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?
"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."
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Well, here is hope that this will be a first step in bringing US internet access to at least something comparable to Balkans. Of course, to reach the likes of Netherlands or Russia even of now, not to mention as of five years ago would take another 20 years or so.
Large broadband providers in the US are allergic to policy and price transparency. They preposterously told the FCC they would not be able to list taxes and fees on proposed consumer broadband labels![1][2]
Not necessarily defending them, but taxes vary depending on state, county, city, and/or taxing district, against a matrix of what type of service is being sold and what revenue limits, if any.
Then add another level as you're not being sold service by Spectrum but Spectrum of New York, and variable tax/fee contributions depend on total revenue of that subsidiary (e.g. Universal Service Fund[1]).
It can be fairly complicated in a static state, but then add in new/pending legislature and it's something that needs to be updated monthly.
Yes, they already do that work internally (and if they get it wrong, the government taxing entities tell them they are miscalculating the amount and assesses penalties and fees) but publishing it adds a new dimension.
Exactly. It's not a valid excuse for the ISP, but it is a legitimate beef. The ridiculous array of taxes really are a giant PITA for them and for consumers.
Sure they do, but even with a computer and a database, keeping track of exactly which taxes apply and which don't to who, from 3,143 counties and 19,495 cities isn't a trivial thing to do.
Again it's not a defense of the big companies, but it is a legitimate beef.
They manage to get it right on my bill, so it's not like they don't have the information handy, they just don't want to disclose it until as late as legally possible.
not trying to unload on you because it's many different people, but Ok, I give up trying to say "it's not a defense of the ISPs" because clearly people aren't capable of separating threads of thought. I guess the limbic system response to "evil ISP" is just too overpowering for the frontal lobe and logic falls by the wayside.
It's simply not possible that two different things can both be true? That ISPs already have to do it so should disclose what they're charging, but that also the number of taxes and fees are ridiculous? Why is that so hard to separate in people's minds?
If a Comcast president said that ham sandwiches are better when they're grilled, and I said "he's got a good point there" would that also be misconstrued as a defense of their billing practices?
But it's completely ridiculous for ISPs (or anybody else) to use that as a justification for dark patterns during the sales cycle.
Now, if the taxes and fees were so complicated, the company simply couldn't comply at all, at any point in the customer lifecycle, then sure, that's a good excuse. But that's not the case - ISPs manage to figure this stuff out eventually.
> but that also the number of taxes and fees are ridiculous?
You know ISPs go out of their way to artificially inflate the number of taxes and fees they charge you, right?
If every company took the approach ISPs took, then every recipe in the U.S. would be the length of a CVS receipt, listing out every minor and incidental tax and fee the company happened to pay as part of its operating procedures. You don’t see stores passing on “electricity fees”, and “union negotiations taxes” etc etc, because only ISPs take affront at the idea that they should pay for their business expenses, rather that passing them on a additional itemised billing items to their customers.
Calling it a “legitimate beef” crosses the line from considering a thread of thought into defending the ISP because it’s only true from their perspective.
> It's simply not possible that two different things can both be true? That ISPs already have to do it so should disclose what they're charging, but that also the number of taxes and fees are ridiculous? Why is that so hard to separate in people's minds?
As several other people told you, because they can get it right on the bill but not on the contract and advertising. If they can do the first, they can do the other two but they don't want to.
> keeping track of exactly which taxes apply and which don't to who, from 3,143 counties and 19,495 cities isn't a trivial thing to do.
I don't see this isn't a legitimate beef. If you can't comply with local regulations because you serve too many municipalities it sounds like you aren't a good fit to serve those customers. Perhaps the solution is to sell your infrastructure off to smaller, local companies who can comply. Or heck even just other equally big companies who are well run enough to manage such a problem.
> taxes vary depending on state, county, city, and/or taxing district, against a matrix of what type of service is being sold and what revenue limits, if any.
Ow well, if yhey cant figure out all these complexities, how do they know they are charging me the rifht amount?
US is really a wild place, if I demanded a random, unexplainable and higher than expected amount of money from my customers, I would be accused of fraud and no court would uphold my demands
How do they know what to charge you? There is some billing system that has all the taxes and fees in it to apply to your bill and there are 3rd parties SaaS companies that solve taxes for business like Avalara that will give a break down of all the taxes it applied to a given address.
They provide you with a form to check if your address is supported which is linked to one system that do the check. I think it is possible to link the two systems together to give you the price for your particular address. I don't think taxes and fees here has to do with anything other than your physical address (They are not the IRS after all)
At the point where I'm querying about internet service, they need to know my address to ascertain that they can in fact have(/can run) a cable into my house. And when they know my address, they know all of the relevant jurisdictions imposing taxes on that and the relevant tax rates.
The two things that are going to be difficult are if you want to promote, say, a nationwide "$60/month plan", or if you've got some corporate tax that's hard to calculate on a marginal basis that you're trying to pass onto consumers. Neither of those things are motivating to me. If it's too hard to compute the accurate tax fee per person, just roll that into your base plan calculation and budget accordingly. We don't expect to have to pay a corporation's corporate tax as a separate line item on the bill, so why should we expect that consumers have to pay an industry-specific corporate tax as a separate line item?
At the end of the day, the reality is that this is an industry that is trying to advertise plans that are at wildly different rates from those the consumer has to pay, and they're upset that some truth-in-advertising laws is starting to be enforced. It's not even outlawing the wildly different rates; it's merely requiring transparency in the differences!
They only need to publish the taxes and fees if they’re not part of the advertised service price. The FCC has made it very clear that if ISP don’t want to publish the minutiae of all the various taxes and fees, then those ISP are welcome to charge a single flat, advertised, price, and not inflate bills beyond that price with spurious taxes and “fees”.
Of course that would require ISPs to be honest and upfront with their advertising and billing practices, something US ISP seem to be incapable of.
It doesn't seem preposterous to me at all. If the goal is to show the price breakdown on marketing materials, it's going to be tough for AT&T to fit 29,000 different permutations of tax regimes in a banner ad.
"the company “would have to create over 29,000 separate labels”" from your source 2.
Chattanoogan, here — providing perspective as a user of city-supplied fiber internet:
Our local ISP, EPB Fiber (available to every. single. electricity. customer), is incredible. Synchronus 300/300, 1gps/1gps, 20gps/20gps... plus they just released the first qubit-capable fiber connections [I don't know/use this].
When they say "$57.99 per month," that's EXACTLY what appears on monthly invoices — including all taxes! And the product is revered for good reason(s).
It's SO GOOD that our state (Tennessee) has actually blocked other municipalities from implementing similar municipal fiber ISPs — and prevents EPB from offering fiber to customers outside of their electricity-supplying jurisdiction.
Asking new arrivals "Why'd you move here," you'll often find tech-types listing "The Internets" within Top5 reasons.
Much of the neighboring areas of north Georgia and western North Carolina also have widely available fiber from the local electric and telephone co-ops. Obama's broadband stimulus paid for much of a fiber backbone that connects them running from north of Atlanta through the Tennessee Valley to Asheville and beyond.
My place in WNC is, sadly, just outside Blue Ridge EMC's footprint. Pay $100/m for 100/4 cable. The billboard on US-129 proclaiming "Big City Speeds & Performance, Small-Town Personal Service" irks me every time I pass by because the service is every bit as shitty as that slogan made me expect.
I'm sure it's within their regulatory laws to determine what can be rolled out where. Of course, the real question is where are all those free market Republicans in Tennessee when it comes time for the market to compete with their donors?
I've lived in a lot of red states, and the same thing repeatedly happens. I've given up trying to change things. For every 1 person who will care, there are 25 who just check that there is an "R" next to the name of the person. Ignorant votes make educated votes irrelevant.
