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US cable giants calls on FCC to block cities' expansion of high-speed internet

460 points by primelens 12y ago

acjohnson55 12y ago
My opinion of those companies is so poor at this point that my knee jerk reaction is to assume that whatever they want is the opposite of what's good for me.
- matthuggins 12y ago
  I mean, you're not wrong.
- sitkack 12y ago
  At least they are consistent.
  - atmosx 12y ago
    word
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
pessimizer 12y ago
I wish there had been a lot more stimulus, and a lot more projects like Chattanooga.
sehrope 12y ago
> Chattanooga has the largest high-speed internet service in the US, offering customers access to speeds of 1 gigabit per second – about 50 times faster than the US average. The service, provided by municipally owned EPB, has sparked a tech boom in the city and attracted international attention. EPB is now petitioning the FCC to expand its territory. Comcast and others have previously sued unsuccessfully to stop EPB’s fibre optic roll out. I did a quick search to see pricing for EPB's internet service and wow is it cheap[1]. The two plans listed on the site are 100 Mbps for $57.99/mo or 1Gpbs $69.99/mo. Oh and both plans are symmetric so you get that for upload as well. I don't know of any city where the local cable co offers anything like that, let alone at those price points. No wonder they want to block this through legislation; competing in the market would not be pleasant for them. [1]: https://epbfi.com/internet/ https://epbfi.com/internet/
- dobbsbob 12y ago
  No monthly data caps either according to these reviews http://www.dslreports.com/comments/3492 http://www.dslreports.com/comments/3492
  - beloch 12y ago
    Bandwidth is insanely cheap compared to last-mile infrastructure. Bandwidth caps are basically just a way to soak the customers who use the service more and are, hence, willing to pay more.
    - kalleboo 12y ago
      Well if you have a lot of contention in your last-mile infrastructure bandwidth caps make sense. This applies to shared infrastructure like a coax cable network, or the connection up to a DSLAM. Fiber nicely solves that though.
      - p1mrx 12y ago
        Why would the connection up to a DSLAM have more contention than a fiber-to-the-home network? Shouldn't most DSLAMs be using fiber already?
        dunmalg 12y ago
        Yeah, there's no contention AT ALL up to the DSLAM. DSLAM is DSL Access Module. Every DSL customer has their own dedicated copper pair from the DSLAM to their house--- it's their phone line. There may be congestion between the Central Office where the DSLAM lives and the rest of the internet, but in practice that rarely happens. The big limit on DSL is getting reasonable speeds a mile down the line over ancient copper pairs that were never intended for the purpose. Don't people remember the old Cable vs. DSL commercials, where the DSL companies were showing cable customers furiously calling each other bandwidth hogs and telling them "log off!"
        12y ago
rayiner 12y ago
This is a really good example of how lobbying works. On one hand, these telecom companies have a clear interest in not having to "compete" with cheap, publicly funded broadband. On the other hand, their position just happens to tie in with a broader political debate: states and municipalities are on the verge of bankruptcy, and municipal infrastructure projects are a disaster outside a few well-managed cities like NYC. The telcos aren't incorrect in saying that these sorts of projects often turn into boondoggles, or disproportionately benefit parts of the population,[1] or cost too much and end up underfunded and poorly maintained in the future. With these lobbying measures, the telcos can tie something that benefits them to a position (municipal infrastructure projects), that many people oppose for entirely different reasons. [1] It is worth noting that only 1/3 of adults 65+ subscribe to broadband at home, and that many poor people access the internet through libraries or cellular phones instead of home computers.
- transfire 12y ago
  By that logic we all better stop using tap water, roads, libraries, schools and parks before we get hit upside the head with that "boondoggle".
- unethical_ban 12y ago
  >and municipal infrastructure projects are a disaster outside a few well-managed cities like NY citation needed... I know government has a reputation for being wasteful and corrupt, but weird for you to defend NYC.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    The American Society of Civil Engineers says that U.S. infrastructure is underfunded to the tune of $3.6 trillion: http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org. People like to compare municipal broadband to municipal water, but the ASCE gives our water and wastewater systems a grade of 'D'. I defend NYC because as corrupt as it may be, over the last 20-30 years it has a pretty good record of getting municipal projects done. It has functioning subway, regional rail, etc. It has invested in protecting its water sources, etc. Most American cities have not done as well as NYC in that regard. E.g. Atlanta's ancient sewer system dumps untreated waste into the city's main river after every heavy rain, and the city's water supply is entirely at the mercy of the water levels in Lake Lanier. After a drought a few years ago, the city came this close to running out of water. This is not voodoo economics. In the absence of profit motive, you need social consensus and a forward-looking bureaucracy to ensure that public infrastructure receives adequate funding. Most American cities do not have either.
hoilogoi 12y ago
