatever chains management puts on them.
This was also shortly after they sent me a new modem and told me to install it or risk losing connectivity within like a week. And then on my next bill is a charge for updating the modem...
A cable company moved in with introductory rates that were about what the previous rate was, but for higher dl speeds and much lower ul speeds. It was cable based. They added eyesore boxes all over the neighborhood.
Plenty of people building new houses bought cable, and some switched as well.
I've also lived in a neighborhood with ATT fiber, and have seen the same phenomenon. The cable company is much worse, but people will still choose them sometimes.
Why be competitive, when you'll get customers either way? :shrug
Or, just think of how many people keep buying bottles of drinking water.
OTOH, when icloud (or Google Photos) is uploading full in the background with the crummy ISP provided router, they'll wonder why they aren't getting anywhere near 500 via their cable.
*Star Wars Holiday Special only
What do you think the states of Arkansas and Tennessee (two states mentioned with municipal Internet) are? Coastal socialist paradises?
Send some of that to the Tulsa area, please! Here, it's the land of Cox Cable, reliable, but $$$.
When AT&T first started offering fiber I called them to ask about where was at because I was moving and wanted to factor it into my move. I was told they had an agreement with Cox not to reveal that information. You either happened to be in the right spot or you didn't.
To this day you still cannot call them and get that information.
fuck Cox.
We'll see how long that lasts. But at the moment they are being good.
And the appeals decision overturning the preemption https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca6/15...
TN arguments were never really on why it would work besides claiming it would somehow protect TN residents from "mismanaged" municipal broadband. They mostly focus on how they can do it if they want to, no matter the reason.
They literally had situations where people were upset that fire service was going to be paid for, then got upset they had to pay for it to get it when their house was burning.
It makes me so frustrated too. Calling our state leadership incompetent would actually be a compliment considering how poorly ineffective and self-serving many of them are.
About a decade ago, EPB called a friend of mine. The representative on the phone said, "Hello <insert name>, we noticed that your internet has been slower than what you are paying for. Do you mind if we send someone out to fix it for you?" We were both so surprised that a company would volunteer their services like that.
EPB is all I ever had when I was there, and I still miss them everyday. Absolutely 10/10 company to work with. I worked at a place that had a 10gb connection and the hardware to handle it when it first was released. Nothing like downloading a full movie in mere seconds.
Its not incompetence, just corruption. The large and ever growing bureaucratic apparatus of modern democracies are very vulnerable to this covert form, because responsibilities are unclear and diluted and at the end of the day, you need campaign money to win an election.
EPB's customer support is 24/7/365.25 (i.e. no holidays off). And the people working there, dealing with typically-grateful customer, aren't all burnt-TF-out. The rare call for support is thus pleasant and provides immediate resolution.
If your house-mounted fiber/copper modem ever "burns out," a technician will typically respond within a few hours to replace the device (it is mounted outside, they don't even call first, they just fix it). I'm a retired electrician, and even when you "call in" a panel replacement, an ISP tech usually shows up to "fix" the "problem" (went offline because consumer meter/unit/main panel was being upgraded). It's actually kind of cute =P
I also know several of their backend techs, and despite hesitant gripes of "lower government pay," none of them apply for tech/opsec jobs at private companies.
It probably helps that they are working for a company popular with customers.
Also profit margins on ISPs are extremely high. comcast, verizon, at&t, etc... all ~60% gross profit if you look at financials.
Stop electing people who block it.
Tennessee also recently enacted legislation OUTLAWING RANKed-CHOICE VOTING [after Memphis attempted such voting], thus ensuring only two-party electorate; and for the foreseeable future.
This state HATES its constituency, beyond anything more than their "fair" votes.
Before you can say that, I think first you have to show that most of the voters in TN want ranked choice voting. In my experience many people do not want it, because they feel it is unfair and that it amounts to getting multiple votes.