> the real question is where are all those free market Republicans
Blocking public services that naturally have a pricing advantage over private businesses because they're supported by tax dollars. Like if you're gonna drag Republicans for not living up to their free market ideals this really isn't what you should point to.
People said the same thing when they opposed the public option in the '00's and the rationale was the same. "Competing" with government services is just roundabout price controls. I'm zero percent opposed to such things when the market fails to sort itself out but I can see why strict free market adherents wouldn't be on board.
ISPs and Pharma companies get subsidies from the government, I don't think your argument holds up here. Just another area that Republicans are happy to be hypocrites on. I would love to see Republicans set out "small government" legislation that removes subsidies to the core businesses in their states but you and I both know that will never happen. A child getting food stamps is an example of our 'welfare state' but it's never the billions that go to agriculture or pharma companies.
I laugh often knowing that WalMart is the largest single recipient of "corporate welfare" in this fine state/country. What a term/fact. When my black nephew started working there, they walked him through "applying for foodstamps" as part of his training/onboarding.
>Blocking public services that naturally have a pricing advantage over private businesses because they're supported by tax dollars.
That's the stated rationale. The actual reason is that the entirety of Republican economic ideology revolves around the idea that the government isn't capable of providing better service than private companies and municipal broadband shows this to be a complete lie.
Well, firstly, we should acknowledge that municipal broadband isn't a story of completely unmitigated success - there are cases of tremendous failure as well.
I'm also fairly sure that most Republicans would not mind if municipal broadband were run - and competed on - commercial terms.
However, if it's funded by municipal bonds that are backed by general obligation (i.e. all taxpayers subsidize, whether they use the service or not) then that seems obviously a problem to me. Even if they're revenue bonds, they're still implicitly subsidized by tax treatment.
They weren't using tax dollars. The service is paid for by the bills, its simply not for profit, it just treats the fiber lines like roads and side walks, a common public good. You can even choose your own ISP.
If you think Democrats aren't just as corrupt and willing to pass bills that are bad for the people but good for their donors, I have a bridge in Arizona to sell you. The problem here is that the vast majority of public officials are corrupt, not which party they happen to run with.
The reason Chattanooga is even allowed to offer fiber internet service is that TECHNICALLY it is for monitoring their power delivery infrastructure, down to each household. Customer internet is just an "additional benefit."
When your power disconnect here (without explanation), somebody from the power company shows up within the hour (to figure out why, then replace any broken hardware). But this is rare, as the "auto switchers" can typically reroute blackouts, restoring service usually within seconds.
US states typically can organize their municipalities, school districts, fire departments, public power agencies, etc. however they want.
If the state constitution doesn’t say otherwise, the legislature can just pass a law saying municipalities can’t get into the internet business and that’s that. This comes up a lot with liberal cities in conservative states.
Our county did basically same thing in rural va. Our coop who the county partnered with is now expanding to 5 other counties. 1gb 75 mo. Its been down once in 4 years
I've actually seen this elsewhere as well. The local rural telephone cooperatives tend to have better service and better support if the customer base decides it and can afford it.
Same in Fort Collins CO. I think the director of EPB broadband headed the Connexion service here at the start. Also in Loveland, Estes Park. Incredibly good service for cheap.
Is this one of those situations where it went from practically non-existent to holybejeebusfast? I had friends that lived in an upper mountain valley that barely had POTs, no cable (not enough customers for provider to feel construction was worth it) all the way until ~2014. Finally, the utility strung fiber along the existing POTs poles, and they now had 1Gbps up/down as well as TV service. Being in a valley, the broadcast reception left a lot to be desired, so pretty much everyone had a satellite dish of some sort.
2016 - 2023, I lived inside a national forest in a 100+ year old cabin... not even within the city limits of Chattanooga.
BUT, since I received electricity from the city's Electric Power Board... 20gbs syncronous internets was available for $299/month (all taxes included). Being a mere mortal, I settled for the 0.3gbs (300mb, synchronous, exactly $57.99/mo.) fiber, which allowed me to run a bitcoin node maintaining 100+ <9ms connections.
In the middle of a national forest, "out in the sticks."
Tennessee is a wonderful place, and I'd recommend it. Keep in mind that it's a brutally conservative place, and the typical Californian will likely be uncomfortable outside of Nashville. The people are lovely, just a note.
No, I compared when I moved from a blue state, chose here because it's much more conservative. Texas is almost a swing state at this point. I'm friends with our former lieutenant governor, and I can assure you that it's not all show, either.
> providing perspective as a user of city-supplied fiber internet:
Yup, I live in another city that has a setup like this (Conway, AR of all places). Ours even goes a little further than EPB though.
Electricity, Water, Sewer, Trash, Cable, Phone, Internet (already fiber for recent builds, upgrading all to it currently) all through one company that's owned by the city...it's amazing.
One bill a month, and my bill is ~300/mo for all services including 1Gb/s fiber. Plus the other aspects of it. Tech support is someone sitting downtown, power outages are fixed in record time... just so much is right with the model.
I wish we could get a setup like that going where I live, but sadly I live in the flyover states and this would NEVER play with our voter base, they'd be screaming socialism at the top of their lungs until they turned blue in the face.
At least we got fiber, finally. It isn't state-run but it is a local telecom, the price is reasonable, the service is incredible and the uptime is great. I still get letters occasionally from Spectrum begging me to come back and their PROMOTIONAL PRICE is $10 more per month than my 600 parallel, for slower service. Absolutely brain-dead, I'm not entirely sure the marketing people for cable companies are still living in our reality. Why would you even bother sending these out? Who in their right mind is going to pay more money for worse service to possibly the single greatest and most widely known avatar for corporate avarice, the cable company?
I don't know a single person in my area who still has cable internet if fiber is available to them. Spectrum must be hemorrhaging customers.
Edit: and if it isn't obvious, yeah I'm a cord cutter too, though tbh there was never a cord in my life to cut. I haven't had cable since I moved out of my parents house, and if not for semi-frequent hotel stays for work, I'd not be exposed to television at all. And said minimal exposure lets me verify that I'm missing absolutely nothing by not having the idiot box in my home. I cannot comprehend people who pay up to the range of hundreds of dollars a month to have a firehose of ads and mediocre bullshit pointed at their faces as a recreational activity. Not gonna yuck someones yum, you like what you like, but it ain't for me and I truly cannot understand why anyone wants it at all, certainly not enough to spend that kind of money on it.
Oh yeah, look at that. Damn. I wonder how they pulled that off. Any time anything like that is suggested around here the culture warriors come in red faced and screaming.
>the culture warriors come in red faced and screaming.
I enjoy reminding these typically-babyboomers that Medicaid Part D (subsidized prescriptions) is "about as socialist as it gets" — they get low-priced medications, after largely having paid [relatively] nothing in to this "entitlement." Why have they paid almost nothing in to Part D? Because Part D is relatively new, thus passing the costs of medicine on to younger generations/taxpayers.
I highly recommend, for better understanding your neighbors (of any age), that you read "A Generation of Sociopaths" — chocked full of statistics to help everybody see why we commoners need "socialism," or whatever they want to call it... BECAUSE IT MAKES LIVING BEARABLE, LESS EXPENSIVE, AND GD you cannot make up their lifetimes of hypocrasies.
I'm about 2/3 the way through it actually! It's a good read.
That said, what do they say when you point this stuff out? I've been attending local city meetings for a bit now, and when confronted with this stuff, they don't change their minds, they just double and triple down, get even angrier, and screech even louder about MUH FREEDOM.
I don't even get angry, I'm just like, explaining how society works (pooling of resources so people can get what they need) and they absolutely melt the fuck down! It's crazy!
My best local friend is twice my age (late-30's VS late-70's); former landlord, he married a rich girl from The Mountain, and is himself a blue-collar-raised Veteran [drafted, no less]; he is essentially the only "receptive" elderly person I've met, his wife vitriolic at the idea/concept of providing any of the same benefits as her own generation (The Silent Generation) received.
