You are over generalizing, and like many others, do not realize the costs it takes to upgrade. If it was as simple as making a spaghetti mess of cable runs like in the pictures, then yes, we could run fiber all day long for a very reasonable cost. If our country was half the size of Texas, then yes, we could provide fiber for a very reasonable cost. Comparing Sweden and S. Korea is ridiculous. Loosely speaking, there are three tiers of ISP's. Tier 1 is, for the most part, the backbone of the internet. Tier 2 is a reseller to Tier 3 providers or customers the require high quality of service. Tier 3 sells a much lower quality of service, basically your residential and small to mid size businesses. An ISP can be any number of tiers. What you must understand is Tier 1 and Tier 2 networks can be upgraded rather easily. They already have state of the art equipment and they have the infrastructure in place to run additional fiber if needed. Tier 3 is a complete different story. The two biggest providers by far are DSL and Cable. Telco lines, which DSL uses, has been around for nearly a century. Most houses and neighborhoods for the last 3 decades have been wired for Telco and Cable when they are built out. The infrastructure is already there. However, technology has already outpaced DSL and is rapidly outpacing cables limitations. Its basically obsolete. This leaves us with fiber. The vast majority of new neighborhoods today are not being installed with fiber. If new neighborhoods today would be required to have fiber before being built, their chances of getting fiber would be exponential. So now you want to roll fiber out to existing locations. Do you really believe you can roll up to the local telephone pole and string up fiber on it? Wrong. The pole belongs to a utility. If you want to use a pole, you must pay a premium. And if you're not friendly with that utility? (ie. they are partnered with your competitor). They will find every reason to increase that premium. For example, there might be five miles of 30 year old telephone poles that do not meet current standards that will require you to replace before you can add anything additional. Do you want to bore fiber under a road or highway? Feel free to wait while you have to fight through months of red tape to get approval from local, county and state government. The hurdles to roll fiber out are insane. Now to deal with the insanely rich ISPs. Do you remember that 50 gigs of data you torrented last month on your 39.99 internet plan? You very well could be a customer operating at a loss. The cost of running an ISP is not cheap. They are not making billions of dollars in profits. They are a corporation. And the only thing a corporation cares about is its stock prices. If these corporations are spending a dollar only to make a dime back, that doesn't make their stock prices a good sell. And if the stock is crap, then the company follows suit. Unfortunately, that is the down side of capitalism. If you dont like it, then stick with non-profit co-ops. Title II regulation is a bad idea because there is not a good infrastructure. It will place costly mandates on ISP's. On the surface, it sounds like a great idea. Realistically, it will slow the growth and put some out of business. For example, if there are 30 houses out in BFE that have connectivity issues and it costs a million to fix it, they will be required to fix it. For a rich guy like yourself, a million might not sound a lot, but that million dollars could put an ISP out of business or that million could go to offering 5000 homes else where. And then comes all the federal BS regulator charges that will appear on everyones bill. And the price hike to cover the costs to upgrade their networks. Municipalities can become a problem because they can make it very difficult for other ISP's to enter the market. As I mentioned, we work with a few municipalities. They have made it abundantly clear they will not do any favors for the (terrible) incumbent ISP. Further, municipalities are made up of council members. There does not need to be favoritism. All it takes is a disagree group of people to make everyone miserable. (just take a look at congress for this). Personally, I believe the solution lies within the districts, cities and counties. They should be placing mandates on all new construction to include the latest technologies. They should also place mandates on all utilities to play ball. They should be raising taxes to ensure they can build easily expandable backhauls.
Lets get pass the pictures. So no competition. Prices keep going up. Speed and capacity does not keep up with demand. US falling way behind other countries. Cable companies are monopoly making a killing isn't that big of a deal. Why, because it's difficult to do what other have done? I hear excuses. I'm sure if they spent a bit more of their profit and have less profit, the U.S. would have better service, better price and can compete better with the rest of the worlds.
I have explained the problems. You have ignored these problems and countered with the all too common corporate greed and suggest mandates to spend "a little bit more" of their profits. It takes more than just a little bit more. It takes multiple billions to do what you are suggesting. Where do you think these companies should get these billions of dollars? Please explain how to cram decades of cable and telco infrastructure into an overnight solution like you demand. We will never have competitive services unless the whole infrastructure is socialized.
coming soon: got a small website selling ties or your kids soccer team? Well it has been throttled 'WEBSITE UNAVAILABLE. PROCESS PAYMENT TO SEE CONTENT' Clutchfans would get throttled for sure. I wonder what clutch thinks about it? Hard to side with the repubs on this one.
Again, excuses. When there is a need, there is a way. Competition does that. You compete or you go out of business. Countless example of what real free-market does out there that are great. What we have here is not free-market. I don't know the solution but there is no way these companies would not provide better services at better pricing if there were real competition. If you think that the only solution is to socialize, then socialize. I think there are solutions out there but these companies have been and will continue to fight them to protect their power and profit.
