ISPs Fight To Keep Broadband Gaps Secret 170
Aaron writes "Broadband Reports notes how Maryland was working on a law that would force ISPs to show exactly where they offer service and at what speed. The goal was to help map coverage gaps, since FCC broadband data is worthless for this purpose. Cable and phone company lobbyists have scuttled the plan, convincing state leaders the plan would bring 'competitive harm,' 'stifle innovation,' and even close local coffee shops. Of course the real reason is they don't want the public to know what criteria they use to determine the financial viability of your neighborhood — as they cherry-pick only the most lucrative areas for next-generation services. The Center for Public Integrity is trying to obtain the unreleased raw FCC penetration data, but these companies are also fighting this tooth and nail."
Easy web business opportunity (Score:5, Insightful)
Marketability? (Score:3, Insightful)
Nidjits (Score:1, Insightful)
If you interrupt this process by forcing them to sell at lower profit margins to a wider population earlier, they won't be able to pay for the R&D costs, so they won't bother creating new technologies.
Re:Nidjits (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Easy web business opportunity (Score:0, Insightful)
Oh, by the way. Is it a problem that one housemate is seeding a bunch of stuff on BitTorrent and another is busy playing WoW? (Rhetorical question. Just pointing out a common problem with those online speed tests).
Re:Marketability? (Score:3, Insightful)
This nonsense of leaving everything up to the free market will only result in an increasingly dysfunctional state, even if some people do become very wealthy as a result. It is not like you need to resort to complete socialism just because of placing restrictions on the private sector, providing some public services, and mitigating the more problematic aspects of capitalism.
In short - nothing is going to change with regard to sections of the US population being bypassed when it comes to broadband provision, unless you have a significant movement in politics to take on board some of the concepts of Christian Democracy. I find it baffling that in a country with such a large Christian community that equal opportunity and social justice are so far down the list of priorities when it comes to politics. I guess that's what comes of having a two party state; little chance of different political influences other than the status quo.
What "new technologies" would that be? (Score:5, Insightful)
And how is any of this "leftist"?
This may be news to you, but the technology is rather old. Look at other countries that have deployed better tech than this YEARS ago.
This is all about squeezing the maximum profit from the minimum investment
The Harsh Truth (Score:4, Insightful)
DSL only goes so far along the copper wire from the DSLAM in the phone company central office. If you are past 11-12000 feet, you can kiss ADSL goodbye, past 18000 ft, you can forget about SDSL. If you live further than that, no amount of, "we are expanding into your area" is going to happen. Unless the LEC builds a new CO, closer to you, and has all of your copper terminate there instead of the old place, then, you might be able to get DSL. But for the most part, if you can't get DSL now, you can't get DSL ever.
Cable costs thousands of dollars to grant access to an entire street, whether it has houses on it, or not. Generally, cable companies, in this area at least, have always been willing to build out for any customer with the cash in hand. If it is rural, they want you to help cover the installation cost. Buckeye Cable in NW ohio generally says, "if it is not a densely populated area for us, we need $10,000 up front to guarantee a return on our investment." Heaven forbid they make money, heaven forbid they not build out for one customer, at huge expense to themselves, so they can earn 69.95/month for basic cable and inet service off of one, maybe two customers.
If you live in the middle of nowhere, either find a solid WISP, fork over the cash for expensive telecom, or quit your bitching. It is not the faceless phone company's fault that you can't get the same internet as someone in the burbs can. No amount of putting all this data on a map is going to change any of this.
Re:Market demographics (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nidjits (Score:4, Insightful)
No one said anything about forcing them to alter their business plan. We just want to see what our tax dollars are helping to fund, especially since almost all carriers have a legalize monopoly over areas.
If I were a company with business practices like you said, I'd be terrified of the data, too. If it were easily discernible that an area had lackluster coverage in a way provable to local and state governments, their monopolies will be threatened. If it is easy and clear for a new company to say, "We will provide affordable TV and Internet connections to these four poor areas of your city if you allow us to operate next to [Monopoly Cable Company]." What responsible city would deny that?
Re:What "new technologies" would that be? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Nidjits (Score:3, Insightful)
So the TVA and other Rural Electrification movements weren't necessary? I mean, eventually the cost to run power lines into Appalachia would have dropped dramatically and demand for electricity would have brought it to those poor people eventually, right?