I will just quote Her, instead of trying to generalize:
"Nobody wants to be 'the last one' at the party — then you have to clean up all the mess!" —80's, female member of local Patriarchy™.
Also her: "What should we last few members of my generation do, then; just DIE?!?" Me: "Well, you could start by not complaining about the minimal taxes you pay on ownership of hundreds of acres of undeveloped land. Or, stop cashing your social security checks, which you clearly do not need." Her: "but I EARNED that."
Narrator: No, she did not. She inherited it from Daddy, over sixty years ago.
>Absolutely brain-dead, I'm not entirely sure the marketing people for cable companies are still living in our reality. Why would you even bother sending these out?
I actually submitted a ticket/request to Spectrum, with essentially the exact same question once. Surprisingly, they called me back and interviewed me about "What it would take to sign up for their service?"
When I described what I get from my local city fiber service, they acted like "price" and "reliability" and "decent customer service" were all impossible requests — as if EPB didn't exist. I'm not sure if feigned, or actual, ignorance was at play.
Regardless, I did not switch over, and they didn't lower their prices. Still get advertising, and am often left wondering "why do they even bother?!"
I do know a few elderly folks, despite also having EPBfiber (local city-supplied), maintain other services as "backup" or "for the email address they've always used from @comcast." No amount of reasoning will resolve this, so the cable internet lines still get maintained along city-provided-fiber routes.
> When I described what I get from my local city fiber service, they acted like "price" and "reliability" and "decent customer service" were all impossible requests — as if EPB didn't exist. I'm not sure if feigned, or actual, ignorance was at play.
I mean, I'm sure the calls are monitored and them openly acknowledging that their service sucks ass and is more expensive than their competitors would have them fired more or less immediately, but I am shocked they were ready to even send one of their reps your way knowing damn well they had no leg to stand on to actually make a sale. Like why even waste the time?
Idk man, these dinosaur companies are a trip and their internal machinations are endlessly fascinating. Corporate bureaucracy (at least when it isn't actively making my life worse) is always an interesting topic to discuss.
I felt SOOO bad for the sweet-sounding (sincere? I'll never actually know) woman interviewing me — like a lamb-to-slaughter, I think the corporate intention was to make me feel bad for "believing such nonsense ISP could actually exist."
My last semi-corporate gig, a performance review indicated "[ProllyInfamous] uses too much profanity." I responded verbally by informing them that "from now on I'll stop 'giving a shit,' and instead will start 'giving a hoot'." The owner's complaining wife was NOT thrilled. [I know "I AM fucking difficult"].
I'm pretty sure Spectrum corporate culture is incentivized by only one thing: SELL!
I canceled my service after several years due to a negative customer service experience, which I explained was the primary reason I was cancelling. Never was I asked about the incident... only more offers and promotions.
I called Spectrum before I canceled to specifically ask if they could get me faster internet without changing my TV package. They said no -- I was on a grandfathered plan from a prior company they had bought, and they would have to recreate the account to do anything. So I got Fios + YouTube TV instead. And when I called to cancel Spectrum, the guys says he wishes I had called before getting Fios.
It's very clear that the only time they care is when your actual money is on the line. Before that, everyone is shackled by whatever chains management puts on them.
This was also shortly after they sent me a new modem and told me to install it or risk losing connectivity within like a week. And then on my next bill is a charge for updating the modem...
I've lived in a place where a nice local company offered fiber. Up to 1gbps, symmetric and very reasonably priced lower tiers too (100-300mbps). They had a monopoly, and people loved to complain about issues that were... mostly their router. Though occasionally real issued happened too, of course.
A cable company moved in with introductory rates that were about what the previous rate was, but for higher dl speeds and much lower ul speeds. It was cable based. They added eyesore boxes all over the neighborhood.
Plenty of people building new houses bought cable, and some switched as well.
I've also lived in a neighborhood with ATT fiber, and have seen the same phenomenon. The cable company is much worse, but people will still choose them sometimes.
Why be competitive, when you'll get customers either way? :shrug
My experience: There are some people who are distrusting or hostile enough toward "socialism"/"politicians"/"the gov'ment" that they'll eagerly pay more for worse service.
Or, just think of how many people keep buying bottles of drinking water.
I think there's also an element of competence. Why choose 300/300 over 500(*)! They don't know the difference between fiber and cable, didn't read the fine print showing the low upload speeds on the "500". :facepalm
Not really. Either one will handle downloading those emails and videos just fine. Rarely will the service at the other end keep up anyway.
OTOH, when icloud (or Google Photos) is uploading full in the background with the crummy ISP provided router, they'll wonder why they aren't getting anywhere near 500 via their cable.
Point. And the muni service has ~no chance of out-glitzing the commercial ISP's slick marketing, celebrity endorsements, "Watch Star Wars for Free!*" offers, & such.
I hate Cox with the passion of a thousand burning suns, but fuck me if there's actually a competitor.
When AT&T first started offering fiber I called them to ask about where was at because I was moving and wanted to factor it into my move. I was told they had an agreement with Cox not to reveal that information. You either happened to be in the right spot or you didn't.
To this day you still cannot call them and get that information.
Is there a legitimate reason why TN blocks other municipalities from implementing similar service? Besides Regulatory capture or other forms of corruption as others suggest?
TN arguments were never really on why it would work besides claiming it would somehow protect TN residents from "mismanaged" municipal broadband. They mostly focus on how they can do it if they want to, no matter the reason.
TN is the HN libertarian paradise. Vast majority of the state's people hate anything the government provides and want to kill it with fire. Especially if their neighbors could benefit from it.
They literally had situations where people were upset that fire service was going to be paid for, then got upset they had to pay for it to get it when their house was burning.
> It's SO GOOD that our state (Tennessee) has actually blocked other municipalities from implementing similar municipal fiber ISPs
It makes me so frustrated too. Calling our state leadership incompetent would actually be a compliment considering how poorly ineffective and self-serving many of them are.
About a decade ago, EPB called a friend of mine. The representative on the phone said, "Hello <insert name>, we noticed that your internet has been slower than what you are paying for. Do you mind if we send someone out to fix it for you?" We were both so surprised that a company would volunteer their services like that.
EPB is all I ever had when I was there, and I still miss them everyday. Absolutely 10/10 company to work with. I worked at a place that had a 10gb connection and the hardware to handle it when it first was released. Nothing like downloading a full movie in mere seconds.
> Calling our state leadership incompetent would actually be a compliment considering how poorly ineffective and self-serving many of them are.
Its not incompetence, just corruption. The large and ever growing bureaucratic apparatus of modern democracies are very vulnerable to this covert form, because responsibilities are unclear and diluted and at the end of the day, you need campaign money to win an election.
EPB's customer support is 24/7/365.25 (i.e. no holidays off). And the people working there, dealing with typically-grateful customer, aren't all burnt-TF-out. The rare call for support is thus pleasant and provides immediate resolution.
If your house-mounted fiber/copper modem ever "burns out," a technician will typically respond within a few hours to replace the device (it is mounted outside, they don't even call first, they just fix it). I'm a retired electrician, and even when you "call in" a panel replacement, an ISP tech usually shows up to "fix" the "problem" (went offline because consumer meter/unit/main panel was being upgraded). It's actually kind of cute =P
That is an incredibly tightly run organization. It might be reactive, dispatching a technician as soon as the ONT goes offline, or the router plugged into the ONT stops pinging, but this is first class customer service.
They'll also run ethernet lines in your house, typically just to the inside router and one computer — FREE with installation (which is also FREE, just pay monthly no-contract bill). I am a retired electrician, and have worked along-side many techs in new-builds... never met an EPB worker who wasn't thrilled to work for their employer.
