Here Comes Big Cable to Slay Another Rule That Helps Small ISPs Compete

[Nanogrip]

Here where I live, internet is $90 bucks (but must come with a $30 bucks phone-line) and it's at 2mbps speeds. It's a monoploy. 720p 30fps on YouTube sometimes happen. 240p was a normal thing for us just last year.

 

[darckhart]

The small local guys need help to foster competition otherwise the big companies will leave many of us stranded. I do not like them trying to get rid of this rule.

In my particular case, say oh about 2012, I was buying ADSL from ATT at 6Mbps down/1.5 up. Later that year, they decided that I lived too far away for them to bother maintaining the circuit so when I went to renew my DSL, they said sorry that plan doesn't exist anymore. Guy on the phone says, "We have a ....... pause....... 1.5 Mbps down for your area and that's it." Oh really? I did my google fu and found out Sonic had recently come to the area..... and lo and behold, they told me, "Yup you can have back your 6 Mbps line like you were getting.... In fact, it's being sold to you all running on ATT hardware. Not sure why they told you you couldn't get the speed you wanted." Turns out it just needs some guy to come out every so often to fix the noise on the lines.

I can't wait for Sonic to deploy their fiber down here because ATT sure isn't helping me out.

 

[SomeoneElse]

I can already point to two articles where ISPs are violating NN now that it has been repealed. Want to watch hi-def video on your phone? Sorry you have to pay extra for that.

Actually just started a fight with Comcast about this for TV. They are charging for HD now because they claim their DVR hardware is chargeable (somewhat understandable) and that HD is no longer Free service.....even though HD broadcasting is the standard now. I was on the phone for 40 mins because my bill went up $40 in 2 months.....20 last month and 20 this month.....They are charging for HD on TV in general not just for your phone.

 

[lcpiper]

The small local guys need help to foster competition otherwise the big companies will leave many of us stranded. I do not like them trying to get rid of this rule.......

I'm not picking on you, but you have offered a perfect opportunity for me to make my point clearly.

You say that we need the little guys, and that without them competing, that you and others will "be left stranded".

But the little guys aren't putting in their own lines and faster equipment. This rule only forces the big guys to sell bandwidth to the little guys, that they in turn resell to you. It's not faster, better, or improved, it's just cheaper sometimes. But it's over the same lines the same equipment the same speeds, and if you get faster for less it's only because the little guy offers the faster lines cheaper, but the same quality remains available from the big guys. It's just that the smaller company has far less overhead and far less maintenance costs so they don't have to save up money for upgrading older equipment, they're using someone else' equipment and lines, and when the big guys upgrade the little guys will see that benefit for free.

It's faux competition, not real. I'm not against helping the little guys get a leg up so they can become competitive, but I don't think this is it.

 

[Deleted member 93354]

I'm not picking on you, but you have offered a perfect opportunity for me to make my point clearly.

You say that we need the little guys, and that without them competing, that you and others will "be left stranded".

But the little guys aren't putting in their own lines and faster equipment. This rule only forces the big guys to sell bandwidth to the little guys, that they in turn resell to you. It's not faster, better, or improved, it's just cheaper sometimes. But it's over the same lines the same equipment the same speeds, and if you get faster for less it's only because the little guy offers the faster lines cheaper, but the same quality remains available from the big guys. It's just that the smaller company has far less overhead and far less maintenance costs so they don't have to save up money for upgrading older equipment, they're using someone else' equipment and lines, and when the big guys upgrade the little guys will see that benefit for free.

It's faux competition, not real. I'm not against helping the little guys get a leg up so they can become competitive, but I don't think this is it.

You could say the same thing about telephone lines. But lo and hehold, the telecoms were just fine when telephone lines became a publicly shareable resource like the power grid with maintenance and upgrade cost going to the host company as a separate charge approved by the government.

Your argument is weak sauce. No points for you. Come back 1 year.

