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Comment by NickC25 | Hacker News Reader

The same telecom industry that got hundreds of billions to build out Fiber Optic networks around the country? The same telecom industry that took those hundreds of billions and spent them on lawsuits against the government, on wooing lobbyists and padding executive salaries instead of actually doing the work they told the government they would do?

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.

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"And the principle of really existing free market theory is: free markets are fine for you, but not for me. That’s, again, near a universal. So you — whoever you may be — you have to learn responsibility, and be subjected to market discipline, it’s good for your character, it’s tough love, and so on, and so forth. But me, I need the nanny State, to protect me from market discipline, so that I’ll be able to rant and rave about the marvels of the free market, while I’m getting properly subsidized and defended by everyone else, through the nanny State."

Chomsky, "Free Market Fantasies"

There is absolutely nothing free about utility markets. They are much closer to Chomsky's nanny state than any free market ideology.

AT&T recently (edit: actually almost 2 years ago) laid a new fiber line that runs right under our driveway. They put fliers in all the local mailboxes advertising fiber. But if you go on their site and put in any of the addresses on our street, oops, fiber isn't available.

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.

I'll pile on and point out that Cox is a horrible ISP for a variety of reasons. My primary issue with them is that they will continue slowly adding fees and raising prices until your bill is almost double what you initially agreed to.

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.

Comcast (aka XFinity) does this too. You have to yearly re-subscribe for a "promotion".

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)

> Comcast (aka XFinity) does this too. You have to yearly re-subscribe for a "promotion".

They won't even let me do that when I call them. :(

Yea, last time I tried the "threaten to leave" bluff, they put me on hold for a bit, leaving me with my thoughts: "Allright--I'll be getting that sweet promotional deal again!" And then the rep came back onto the call saying "OK, sir, we have canceled your service as you requested. Is there anything else I can do for you?" Doh.

It sounds like the Cable ISPs might be catching on to the game and stopping it.

So then wait a few hours and call back and now you're a new customer!

You must have no other ISP's in your area.

Starlink

> AT&T recently laid a new fiber line that runs right under our driveway. They put fliers in all the local mailboxes advertising fiber. But if you go on their site and put in any of the addresses on our street, oops, fiber isn't available.

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.

Frontier (ex-verizon fios) did this. They buried the fiber in the community but no one got mailings until it was ready to "pre-order". Time from pre-order to live service was roughly 3 months and it was stated on the flyer that it was a pre-order and service activation dates were not guaranteed.

AT&T ran fiber to my house (and everybody else on my street). 15 months later, the highest speed option we have is still 50/10 Mbps DSL from AT&T.

I wonder why they put it in if they aren't going to bother offering service with it?

So they can activate it in a down quarter or if Comcast threatens to move into the area.

As long as it costs tens of thousands of dollars to trench to a single home; and as long as aerial utilities remain the least regulated, but somehow still not sensibly regulated, you cannot deliver fiber cheaply to Californians.

It's not that expensive if you only deliver to customers served by aerial utilities, and you have access to poles and understand how to get easements for outside equipment. And you expect to serve a significant fraction of dwellings passed.

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 guess I shouldn't have said "recently", just checked and it was actually almost 2 years ago.

Yeah, 2 years is too long. Something is fishy there. Sorry about that :(

Our internet was out for a week recently, so I bought Starlink. It's cheaper and faster than anything else available out here.

I've been reasonably happy with my fiber provider (Ziply). My town is building out a municipal fiber network that is considerably cheaper however. They just finished a phase that stopped 50 yards south of my home. They'll be back to finish the north half of my street in another 4 years if they stay on schedule.

Sigh.

The only thing Cox gets right here is that they are reliable. I'm still paying an exorbitant monthly fee with a crazy low data cap, but the alternative here is Frontier; everyone I know with that experiences at least one outage a month during business hours.

Classic wealth transfer from everyone to the wealthy.

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