Or to pick a Republican backed notion: The wealthy would have created the highway system for their own use, right? And eventually, it would have been affordable to ordinary folks.
To put it another way: Don't start your argument with ad hominem attacks.
Re:Nidjits (Score:5, Insightful)
>The way that technology becomes available is that it is first offered to the rich.
Except, of course, the Telcos weasled a huge $200 billion out of the government so they could provide this service to everybody. There is a long standing public utility business model in the US. There is also a free-market capitalism business model. The guys want to have it both ways; switching back and forth depending on which gives them the most money today.
Re:What "new technologies" would that be? (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words: the consumer has no right to the information that would drive capitalistic market forces.
I think you missed the point. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the point might have eluded you.
No one is saying that broadband providers CANNOT send an ad to people who make over $100,000. That would be an example of targeting a specific market. That is why your attempt at flippancy missed.
What is actually happening is that someone making over $100,000 is trying to find where he can purchase a specific product. And that information is being denied to him. By the companies providing product. And those companies are also trying legal maneuvers to prevent him from finding the product via other channels.
That's very strange behaviour for a company. Usually companies WANT to sell their products.
That behaviour becomes understandable when you look at it from the perspective of trying to extract as much money as possible from the existing infrastructure.
We're supposed to believe in competition and bringing more/better/cheaper products to the consumer. That's not what is happening here.
Re:Market demographics (Score:3, Insightful)
If this were the case than Manhattan and Beverly Hills and San Francisco would have 100Mb symmetrical fiber connections like the ones that are available in similar places in Japan, South Korea, and Sweden.
Let me provide another example. I live near one of the most expensive colleges in the country, and I'm surrounded by students living off campus. Even though I'm in a small city, you'd expect that I'd have some decent broadband choice, even if I had to pay through the nose. It's a fairly lucrative market: College students with parents rich enough to give their kids brand new luxury cars. You'd think Comcast and Verizon, or some other company, would have come through with fiber ages ago.
However, I have two choices: Comcast's expensive service with decent download speeds but atrocious upload speeds, or Verizon's service with poor download speeds and similar upload speeds.
The evidence simply doesn't support your contention that broadband providers are spreading true broadband, like the stuff that's in other countries, to places as fast as they can. They're dragging their feet and using the outdated telecommunications laws to their advantage. They're even getting state and federal governments to write new laws to support them, like the one last year in PA that made it illegal for a community to provide broadband if Verizon or Comcast are going to provide it within the next year.
What's needed is a push from consumers to understand what would truly be available if we opened up the market and got the government truly dedicated to providing next-generation communications to the people.
P.S. I live in "Amish country" and we don't just have a Gap store, but a Gap outlet, along with dozens of other factory outlets.
Re:Marketability? (Score:2, Insightful)
We never had a "free market". That does not exist. What we have is a series of protected monopolies. And we're not allowed to apply the rules of Christianity to our leaders. They only apply to the worker bees.
Interesting problem. (Score:3, Insightful)
Secondly, ISPs have no business restricting what can be published about what is provided. Actually, it would be good if we could see not only the performance of the network provided but also how the downstream performance compares with the upstream pipes. (Are they at capacity? Are they oversubscribed, and if so, by how much? What do customers really get for their money? What services or benefits do the ISP get that are NOT passed on to consumers?)
This information can't possibly put them at risk. What puts ISPs at risk is incompetency so great that if anyone actually knew the details, the ISP's customers and possibly shareholders would launch an all-out rebellion. Secrecy for an established service - as opposed to one that is new and vulnerable to the unreasonable and unreasoning excesses of the market - exists only to hide the skeletons in the closet and brush the mountains of dirt under the carpet. It has no legitimate basis.
Now, that's very different from publishing internal documents on why certain decisions were made or other internal matters. Those things probably should stay confidential within the corporation. I think it would be a mistake to confuse information that is of genuine value in making a sensible decision with information that is only useful in slamming others for making what they believe to be sensible decisions.
(Having said that, if a newspaper's investigative reporter digs up such information as part of an investigation into fraud, abuse of consumers, or something similar, then that should be entirely fair game. Companies that use reasonable protections in an seriously unreasonable way - concealing anti-competitive actions, price-gouging, illegal wiretaps, unreasonable denial of service, etc. - then the company's interests should be secondary to the needs and rights of consumers and authorities alike.)
