New Jersey Thinks 4G And Wired Broadband Are The Same

You have to wonder how government officials, especially ones with no idea how technology works, are in charge of making these types of decisions

Someone at Verizon is wearing a party hat and celebrating this week, as the telecom titan convinced the state of New Jersey to let it wriggle out of a decades-old obligation to provide broadband throughout the entire Garden State, because apparently 4G wireless broadband is the same as a to-the-home wired connection, and broadband competition is completely unnecessary.

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Don't ascribe to ignorance what can be easily explained by corruption.

not too bad of a deal, better then paying the whole thing along to get a line.

Residents who happen to live in areas not served by cable or wireless broadband can petition Verizon for service, but can only get broadband if at least 35 people in a single census tract each agree to sign contracts for a minimum of one year and pay $100 deposits.

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Newsflash - Gov't officials are all idiots.

Babbster said:

Don't ascribe to ignorance what can be easily explained by corruption.

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Ah, but you see, it's both. Most politicians do not bother to learn in depth about the things they vote on. In fact it's been shown over the years that many politicians vote on things without even reading significant portions of those things.

This is absolutely ridiculous. ISPs need to be regulated like utilities until/unless we completely decouple infrastructure from ISP. The infrastructure needs to either be government or privately owned, and should lease lines out to any ISP for the same rates. If privately owned, we need to make sure none of those companies can ever merge with an ISP.

If we open up the infrastructure to competition, THEN they can morally strike down net neutrality, because competition will help keep companies from abusing their newfound power to charge people even more. But without that competition (and 4G is very obviously not good enough as OP implies) we're all screwed - even moreso if the government lets huge companies like Comcast and TW merger. ANY politician who would okay such a thing should never be elected again (if only people cared enough to vote correctly).

bloodhawke83 said:

not too bad of a deal, better then paying the whole thing along to get a line.

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Not good for customers either way. NJ has the highest density of people in the US, and the rural areas are too much trouble for telecoms to provide wired service?

Just seems like an easy money grab for telecoms, rather then doing their jobs. Not like population density won't eventually grow in areas in NJ.

It's always about a money grab.
If our country wanted to have 100% of the population hooked to fiber we'd get it done.

But nobody is willing to spend the money.

plupien79 said:

It's always about a money grab.
If our country wanted to have 100% of the population hooked to fiber we'd get it done.

But nobody is willing to spend the money.

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From what I under, the government did give telecoms boat loads of money to do that very thing. Then the companies are like, "what money?", pocketing the money and pretending like nothing happened. Probably giving a good bit of it to law makers who gave it to them to begin with.

Depends really on what you do with it, on EE 4G in the UK i get around 52Mbps which is faster then most landline vDSL but the problem being is latency, 4G just can't cut it and is really really bad for online games.

Babbster said:

Don't ascribe to ignorance what can be easily explained by corruption.

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Amen, they knew EXACTLY what they are doing. Watch their campaign contributions and how they are hired as consultants and have various investments and what not to make this worth their while.

Ducman69 said:

Amen, they knew EXACTLY what they are doing. Watch their campaign contributions and how they are hired as consultants and have various investments and what not to make this worth their while.

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They know what they're getting paid to do; absolutely. They don't understand the technology behind it at all. So technically you could be correct either way.

To be fair, 4G speeds would be fast enough to be considered broadband, it's just people don't want to pay cellular phone internet pricing and have the caps that they do.

Its like the sprawl of wired internet, just way worse, where the raw speed is there, just the overall capacity isn't.

With everything that happens in this day and age, how can anyone honestly be surprised. The govt. Is so corrupt that nothing will change as long as people are willing to let it go. Afraid at this point the only way we can change the govt would be a coup.

17 years to wire the small state and they couldn't do it. There should have been fines starting in 2010 when they failed to meet the 17 year deadline.

4G is certainly fast enough to be considered broadband.

But the typical 10GB/month limit is nothing but a sad joke.

Municipal broadband/broadband co-ops will be the way forward. Well, except in states where the telecoms haven't paid off state legislators to make it straight-up illegal for a town to build its own broadband network by the choice of the people.

These polticians were bought and paid for many decades ago ....

Dazz said:

Depends really on what you do with it, on EE 4G in the UK i get around 52Mbps which is faster then most landline vDSL but the problem being is latency, 4G just can't cut it and is really really bad for online games.

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Certainly the speed is there, but, given that caps with Verizon range from a hilariously low 250 MB for $15/month all the way up to the wallet-crushing 50 GB for $375/month nothing with that is anywhere close to providing reasonable broadband home service. Plus you have to add another $20 a month for the USB modem.

For comparison, I have unlimited data from T-Mobile but have only 3 GB per month of tethering. I could pay $10 more a month for the new unlimited and 5 GB of tethering, but, yeah. Having 5 GB for a 'home connection' per month is woefully inadequate. So, again, speed over LTE can technically be over 45 mbps (though in practice is typically in the 25-30 range) the minuscule caps make it impossible to use if the user is doing anything outside of reading Wikipedia and email.

As an employee of a rural Telco/ISP. I have to say that actually 4G does meet the requirement, although I really like it either. There is no requirement that the broadband be wired. The only requirement that the FCC put in place is that areas have to be serviced with 4Mbps down / 1Mbps up. If an area is not serviced by that and people request it within reason you have something like 60 or 90 days to get service to that area. Looks like for them they need so many people to sign up and pay a deposit to cover the cost of putting in a new tower. Which any other company could do something similar and say they need at least so many people and a contract for a certain amount of time to cover the cost of getting out there. In a lot of areas where loans were give to get people up to that level of 4Mbps people put up WISP as they were cheaper to put up and then were able to have the 4/1 service up and running. So while it would be nice to bash New Jersey, they really aren't doing any wrong by saying that is fine for the requirement as that is what the FCC classifies as broadband for everything else.

dandragonrage said:

Ah, but you see, it's both. Most politicians do not bother to learn in depth about the things they vote on. In fact it's been shown over the years that many politicians vote on things without even reading significant portions of those things.

