Time Warner Boosts My Speed, Cuts My Bill
consumerist.com
consumerist.com
Here's the announcement from December: http://www.twcableuntangled.com/2012/12/we-are-boosting-down...
Frankly, Time Warner needs to increase their internet speeds to keep up with LTE. I have one of the higher speed options and my LTE speeds are about twice what I experience on my Time Warner connection.
One thing I've noticed since moving to New York City from Chicago is that nobody has to even try in New York because the captive audience is so large that even the worst-run business will make tons of money. ("We don't take credit cards." "A $5 fee will be added for paying your bill online." "No laptops allowed at this coffee shop.") I'm surprised JFK isn't a Ryanair hub yet. </rant>
http://www.motorola.com/Video-Solutions/US-EN/Products-and-S...
Call the service # and tell them you have a new MAC address to give them for your subscription and the fee gets removed. All-in-all it took 5 minutes.
No, it is not. The guy states what he /thinks/ might be reasons for this change, not that they /are/ the reasons.
Which is not really the case.
Is it not, really? :)
They already got the NC legislature in their pocket http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/22/nc-governor-will-let-cabl...
Years ago in our spot in rural California Sierra Nevada foothills we were patiently waiting for DSL... Every time we called AT&T they said DSL was a year or two away. According to rumor it took a fire for it to finally happen.
Around 2001 we had a major wildland fire that burned off a lot of trees and such which cleared off line of sight for satellite reception for TV and internet to a lot of folks. According to some, that possibility prompted Comcast to stretch out their cable access to beat the satellite service to the punch, and at the same time they started working on digital cable service here-which meant high speed internet, and lo and behold DSL was available in mere months!
Not to say it was a total roll out - there are still some areas beyond the 5000 meters from the CO and too far from the cable routes that have to suffer with satellite - and its really lousy, just above dial up - unless cable or DSL moves in I'm sure Hughes/WildBlue wont bother on improving that.
It wasn't until Comcast started rolling in wholesale and eating their lunch (also "stealing" voice service with their multiple and combined offerings), that AT&T deigned to make any significant improvements. This is despite having a very significant tax break from the state in return for a commitment to roll out "universal access".
All these companies that do better -- when there is finally a threat; incentives don't work. A pox on them. I hope the publicity of their responses just aids in shining a light on their longstanding corruption and shit service.
I'm glad the service is working out for you, but a quick search of dslreports.com shows that not everyone is as happy with Exede as you are.
Gigabit connection got premium price of 99€/mo (including taxes).
There are no additional fees, like device rents, connection fees or what ever.
In Finland there are 17,6 people/km^2 and in US there are 33.7 people/km^2. Densely populated small?
Netherlands (491p/km^2) or Belgium (353p/km^2) would be very different story.
50Mbit/s 4G connection seems to cost 19,96€/mo (including 24% tax, without data caps or prioritization limits) 100Mbit/s 4G connection seems to cost 40,13€/mo (inc tax). But with those connections you won't get full speed all the time, as you do get with fiber.
Naturally our rural areas got whole different pricing policy and fiber connections aren't often available. In worst case you could get 1 Mbps ADSL or similar 3G connection.
In Europe, they tend to live in either cities or high-density towns (small population but very small area). The UK is an exception, but also has relatively crappy Internet, too.
Time Warner has a monopoly in the area, and Verizon / Google have no interest in competing (for whatever reason).
It sucks.
That should tell us, that they're still making hefty profits from the connection.
I really hope he is not serious - is this true? I've not seen a checkbook in years and years.
I do pay most of my bills online. (Including my TWC Internet bill, actually.)
However there are some bills that _require_ me to use a checkbook, primarily my rent and housing related expenses [water, sewage, garbage, maintenance].
I could pay in cash, but a check provides additional security and convenience anyways. -- They won't accept debit or credit cards though.
We don't have duopolies in internet throughout most of the country by accident or because no one has noticed. It's because it's illegal to operate otherwise.
I know people who have started local ISP's in the US (10+ years ago, not recently, because it's hard to get into the market now for business reasons) -- they needed no FCC license. Although, yes, by renting fiber from the teleco's not by running their own. But that's a capital issue, and a right-to-run-fiber-through-the-public-way issue (permission from muncipality, as you note), not an FCC issue.
I'm not sure what you're referring to.
Basically, there's often a tacit (or even explicit) understanding that the winner of a bid to supply cable or Internet services to a municipal area will have the exclusive right to do so (mainly, the service providers argue, to make the capital investment involved in supply said services worth it).