 

[lcpiper]

You could say the same thing about telephone lines. But lo and hehold, the telecoms were just fine when telephone lines became a publicly shareable resource like the power grid with maintenance and upgrade cost going to the host company as a separate charge approved by the government.

Your argument is weak sauce. No points for you. Come back 1 year.

If you think so.

I suppose the changes you reference, the breaking up of Ma Bell yes? (1982) I suppose that ushered in a renaissance of development in phone communications with real differences in service all at greatly lower prices. Over 20 years before things really changed at all.

But as I remember it, nothing really change except the name of who I sent my monthly check to. Nothing changed with the land-line phone business until the cell phone finally made them useless to most people where only hold-outs and businesses still use them. And even with businesses and the government VOIP Telephoney is the primary vector, the internet.

 

[Deleted member 93354]

If you think so.

I suppose the changes you reference, the breaking up of Ma Bell yes? (1982) I suppose that ushered in a renaissance of development in phone communications with real differences in service all at greatly lower prices. Over 20 years before things really changed at all.

But as I remember it, nothing really change except the name of who I sent my monthly check to. Nothing changed with the land-line phone business until the cell phone finally made them useless to most people where only hold-outs and businesses still use them. And even with businesses and the government VOIP Telephoney is the primary vector, the internet.

So are you saying competition spurs lower price? Fascinating.

 

[lcpiper]

So are you saying competition spurs lower price? Fascinating.

Competition can spur lower prices, but creating a situation that isn't actually competition just for the sake of lowering prices at the detriment of other businesses is not competition, and it's not right.

I know that trying to stand up for big businesses like the telecoms isn't popular, and frankly I do get it that these businesses have done shady shit and abused their dominant positions within markets. But trying to fix or control these things through unfair government dictates isn't going to foster an environment of fair play either. They will just feel justified in taking advantage of everything they can.

Look, I take my big business because I have a lot of money and I lay in cable and infrastructure, I shoulder the costs and the risks. Now you tell me that there needs to be competition and you tell me that I must sell bandwidth to other companies who can resell it to my old customers and they have no where near the risk or the upkeep nor will they ever, because they aren't competing with me. The government just made me shave off a slice of my action and give it away costing me a percentage of my business base that is supposed to be paying for what I have done, and for the future of where things should go.

Then you want me to push out cable to areas that are less lucrative and frankly, not even profitable, and I still will have to give away part of it to any little ISP that decides they want a slice of my pie. I have to sell, at a rate determined by the government as fair, give away my customers and lose money and while that little ISP can't help but make money, I have to suck it up and take whatever scraps remain whether it's profitable or not.

I have no doubt that this does keep prices down. But this is not competition. Not by any definition I'll agree to.

If this is the best possible solution to a problem then it is what it is. But I'm not going to call it competition because it's not that.

You force the telecom to sell off the infrastructure, carve it off, put it Under Title II as a common carrier and separate the major transport from the public facing service part of the industry. Now all ISPs can be equal and you'll have competition. The long haul data carriers are Tittle II, the ISPs are Title I, tweak the laws a little and now we have something very different to look at.

 

[Master_shake_]

Here where I live, internet is $90 bucks (but must come with a $30 bucks phone-line) and it's at 2mbps speeds. It's a monoploy. 720p 30fps on YouTube sometimes happen. 240p was a normal thing for us just last year.

Do you live in 1999??

That's terrible. My condolences

 

[wizdum]

That's not smaller companies competing. That's leeching off the big companies.

For smaller companies to be able to compete, local governments must be forced to allow other companies to put down their own cables, as long as they abide by the rules to do so.

This is mostly FUD, possibly spread by those large monopolistic ISPs. The only exclusion agreements that I have ever seen in municipalities are for coax cable. Theres nothing stopping a competitor from running fiber or twisted pair.

 

[Nanogrip]

Do you live in 1999??