And before anyone argues at me about "that isn't what RCV means", you're preaching to the choir. I am 100% for using some form of RCV instead of FPTP voting. But if it turns out most of the people in TN favor FPTP, then their representatives are simply doing their job on behalf of the people. I don't know if that's the case, but it wouldn't surprise me based on past experience.
You definitely do need a license to hunt in this state, even on your own private land. There are even defined seasons (except for invasives).
$400/yr/tax is probably a singlewide, but I do agree that property taxes here are low (and thus our education pays 43rd in the country to teachers).
I'm genuinely curious about the truck-to-church thingy, though — as I do truly have an unregistered pickup truck (I have insurance, just no title).
2) See citation, but basically "you still have to get permission, yes."
3: Awesome, dude, it must be way undervalued =D Alabama is "just a stone's throw away" and the property taxes there make Tenn (and TEX!) seem like highway robbery.
4: Have a great day!
1: https://www.tn.gov/content/tn/revenue/title-and-registration...
2: "Landowner License Exemption: Persons hunting without a license under a farmland owner exemption must complete and sign a statement attesting where the property is located and how this land qualifies for a landowner exemption before hunting"
2. Yeah, you need address, name, and ownership on a piece of paper.
3. Nashville property taxes are brutal. I'm also in an unincorporated town, but taxes are low out east in general.
4. You too!
EDIT: Realized I should have noted that while we have 37000 voters, our population is around 62000... so even getting people registered to vote is a major need.
So, sadly, it doesn't matter who you vote for; you need to start earlier in the process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
But Tennessee outlawed this voting method, last legislative cycle. So all they needed to do was redefine "fair elections" and —presto— they've saved their constituency from the nuissance of actual choice... [smell that, Mericuh'... it's the smell of "freedom"].
Right now one can case a meaningful vote only for legislators who serve corporations and the wealthy, or legislators who serve corporations and the wealthy even at the expense of democracy and human rights. Of the two, I think it is obvious one should choose the group that isn't supporting the leader of an actual insurrection. But the fact that's a controversial suggestion gives me no hope that we'll ever have a sane voting system.
Perhaps I'll soon become one of the next few hundred annual American expat departures into the Balkans [if they'll have me — 'Mercuh has prettymuch chewn me up and spat me out, the few decades I've been employed here].
::waves:flag:patrioticly::
In our lifetimes we have seen real improvements in voting systems. Washington has a successful vote by mail system as do other states.
It’s not hard to find examples in living memory of seismic shifts in law, even at a national level. Look at gay rights and weed legalization for example. The status quo would have been unthinkable in the 1990s.
Change comes from the bottom. Municipalities across the nation are implementing ranked choice. Get involved locally and prove your ideas work. The rest of us will take notice.
(I say "addresses" rather than "solves" because IIUC some people are very unhappy with it.)
Something very similar to this recently happened to me with Spectrum (cable internet) in NYC, which is not a company known for being nice to customers. The tech who came out explained to me that they were seeing unusual performance profiles on their end and that's why they do this. In my case, it turns out there was a splitter somewhere outside where there shouldn't be instead of the line going directly to some junction box, and that's why they were seeing the odd profile. After he removed it and made the line be direct, our service was indeed better, but I guess whoever installed the splitter stopped getting free internet/cable. (I'm not mad about that.) So while the service call was framed as "improving my service" and it did indeed, it was also an investigation into something suspicious they detected. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a similar situation for your friend.
quite the legitimate use case for such bandwidth! :)
One of my "actually legitimate" uses of EPB Fiber (as an individual end-user) is hosting a bitcoin supernode, which is essentially a non-mining "verifyer of record" which allows other nodes to upload all-day-long. With me throttling locally to 10Mbps (specific to bitcoin blockchain upload traffic, only), we have mutual peace (and I am constantly maintaining >100 connections at pings as low as 3ms (typical non-fiber is >25ms; typical newnode is >80ms). All other fiber connections, worldwide, are single-digit-?ms.
When Google Fiber began its rollouts, I remember the cable providers simply NOT ALLOWING GOOGLE ACCESS TO THEIR UTILITY POLES (they owned <10%, but in vital places this essentially crippled gFiber rollout for the first few years of litigation).