Spaceghost, thanks for taking the time for a substantive reply, I appreciate it. Fine, let's skip the messy wires in Korea. You think it's a mess in Sweden, or here in Germany, where I get phone + 50megabit internet for 37 Euros/month, and I can have 100megabit for another five euros/month? And I can choose from more competitors than I can count? Practically the entire developed world is providing higher speed internet at lower prices to their consumers, and has been for years. Eventually the excuses have to stop. If you say Tier 1 and Tier 2 are easier and cheaper to upgrade, but it's the "last mile" (Tier 3) that's difficult (which I absolutely agree with, it's an expensive mess) - that conflicts with the narrative that other countries do it cheaper because of population density. If the last mile is the part that's so hard, why is pretty much every first-world country out there doing it faster and cheaper than the US? If the backbone part is easy and the last mile is where it's apparently impossible to get ROI, then the "if our country were half the size of Texas" argument is invalid. And don't respond with messy wires- ain't none of that in northern Europe/Scandinavia. If I understand correctly, the real cost in the ISP business is the expense of building, maintaining, and upgrading the network, and that cost must be recouped over time (a concept not foreign to any businessman who has to make an initial investment to get started.) The way you phrase the above sentence makes it sound like the 50GB torrenting guy is actually incurring a significantly greater cost than the 1GB email checking grandma. Is that what you're saying? There is no way in hell I'll believe that the cost of existing infrastructure sending 50GB of data costs a Tier 3 ISP over $40, but maybe that's not what you're saying. Apparently the equivalent of Teir 3 ISPs in every first-world nation have found a way to deliver faster speed at lower prices through the last mile to their customers, and not go bankrupt. Maybe it's magic dust. Let's not forget that over the years ISPs have taken tens of billions dollars of taxpayer money to build their networks on the promise that they'll deliver service- promises that often go unfulfilled. Verizon took TONS of taxpayer money on the promise that they'd deliver FIOS to a certain percentage of NY by the summer of 2014. Of course they haven't. Do we get the money back? No. Do we get continued excuses about the cost of implementation when they were given billions of dollars to implement? Yep. Yes, building infrastructure is very expensive and a major pain in the ass from a regulatory standpoint. Yes, it's a huge investment to recoup. But the big ISPs have decided on a certain ROI that means we get slower speeds at higher prices. The fact that hundreds of other cities worldwide are getting better service at lower prices points to the simple fact that the American customer must deal with poorer service at higher costs because of greed. Complaining about corporate greed when it comes to American ISPs is completely legitimate. And another thing about infrastructure- Here in Germany, if I drop phone service I can have 100megabit internet from Unity Media for 35 Euros a month via cable modem. No fiber. Are there equivalent deals in the US for cable internet? If not, why not? My point is, this isn't just an issue of the expense of FTTH. It's price competition. It's maddening that my home country should be the shining example of capitalism done right, where the captains of industry compete with one another and the populace benefits- but when it comes to internet service, it's the supposedly "socialist" European countries that actually get it right. Ok this is good information that I didn't know about. I only knew that Common Carrier rules would forbid discriminating against different types of data traffic. But there are also increased regulations on physical maintenance? And Title II would force a network upgrade? I find that a little hard to believe, I haven't read that anywhere. What kind of ISP would be put out of business by a million bucks? I thought all the smaller ISPs were basically sharing infrastructure with the larger ones, which the larger ones were forced to sell some bandwidth wholesale- or am I mixing that up with the wireless providers? That's a good argument. If a municipality doesn't want to do any favors for an incumbent, what does that mean? The incumbent can't use any of the infrastructure built by the municipality? If they have a separate infrastructure, does it matter? Americans should have choice and competition. It seems the only way to do that is have competing ISPs on one infrastructure. Is that what you mean by 'socializing' the network? Absolutely agree.
Turns out I was mistaken on the prices of some plans available to me in Germany. Prices have already gone down, again, since the last time I checked. http://www.unitymedia.de/ -100 megabit internet: 30 Euros/month. -150 megabit internet, phone, HD cable TV with 500GB HD recorder: 43 Euros/month first 12 months, 50 Euros/month after. This is one of many competitors I can compare when shopping for home internet. Again, this isn't fiber to the home- it's just cable internet.