I also know several of their backend techs, and despite hesitant gripes of "lower government pay," none of them apply for tech/opsec jobs at private companies.
Such an unhelpful answer. You assume parent is one of the ones casting votes for those politicians? You seem to assume that there’s even a politician on the ticket that’s worthy of the vote on this issue.
>You seem to assume that there’s even a politician on the ticket that’s worthy of the vote on this issue.
Tennessee also recently enacted legislation OUTLAWING RANKed-CHOICE VOTING [after Memphis attempted such voting], thus ensuring only two-party electorate; and for the foreseeable future.
This state HATES its constituency, beyond anything more than their "fair" votes.
> This state HATES its constituency, beyond anything more than their "fair" votes.
Before you can say that, I think first you have to show that most of the voters in TN want ranked choice voting. In my experience many people do not want it, because they feel it is unfair and that it amounts to getting multiple votes.
And before anyone argues at me about "that isn't what RCV means", you're preaching to the choir. I am 100% for using some form of RCV instead of FPTP voting. But if it turns out most of the people in TN favor FPTP, then their representatives are simply doing their job on behalf of the people. I don't know if that's the case, but it wouldn't surprise me based on past experience.
That's a fair bit of rhetoric, but we're pretty much a single-party state. New York is about as hard blue as we are hard red, and they despise their citizens. At least here I have more freedom and less taxes.
Yeah, mine is owned by the state instead, dirt cheap. I can do more things with fewer restrictions, I have more freedom. Anyway, I have to put together the gun I 3d printed, take my completely unregistered truck to church, then maybe go hunting without a license, then come home to my house where I pay $400 a year in property taxes. All legal.
1. Farm tags exist, but only in some counties. Destinations can be church, groceries, or farm purposes.
2. False. On your own land (or land owned by family), you just need to follow season and report harvest. Check TWRA site.
3. 2k sqft and 5 acres. I'm in the mid-sticks, but yes, our property taxes are excellent.
1. I would say this interpretation is "quite a stretch" [e.g. FARM tags typically only for >6000lb class, but okay]; in attempting further research it does seem that any vehicle (with four or more wheels), even with specific no intention or minimal roadway use, still MUST be registered within Tennessee (e.g. TDR-sticker program) — of course presuming no farm plate availability (e.g. weight class, county). I am mainly asking because I have a Tacoma (that I've insured for almost two years now) which I cannot register because the probate executive is too disrespectful to fulfill his duties... and live in Tennesse... and really only drive to get groceries and between properties (as a beekeeper, still inelgibile for farm tag/plate).
2) See citation, but basically "you still have to get permission, yes."
3: Awesome, dude, it must be way undervalued =D Alabama is "just a stone's throw away" and the property taxes there make Tenn (and TEX!) seem like highway robbery.
2: "Landowner License Exemption: Persons hunting without a license under a farmland owner exemption must complete and sign a statement attesting where the property is located and how this land qualifies for a landowner exemption before hunting"
I can't speak for Tennessee, but I bet it's like most parts of the country. In my county we have something on the order of 37000 voters. Roughly 6000 voted in the last election. I ran two different campaigns and that meant our win number was just north of 3000. We have a relatively small population under 50 -- and none of them vote. Almost every problem in my county - housing, limited job prospects, etc -- can be traced to the morons that are in office. So, I'm recruiting the heck out of candidates, rebuilding the infrastructure to get them elected, running campaigns, etc. So yeah, the parent poster isn't wrong - you gotta get people out to vote, but you are right to that you've got to be a force for change in the overall system too.
EDIT: Realized I should have noted that while we have 37000 voters, our population is around 62000... so even getting people registered to vote is a major need.
It got SO BAD [the corruption] recently that our city/county (Chatt/Hamilton Co.) elected mayors/DAs that only recently began gray-hairing. From memory, the ages went from averaging 60 to 45. I'm not even 40, and one of our best local judges is my age!
How much of that population of 62000 are people eligible to vote? Each district in the US should have 700k people. Now back in the day it used to be like 250k but efforts to water down the power of the house in favor of the senate have led to 700k. There has got to be a percentage of people who cannot vote due to age/citizen status/etc.
Representative democracy as practiced in the U.S. does not usefully solve for single-issue politics outside of things like abortion / gun-control that also split along a pre-existing partisan divide.
So, sadly, it doesn't matter who you vote for; you need to start earlier in the process.
But Tennessee outlawed this voting method, last legislative cycle. So all they needed to do was redefine "fair elections" and —presto— they've saved their constituency from the nuissance of actual choice... [smell that, Mericuh'... it's the smell of "freedom"].
Score voting or proportional representation are the real fixes. We need to be able to vote for a different candidate without it being equivalent to burning the ballot.
Right now one can case a meaningful vote only for legislators who serve corporations and the wealthy, or legislators who serve corporations and the wealthy even at the expense of democracy and human rights. Of the two, I think it is obvious one should choose the group that isn't supporting the leader of an actual insurrection. But the fact that's a controversial suggestion gives me no hope that we'll ever have a sane voting system.
Honestly (and just a bit more than "pipe dream"), I'm a well-educated American that is actively planning exit to a former Balkan country... because the trajectory "seems better" / "more realistic" than attempting to die in what appears clear to me [at just-shy of forty]: unless I'm willing to shit all over my peers, I will die destitute in what this shithole is becoming.
Perhaps I'll soon become one of the next few hundred annual American expat departures into the Balkans [if they'll have me — 'Mercuh has prettymuch chewn me up and spat me out, the few decades I've been employed here].
In our lifetimes we have seen real improvements in voting systems. Washington has a successful vote by mail system as do other states.
It’s not hard to find examples in living memory of seismic shifts in law, even at a national level. Look at gay rights and weed legalization for example. The status quo would have been unthinkable in the 1990s.
Change comes from the bottom. Municipalities across the nation are implementing ranked choice. Get involved locally and prove your ideas work. The rest of us will take notice.
If by "Calif.'s prop. sys. addresses..." you mean REFERENDUM (legistlation introduced by citizen initiative) then ABSOLUTELY YES this is what many redder states specifically DO NOT ALLOW — allowing citizens to actually self-govern is DANGEROUS, in their opinions.
> About a decade ago, EPB called a friend of mine. The representative on the phone said, "Hello <insert name>, we noticed that your internet has been slower than what you are paying for. Do you mind if we send someone out to fix it for you?" We were both so surprised that a company would volunteer their services like that.
Something very similar to this recently happened to me with Spectrum (cable internet) in NYC, which is not a company known for being nice to customers. The tech who came out explained to me that they were seeing unusual performance profiles on their end and that's why they do this. In my case, it turns out there was a splitter somewhere outside where there shouldn't be instead of the line going directly to some junction box, and that's why they were seeing the odd profile. After he removed it and made the line be direct, our service was indeed better, but I guess whoever installed the splitter stopped getting free internet/cable. (I'm not mad about that.) So while the service call was framed as "improving my service" and it did indeed, it was also an investigation into something suspicious they detected. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a similar situation for your friend.
NYC is pretty good for internet, because there's Fios in many buildings, so the cable companies really try. There's competition here. I've lived here for about 11 years, and outside NYC for 20 years, and as a techy and heavy internet user my whole life, the difference in pricing, performance, and customer service _of the same company_ (actually a conglomerate which acquired other ISPs over the decades) is quite significant. I have an amazing deal on Fios right now, but had Time Warner for 6-ish years across 3 apartments here, and it was way way better than Time Warner in California, or Comcast in Delaware ... where they really just DGAF
Typically this will be some sort of medical [imaging] business, with some errant technician barely utilizing any capacity (long-term basis).