I got google fiber (Austin) in 2015, and when I chose to leave The Violet Crown, fiber internet was an absolute requirement... which is how I found myself in Chattanooga, Tennessee (thank god)!
In 1945, the government of Saskatchewan (Canada) recognized this and has been handling province wide insurance since then (Health, Home, Auto, etc). This has meant drastically lower insurance rates, because they aim to operate with no profit, and you don't have insurance companies suing each other for damages because everyone has the same insurance company. It creates lots of jobs, and better service for the residents.
States like Florida, California, North Carolina, and others have had to start their own insurance companies to handle residents who cannot get fire/flood/hurricane/etc insurance from a private insurance company because the private insurance companies have decided the risk is too high.
It seems silly to maintain this broken patchwork system when there are several examples of governments creating entities to handle these ubiquitous needs in a better way.
I didn't think the Romanian competition authorities can do a better job than the US ones.
[And they probably can't, see high natural gas and electricity prices.]
much freedom
Also, there is A LOT OF MONEY here, concentrated in such mountaintop locations as Lookout Mountain [cited in MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech, specifically as an example of wealth/cronyism].
...as I sit in my apartment connected to Nextlight (Longmont Power & Communications) at 2.5Gbps symmetrical for $150/m.
I can only hope this becomes more and more obvious to politicians that wonder why their constituency is stagnating. Even my less techy parents recently shared that they voted yes on their city's project to build a local fiber ISP.
I'm not being snarky, I'm usually a pretty strong 'let it be decided by markets' guy.
- Greenfield tech is simpler, and more stable. There's only 1 or 2 CPEs, a handful of distribution gear types, and a much smaller network. As a result, the support cost is much cheaper, more stable, and less prone to failure from equipment damage. These networks aren't traversing over 40, 50, 60 year old coax or 80, 90, 100 year old copper, it's fiber all the way down.
- Profit as a motive for the ISP is purely to pay for the costs of the service. Wages, equipment, investment in the service. Without a need to spread dividends to investors, and those investors leading a board to shift the motive of the service provider to generate revenue as a first priority, pricing priorities can be much more simple. This also mitigates choices to stay on existing infrastructure to squeeze more money purely for the purposes of paying more dividends. Those choices will happen, but they should be to buy time for the next upgrade that is planned.
- Manufactured monopolies by virtue of connection agreements (Cable provider X is allowed to have a monopoly as a service provider for a municipality so long as they provide service to N% users) have turned out to be a poor incentive to provide up to date, quality, affordable service as the service matures. New fiber providers, whether muni or independent, seem to be taking a much more sustainable approach to buildout and growth. As a result, because they are capturing the market by virtue of a better product, at a better price, whenever these ISPs onboard a new neighborhood, they have to do what they do well to retain the subscriber base, because the alternatives may not be as good, but they're not awful.
When that happens, the most important thing is ensuring the monopoly is run well, for which strict regulations are a must. You must define a mission independent of profit seeking, requirements that must be met, and be able to hold people responsible if they fail to meet the requirements or succumb to excessive greed.
After that it's largely irrelevant whether the entity providing the monopoly service is private or public.
Curiously, the city I'm currently living in will soon be rolling out it's own fiber and the existing providers are all scrambling to improve their infrastructure and "bribe" existing customers with free gadgets (e.g., Google home speakers, etc.) because they know that their current offerings are not competitive and that they would go out of business overnight if they stood by and did nothing in the meantime.
South Park captures this best by having their cableguys rub their nipples when complaining cartoon characters ask for better service/treatment. "What're'you gonna'do 'bout'it?!" the South Park Cable Guys mockingly ask.
Nothing. You'll DO NOTHING and be happy. Perhaps the beatings will end when morale improves? [avg joe gets community fiber for $60/month] "Is this socialism? Is socialism wrong?"