Counterpoint: try googling "Volstate EPB". I'm no expert, but I think it would be a shame if small struggling ISPs get the short end of the stick. It's hard for me to make a judgement on this specifically.
- radicalbyte 12y ago
  OT: this post is the 4th result in Google. Comment on HN indexed within 35 minutes. Crazy. It kind of sucks for companies like that, but competition is good. In an ideal situation you'd have "the people" own the pipes which they then rent at cost to commercial providers. In practice this would usually be via local government, but I'd prefer it via some kind of mutual society (where residents own a share, is open only to residents, and which is sold along with the property). The UK has a variation of this model, called "local loop unbundling" (http://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/home/products/llu/llu.do http://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/home/products/llu/llu.do). The infra was originally built by the state telco BT, which was then privatized. To create competition they introduced LLU, which forced BT to allow competition access to the pipes.
  - sitkack 12y ago
    The last mile should be open to the people and supported as infrastructure. I should be able to send packets across town for zero cost.
    - kordless 12y ago
      You should also be able to host your own services. These two things are more closely related than a lot of people realize.
      - sgt101 12y ago
        Two points - someone has to maintain the network; holes need digging, kit needs buying, upgrading and monitoring. This cannot be free. It could be a government utility, but paying for it would then come out of taxes and the choice would be between paying for that, aircraft carriers or incubators. Second, networks are designed to deliver different things at different price points. Running a web service at the end of a residential connection does not make economic sense compared to running it in a datacentre connected directly to a peering point on 40gig-e.
jgalt212 12y ago
I remember the day in US when the consumer was king, and its interests were second to all others (govt, big business, etc). Sadly that day has passed. Without getting too political, the root cause is unrestrained campaign giving.
- pyre 12y ago
  > its interests were second to all others I think that you mean: > all other interests were second to it If 'it' was second to something else, that would mean that said something else was first.
- oldmanjay 12y ago
  When was this glorious time? Certainly doesn't seem like that would have been anytime since the 19th century, at the latest.
  - tim333 12y ago
    I remember 30 years ago in the UK being envious of US telecom regulation. The US had free local calls - unheard of in the UK then and you could connect modems to the phone line. In the UK that was banned as the lines were all owned by the government monopoly and could not be touched so you had to put an acoustic coupler on the phone handset, believe it or not. Now the UK surprisingly seems to have better telecom regs than the US.
    - jessaustin 12y ago
      Are you sure the handset-suction-cup thing wasn't just the average technology 30 years ago? Because while I was too young to know about that, I distinctly remember seeing it in use here in USA at that time.
- ulfw 12y ago
  How many decades ago was that?
- baddox 12y ago
  It's interesting that most people (at least around here) point to unrestrained campaign giving, rather than the fact that government even has the regulatory authority to do what it does. Of course, we have both, and stopping either one would in theory stop the other, but it's interesting that people always seem to point exclusively at one or the other. I wonder if there's some correlation between what angle people take and what their broader political leanings are.
djokkataja 12y ago
2 questions: 1. Why aren't cities everywhere doing this? 2. Who do I have to bother in my city to get this to happen?
- steanne 12y ago
  it may already be too late for your city. often when cable companies wire up a town, they offer free access to gov and school buildings in return for exclusive development rights. no one can compete with them, including the town itself.
  - robflynn 12y ago
    That happened in the town where I grew up. My parents still cannot get proper broadband. There is a cable company in the town and they have one of these exclusivity agreements with the county. However, they refuse to provide broadband access to the entire county. It is quite frustrating.
- pjspycha 12y ago
  Its illegal in many states to do this, including north carolina since Wilson, NC turned to be successful. TWC lobbied and got new laws passed to prevent other cities to do the same. Wilson, NC got an exemption because they aleady built the infrastructure.
- cldellow 12y ago
  Big telcos lobby for laws to make it illegal, e.g. Louisiana 844.42 [1]: "To ensure that cable television services and telecommunications and advanced services are provided through fair competition [...]" Advanced services are defined in 844.43 [2] to mean Internet that's faster than 144 kilobits per second. This means that the wifi in MSY (New Orlean's airport, a government facility) is utterly unusable. I can understand the narrative: having government skim the good stuff is a bad deal for corporations since government can do things corporations can't (e.g., taxes, zoning, land use permits, seize land). Presumably, this discourages corporations from providing comprehensive services since they cannot subsidize poorly-performing areas with great performing areas. I'm skeptical that that's a valid reason to have such a law, but c'est la vie. [1]: http://www.legis.state.la.us/lss/lss.asp?doc=285523 http://www.legis.state.la.us/lss/lss.asp?doc=285523 [2]: http://www.legis.state.la.us/lss/lss.asp?doc=285524 http://www.legis.state.la.us/lss/lss.asp?doc=285524