That's terrible. My condolences

Republic of Palau

Tiny island 500 miles east of the Philippines and 500 miles north of Papua New Guinea. Population is less than 22,000 with around 3,000+ non-citizens. We can all fit in a sport stadium, in fact, nearing the end of WW2, Japanese soldiers were given order from the higher ups to huddle all of us into a bomb shelter, where they were to kill all of us with a bomb. Story here on the 6th page of the PDF:

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/5104016.pdf

Interesting piece of history, just a slight change in it, and my family lineage would have ended right there, and I wouldn't be bitching about our atrocious internet speed today hehe.

 

[dgingeri]

This is mostly FUD, possibly spread by those large monopolistic ISPs. The only exclusion agreements that I have ever seen in municipalities are for coax cable. Theres nothing stopping a competitor from running fiber or twisted pair.

Oh? And if you built a driveway, and the city mandated that, because someone bought a lot behind your house that doesn't have access to the road, you had to allow your neighbor to use your driveway rather than build his own. How about if you built a gazebo and a fire pit in your backyard, and the city mandated that you had to allow your neighbors use it at their whim. Would either of those be fair?

 

[unholy89]

I used to use the CLEC Sonic.net which resells AT&T DSL. Price was $60 for 4 Mbps due to distance and forced bundled phone which I didn't use. Left after they bumped the price up $10 to help finance building fiber for San Francisco. Now have Comcast at $40 for 100 Mbps.

So in my case, the competition brought by CLEC was worse than the AT&T and Comcast speed wise.

 

[mope54]

They will just feel justified in taking advantage of everything they can.

Look, I take my big business because I have a lot of money and I lay in cable and infrastructure, I shoulder the costs and the risks. Now you tell me that there needs to be competition and you tell me that I must sell bandwidth to other companies who can resell it to my old customers and they have no where near the risk or the upkeep nor will they ever, because they aren't competing with me. The government just made me shave off a slice of my action and give it away costing me a percentage of my business base that is supposed to be paying for what I have done, and for the future of where things should go.

First off, corporations do not "feel" anything, much less justified in their actions for any reason real or imagined. Employees for a corporation make choices and those choices, in this context by and large, are to extract value from communities and wrap it inside of a ticker box.

But more importantly, *if* these corporations were doing as you write, "shoulder[ing] the costs and the risks" there would be less criticism of this behavior. The reality, however, is they do *not* shoulder the cost (those are paid for by the taxpayers) nor do they shoulder the risks (also covered by taxpayers). They also aren't simply "keeping" their money since they (AT&T, specifically) received $38 million dollars in tax rebates to spur economic growth last year. Even if they didn't receive such a large amount of government dole, even if they did actually pay some taxes, keeping some of it is certainly "receiving" public money in the same way that when I refuse to pay, or for some other reason don't have to pay, my income or property taxes I'm not paying my fair share no matter how you want to try and slice that apple--assuming you believe in taxes and public cost sharing, etc. If you don't believe in those things as part and parcel of living and benefiting from society at large, then the conversation really can't reach a resolution.

These companies aren't even being "told" what to do--that's a gross misrepresentation. These actions are things they *agreed* to do when they got those juicy tax concessions, infrastructure access, and whatever else we don't even know about and won't know about until the next wave of career politicians move in to whatever cushy industry jobs they've been greasing everyone up in order to get.

 

[Deleted member 93354]

First off, corporations do not "feel" anything, much less justified in their actions for any reason real or imagined. Employees for a corporation make choices and those choices, in this context by and large, are to extract value from communities and wrap it inside of a ticker box.

But more importantly, *if* these corporations were doing as you write, "shoulder[ing] the costs and the risks" there would be less criticism of this behavior. The reality, however, is they do *not* shoulder the cost (those are paid for by the taxpayers) nor do they shoulder the risks (also covered by taxpayers). They also aren't simply "keeping" their money since they (AT&T, specifically) received $38 million dollars in tax rebates to spur economic growth last year. Even if they didn't receive such a large amount of government dole, even if they did actually pay some taxes, keeping some of it is certainly "receiving" public money in the same way that when I refuse to pay, or for some other reason don't have to pay, my income or property taxes I'm not paying my fair share no matter how you want to try and slice that apple--assuming you believe in taxes and public cost sharing, etc. If you don't believe in those things as part and parcel of living and benefiting from society at large, then the conversation really can't reach a resolution.