2) It's often impossible (without moving) for consumers to choose a competitive service.
https://www.thenewstribune.com/opinion/article270126722.html
Comcast has insane economies of scale, the rip they must make every single month on customers who are stuck with them is just sick.
1. Big Telecom: This includes Comcast, CenturyLink, etc. You are basically guaranteed to overpay, but service is usually pretty reliable. Last year I was paying >$100 for 1gbit down & 40mbit up on Comcast's coax; while every one of my neighbors had UTOPIA FTTH (the house I was renting was not connected to the network).
2. UTOPIA or Google Fiber: Yes, Google Fiber is another big telecom, but it's pricing ($70 for 1gbit symmetric FTTH) and reliability are practically identical to UTOPIA (the municipal network).
3. Residential lock-in: This is what I'm stuck with right now. I pay $100/mo. for ~120mbit with noticeably bad peering. The price is literally written into my apartment's lease, with no mention of speed or reliability.
I miss having actually good internet, but what I have is still much better than what I have lived with before.
This happened to me. In the beginning, I was paying $35 for 25/5 through Comcast. It was fine, did everything I needed. But then, roughly once a year, for a few years in a row, they would announce a speed increase on my plan, complete with a flyer in the mail congratulating me on being a loyal customer while patting themselves for being such a fine, generous company.
A few months later, like clockwork, a plain black-and-white letter would be attached to my bill informing me of a change in the price of my plan due to unspecified business and economic factors.
I am literally on their lowest plan, and still pay over $60 a month. That's more than what I pay for 3 cell phones.
It's fucking sleazy and I would gladly switch ISPs yesterday if they didn't have a government-granted monopoly in my area. (And no, Starlink and T-mobile are not options for reasons I don't have time to get into right now.)
[1] https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels
[2] https://www.pcmag.com/news/isps-to-fcc-listing-every-governm...
Then add another level as you're not being sold service by Spectrum but Spectrum of New York, and variable tax/fee contributions depend on total revenue of that subsidiary (e.g. Universal Service Fund[1]).
It can be fairly complicated in a static state, but then add in new/pending legislature and it's something that needs to be updated monthly.
Yes, they already do that work internally (and if they get it wrong, the government taxing entities tell them they are miscalculating the amount and assesses penalties and fees) but publishing it adds a new dimension.
1: https://sourceadvisors.com/blogs/salt/what-is-the-federal-un....
Again it's not a defense of the big companies, but it is a legitimate beef.
It's simply not possible that two different things can both be true? That ISPs already have to do it so should disclose what they're charging, but that also the number of taxes and fees are ridiculous? Why is that so hard to separate in people's minds?
If a Comcast president said that ham sandwiches are better when they're grilled, and I said "he's got a good point there" would that also be misconstrued as a defense of their billing practices?
But it's completely ridiculous for ISPs (or anybody else) to use that as a justification for dark patterns during the sales cycle.
Now, if the taxes and fees were so complicated, the company simply couldn't comply at all, at any point in the customer lifecycle, then sure, that's a good excuse. But that's not the case - ISPs manage to figure this stuff out eventually.
You know ISPs go out of their way to artificially inflate the number of taxes and fees they charge you, right?
If every company took the approach ISPs took, then every recipe in the U.S. would be the length of a CVS receipt, listing out every minor and incidental tax and fee the company happened to pay as part of its operating procedures. You don’t see stores passing on “electricity fees”, and “union negotiations taxes” etc etc, because only ISPs take affront at the idea that they should pay for their business expenses, rather that passing them on a additional itemised billing items to their customers.
As several other people told you, because they can get it right on the bill but not on the contract and advertising. If they can do the first, they can do the other two but they don't want to.
I don't see this isn't a legitimate beef. If you can't comply with local regulations because you serve too many municipalities it sounds like you aren't a good fit to serve those customers. Perhaps the solution is to sell your infrastructure off to smaller, local companies who can comply. Or heck even just other equally big companies who are well run enough to manage such a problem.
Ow well, if yhey cant figure out all these complexities, how do they know they are charging me the rifht amount?