One of my "actually legitimate" uses of EPB Fiber (as an individual end-user) is hosting a bitcoin supernode, which is essentially a non-mining "verifyer of record" which allows other nodes to upload all-day-long. With me throttling locally to 10Mbps (specific to bitcoin blockchain upload traffic, only), we have mutual peace (and I am constantly maintaining >100 connections at pings as low as 3ms (typical non-fiber is >25ms; typical newnode is >80ms). All other fiber connections, worldwide, are single-digit-?ms.
When Google Fiber began its rollouts, I remember the cable providers simply NOT ALLOWING GOOGLE ACCESS TO THEIR UTILITY POLES (they owned <10%, but in vital places this essentially crippled gFiber rollout for the first few years of litigation).
I got google fiber (Austin) in 2015, and when I chose to leave The Violet Crown, fiber internet was an absolute requirement... which is how I found myself in Chattanooga, Tennessee (thank god)!
I would throw insurance into this mix too. At the end of the day, the government is on the hook for rolling out money when there are major disasters, so why not just start there instead of backstop there? How about we pool all our money in one big place (the government) instead of spreading it around in a bunch of smaller pools with different rules (private insurance).
In 1945, the government of Saskatchewan (Canada) recognized this and has been handling province wide insurance since then (Health, Home, Auto, etc). This has meant drastically lower insurance rates, because they aim to operate with no profit, and you don't have insurance companies suing each other for damages because everyone has the same insurance company. It creates lots of jobs, and better service for the residents.
States like Florida, California, North Carolina, and others have had to start their own insurance companies to handle residents who cannot get fire/flood/hurricane/etc insurance from a private insurance company because the private insurance companies have decided the risk is too high.
It seems silly to maintain this broken patchwork system when there are several examples of governments creating entities to handle these ubiquitous needs in a better way.
I just found out that British Columbia also made their Auto insurance public. Basically, it's part of the DMV there... which makes a lot of sense since they obviously issue the driver and vehicle licenses. A lot of the same information is needed for all of these services, which makes each of these more efficient (and cheaper). It also allows them to ensure that all registered vehicles actually have insurance with good coverage for everyone involved.
Another poster said that infra in general is good in TN. My municipality has significantly higher than average tax burdens, but the road, water, waste management and schools are all ignored and in terrible condition. Collective ownership requires the collective to hold its leadership accountable for misbehavior.
Funny enough, if the state would offer internet service in my eastern european country, it will be expensive and shitty, while the private fiber offers are dirt cheap and compete with each other on price.
I didn't think the Romanian competition authorities can do a better job than the US ones.
[And they probably can't, see high natural gas and electricity prices.]
> blocked other municipalities from implementing similar municipal fiber ISPs — and prevents EPB from offering fiber to customers outside of their electricity-supplying jurisdiction.
Our housing market typically "lags" national markets by a few years (up & downs); but the recent whiplash effect has made the median homesale about 2x what it was in 2020. Also, inventory is lagging massively, and NIMBYism has prevented recent citywide attempts at allowing ADU's / increased density (e.g. see St.Elmo Historic District, which even though part of Chattanooga, exempts itself from most density rules by "being historic" — BS).
Also, there is A LOT OF MONEY here, concentrated in such mountaintop locations as Lookout Mountain [cited in MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech, specifically as an example of wealth/cronyism].
Similar to your last comment, here in the Boulder region, you will find a lot of techies actually living in Longmont, about 15 minutes north of Boulder, because they have a really good municipal fiber ISP.
Having a techy wife has made internet access speed our #1 qualifier for any moves over the past decade. Great neighborhood and price but it only has DSL or slow cable internet? Automatic veto.
I can only hope this becomes more and more obvious to politicians that wonder why their constituency is stagnating. Even my less techy parents recently shared that they voted yes on their city's project to build a local fiber ISP.
Canadian here. I also live in a city with municipal fibre. No fancy additional services like some others here, but I pay around US$20 per month for Gigabit symmetric internet. The major national ISPs start at around 4x higher.
ISPs largely don't compete. They're legalized regional monopolies. There was a single cable TV provider, and they became the single cable internet provider, and so they don't need to reduce prices or improve the service offering, at least not until an alternative competitor emerges.
I imagine there's a handful of solid reasons for this.
- Greenfield tech is simpler, and more stable. There's only 1 or 2 CPEs, a handful of distribution gear types, and a much smaller network. As a result, the support cost is much cheaper, more stable, and less prone to failure from equipment damage. These networks aren't traversing over 40, 50, 60 year old coax or 80, 90, 100 year old copper, it's fiber all the way down.
- Profit as a motive for the ISP is purely to pay for the costs of the service. Wages, equipment, investment in the service. Without a need to spread dividends to investors, and those investors leading a board to shift the motive of the service provider to generate revenue as a first priority, pricing priorities can be much more simple. This also mitigates choices to stay on existing infrastructure to squeeze more money purely for the purposes of paying more dividends. Those choices will happen, but they should be to buy time for the next upgrade that is planned.
- Manufactured monopolies by virtue of connection agreements (Cable provider X is allowed to have a monopoly as a service provider for a municipality so long as they provide service to N% users) have turned out to be a poor incentive to provide up to date, quality, affordable service as the service matures. New fiber providers, whether muni or independent, seem to be taking a much more sustainable approach to buildout and growth. As a result, because they are capturing the market by virtue of a better product, at a better price, whenever these ISPs onboard a new neighborhood, they have to do what they do well to retain the subscriber base, because the alternatives may not be as good, but they're not awful.
Some of these solutions may not work as well in "big government" cities - they layer on so many non-core requirements the underlying product can become somewhat expensive or challenging. I had to deal with government tech support on something 10 years ago and you'd NEVER want to experience something like that - an entire office (being paid for by the government) would be offline for one silly reason or another. It was always like for x, y and z reasons only Q can do that needful thing, and Q is on a protected leave of some sort.... and cost and disruption was irrelevant. Then put in compliance with McBride Principles for Northern Ireland, required virgin redwood purchasing evaluations, sweatshop evaluations, travel restrictions, purchasing restrictions, first source hiring, purchasing procedures that were both highly complex and product quality / price only a small part of eval and extend this list 20x - all worthy things of course, but tough to get stuff done at times.
There's basically this whole category of things that function best as a monopoly. For insurance, you want the pool to be as large as possible to amortize risk over. For distribution networks, you don't want two networks covering the same area.
When that happens, the most important thing is ensuring the monopoly is run well, for which strict regulations are a must. You must define a mission independent of profit seeking, requirements that must be met, and be able to hold people responsible if they fail to meet the requirements or succumb to excessive greed.
After that it's largely irrelevant whether the entity providing the monopoly service is private or public.
My understanding (i.e., personal experience) is that many areas only have one or two providers (same with health insurance). Without competition, it's not a true free market as the companies have no incentive to improve since everyone just has to deal with their subpar product or forego it all together.
Curiously, the city I'm currently living in will soon be rolling out it's own fiber and the existing providers are all scrambling to improve their infrastructure and "bribe" existing customers with free gadgets (e.g., Google home speakers, etc.) because they know that their current offerings are not competitive and that they would go out of business overnight if they stood by and did nothing in the meantime.
>Without competition, it's not a true free market as the companies have no incentive to improve since everyone just has to deal with their subpar product or forego it all together.
South Park captures this best by having their cableguys rub their nipples when complaining cartoon characters ask for better service/treatment. "What're'you gonna'do 'bout'it?!" the South Park Cable Guys mockingly ask.
Nothing. You'll DO NOTHING and be happy. Perhaps the beatings will end when morale improves? [avg joe gets community fiber for $60/month] "Is this socialism? Is socialism wrong?"
Meanwhile in Tacoma,WA our mismanaged muni ISP turned over managment to a local private company, which was then bought by global company Palisade Infrastructure.
nah I just sling large files around now and again. If they did 5 I'd probably do that instead, frankly; I can barely route 10 (effective speed of about 8, typically).