These companies aren't even being "told" what to do--that's a gross misrepresentation. These actions are things they *agreed* to do when they got those juicy tax concessions, infrastructure access, and whatever else we don't even know about and won't know about until the next wave of career politicians move in to whatever cushy industry jobs they've been greasing everyone up in order to get.

Very true. Companies ask for Assistance money all the time because "It will be good for the community" (Which is a load of horse shit) If you don't believe me, I'll happily point you to a dear friend of mine who's a county commissioner at one of the largest counties in the USA. The number of "Assistance" request companies ask for from government is quick frankly asinine.

And there are more than several studies which show investments into broadband infrastructure have already been paid off, so everything else at this point is gravy, yet prices remain high. The reason being is companies like Comcast are beholden to stock investors and returning the maximum profit possible.

 

[darckhart]

I'm not picking on you, but you have offered a perfect opportunity for me to make my point clearly.

You say that we need the little guys, and that without them competing, that you and others will "be left stranded".

Not sure if you read my story clearly. ATT was not going to bother offering anything past 1.5 Mbps DSL due to a decision to forgo maintenance on boxes they deemed too far away. Sonic did not offer anything cheaper nor anything better. They simply said, OK we'll keep selling you 6 using the ATT hardware that is already there AND GO SERVICE THE BOX OURSELVES.

We know these standalone internet packages are not lucrative for ATT/Comcast/etc and they are playing games where they want you to pick up the bundle with tv and phone and then magically you also get faster internet because they probably are sending those all on different hardware. (though I doubt that would be the case out where I am because they probably never bothered to lay in the new technology to support it.) So yes, I'm certain ATT at some point would just kill off accounts like mine, even 1.5, when it's no longer useful for them to keep it alive.

 

[lcpiper]

.......But more importantly, *if* these corporations were doing as you write, "shoulder[ing] the costs and the risks" there would be less criticism of this behavior. The reality, however, is they do *not* shoulder the cost (those are paid for by the taxpayers) nor do they shoulder the risks (also covered by taxpayers).........

Hold on, you are saying that the Federal Government or the States paid for those lines to be laid and the equipment and manpower associated with deploying the major Internet Communications Infrastructure?

Do you mean that the Government contracted for lines to be run to say, sparsely populated regions like many of the DoD bases or other government facilities where they needed service? I wouldn't dispute that at all. But are you saying that the government also payed AT&T to lay concrete pipe and run cable from Denver to Chicago (example) and that was also contracted work?

The majority of all the major communications lines were not paid for by the government, or subsidized by the government, Ma Bell ran them. Ma Bell ran all the major land lines trunks through the nation and they did so because it was profitable business.

That is a huge claim. And no link so I guess I have to go hunt down the truth of it because you didn't want to post where you get this from. Let's see how it turns up.

There will be edits as I amass information;

Might as well get started early because it sets an example;


The Morse Telegraph system, initially Congress appropriate funds to run a line from DC to Baltimore
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_North_American_telegraphy

After that, the government turns private industry loose and the Telegraph is privatized which leads to it's expansion across the US.
https://books.google.com/books?id=SnjGRDVIUL4C&pg=PA61#v=onepage&q&f=false

You won't see many references to government funded or contracted deployments in this article or it's linked pages because it was private industry that ran telephones to the citizens of the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_telephone


https://www.quora.com/Who-funded-an...l-components-that-makes-the-internet-possible

So the answer in the US is: yes, a lot of the infrastructure was built by private companies. But on the other hand, such companies had incentives from the government to do it, either directly (money) or indirectly (exercise of monopoly power on other markets). So it's not a simple "the market did it" as some may want us to believe.