Do you honestly believe that can work in the US? Im not being factious. The problem is not jammed at one place. Or two. Or three. Its several self serving entities that prevent broadband growth. And its not the self serving ISP leading the pack that is preventing the growth. Europe is heavily regulated and forces entities to play ball with each other. They are not quite as self serving as found in the US. The good news is that the FCC is pushing for co-location across the board. This is where I am mixed on whether ISP's should be considered a utility. To clarify, yes, the Title II regulation is primarily about net neutrality, but once its categorized, they can and will have additional stipulations further down the line that can cause serious problems. Here is a good article that sheds a different light on our problems. http://www.wired.com/2013/07/we-nee...-government-for-dismal-broadband-competition/ I can give you a first hand example of the problems everyone has to put up with. As I have alluded in previous posts, our company partnered up with a large fiber co-op. Our charter is to bring an alternative internet solution to the under-served markets in our rural area. There is no cable. You are stuck with DSL or satellite. We have been working with our home county for months on securing a key easement that would allow us to cover over 1/2 the county. After coming to an agreement to provide several of their remote facilities with internet (and to get off the crappy DSL), we discovered the city manager (who is incompetent and has been our stumbling block the entire time) rubber stamped an agreement a couple months ago with the incumbent DSL provider which has a non compete clause in the contract to the easement. The only reason for this clause is to prevent competition. For us to provide service like we wanted, it will now cost us 50x as much.
Most current ISP's ran their cables for TV and phone services as franchised monopolies. They were granted infrastructure advantages to serve as utilities. The only reason this is a question is because they are buying the politicians.
Exactly. Play both sides. Laying down infrastructure? We're utilities! Providing service? Don't you dare call us utilities! Communists!
I have two answers to that question. - Is it possible to force numerous providers to compete with each other on the same infrastructure, like the utilities we're already using now? Of course it is. - Is it possible to force numerous providers to compete with each other in the present political climate in the US? Probably not. Only here in America would twelve different ISPs competing hard to provide you the best, fastest, most reliable service for your dollar be considered socialist/communist, while having access to only one behemoth ISP who has very little motivation to provide bang for the buck is MegaFreedom Apple Pie. Do you concede that Europe is providing faster service at lower prices not because of messy wires and smaller countries, but because they have more effective regulation? I did a lot of searching just now on "co-location" and "colocation" but can only find info on web hosting. What is it? FCC forcing providers of last-mile to lay infrastructure in the same place? Thanks for the link. This is a 'solution' I don't understand. Let's say local governments get out of the way and everybody gets open access- are you saying the best way for customers to enjoy the benefits of competing services is to have every single entrant pull their own infrastructure through the city, tearing up the streets over and over again?? Is that the best way to provide water? Electricity? Gas? I'm all for open access and local governments getting out of the way, and not squeezing new entrants for revenue. But every single new entrant tearing up city streets (again) in order for us to have competition? That sucks so bad, I'm really sorry you had to deal with that. Out of curiosity, who do you blame more- the incompetent city manager, or the incumbent that went out of it's way to bar competition?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/embed/fpbOEoRrHyU[/youtube] http://www.fcc.gov/comments Proceeding# 14-28
http://www.newsweek.com/john-olivers-call-urging-trolls-action-net-neutrality-appears-crash-fcc-servers-253320 Did John Oliver’s Call Urging Trolls to Comment on Net Neutrality Crash FCC Servers? <iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/fpbOEoRrHyU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> He ended the monologue with a plea to Internet trolls everywhere to “once in your lives, focus your indiscriminate rage in a useful direction,” and pointed his audience to the FCC's public comments website, FCC.gov/comments. It apparently worked. The FCC’s comments section was reportedly down for a few hours on Monday, and the FCC’s Twitter account sent out two tweets indicating that “technical difficulties” due to "heavy traffic" had been affecting its servers.
ReCode: Major League Baseball Cries Foul on Net Neutrality Proposal Why is it that the only companies who seem to be in favor of the proposed "fast lines" are ISPs? Powerful businesses like the MLB, Facebook and Google are against the "fast lanes." How can the defenders of the new lanes not see that it is a money grab on behalf of ISPs?
If you own the ISP's and made $2 billion in the last year, you can manufacture your public support, online and in Congress. Nobody but paid shills and bought politicians would support this. But it will win anyway.
Word. Really this is an issue for which the appropriate response is: Can't go to work or do anything else but protest this assault on my access to information because I care about this fundamental right and because this change will erode the rights of my kids and/or everyone in the future. The US government continues to treat its citizens as enemies. In the coming weeks we'll see increased demonization of anyone who supports this. Nothing sways the public towards state opinion like fear and PTSD!
In my utopian word, I would treat the infrastructure as we treat our current road system. I would not be opposed to socializing our infrastructure. If we are to keep up with the rest of the world, this is the only way. I like the idea of the federal, state, county and local governments being responsible for keeping up the infrastructure. From there, each of the level of governments could allow the private sector to lease the space. Only then can we offer the speeds and pricing as our overseas counterparts. That said, I would still be very concerned about the control and censorship and lobbyists. City Manager, definitely. I cant fault a business for having a killer instinct, regardless of their product. Pound for pound, yes, I do concede Currently its mostly with wireless carriers. Instead of each wireless carrier putting up their own towers, they want carriers to share towers. I really hope to see this expand more.