Agreed. It's stunning how quickly I went from paying $100+ to Comcast for 250Mbps down / 20 up (or whatever), to $80 to AT&T for symmetric gigabit, to $50 to Sonic for symmetric 10gig. And presumably they're still making money!
Comcast has insane economies of scale, the rip they must make every single month on customers who are stuck with them is just sick.
I live in SLC. There are basically 3 categories of internet here:
1. Big Telecom: This includes Comcast, CenturyLink, etc. You are basically guaranteed to overpay, but service is usually pretty reliable. Last year I was paying >$100 for 1gbit down & 40mbit up on Comcast's coax; while every one of my neighbors had UTOPIA FTTH (the house I was renting was not connected to the network).
2. UTOPIA or Google Fiber: Yes, Google Fiber is another big telecom, but it's pricing ($70 for 1gbit symmetric FTTH) and reliability are practically identical to UTOPIA (the municipal network).
3. Residential lock-in: This is what I'm stuck with right now. I pay $100/mo. for ~120mbit with noticeably bad peering. The price is literally written into my apartment's lease, with no mention of speed or reliability.
I miss having actually good internet, but what I have is still much better than what I have lived with before.
More like they sell you an oversized spoon, claim it can scoop 1 cup per minute, in reality it’s 1/4 cup per minute, and if you actually refill your bowl with said spoon, they say you’re using too much cereal.
But if you buy a 16oz box for $3 you actually get a pound of cereal for $3.
Compare:
"Up to 16oz for $3*"
There's a $0.75 fee to pay for the new box art, a $1 fee for renting the milk jug, you actually get 14oz of cereal if you eat during peak hours, and if you eat a second bowl on the same day they charge you for excessive usage.
Please do something about Comcast. They've ripped me off for over 20 years and I'm so sick of it. You sign up for a promotional offer then they just slowly raise prices and boil the frog. You have to cancel and go through all these negotiation tactics just to not get ripped off. Same thing with all their competitors too. And the speeds they offer are not the same speeds you actually get. You usually get 1/10th or 1/20th of the actual speed offered on average. It's a complete scam. Then you go abroad and see how every their developed country has better quality service for a fraction of the price.
Over the last 8 years my Spectrum bill has almost doubled. I don't have any complaints about uptime or performance, speed has gone from 100 to 160mbs (kind of an odd number) during that time.
I realize inflation, wages, etc. But how much of this increase is just because? I'm glad I'm not paying more, but who's preventing that?
My other options are some real low-end local wireless providers, very slow DSL (7-12mbs with 1.5mb or less upload). We are just now starting to see Tmobile and Verizon offer home wireless. I've tried both and they are only around half the speed of my cable connection but they are a little cheaper (25% or so)
I'm using StarLink now and it's pretty great. I was skeptical of satellite working very well, but zoom meetings and all work just fine. It's about as plug and play as internet can get. Speed doesn't match my 1gb at home, but it's only noticeable when downloading something large.
I have done zero research, but my assumption is that ping/lag is far from where gamers would want it. Back in the day I would have said that wouldn't really tip the scales but it's more uncertain now...
Starlink satellites are a couple orders of magnitude closer to Earth than legacy satellite internet. If you are in a remote area Starlink could actually be faster than ground connections because it’s one hop to the base station which is likely to be near your desired servers.
I have Spectrum and AT&T because I work from home and need redundancy. Spectrum recently pushed my $100-ish a month package up to 2.5 Gbps for the same price I signed up with at 1 Gbps.
What's interesting is the arm-twisting I got when I signed up and the rep tried multiple times to persuade me to cancel AT&T's service and how hard they pushed me to sign up for wireless as well.
Basically - I assume the increase to 2.5 Gbps is because gasp there's moderate competition in my neighborhood. If AT&T wasn't here, I doubt I'd have seen an increase without a bump in monthly cost.
> I realize inflation, wages, etc. But how much of this increase is just because?
I can assure you with certainty that it’s all in the because category. Their approach in my experience is raise prices until the customer complains.
I had to quit spectrum due to moving out of the country (10Gbps symmetric now for €25/mo thank you very much) and they still offered a reduced price “in case any roommates are staying behind”. I was paying ~$100 and the “discount” was significant but I don’t recall the exact number.
I was too lazy to basically fight for a better price, but if you threaten to quit (or better quit it for a while) they’ll 100% lower your bill. I’m sure there are more sophisticated “negotiation” tactics a search away.
I live out of town in southern Thailand, I have 500/500mbps internet that I pay 600THB/month for (around $17USD). Using the same equipment, same fibre and more expensive transit than a US ISP would pay (which could easily do entirely settlement free peering with every network that matters). Moreover I paid nothing for the install despite them needing to bring fibre down my alley off the main road.
US ISPs are just price gouging. The fat salaries and bonuses their executives have received over the last 2 decades and the dividends they pay their shareholders all support this conclusion.
There is intense competition here between a few major players all with their own networks. i.e real market forces that keep prices down, products continually improving and customer satisfaction high.
The idea that there are "service areas" with only a single provider should tell you everything you need about collusion to maintain regional monopolies.
US telecoms certainly use sketchy tactics to push price increases on their monthly billed customers over time, but it's hard to say they are price gouging. Most are publicly traded and their operating and net margins can be found with a quick Google search. Spectrum for instance sits at 9.24% net margins currently. Wipe that out completely and your bill doesn't get much cheaper.
The Thai telcos are publicly traded also. I took a look at AIS (probably the biggest here) and despite much lower prices their books are in a much better shape. Namely Profit Margin 15.81% and Operating Margin (ttm) 23.38%, they have proportionally less debt on their books and their business just looks a lot leaner and more efficient so despite charging ~1/10th what US ISPs do they have a better return on invested capital.
So maybe US ISPs are just very poorly run businesses.
Starlink available? It's not cheap, but should offer at least faster download speeds most of the time and better than 1Mbps upload from what I've read.
Starlink is cheap - where I am at least - and it just got cheaper. I get 300/40 with it for €40/mo., which they just reduced from €65. I mean, dog slow fixed line fibre in the nearby village is €50 a month. If ISPs aren’t careful starlink is going to eat their breakfast. It’s also faster and cheaper than LTE.
Cell-based internet in the US often doesn't work well in practice -- cell coverage tends to be incredibly spotty away from major roads. In populated areas, enough people are irrationally frightened of cell radiation to NIMBY additional cell towers required for coverage.
why on earth would this comment be downvoted? This is absolutely true in some places, particularly in smaller states. To the downvoters, please go try using cell-based internet in nearly any big city in Wyoming and let us know how that goes. Idaho has a much higher population and even much of that is way too unreliable for home internet.
It’s irrelevant, and wrong. 20 minutes outside a major US city wouldn’t be in Wyoming or Idaho; it would be in an area serviced by one of the newer 5G Internet offerings that gets 100-300 down. Or at least about to be.
Complaining about rain and cloudy days doesn’t matter when leaving a connection capped at 20/1. In practice it does work well from the perspective of someone leaving a bad wired service.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. Cellular home internet isn't the same thing as your cell phone; you can be 20 miles from the nearest tower without it being an issue. Def not 300 down at that distance but when all you need to beat is 20 it's no issue.
I didn't downvote the comment. Just wanting to address this idea:
> in nearly any big city in Wyoming
Every "big city" in Wyoming is smaller and way more remote than most "small cities" in the rest of the country. It is not really a good representation of the rest of the country. There are only four cities which break 30,000 people. There's 40 in Texas with over 100,000. Being 20 minutes out from a city of < 30,000 people is pretty radically different from being 20 minutes out from a city of > 1M people.
There's also a question of geography when it comes to places like Montana and Idaho compared to the rest of the country. I don't know if you looked out a window but the geography of Idaho and Montana looks pretty different than the geography of Kansas, Michigan, Florida, N+S Carolina, Illinois, Ohio, etc. Its way more difficult to operate cell infrastructure in such a place, and then on top of that each valley only has a few customers to try and cover the cost.