davesque 12y ago
Telcos are a disease in the American economy.
- sitkack 12y ago
  Unconstrained corporatism.
  - hayksaakian 12y ago
    literally state sanctioned monopolies there was a website posted to HN a while ago that described the hurdles for municipal fiber in each state, i don't have the link any more, but it seems very relevant to this discussion
    - sitkack 12y ago
      I think state sanctioned monopolies are _probably_ ok if regulated well. Natural Gas falls in that category here and I think they do a pretty good job. I'd say Comcast falls into state sanctioned monopoly-power-abuse which is different.
      - atom-morgan 12y ago
        > I think state sanctioned monopolies are _probably_ ok if regulated well. Natural Gas falls in that category here and I think they do a pretty good job. How would you ever know since they literally have no competition?
        sitkack 12y ago
        Competition isn't the only way to calculate efficiencies. But yes, my opinion of not feeling gouged is not a scientific indicator. I don't want 2 gas companies or 6 electric utilities. That picture on the left, http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/jamesfallows/1890sWires.jpeg http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/jamesfallows/189... I have seen that in Vietnam. Everyone gets their own wire.
    - 12y ago
raarts 12y ago
I think by now it's hard to deny that Comcast & friends are stifling the progress of the US economy. The US is 31st worldwide on bandwidth speed (which really can't be explained by the US's size alone), consumers and businesses are complaining across the board about high pricing, bad service, and lack of options. These companies do the country and its inhabitants a big disservice. I think the only reasonable option for the FCC and the government would be to increase competition, and remove existing roadblocks.
- rayiner 12y ago
  > The US is 31st worldwide on bandwidth speed (which really can't be explained by the US's size alone) By what measure? Certainly not Akamai's (http://www.akamai.com/dl/akamai/akamai-soti-q114.pdf?WT.mc_id=soti_Q114 http://www.akamai.com/dl/akamai/akamai-soti-q114.pdf?WT.mc_i...). The top 10 U.S. states (much of which are in the Northeast and are Comcast territory), would appear comfortably in the top 10 of the global rankings (compare page 14-15 with page 18). On Ookla's ranking, the U.S. is quite comparable to other big western countries (France, Germany, UK): http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries. Compare the U.K., at 29 mbps, with comparably-dense northeastern states like New York (35 mbps), Massachusetts (33 mbps), etc. Indeed, if you look at Ookla's rankings, you can see that density/wealth is a driver of internet speeds: http://www.netindex.com/download/2,1/United-States http://www.netindex.com/download/2,1/United-States. Sparsely populated or poor states like Wyoming or West Virginia are down in the 15-20 mbps range. Rich, dense states like New York and New Jersey are at 35+. The U.K. and Germany are ~600 people per square mile, somewhere between New York State and Connecticut in density. The U.S. as a whole is only 90 people per square mile, and states like Wyoming are less than 10 people per square mile. EDIT: I don't normally get annoyed at down votes, but I point these facts out every time someone repeats the trope "the U.S. lags in broadband speed!" but I never get a real answer, just down votes. The narrative that the U.S. lags behind in broadband speeds seems pretty central to criticisms of U.S. broadband policy, but the surveys I've seen that measure actual speeds (as opposed to advertised speeds), contradicts the assertion that the U.S. lags behind its counterparts. Can someone explain why they disagree with this analysis?
  - 12y ago
whoisthemachine 12y ago
* sigh
astrocat 12y ago
Nothing, not even the risk of municipal-infrastructure-shennigans-leading-to-disaster, should stand in the way of more competition entering the ISP market. Google Fiber is awesome and all but they're pretty much the only company big enough to tackle large-scale rollouts nationally. These smaller, municipal efforts have much lower barriers and will ultimately provide the market the kind of competitive landscape it needs to begin improving.
dsjoerg 12y ago
Most interesting part of the article: USTelecom would like "public entities [to] bear the same regulatory burdens as private service providers". What's that about? What regulatory burdens are these public providers avoiding, and are those burdens in the public interest or not?
a3n 12y ago
Good thing we don't get our water from Comcast.
- shmerl 12y ago
  Or air...
orbitingpluto 12y ago
Law of unintended consequences. Cable giants lobby to abolish net neutrality and for the FCC to not designate Internet service as a common carrier. Consequently other people band together to provide their own service. Now the cable giants, one pure local geographic monopoly, lobby to control municipal remediation of the crappy service. The hypocrisy is, unfortunately, unsurprising.
Tloewald 12y ago
And then, in a fit of pique, he napalmed Cheltenham. Even the police began to take notice.
ams6110 12y ago