US is really a wild place, if I demanded a random, unexplainable and higher than expected amount of money from my customers, I would be accused of fraud and no court would uphold my demands
And you can't tell me that metro net's mandatory "technology fee" of $10 to every customer can't be disclosed before you get to a buy page
The two things that are going to be difficult are if you want to promote, say, a nationwide "$60/month plan", or if you've got some corporate tax that's hard to calculate on a marginal basis that you're trying to pass onto consumers. Neither of those things are motivating to me. If it's too hard to compute the accurate tax fee per person, just roll that into your base plan calculation and budget accordingly. We don't expect to have to pay a corporation's corporate tax as a separate line item on the bill, so why should we expect that consumers have to pay an industry-specific corporate tax as a separate line item?
At the end of the day, the reality is that this is an industry that is trying to advertise plans that are at wildly different rates from those the consumer has to pay, and they're upset that some truth-in-advertising laws is starting to be enforced. It's not even outlawing the wildly different rates; it's merely requiring transparency in the differences!
Of course that would require ISPs to be honest and upfront with their advertising and billing practices, something US ISP seem to be incapable of.
"the company “would have to create over 29,000 separate labels”" from your source 2.
Also, from a service quality perspective, broadband ISPs have horrible problems with small amounts of persistent packet loss, largely due to physical issues because the actual physical infrastructure is old/shit and they do nothing to maintain/improve it.
Internet performance and digital experience is about a lot more than just how much maximum throughput you get for X dollars, it's about service reliability, QoS, transit quality, and and loss, latency, jitter, all of which have heavy impacts on specifically video and voice calls which are common for those of us working from home.
It took months and multiple visits before one of techs unintentionally gave me the hint that with node congestion, Comcast will throttle all connected subscribers to the same X% of their rated speed. Annoying that the only way to reliably get even a 500kbps uplink out of them during peak videoconferencing hours was to pay for an 800/20mbps connection, but even more annoying that it took months of them blaming my cables and equipment.
I realize inflation, wages, etc. But how much of this increase is just because? I'm glad I'm not paying more, but who's preventing that?
My other options are some real low-end local wireless providers, very slow DSL (7-12mbs with 1.5mb or less upload). We are just now starting to see Tmobile and Verizon offer home wireless. I've tried both and they are only around half the speed of my cable connection but they are a little cheaper (25% or so)
"Reliable high-speed internet, wherever you live. $120/mo in most locations & hardware cost of $599."
What's interesting is the arm-twisting I got when I signed up and the rep tried multiple times to persuade me to cancel AT&T's service and how hard they pushed me to sign up for wireless as well.
Basically - I assume the increase to 2.5 Gbps is because gasp there's moderate competition in my neighborhood. If AT&T wasn't here, I doubt I'd have seen an increase without a bump in monthly cost.
I can assure you with certainty that it’s all in the because category. Their approach in my experience is raise prices until the customer complains.
I had to quit spectrum due to moving out of the country (10Gbps symmetric now for €25/mo thank you very much) and they still offered a reduced price “in case any roommates are staying behind”. I was paying ~$100 and the “discount” was significant but I don’t recall the exact number.
I was too lazy to basically fight for a better price, but if you threaten to quit (or better quit it for a while) they’ll 100% lower your bill. I’m sure there are more sophisticated “negotiation” tactics a search away.
By way of contrast, my parents live in the mid-west and were plagued between a choice of slow AT&T DSL or expensive but slightly faster Comcast/Spectrum/Consolidated (A terrible overbuild provider) cable internet.
The game changed entirely when Google Fiber started rolling out. First in the inner city, then to inner suburbs and just recently to the outer suburbs after spending the better part of decade fighting city councils that obviously preferred Spectrum and AT&T.
Since then 1. Prices have stabilized and declined somewhat from the incumbent carriers. 2. Spectrum did an in-place upgrade and now 500 Mbps down is standard for a reasonable price. AT&T turned around and built it's own GPON network ahead of Google fiber in areas where Google didn't have service.