This is absolutely ridiculous. ISPs need to be regulated like utilities until/unless we completely decouple infrastructure from ISP. The infrastructure needs to either be government or privately owned, and should lease lines out to any ISP for the same rates. If privately owned, we need to make sure none of those companies can ever merge with an ISP.

If we open up the infrastructure to competition, THEN they can morally strike down net neutrality, because competition will help keep companies from abusing their newfound power to charge people even more. But without that competition (and 4G is very obviously not good enough as OP implies) we're all screwed - even moreso if the government lets huge companies like Comcast and TW merger. ANY politician who would okay such a thing should never be elected again (if only people cared enough to vote correctly).

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Depending at which level you are talking about they are regulated, which is part of the reason there are such high prices for some of your area as that is what the government states it must be. My work is the provider for a few small towns, and our prices are not what we want to charge, they are what the government tells us that we have to charge. Just like your phone service. Government states that phone service MUST be $X and then you must charge $Y for these fees. Before they changed it, use to be something like 3Mbps down had to be at least $40 with the person having phone service, if they didn't have phone service then you had to charge $100. These prices have changed but they still dictate what prices you must charge if you are part of regulatory body. This only applies to what are called ILECs, this is the local company for an area. So for example Century link, Verizon, Frontier... I was trying to look up the tariff to give you some examples of prices but without reading all 100 pages line by line I am not sure how exactly they are classifying different services. Because if I am reading this correctly if you are over 300 feet away from the equipment providing your service the monthly rate for 5Mbps (which they get adding 4Mbps down and 1Mbps up) should be $60.46 in the cheapest areas and $20.88 if less than 300 feet. So I am missing some part of what I am looking at here.

Ashbringer said:

From what I under, the government did give telecoms boat loads of money to do that very thing. Then the companies are like, "what money?", pocketing the money and pretending like nothing happened. Probably giving a good bit of it to law makers who gave it to them to begin with.

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Yes and no. The government gave a few of the bigger guys (AT&T, Verizon) money and they blew it all yes. But that is where most of the money went to. Most of the midsized and smaller guys got almost nothing. I want to say that Verizon took something like 75% of the money and gave it to their execs as a bonus and the rest they spent on "planning" to see how they should go about deploying DSL and at that point they were out of money. And that is probably about how the money was given out, something like 75% went to Verizon and the various pieces of Bell at the time (AT&T, SBC..), the other 25% was split between everyone else. If what I heard number wise was true, my work got at best something like $10 per customer. Which for something like ADSL2+ today works out to be about $125 - $175 per customer. So not much help when you get $10, it adds up to be something, but not enough to do everyone in an area.

plupien79 said:

It's always about a money grab.
If our country wanted to have 100% of the population hooked to fiber we'd get it done.

But nobody is willing to spend the money.

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My state capitol did just that via the local power utility

Then the telecoms bought laws making it illegal for public utilities to compete in the same markets as private corporations. Thus all that new fiver is permanently dark and never to be used even though it is ready to go.

Ya gotta love my home state. You can weasel out of anything with the right connections and enough money.

The worst part about this is now it can be cited as precedent where any broadband company that had been given a monopoly of an area can cite in order to get out of repairing land lines (and us rural area people weren't screwed enough already).
"Hey, Sprint/ Verizon provides a 5/1 signal to that area, why should we have to fix the lines out there?"

sfsuphysics said:

To be fair, 4G speeds would be fast enough to be considered broadband, it's just people don't want to pay cellular phone internet pricing and have the caps that they do.

Its like the sprawl of wired internet, just way worse, where the raw speed is there, just the overall capacity isn't.

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Yea the data caps are what kills it. Also I have to wonder how good the speeds will be in bad areas without normal broadband.

Where's heatlesssun to tell us how wonderful 4G is and how we should all be using it?

Sadly, my 4g connection from Sprint is currently faster than my hard line Time Warner connection and is the same price. Both have unlimited data, but as its been said my ping times suck but I get father downloads. Its no good for my gaming.

Ashbringer said:

Not good for customers either way. NJ has the highest density of people in the US, and the rural areas are too much trouble for telecoms to provide wired service?

Just seems like an easy money grab for telecoms, rather then doing their jobs. Not like population density won't eventually grow in areas in NJ.

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Yup, and verizon/bell atlantic/whatever else they have been called before has gone to this well repeatedly before. We pay a tax to subsidize the rollout of fiber everywhere, they don't do it, government says it is ok, another tax is levied to do it again.

This announcement means either one of two things.

1) Since the wording of the last go round was somewhat threatening of not tolerating another go round, this is the way politicians avoid admitting they have no power while telling verizon no more special taxes for this crap again.

2) They officially ended the last cash grab so they can rinse and repeat. IMO the more likely possibility.

Brokennails said:

With everything that happens in this day and age, how can anyone honestly be surprised. The govt. Is so corrupt that nothing will change as long as people are willing to let it go. Afraid at this point the only way we can change the govt would be a coup.

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Who would take over? And what controls would be put in place to prevent the same thing from happening? Even with term limits, etc.., if a company gave you a million dollars, under the table, to vote their way - most people would take it. Even more so with term limits (to pad their income post-position).

Bribery should be a crime...