Ugh. The answer is not municipally owned ISPs. Sure it's easy for a municipal ISP to have "cheap" rates when you consider that they are taxing authorities and don't have to run a profit. How exactly would this service be put into place? It would take a massive capital investment by the municipality, full of opportunities for fraud. I live in a fairly small, highly liberal town and yet in the past few years we've had financial scandal after financial scandal, from city staffers abusing credit cards to money losing investments in everything from technology parks to parking garages to outright fraud by contractors with inside partners in the government. And what does your typical city council know about running an ISP business? Nothing. Where I live, they can't even stay ahead of the pothole repair. It takes a team of a dozen laborers a month to install a block of sidewalk. The incompetence and inefficiency is just staggering. I'm simply unwilling to believe that they would do any better trying to offer internet service. I also don't buy the arugment that municipalites provide better "utility" services than businesses can. My parents lived in a neighborhood with poor water pressure for nearly two decades before the city finally got around to installing a booster pump station that resolved the problem. I'm not in favor of the status quo either. Regulated monopolies have given us the current mess with indifferent and expensive providers, product packaging that forces you to buy services you don't want, and little competition. Remove the monopolies. Let providers provide backbone, last mile, or both. Let them buy and sell bandwidth in bulk, and compete over customers from house to house. I don't see anything else that can possibly resolve the problem.
- sandstrom 12y ago
  Without contesting the rest of your argument, I'd argue that these rates are not unreasonable or artificially low. I pay $42 for 100 Mbit (symmetric, fiber), from a large Swedish ISP (without any government/taxpayer funding). I think the issue in the US is that there is too much monopoly (and oligopoly), with ISPs lobbying [i.e. corruption] instead of competition.
- Omniusaspirer 12y ago
  While I don't really disagree with most of your above points, I will say that when it works (Chattanooga) it really is fantastic. Their internet arm is already profitable all on its own and they've apparently leveraged it to MASSIVELY improve the quality of their electric grid as well. If there's a better ISP anywhere else in the US I'd love to hear about them since I currently believe they do not exist.
golemotron 12y ago
> “The success of public broadband is a mixed record, with numerous examples of failures,” USTelecom said in a blog post. “With state taxpayers on the financial hook when a municipal broadband network goes under, it is entirely reasonable for state legislatures to be cautious in limiting or even prohibiting that activity.” That's the cable companies for you - always looking out for the consumer. It's almost as if they see themselves as a public utility.
stretchwithme 12y ago
I'm all for people owning their own last mile for all kinds of services, if that's what they wish to do. Cooperatives are a great thing. And the marketplace where these coops buy their internet access, electricity or water can still be competitive. It would actually be MORE competitive than the monopolies handed out by governments that you cannot easily leave. And the decision to grant such a monopoly or revoke or allow an increase would not be in hands of the few. It would be in many different collections of hands and be much harder to pay off all those hands for some sweetheart deal.
shmerl 12y ago
They bought corrupted laws and now they are brazen enough to complain that someone dares to oppose them? It's really disgusting.
noisy_boy 12y ago
Atleast in areas where the laws permit, why isn't a competitor, e.g. Google Fiber, not taking advantage of this clearly prevalent customer dissatisfaction with Comcast/TWC etc? Also, some people seem to say that laying Fiber/infrastructure has costs which may be the reason. Then what happened to the wireless technologies which were presented as options for covering a city with connectivity? There was so much chatter about Wi-Max and such technologies - why are they are not being researched/refined/pushed? One of the best example of the vast advantage of penetration of wireless vs wired in terms of speed of deployment and impact is in India - especially rural areas where one can't expect clean drinking water but the cellphone signal is strong. Everytime somebody complains that in smaller towns in US that Comcast is the only choice in such places due to their infrastructure, assuming there are no laws prohibiting wireless competition, wireless should be the best option, no? So what am I missing (seriously)?
- XorNot 12y ago
  Well for one thing, there's a big difference between a 9.6kbps cellphone voice call (and thus data channel) and 20 mbps+ data. Wireless sucks. It is a bad solution to everything except where some much larger problem exists (i.e. you are on a plane). Wireless seems good in India because the networks are not highly demanded - and are expensive to boot so volume is managed. Wireless seems to grow quickly because you throw up a tower and declare "50,000 people now have access!", and telephone service is still kind of a big deal. But that's all you get from it. You can't provide a 20mbps pipe to those 50,000 people - not even close. But India is poverty stricken. The electricity grid is bad. And there's the lawlessness that comes with poverty (heard of copper thieves?). Wireless towers are easy central locations to power and protect. Thousands of miles of copper or fiber is not.
acd 12y ago
horse vs unicorn US cable wants to keep monopoly over subscriber base and keep things as they always were. Nice steady revenue per cable subscriber per month. High speed internet access is disrupting their business model. Pick any streaming service you like as long as you have fast broadband.