Isn't competition wonderful?
I hate what we've become. Maybe we were always this way.
Complaining about rain and cloudy days doesn’t matter when leaving a connection capped at 20/1. In practice it does work well from the perspective of someone leaving a bad wired service.
> in nearly any big city in Wyoming
Every "big city" in Wyoming is smaller and way more remote than most "small cities" in the rest of the country. It is not really a good representation of the rest of the country. There are only four cities which break 30,000 people. There's 40 in Texas with over 100,000. Being 20 minutes out from a city of < 30,000 people is pretty radically different from being 20 minutes out from a city of > 1M people.
There's also a question of geography when it comes to places like Montana and Idaho compared to the rest of the country. I don't know if you looked out a window but the geography of Idaho and Montana looks pretty different than the geography of Kansas, Michigan, Florida, N+S Carolina, Illinois, Ohio, etc. Its way more difficult to operate cell infrastructure in such a place, and then on top of that each valley only has a few customers to try and cover the cost.
All in all, the experience of cellular infrastructure in Montana and Idaho are massively different from the majority of the rest of US consumers.
I've got family in the suburbs 20 minutes out from the deep urban areas of a large city. Their main home internet is T-Mobile 5G. It has stable and low enough latency for them to work remote a remote job with videocalling, they play regular online games and they even do Playstation cloud gaming on it without issue. I've seen it being demoed at county fairgrounds far outside the big cities where they offered free wifi, I was able to get pretty stable low latencies (~25ms) at several hundred megabits of throughput with a dozen+ people using it at the same time.
It might not work in every market. There's a lot of variables in place, even within a specific geographic area. But it is something viable for a large chunk of US households.
I can't downvote you since you replied to my comment, but that's a pretty patronizing thing to say, (it's also classic big city elitism). You know absolutely nothing about me, so assuming that I'm some backward uber dumbass who hasn't even "looked out a window" let alone travelled anywhere else is not a safe assumption, and that's before we even get into my experience designing/deploying wireless comm systems. Assumptions like that just make you sound like an asshole.
Also my comment completely acknowledged I don't know you. It literally states "I don't know if you've looked out a window", so its entirely open to the idea that you have indeed. But then it really makes one wonder why you think Wyoming and Idaho are good examples as to why most US consumers wouldn't be able to get cellular home internet despite knowing the massive geographic and population differences and the challenges those would pose.
Duh. OP wasn't talking about cell service out in the boonies, they were talking about cell service in "big cities." Geography is not a concern in the case of cities in these states. The Bay area's geography is much more extreme than 99% of cities in WY/MT/ID. I've spent time in those states in the last few years (vanlife) and the cell service in cities is atrociously oversubscribed on Verizon. I have all three carriers, and surprisingly T-Mobile has great service (in the cities out there at least.)
Every location in Wyoming is what a lot of the country would consider "the boonies". That's kind of my point. Its a massive outlier compared to where the majority of the US population lives and not really a good place to point to when saying "see, cellular internet often doesn't work, it doesn't work in Wyoming!"
I'd also point out modern cellular home internet can give a pretty different experience than what you get on your cell phone. Antenna design and placement can be a lot better. You can place the antenna in a place where you're more likely to get good reception instead of deep inside your house. The frequencies and channels used can sometimes be pretty different. You're less power limited than your phone. In the apartment where my family lives their phone cell service isn't very great but as mentioned they get low latency several hundred megabit service through their router near a window.
Also fair that hot spots can be better than phones. My brother had one up in Maine but it went to Starlink and, more recently, to fiber.
Telecoms took ENORMOUS sums of money to upgrade their systems and did nothing. Now they want to pass the upgrade costs onto consumers.
These corporate shitlords have enormous legal slush funds to muddy the waters and throw dirt in the air any time reasonable accountability comes their way.
There is no equal power protecting the consumers interest. Claiming that its "inappropriate" to investigate costs is lazy class warfare.
Well that's not fair--they did do something: They handed all that taxpayer money right over to wealthy shareholders. The only thing corporations can be relied upon to do consistently and competently.