All in all, the experience of cellular infrastructure in Montana and Idaho are massively different from the majority of the rest of US consumers.
I've got family in the suburbs 20 minutes out from the deep urban areas of a large city. Their main home internet is T-Mobile 5G. It has stable and low enough latency for them to work remote a remote job with videocalling, they play regular online games and they even do Playstation cloud gaming on it without issue. I've seen it being demoed at county fairgrounds far outside the big cities where they offered free wifi, I was able to get pretty stable low latencies (~25ms) at several hundred megabits of throughput with a dozen+ people using it at the same time.
It might not work in every market. There's a lot of variables in place, even within a specific geographic area. But it is something viable for a large chunk of US households.
> I don't know if you looked out a window but the geography of Idaho and Montana looks pretty different than the geography of Kansas, Michigan, Florida, N+S Carolina, Illinois, Ohio, etc.
I can't downvote you since you replied to my comment, but that's a pretty patronizing thing to say, (it's also classic big city elitism). You know absolutely nothing about me, so assuming that I'm some backward uber dumbass who hasn't even "looked out a window" let alone travelled anywhere else is not a safe assumption, and that's before we even get into my experience designing/deploying wireless comm systems.
Assumptions like that just make you sound like an asshole.
You replied to a comment stating "Cell-based internet in the US often doesn't work well in practice", and your proof of why it often doesn't work was Wyoming and Idaho. Most of the country (population-weighted, at least) in practice does not look like Wyoming and Idaho. You might as well argue cattle ranching is entirely impractical, just look at downtown San Francisco and NYC. How are herds of cattle supposed to graze there?
Also my comment completely acknowledged I don't know you. It literally states "I don't know if you've looked out a window", so its entirely open to the idea that you have indeed. But then it really makes one wonder why you think Wyoming and Idaho are good examples as to why most US consumers wouldn't be able to get cellular home internet despite knowing the massive geographic and population differences and the challenges those would pose.
> There's also a question of geography when it comes to places like Montana and Idaho compared to the rest of the country.
Duh. OP wasn't talking about cell service out in the boonies, they were talking about cell service in "big cities." Geography is not a concern in the case of cities in these states. The Bay area's geography is much more extreme than 99% of cities in WY/MT/ID. I've spent time in those states in the last few years (vanlife) and the cell service in cities is atrociously oversubscribed on Verizon. I have all three carriers, and surprisingly T-Mobile has great service (in the cities out there at least.)
> OP wasn't talking about cell service out in the boonies
Every location in Wyoming is what a lot of the country would consider "the boonies". That's kind of my point. Its a massive outlier compared to where the majority of the US population lives and not really a good place to point to when saying "see, cellular internet often doesn't work, it doesn't work in Wyoming!"
Cellular internet doesn't really work at my house 50 miles outside of Boston either. And, in fact, it goes out pretty predictably when I take the train in (presumably because the high-end closer-in suburbs where it goes out don't like cell towers).
50 miles outside of Boston is an hour away, not 20 minutes. 50 miles outside of Boston it can get really rural.
I'd also point out modern cellular home internet can give a pretty different experience than what you get on your cell phone. Antenna design and placement can be a lot better. You can place the antenna in a place where you're more likely to get good reception instead of deep inside your house. The frequencies and channels used can sometimes be pretty different. You're less power limited than your phone. In the apartment where my family lives their phone cell service isn't very great but as mentioned they get low latency several hundred megabit service through their router near a window.
Fair enough. I'm probably more exurban than rural although I'm in the middle of land with a lot more forest than houses. Cellular around Concord/Lincoln on the train is pretty awful though, but it's perhaps not universal.
Also fair that hot spots can be better than phones. My brother had one up in Maine but it went to Starlink and, more recently, to fiber.
I have no idea where you got that information from. I've been using T-Mobile for about half a year now, and it's leaps and bounds better than the ATT DSL I was using beforehand. I went from 30 Mbps down to 200, and even during high usage periods it's well over 100. Their customer service is also far less of a pain in the ass than ATT or Charter.
Germans have a ultra-wealthy upper class which own everything and skew net wealth figures massively. The bottom 50% of German residents by net wealth have nearly nothing compared to those in a similar situation in neighboring EU countries.
And this is several times more expensive than FTTH in the neighboring countries.
(Sure, maybe not as fast FTTH, but it doesn't matter much when everyone else is still lagging way behind, so over, say, 10 Mo/s you quickly get into diminishing returns.)
I signed up for AT&T internet. They told me I could get a phone line at no charge. (Why not, I thought). Several months later of daily spam calls and junk to the point where I just left my phone unplugged, they added a charge for the phone line. I called to cancel the phone line and just go internet only. I was then informed that they no longer offered internet-only plans. (Chris Farley pissed off face)
I called them with great joy a few months later letting them know I was moving and to cancel my service. Never going back to them.
The thing that annoys me about the FCC, besides that they are generally impotent here or at least unwilling to actually do their job, is that the focus is always on speed as structured by maximum throughput for the link. I pay for a gigabit cable connection, not because I need gigabit, but because of how tiered connections and QoS are implemented by cable / broadband ISPs, and this is the only way I can reasonably guarantee that my traffic will experience low latency during business hours for things like video conferencing.
Also, from a service quality perspective, broadband ISPs have horrible problems with small amounts of persistent packet loss, largely due to physical issues because the actual physical infrastructure is old/shit and they do nothing to maintain/improve it.
Internet performance and digital experience is about a lot more than just how much maximum throughput you get for X dollars, it's about service reliability, QoS, transit quality, and and loss, latency, jitter, all of which have heavy impacts on specifically video and voice calls which are common for those of us working from home.
Technically speaking, wired connections use physical RF bandwidth on the wire, rated in MHz/GHz to specify channel width, and bond these channels together (usually some variation of QAM) to provide you the ability to serve a particular amount of throughput (rated in bits per second/Mbps).
Yep, and they don't see a difference between a company that provides a simple straightforward connection, and one that does all sorts of ridiculous traffic shaping, throttling, multiple levels of NAT, and things that make it hard to run your own router.
> because of how tiered connections and QoS are implemented by cable / broadband ISPs
It took months and multiple visits before one of techs unintentionally gave me the hint that with node congestion, Comcast will throttle all connected subscribers to the same X% of their rated speed. Annoying that the only way to reliably get even a 500kbps uplink out of them during peak videoconferencing hours was to pay for an 800/20mbps connection, but even more annoying that it took months of them blaming my cables and equipment.
I have Comcast, and this is exactly why I have the highest tier of service, so I can guarantee that most of the time my video calls are fine, since I am permanent WFH.
Good, their pricing is often so skewed and totally reflective of their monopolistic capture of certain regions. They act like monopoly but aren't regulated as one.
FWIW, I have Verizon FiOS in NYC at a reasonable price. The city of NY and the state do their best to keep Verizon and Spectrum at arms length.
By way of contrast, my parents live in the mid-west and were plagued between a choice of slow AT&T DSL or expensive but slightly faster Comcast/Spectrum/Consolidated (A terrible overbuild provider) cable internet.
The game changed entirely when Google Fiber started rolling out. First in the inner city, then to inner suburbs and just recently to the outer suburbs after spending the better part of decade fighting city councils that obviously preferred Spectrum and AT&T.
Since then
1. Prices have stabilized and declined somewhat from the incumbent carriers.
2. Spectrum did an in-place upgrade and now 500 Mbps down is standard for a reasonable price. AT&T turned around and built it's own GPON network ahead of Google fiber in areas where Google didn't have service.