460 points by primelens 12y ago

My opinion of those companies is so poor at this point that my knee jerk reaction is to assume that whatever they want is the opposite of what's good for me.

matthuggins 12y ago
I mean, you're not wrong.
sitkack 12y ago
At least they are consistent.
- atmosx 12y ago
  word
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

pessimizer 12y ago

I wish there had been a lot more stimulus, and a lot more projects like Chattanooga.

sehrope 12y ago

> Chattanooga has the largest high-speed internet service in the US, offering customers access to speeds of 1 gigabit per second – about 50 times faster than the US average. The service, provided by municipally owned EPB, has sparked a tech boom in the city and attracted international attention. EPB is now petitioning the FCC to expand its territory. Comcast and others have previously sued unsuccessfully to stop EPB’s fibre optic roll out. I did a quick search to see pricing for EPB's internet service and wow is it cheap[1]. The two plans listed on the site are 100 Mbps for $57.99/mo or 1Gpbs $69.99/mo. Oh and both plans are symmetric so you get that for upload as well. I don't know of any city where the local cable co offers anything like that, let alone at those price points. No wonder they want to block this through legislation; competing in the market would not be pleasant for them. [1]: https://epbfi.com/internet/ https://epbfi.com/internet/

dobbsbob 12y ago
No monthly data caps either according to these reviews http://www.dslreports.com/comments/3492 http://www.dslreports.com/comments/3492
- beloch 12y ago
  Bandwidth is insanely cheap compared to last-mile infrastructure. Bandwidth caps are basically just a way to soak the customers who use the service more and are, hence, willing to pay more.
  - kalleboo 12y ago
    Well if you have a lot of contention in your last-mile infrastructure bandwidth caps make sense. This applies to shared infrastructure like a coax cable network, or the connection up to a DSLAM. Fiber nicely solves that though.
    - p1mrx 12y ago
      Why would the connection up to a DSLAM have more contention than a fiber-to-the-home network? Shouldn't most DSLAMs be using fiber already?
      - dunmalg 12y ago
        Yeah, there's no contention AT ALL up to the DSLAM. DSLAM is DSL Access Module. Every DSL customer has their own dedicated copper pair from the DSLAM to their house--- it's their phone line. There may be congestion between the Central Office where the DSLAM lives and the rest of the internet, but in practice that rarely happens. The big limit on DSL is getting reasonable speeds a mile down the line over ancient copper pairs that were never intended for the purpose. Don't people remember the old Cable vs. DSL commercials, where the DSL companies were showing cable customers furiously calling each other bandwidth hogs and telling them "log off!"
        12y ago

rayiner 12y ago

This is a really good example of how lobbying works. On one hand, these telecom companies have a clear interest in not having to "compete" with cheap, publicly funded broadband. On the other hand, their position just happens to tie in with a broader political debate: states and municipalities are on the verge of bankruptcy, and municipal infrastructure projects are a disaster outside a few well-managed cities like NYC. The telcos aren't incorrect in saying that these sorts of projects often turn into boondoggles, or disproportionately benefit parts of the population,[1] or cost too much and end up underfunded and poorly maintained in the future. With these lobbying measures, the telcos can tie something that benefits them to a position (municipal infrastructure projects), that many people oppose for entirely different reasons. [1] It is worth noting that only 1/3 of adults 65+ subscribe to broadband at home, and that many poor people access the internet through libraries or cellular phones instead of home computers.

transfire 12y ago
By that logic we all better stop using tap water, roads, libraries, schools and parks before we get hit upside the head with that "boondoggle".
unethical_ban 12y ago
>and municipal infrastructure projects are a disaster outside a few well-managed cities like NY citation needed... I know government has a reputation for being wasteful and corrupt, but weird for you to defend NYC.
- rayiner 12y ago
  The American Society of Civil Engineers says that U.S. infrastructure is underfunded to the tune of $3.6 trillion: http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org. People like to compare municipal broadband to municipal water, but the ASCE gives our water and wastewater systems a grade of 'D'. I defend NYC because as corrupt as it may be, over the last 20-30 years it has a pretty good record of getting municipal projects done. It has functioning subway, regional rail, etc. It has invested in protecting its water sources, etc. Most American cities have not done as well as NYC in that regard. E.g. Atlanta's ancient sewer system dumps untreated waste into the city's main river after every heavy rain, and the city's water supply is entirely at the mercy of the water levels in Lake Lanier. After a drought a few years ago, the city came this close to running out of water. This is not voodoo economics. In the absence of profit motive, you need social consensus and a forward-looking bureaucracy to ensure that public infrastructure receives adequate funding. Most American cities do not have either.