Symmetric gigabit feels like a dream.
Cox, on the other hand, lacking literally any survival instinct or competitive sense, charged me $110 per month before taxes, and for only 1.25TB of data. For unlimited data, it was another $50. So I'm in to them for $160+ per month, for vastly inferior service. I hope CL stays healthy enough to keep our deal going because it's the best internet I've ever had. (CL's old DSL product, in contrast, sucks immensely.)
Then I began to exhibit packet loss. For gaming/discord, it's a death knell. I isolated the source of packet loss to be within the CenturyLink network, basically between me and the first traceroute hop. (Also retroactively verified by switching ISPs)
CenturyLink as an _offering_ is great, but their company operations and customer support is... kafkaesque and absurd. They are beyond incompetent and seem to have neither the capacity nor desire to fix any real problems.
When talking with some of the technicians and support people, the insight into their world was sad and disappointing. What a ramshackle company.
I really hope nothing ever goes wrong in your network segment :)
That said I've been lucky, in the 6-7 years I've been on CL moving from Cox I've had 0 problems with my DSL, where I'll say there's something to be said for the old legacy 2-wire stuff. At least every 3-4 years, I'd have to have cox out to fix my cable terminations for suck-out (center conductor eventually contracts itself to lose contact with hot/cold over time) with the extreme heat in Phoenix, so it's been almost a nice change.
One of my best friends is an engineer at Cox in town, and still quip at him about their silly bandwidth caps. He says it's a topic at every all-hands meeting that even employees are tired of hearing from their friends and family that they hate their bandwidth caps. Cox was one of the last Cable MSO's to actually implement bandwidth caps, but eventually they realized every other scumbag Cable ISP in the country was doing so, that they were leaving too much money on the table. Everyone else is doing it, so why not them too.
It's cool providers have gig speeds now, but if you use all you bandwidth for a month in 3 days to start getting overage charges every month, it isn't cool for long. It took Google Fiber threatening Cox and CL in Phoenix to actually get them to start rolling out FTTH years ago, so at least Google was good for something.
> The NOI’s undue focus on affordability—or pricing—is particularly inappropriate.
The linked ArsTechnica article describes this as a "tizzy."
Nobody likes cable providers, sure, but I don't think this justifies all this editorializing and projection.
welcome to journalism
And Switzerland is a country with very high labor prices.
"Compared to us the Swiss pay double but earn triple the money".
PDF Page 6
Table A3 Net wealth medians - breakdowns
EUR thousands
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/home/pdf/research/hfcn/HFCS_Statis...
(Sure, maybe not as fast FTTH, but it doesn't matter much when everyone else is still lagging way behind, so over, say, 10 Mo/s you quickly get into diminishing returns.)
- https://www.digi.ro/servicii/internet/internet-fix
- https://www.digi.ro/servicii/internet/internet-fix/fiberlink...
- https://www.orange.ro/internet/
- https://www.vodafone.ro/serviciifixe/internet
- https://www.next-gen.ro/abonamente-personal.html
- https://www.gemenii.ro/internet-in-sectorul-2/
The prices include VAT and are final, $8-$12/month for gigabit bandwidth.
Compare:
"Up to 16oz for $3*"
There's a $0.75 fee to pay for the new box art, a $1 fee for renting the milk jug, you actually get 14oz of cereal if you eat during peak hours, and if you eat a second bowl on the same day they charge you for excessive usage.
When I lived in NYC, I paid $65/month for 200Mbps down, 20Mbps up (Spectrum).
I moved 50 miles south into NJ and I now pay $99/month for 1Gbps down, 1Gbps up (Verizon).
An acquaintance lives in Houston, TX and pays ~$300/month for 5 Gbps down, 5 Gbps up (Comcast).
That said, you will find people who have happy stories about Spectrum/Charter/Cox, and terrible stories about Verizon/Comcast all across the US.
I called them with great joy a few months later letting them know I was moving and to cancel my service. Never going back to them.