More to come I expect.

https://gizmodo.com/why-more-technology-giants-are-paying-to-lay-their-own-1703904291

Microsoft is investing in its own undersea internet cables.

Microsoft isn’t the first tech company to pay for its own cables. As PC Mag points out, Google is doing the same thing.

Maybe Mope54, maybe you can find where Congress spent money to deploy telecommunications services across the country. Or the States, because even that report about all the money that the Telcos billed us for fiber deployments. That report says we paid and didn't get, it doesn't say who paid for what we have today.

 

[lcpiper]

Not sure if you read my story clearly. ATT was not going to bother offering anything past 1.5 Mbps DSL due to a decision to forgo maintenance on boxes they deemed too far away. Sonic did not offer anything cheaper nor anything better. They simply said, OK we'll keep selling you 6 using the ATT hardware that is already there AND GO SERVICE THE BOX OURSELVES.

We know these standalone internet packages are not lucrative for ATT/Comcast/etc and they are playing games where they want you to pick up the bundle with tv and phone and then magically you also get faster internet because they probably are sending those all on different hardware. (though I doubt that would be the case out where I am because they probably never bothered to lay in the new technology to support it.) So yes, I'm certain ATT at some point would just kill off accounts like mine, even 1.5, when it's no longer useful for them to keep it alive.

Well one does have to challenge the wisdom of a government that "incentivizes" a business to expand service to an area as a temporary thing and then no longer wants to provide additional incentive to keep it going when the basic situation is that it is unprofitable to begin with.

If the government sees it as important to push service into these areas then they need to put it in and maintain it. Either that or they have to figure out some way to pay for it that doesn't rely on companies to do so based solely on a business solution. If there were money in it the businesses would be there trying to make it. Government trying to temporarily incentivize deployments is frequently temporary.

 

[Deleted member 93354]

Well one does have to challenge the wisdom of a government that "incentivizes" a business to expand service to an area as a temporary thing and then no longer wants to provide additional incentive to keep it going when the basic situation is that it is unprofitable to begin with.

If the government sees it as important to push service into these areas then they need to put it in and maintain it. Either that or they have to figure out some way to pay for it that doesn't rely on companies to do so based solely on a business solution. If there were money in it the businesses would be there trying to make it. Government trying to temporarily incentivize deployments is frequently temporary.

What do you have to say about:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060131/2021240.shtml
http://www.kmov.com/story/28501960/...illions-in-grants-leave-towns-without-service

Government shouldn't incenitize anything where a company stands to make almost endless profit. It has been proven cable companies have paid for their infrastructure many times over with fees.

 

[lcpiper]

What do you have to say about:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060131/2021240.shtml
http://www.kmov.com/story/28501960/...illions-in-grants-leave-towns-without-service

Government shouldn't incentivize anything where a company stands to make almost endless profit. It has been proven cable companies have paid for their infrastructure many times over with fees.

Not sure whether you are backing what I am saying or disputing it.

Let's make sure we're clear on things. Just because I am saying that the small ISP thing just looks like competition, but isn't real competition in any meaningful way. it's like a way to enforce price ceilings when you don't have the power to do so. This doesn't mean I am backing the big ISPs in all the things they do. I'm just saying that I don't see any thing in this legislation that's actually creating competition or any benefits of competition short of a way of creating a government controlled price ceiling.

Now I'm not saying that every small ISP is a fake placebo for competition, but that this legislation is only good for that. Again, this is subject to my understanding of what these small ISPs are and aren't. And that no one has said I got it wrong on what they are and aren't.

Second, that second article you linked, please don't link an article about one shady company that did some crooked bullshit and try and paint an entire industry with it. Some business pulled a scam, surprise me. At least the first article has some meat even if it is over 10 year sold.

EDIT: And to put something into perspective, this legislation is from 1996. I was still on dialup until like 2003 or so. This legislation does need to be relooked. Whether that relook turns out good for the big ISPs is immaterial, this is old stuff and the world has changed a lot for something like this to not at least be revisted and reconsidered.