hoilogoi 12y ago

Counterpoint: try googling "Volstate EPB". I'm no expert, but I think it would be a shame if small struggling ISPs get the short end of the stick. It's hard for me to make a judgement on this specifically.

radicalbyte 12y ago
OT: this post is the 4th result in Google. Comment on HN indexed within 35 minutes. Crazy. It kind of sucks for companies like that, but competition is good. In an ideal situation you'd have "the people" own the pipes which they then rent at cost to commercial providers. In practice this would usually be via local government, but I'd prefer it via some kind of mutual society (where residents own a share, is open only to residents, and which is sold along with the property). The UK has a variation of this model, called "local loop unbundling" (http://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/home/products/llu/llu.do http://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/home/products/llu/llu.do). The infra was originally built by the state telco BT, which was then privatized. To create competition they introduced LLU, which forced BT to allow competition access to the pipes.
- sitkack 12y ago
  The last mile should be open to the people and supported as infrastructure. I should be able to send packets across town for zero cost.
  - kordless 12y ago
    You should also be able to host your own services. These two things are more closely related than a lot of people realize.
    - sgt101 12y ago
      Two points - someone has to maintain the network; holes need digging, kit needs buying, upgrading and monitoring. This cannot be free. It could be a government utility, but paying for it would then come out of taxes and the choice would be between paying for that, aircraft carriers or incubators. Second, networks are designed to deliver different things at different price points. Running a web service at the end of a residential connection does not make economic sense compared to running it in a datacentre connected directly to a peering point on 40gig-e.

jgalt212 12y ago

I remember the day in US when the consumer was king, and its interests were second to all others (govt, big business, etc). Sadly that day has passed. Without getting too political, the root cause is unrestrained campaign giving.

pyre 12y ago
> its interests were second to all others I think that you mean: > all other interests were second to it If 'it' was second to something else, that would mean that said something else was first.
oldmanjay 12y ago
When was this glorious time? Certainly doesn't seem like that would have been anytime since the 19th century, at the latest.
- tim333 12y ago
  I remember 30 years ago in the UK being envious of US telecom regulation. The US had free local calls - unheard of in the UK then and you could connect modems to the phone line. In the UK that was banned as the lines were all owned by the government monopoly and could not be touched so you had to put an acoustic coupler on the phone handset, believe it or not. Now the UK surprisingly seems to have better telecom regs than the US.
  - jessaustin 12y ago
    Are you sure the handset-suction-cup thing wasn't just the average technology 30 years ago? Because while I was too young to know about that, I distinctly remember seeing it in use here in USA at that time.
ulfw 12y ago
How many decades ago was that?
baddox 12y ago
It's interesting that most people (at least around here) point to unrestrained campaign giving, rather than the fact that government even has the regulatory authority to do what it does. Of course, we have both, and stopping either one would in theory stop the other, but it's interesting that people always seem to point exclusively at one or the other. I wonder if there's some correlation between what angle people take and what their broader political leanings are.

djokkataja 12y ago

2 questions: 1. Why aren't cities everywhere doing this? 2. Who do I have to bother in my city to get this to happen?

steanne 12y ago
it may already be too late for your city. often when cable companies wire up a town, they offer free access to gov and school buildings in return for exclusive development rights. no one can compete with them, including the town itself.
- robflynn 12y ago
  That happened in the town where I grew up. My parents still cannot get proper broadband. There is a cable company in the town and they have one of these exclusivity agreements with the county. However, they refuse to provide broadband access to the entire county. It is quite frustrating.
pjspycha 12y ago
Its illegal in many states to do this, including north carolina since Wilson, NC turned to be successful. TWC lobbied and got new laws passed to prevent other cities to do the same. Wilson, NC got an exemption because they aleady built the infrastructure.
cldellow 12y ago
Big telcos lobby for laws to make it illegal, e.g. Louisiana 844.42 [1]: "To ensure that cable television services and telecommunications and advanced services are provided through fair competition [...]" Advanced services are defined in 844.43 [2] to mean Internet that's faster than 144 kilobits per second. This means that the wifi in MSY (New Orlean's airport, a government facility) is utterly unusable. I can understand the narrative: having government skim the good stuff is a bad deal for corporations since government can do things corporations can't (e.g., taxes, zoning, land use permits, seize land). Presumably, this discourages corporations from providing comprehensive services since they cannot subsidize poorly-performing areas with great performing areas. I'm skeptical that that's a valid reason to have such a law, but c'est la vie. [1]: http://www.legis.state.la.us/lss/lss.asp?doc=285523 http://www.legis.state.la.us/lss/lss.asp?doc=285523 [2]: http://www.legis.state.la.us/lss/lss.asp?doc=285524 http://www.legis.state.la.us/lss/lss.asp?doc=285524

davesque 12y ago

Telcos are a disease in the American economy.