All of this is textbook capitalism: Enclosures and wealth extraction from workers to capital owners. Municipal broadband is a textbook example of the workers (ie the town residents) owning the means of production being better for everyone except the capital owners.
Yet as soon as you mention "capitalism" in a negative light people just shut down and reject any argument to defend a system they don't really understand that is exploiting them for profit.
In the very least, ISPs should be regulated as utilities. But that's still a bandaid solution.
The FCC doesn't just tolerate these cable Crooks, they enable their existance.
They had to dismantle obviously too expensive transits... which where actually used to move money from one country to another (and probably do some kind of tax evasion).
Now they are mad because their blatant price gouging and shitty service is going to be laid bare for all to see?
Oh gee, my heart breaks for them.
Chomsky, "Free Market Fantasies"
Our Cox cable service went down for two days last week. When the guy finally came out to fix it, he confirmed what I had already guessed: our line was literally just unplugged at the junction box.
I'm so sick of all their crap I'm tempted to switch to a local fixed wireless company. On paper it's a worse deal than I have now, but if as I've heard they don't give you any BS, that's a strong selling point.
When ATT ran fiber on my street, it took about 3-4 months before you could order. IIRC, they ran the bulk fiber before all the rest of the outside equipment was installed. It'd be nice if they didn't do fliers until they're ready to take orders though.
I don't think AT&T was secretly planning for years and years to rewire my neighborhood for fiber; they were just well prepared with then information and expertise to get it done. I think they saw Google announce service upcoming in 15 cities or whatever, and figured they would need fiber in those cities as well, then they took their existing maps to figure out where they needed outside equipment, set their lawyers ro getting or expanding easements, and once those were set, they sent an order to Corning for GPON cables with drops at measured lengths for each pole. Easy and cheap for ATT. Unless you have underground utilities.
It's not easy and cheap for upstarts because you don't have access to the poles, and you don't have field maps, and you're unlikely to serve a significant number of customers that you pass.
It's not easy and cheap for anyone if utilities are undergrounded, because encapsulating your infrastructure makes costs start at about 3x the cost of aerial buildouts, and it gets much worse if you hit other utilities when you dig. Best case, a lot of manual digging; worse case, you need to call out another utility to do an emergency repair; worst case, you cause an explosion. Plus your burried utilities are at risk of being damaged and needing repair during other utility work. Wires on poles are at risk too, but at least it's easy to access them for repairs.
One day maybe, they'll tear down their copper that's rotting on the same poles. Maybe when copper scrap value is high.
I wonder why they put it in if they aren't going to bother offering service with it?
At this point you call them, threaten to leave, and they find a new "promotion" that resets you to baseline and the process starts anew. I've gone through this with them for the past 10+ years. Their latest trick is charging for any usage over 1.5TB (which is criminally low if you have kids streaming, playing, and talking to friends all day IMO), but instead of tacking on one of their overagew bundles (which are somewhat resonably priced) they charge a huge per-GB fee.
I'm about 2 blocks outside the primary service area of a large suburb so they're my only wired option that provides at least 100MB down speed so I'm stuck with them.
The long game is of course to lure you with a lower price and hope you do not notice the price going up so they can gouge you to their heart's content.
As soon as I can get Metronet fiber, I am out. (I am hoping they do not play similar games with promotions)
They won't even let me do that when I call them. :(
It sounds like the Cable ISPs might be catching on to the game and stopping it.
Sigh.
US ISPs are just price gouging. The fat salaries and bonuses their executives have received over the last 2 decades and the dividends they pay their shareholders all support this conclusion.
There is intense competition here between a few major players all with their own networks. i.e real market forces that keep prices down, products continually improving and customer satisfaction high.
The idea that there are "service areas" with only a single provider should tell you everything you need about collusion to maintain regional monopolies.
So maybe US ISPs are just very poorly run businesses.
It’s sad how we’re perpetually fighting the same battles with the professional managerial class who tacitly understands their only job is block progress, thus they are miserable from it and to work with