There has been a long-running debate over whether or not last-mile networks and local cable are natural monopolies - i.e., whether or not it is most efficient for the industry to have a monopoly. If such services are public utilities with high capital costs, service providers might argue, they should have the exclusive rights to sales in an area.
In fact, it got so bad that the Supreme Court said that municipalities could be guilty of antitrust violations if they explicitly gave monopoly power to such providers (see Community Communications Co. v. City of Boulder).
So municipalities and service providers moved to implicit guarantees of monopoly - RFP processes that are hard for less-well-resourced companies to win, for example. [1] What I'd like to know is whether or not these implicit guarantees are still a problem.
Some states (like North Carolina) set up a 'franchising' process for service providers to get the right to serve an area. So it's not always just about permission from the municipality. It might be about whether or not your state's equivalent of a franchising process is exclusive on the local level. For cable, North Carolina's is supposedly non-exclusive, though I wonder how many times Time Warner runs into trouble getting approve to serve an area, and whether they end up developing small natural monopolies in some locations. But regardless of whether or not those monopolies develop, you have to think about who gets to run lines on whose land.
The fact is that the big companies have an easier time running lines for any data/media service (cable, Internet, etc) through easements and public areas. (This is the part some people refuse to believe. 'Oh, but anybody can purchase land!' Sure, but do you have the capital to do that, or does Time Warner?)
A truly competitive market would involve setting up the infrastructure and having the public own that, instead of owning or operating actual ISPs, which, to any rational observer, constitutes unfair competition, even in light of the desperate need for competition in some markets.
States and municipalities would hand out licenses to the infrastructure, not to the land. That'd be really cool, and possibly really efficient.
[1] - http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa034.html (Good summary of the debate; pretty fair)
But it's got nothing to do with any "FCC licenses", as the post I was replying to said, there aren't any involved.
(Slightly more feasible practically, although still capital-intensive, would be starting your own over-the-air ISP with blanket wifi or point-to-point microwaves or whatever, I don't know the tech details, but THEN you've possibly got FCC licenses involved!)
In most places in the US the telephone poles and utility conduits are generally owned by the telephone or electric company. You need to lease pole space from them, and those leases aren't cheap. There have been several municipal WiFi initiatives that got alot of press, but later died because they couldn't afford to rent the pole access.
In higher-density areas, there are alternatives. For example, in Albany, NY a small telco provider worked with the city to provide municipal wifi and public safety networking using traffic lights, city buildings, and streetlights (which are owned by the city). The problem with that model is that you get good coverage in central business districts and avenues, but nothing on residential blocks.
You have duopolies because the Bell System was the one and only phone company, and the Feds have basically allowed SBC/AT&T and Verizon to bring that back. Phone companies didn't "get" IP networks in the 90's and early 2000's, and decided to just milk the aging out POTS network as long as possible and ask for government handouts later. Cable companies evolved differently from community co-ops (Ars Technica has a few good stories about this) and tend to operate in a model where they get a franchise agreement that gives them a monopoly in a city or town. So now you have highly regulated, dumb telcos and lesser regulated cable companies who negotiate sweetheart deals with dumb municipal governments.
I pay $99/month for 50M/50M internet, phone and TV (with the movie network, a couple of extra 'networks' and the full home DVR). Admittedly, that's for 12 months, but I can renew at that price for another 24 months after that.
If worse comes to worst I'll switch back to Eastlink. For now, though, it was worth switching just for getting Bell to run network cables throughout the house for me for nothing :)
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Bell-Canada-Offers-Unlimi...
I don't think people know that most service providers have retention departments designed specifically to give you far better rates to keep you around.
Sure it's annoying and the price still goes up every year but there are also people who refuse to use coupons so thank you for funding my discounts.
Admittedly if you live in a monopoly or duopoly isp area it's significantly harder to get good performance for a low rate.
Now we need to figure out why server rental rates are so much higher in the USA vs elsewhere.
/me tips his hat to capitalism
This is a win for competition, not capitalism. Not all competition is capitalism, and capitalism does not always imply meaningful competition (it does, however, generally fail to serve people best in the absence of competition).
No government on earth would tolerate any kind of capitalism other than the competitive bidding for multi-year exclusivity agreements (ie: guaranteed ways of sticking it to consumers).
http://www.speedtest.net/result/2475450363.png
Now, could someone explain to me why this is on hacker news, and so high in the list? It only remotely references something new that Google is doing, is that the requirement these days?
http://imageshack.us/scaled/landing/11/speedtestga.jpg (edit: does anyone here have a faster connection to the place where he lives?)
(Typically its much slower (esp wrt latency, but throughput too, around 25ms/90Mbit/s down) though because for normal surfing I usually just use WLAN.)