sitkack 12y ago
Unconstrained corporatism.
- hayksaakian 12y ago
  literally state sanctioned monopolies there was a website posted to HN a while ago that described the hurdles for municipal fiber in each state, i don't have the link any more, but it seems very relevant to this discussion
  - sitkack 12y ago
    I think state sanctioned monopolies are _probably_ ok if regulated well. Natural Gas falls in that category here and I think they do a pretty good job. I'd say Comcast falls into state sanctioned monopoly-power-abuse which is different.
    - atom-morgan 12y ago
      > I think state sanctioned monopolies are _probably_ ok if regulated well. Natural Gas falls in that category here and I think they do a pretty good job. How would you ever know since they literally have no competition?
      - sitkack 12y ago
        Competition isn't the only way to calculate efficiencies. But yes, my opinion of not feeling gouged is not a scientific indicator. I don't want 2 gas companies or 6 electric utilities. That picture on the left, http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/jamesfallows/1890sWires.jpeg http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/jamesfallows/189... I have seen that in Vietnam. Everyone gets their own wire.
  - 12y ago

raarts 12y ago

I think by now it's hard to deny that Comcast & friends are stifling the progress of the US economy. The US is 31st worldwide on bandwidth speed (which really can't be explained by the US's size alone), consumers and businesses are complaining across the board about high pricing, bad service, and lack of options. These companies do the country and its inhabitants a big disservice. I think the only reasonable option for the FCC and the government would be to increase competition, and remove existing roadblocks.

rayiner 12y ago
> The US is 31st worldwide on bandwidth speed (which really can't be explained by the US's size alone) By what measure? Certainly not Akamai's (http://www.akamai.com/dl/akamai/akamai-soti-q114.pdf?WT.mc_id=soti_Q114 http://www.akamai.com/dl/akamai/akamai-soti-q114.pdf?WT.mc_i...). The top 10 U.S. states (much of which are in the Northeast and are Comcast territory), would appear comfortably in the top 10 of the global rankings (compare page 14-15 with page 18). On Ookla's ranking, the U.S. is quite comparable to other big western countries (France, Germany, UK): http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries. Compare the U.K., at 29 mbps, with comparably-dense northeastern states like New York (35 mbps), Massachusetts (33 mbps), etc. Indeed, if you look at Ookla's rankings, you can see that density/wealth is a driver of internet speeds: http://www.netindex.com/download/2,1/United-States http://www.netindex.com/download/2,1/United-States. Sparsely populated or poor states like Wyoming or West Virginia are down in the 15-20 mbps range. Rich, dense states like New York and New Jersey are at 35+. The U.K. and Germany are ~600 people per square mile, somewhere between New York State and Connecticut in density. The U.S. as a whole is only 90 people per square mile, and states like Wyoming are less than 10 people per square mile. EDIT: I don't normally get annoyed at down votes, but I point these facts out every time someone repeats the trope "the U.S. lags in broadband speed!" but I never get a real answer, just down votes. The narrative that the U.S. lags behind in broadband speeds seems pretty central to criticisms of U.S. broadband policy, but the surveys I've seen that measure actual speeds (as opposed to advertised speeds), contradicts the assertion that the U.S. lags behind its counterparts. Can someone explain why they disagree with this analysis?
- 12y ago

whoisthemachine 12y ago

* sigh

astrocat 12y ago

Nothing, not even the risk of municipal-infrastructure-shennigans-leading-to-disaster, should stand in the way of more competition entering the ISP market. Google Fiber is awesome and all but they're pretty much the only company big enough to tackle large-scale rollouts nationally. These smaller, municipal efforts have much lower barriers and will ultimately provide the market the kind of competitive landscape it needs to begin improving.

dsjoerg 12y ago

Most interesting part of the article: USTelecom would like "public entities [to] bear the same regulatory burdens as private service providers". What's that about? What regulatory burdens are these public providers avoiding, and are those burdens in the public interest or not?

a3n 12y ago

Good thing we don't get our water from Comcast.

shmerl 12y ago
Or air...

orbitingpluto 12y ago

Law of unintended consequences. Cable giants lobby to abolish net neutrality and for the FCC to not designate Internet service as a common carrier. Consequently other people band together to provide their own service. Now the cable giants, one pure local geographic monopoly, lobby to control municipal remediation of the crappy service. The hypocrisy is, unfortunately, unsurprising.