City councils and planning commissions are the worst. They are so captured by people in the real estate business that you can't do anything without consulting them (agents, brokers, developers, investors, even flippers, mortgage people, and lawyers). Non-real estate people that run and make it will find that 95% of the donors are real-estate industry people, so good luck if you have positions that they don't find agreeable. Oh and the same people own the state politicians too, so even if you do manage to get the city council, state law is going to tie your hands pretty dramatically.
Ah, regulatory capture. An American pastime as old as apple pie, baseball, and tax loopholes.
Telecoms took ENORMOUS sums of money to upgrade their systems and did nothing. Now they want to pass the upgrade costs onto consumers.
These corporate shitlords have enormous legal slush funds to muddy the waters and throw dirt in the air any time reasonable accountability comes their way.
There is no equal power protecting the consumers interest. Claiming that its "inappropriate" to investigate costs is lazy class warfare.
> Telecoms took ENORMOUS sums of money to upgrade their systems and did nothing. Now they want to pass the upgrade costs onto consumers.
Well that's not fair--they did do something: They handed all that taxpayer money right over to wealthy shareholders. The only thing corporations can be relied upon to do consistently and competently.
I'm fortunate to live in an area of downtown Phoenix served by CenturyLink FTTH. They offer symmetric 1 Gbps for $65, priced for life (I think it's $70 now for newcomers), with no caps, and that's inclusive of all fees and taxes.
Symmetric gigabit feels like a dream.
Cox, on the other hand, lacking literally any survival instinct or competitive sense, charged me $110 per month before taxes, and for only 1.25TB of data. For unlimited data, it was another $50. So I'm in to them for $160+ per month, for vastly inferior service. I hope CL stays healthy enough to keep our deal going because it's the best internet I've ever had. (CL's old DSL product, in contrast, sucks immensely.)
I used to be so pleased with CenturyLink myself. symmetric 1Gbps as well, and it was dreamy.
Then I began to exhibit packet loss. For gaming/discord, it's a death knell. I isolated the source of packet loss to be within the CenturyLink network, basically between me and the first traceroute hop. (Also retroactively verified by switching ISPs)
CenturyLink as an _offering_ is great, but their company operations and customer support is... kafkaesque and absurd. They are beyond incompetent and seem to have neither the capacity nor desire to fix any real problems.
When talking with some of the technicians and support people, the insight into their world was sad and disappointing. What a ramshackle company.
I really hope nothing ever goes wrong in your network segment :)
You are right, CenturyLink support is apparently non-existent these days. My aunt recently had issues for weeks before finally giving up trying to get any real engineering support, and eventually it resolved itself, presuming some monkey noticed a rampant trend for problems in the area. Cox wasn't much better at times unless you knew exactly how to deal with support (I for a time ran part of their engineering and do), but it's still volumes better than the worse than nothing you get with CenturyLink now.
That said I've been lucky, in the 6-7 years I've been on CL moving from Cox I've had 0 problems with my DSL, where I'll say there's something to be said for the old legacy 2-wire stuff. At least every 3-4 years, I'd have to have cox out to fix my cable terminations for suck-out (center conductor eventually contracts itself to lose contact with hot/cold over time) with the extreme heat in Phoenix, so it's been almost a nice change.
Living in Phoenix too, I moved off Cox when they instituted their bandwidth caps to CenturyLink, but I can only get DSL here in Peoria, and will likely never get their fiber with the lazy US telco mentality. Still, even with "only" 140mbps down and I think like 3mbps up, I can live with it vs. Cox sending me hate emails and a bill for bandwidth overages every month.
One of my best friends is an engineer at Cox in town, and still quip at him about their silly bandwidth caps. He says it's a topic at every all-hands meeting that even employees are tired of hearing from their friends and family that they hate their bandwidth caps. Cox was one of the last Cable MSO's to actually implement bandwidth caps, but eventually they realized every other scumbag Cable ISP in the country was doing so, that they were leaving too much money on the table. Everyone else is doing it, so why not them too.
It's cool providers have gig speeds now, but if you use all you bandwidth for a month in 3 days to start getting overage charges every month, it isn't cool for long. It took Google Fiber threatening Cox and CL in Phoenix to actually get them to start rolling out FTTH years ago, so at least Google was good for something.
Does anyone know if there is a quality map for where AT&T, Google Fiber, or Quantum Fiber services are available for the Phoenix Metro area? I’m trying desperately to get off of Cox, and am assessing my options on where to relocate to in the Valley (I currently live in East Mesa) but it seems like a real pain in the butt finding actual service easily. Any recommendations aside from searching one mailing address at a time?
Funny how this topic blew up in the late 00s and early 10s. Google Fiber popped up looking to push the issue
It’s sad how we’re perpetually fighting the same battles with the professional managerial class who tacitly understands their only job is block progress, thus they are miserable from it and to work with
What I want the FCC to look into is the practice of what I call "price bumping." Where they increase speeds and features of a plan "for free" and then raise your bill accordingly a few months later and hope you're too busy to notice.
This happened to me. In the beginning, I was paying $35 for 25/5 through Comcast. It was fine, did everything I needed. But then, roughly once a year, for a few years in a row, they would announce a speed increase on my plan, complete with a flyer in the mail congratulating me on being a loyal customer while patting themselves for being such a fine, generous company.
A few months later, like clockwork, a plain black-and-white letter would be attached to my bill informing me of a change in the price of my plan due to unspecified business and economic factors.
I am literally on their lowest plan, and still pay over $60 a month. That's more than what I pay for 3 cell phones.
It's fucking sleazy and I would gladly switch ISPs yesterday if they didn't have a government-granted monopoly in my area. (And no, Starlink and T-mobile are not options for reasons I don't have time to get into right now.)
Starlink is roughly double what you're paying right now anyway. I consider it a "last resort" ISP that should only be used if you "need" it (don't have adequate land line options available to you.) It's not really a first choice provider, and it doesn't intend to be.
I have a couple hundred acres of farm land with hills between it and the closest cell towers. There's no internet or cell service, so I got StarLink. It was easy to set up and works great, but I don't go out there enough to justify the $110/120 per month. So after a while, I cancelled it.
CenturyLink advertises that they don’t raise the rate and they STILL do it. Mine went from $50->$60 with no speed change. I don’t have the energy anymore to fight it. My alternative is xfinity which is far worse.
It astounds me we have some blatant examples of a broken system (ie nationalISPs) juxtaposed with many working examples (ie municipal broadband) and yet the FCC and the government just scratch their heads in confusion. More accurately, national ISPs have used their profits to erect legislative and regulatory barriers to competition such as states banning municipal broadband.
All of this is textbook capitalism: Enclosures and wealth extraction from workers to capital owners. Municipal broadband is a textbook example of the workers (ie the town residents) owning the means of production being better for everyone except the capital owners.
Yet as soon as you mention "capitalism" in a negative light people just shut down and reject any argument to defend a system they don't really understand that is exploiting them for profit.
In the very least, ISPs should be regulated as utilities. But that's still a bandaid solution.
I did work for a ISP which bought another one, in an international context.
They had to dismantle obviously too expensive transits... which where actually used to move money from one country to another (and probably do some kind of tax evasion).
My biggest issue is that there’s not really competition for internet providers in many locations. I’ve only had Comcast not because they are good, but because they are the only provider that has the speeds I want. For example, in one area Comcast’s speed was 100/25, but AT&T had 25/10 for the same price. It felt like they were just there to say there were options, when really they colluded to split the city up.
I will provide you a brief glimpse into the future. The FCC investigates and opens up the issue to comments. Despite pleas from an overwhelming majority of the population, those comments are ignored or deleted and the FCC resolves the issue as "reviewed." At the very most they hold a closed door vote where 2 of 3 or 3 of 5 of the panel side with the telecoms where they have cushy jobs lined up.
The FCC doesn't just tolerate these cable Crooks, they enable their existance.
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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