Tloewald 12y ago

And then, in a fit of pique, he napalmed Cheltenham. Even the police began to take notice.

ams6110 12y ago

Ugh. The answer is not municipally owned ISPs. Sure it's easy for a municipal ISP to have "cheap" rates when you consider that they are taxing authorities and don't have to run a profit. How exactly would this service be put into place? It would take a massive capital investment by the municipality, full of opportunities for fraud. I live in a fairly small, highly liberal town and yet in the past few years we've had financial scandal after financial scandal, from city staffers abusing credit cards to money losing investments in everything from technology parks to parking garages to outright fraud by contractors with inside partners in the government. And what does your typical city council know about running an ISP business? Nothing. Where I live, they can't even stay ahead of the pothole repair. It takes a team of a dozen laborers a month to install a block of sidewalk. The incompetence and inefficiency is just staggering. I'm simply unwilling to believe that they would do any better trying to offer internet service. I also don't buy the arugment that municipalites provide better "utility" services than businesses can. My parents lived in a neighborhood with poor water pressure for nearly two decades before the city finally got around to installing a booster pump station that resolved the problem. I'm not in favor of the status quo either. Regulated monopolies have given us the current mess with indifferent and expensive providers, product packaging that forces you to buy services you don't want, and little competition. Remove the monopolies. Let providers provide backbone, last mile, or both. Let them buy and sell bandwidth in bulk, and compete over customers from house to house. I don't see anything else that can possibly resolve the problem.

sandstrom 12y ago
Without contesting the rest of your argument, I'd argue that these rates are not unreasonable or artificially low. I pay $42 for 100 Mbit (symmetric, fiber), from a large Swedish ISP (without any government/taxpayer funding). I think the issue in the US is that there is too much monopoly (and oligopoly), with ISPs lobbying [i.e. corruption] instead of competition.
Omniusaspirer 12y ago
While I don't really disagree with most of your above points, I will say that when it works (Chattanooga) it really is fantastic. Their internet arm is already profitable all on its own and they've apparently leveraged it to MASSIVELY improve the quality of their electric grid as well. If there's a better ISP anywhere else in the US I'd love to hear about them since I currently believe they do not exist.

golemotron 12y ago

> “The success of public broadband is a mixed record, with numerous examples of failures,” USTelecom said in a blog post. “With state taxpayers on the financial hook when a municipal broadband network goes under, it is entirely reasonable for state legislatures to be cautious in limiting or even prohibiting that activity.” That's the cable companies for you - always looking out for the consumer. It's almost as if they see themselves as a public utility.

stretchwithme 12y ago

I'm all for people owning their own last mile for all kinds of services, if that's what they wish to do. Cooperatives are a great thing. And the marketplace where these coops buy their internet access, electricity or water can still be competitive. It would actually be MORE competitive than the monopolies handed out by governments that you cannot easily leave. And the decision to grant such a monopoly or revoke or allow an increase would not be in hands of the few. It would be in many different collections of hands and be much harder to pay off all those hands for some sweetheart deal.

shmerl 12y ago

They bought corrupted laws and now they are brazen enough to complain that someone dares to oppose them? It's really disgusting.

noisy_boy 12y ago

Atleast in areas where the laws permit, why isn't a competitor, e.g. Google Fiber, not taking advantage of this clearly prevalent customer dissatisfaction with Comcast/TWC etc? Also, some people seem to say that laying Fiber/infrastructure has costs which may be the reason. Then what happened to the wireless technologies which were presented as options for covering a city with connectivity? There was so much chatter about Wi-Max and such technologies - why are they are not being researched/refined/pushed? One of the best example of the vast advantage of penetration of wireless vs wired in terms of speed of deployment and impact is in India - especially rural areas where one can't expect clean drinking water but the cellphone signal is strong. Everytime somebody complains that in smaller towns in US that Comcast is the only choice in such places due to their infrastructure, assuming there are no laws prohibiting wireless competition, wireless should be the best option, no? So what am I missing (seriously)?

XorNot 12y ago
Well for one thing, there's a big difference between a 9.6kbps cellphone voice call (and thus data channel) and 20 mbps+ data. Wireless sucks. It is a bad solution to everything except where some much larger problem exists (i.e. you are on a plane). Wireless seems good in India because the networks are not highly demanded - and are expensive to boot so volume is managed. Wireless seems to grow quickly because you throw up a tower and declare "50,000 people now have access!", and telephone service is still kind of a big deal. But that's all you get from it. You can't provide a 20mbps pipe to those 50,000 people - not even close. But India is poverty stricken. The electricity grid is bad. And there's the lawlessness that comes with poverty (heard of copper thieves?). Wireless towers are easy central locations to power and protect. Thousands of miles of copper or fiber is not.

acd 12y ago

horse vs unicorn US cable wants to keep monopoly over subscriber base and keep things as they always were. Nice steady revenue per cable subscriber per month. High speed internet access is disrupting their business model. Pick any streaming service you like as long as you have fast broadband.