You'll notice I specifically mentioned what the ISP gets versus what the customers get - not just bandwidth but any service or benefit. If the ISP is passing on the costs of their upstream line(s) to their consumers, but the sum total of what the customers get is significantly worse than the sum total of what the ISP gets - whether that is protocols, service guarantees, bandwidth, latency, capabilities, fault-tolerance, or whatever - then the customer should have the right to know that what they are getting is substandard. The customer should not have the automatic right to know why - that should be a private matter for the ISP, unless the ISP decides otherwise. But customers cannot compare two options if they have no metrics by which to make such a comparison, which means there is no real market, no real customers - consumers, yes, but not customers, there are only smoke and mirrors.
Re:The Harsh Truth (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Harsh Truth (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the problem with your argument: This is in response to companies claiming to have access in places in which they do not. They publish these color-coded "coverage" maps that say they have coverage all over a particular county, for example. But as anyone knows, there are holes in that coverage. Is it unreasonable to force the providers to announce where they don't have coverage, if they can reasonably know where they do or do not have coverage?
It's [relatively] easy to figure out places you don't have coverage when you deal with GPS or TDOA-tracked phones. If a phone is reachable in two places, but not the place in between, there is a possible hole there. If it happens regularly enough, then it's a real hole. Big deal. That covers wireless. For street coverage, the provider has a map of where the cable is laid. For DSL, you can just measure feet of wire from the CO to find out where they will willingly sell you service. But let me just go back to something ignorant you said in your comment, higher up;
That is a bunch of shit. First of all, I don't know the current limit, but last I checked (~3 years ago) SBC sold DSL to 14,000 feet. Second of all, back when they were pacific bell they sold to 17,000 feet. I used to live in a house in Santa Cruz at about 17,500 feet that they gave service to anyway, and we were able to consistently reach our peak speeds downstream.
The reason they don't sell to the maximum range is that the FCC started fining the shit out of telcos that provided spotty DSL access, and they don't want to do trial provisioning and shit like that. So unless you're very close they simply refuse to sell you a product that may very well work flawlessly.
In any case, in the case of the telcos, we helped pay for that copper and we have a right to know what services we can get where. In the case of the cable company AND the telcos, our government has granted them a monopoly on the right of way, enabling their business model. The least they can do is tell us where we are able to pay for the benefits of this monopoly. (Even if there's two cable companies overlapping, they tend to have their own right-of-way, and only so many cable companies can be there...)
The Harsher Reality (Score:5, Insightful)
I've spent more than a decade running ISP services for residential customers. Both big metro and extremely rural areas.
These maps would be a *boon* to the ISP's who want customers, and are willing to invest for them. We had nothing but problems trying to figure out where we COULD find customers, because the rural telco was actually doing well running lines. But they were extremely poor with giving out that information. Heck, I would have taken the information just to know where they put their DSLAMS so I could target OTHER areas they weren't.
Bottom line, rural does not mean "more than 20 miles between humans" - there are areas that have the density to support expansion. The problem is, it is tough to justify.
THAT is the real reason you don't see it going rural. It is indeed a situation of "Hmm I can pay $10k to drop a DSLAM and equipment to service a potential of $20k a month, --OR-- I can drop that SAME equipment, in an area that will support $75k/mo".
The equipment is under-powered and will need to be upgraded, but in every case that situation is a potential I was told: "Well hell my boy, we would LOVE to have that problem"... and when they DID have that problem it took a while to actually fix it.. profits ruled the roost.
As far as I am concerned, compel them to publicly post the information. Without it, there will be nobody providing service in those areas. There is no reason the public has to suffer and wait until they are "ready" (ready in this context means: "we have exploited all of the higher margin areas, time to start scraping the sides & bottom of the barrel")
-bs
Re:The Harsh Truth (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't that what all those federal funds tacked onto each phone bill supposed to support? Getting telcom infrastructure out to those of us in the sticks? If the telecom market were totally "free", I'd agree with you. However, there are so many subsidies and weird spaghetti bowl of forces at work by the governments and the companies themselves, I don't feel that any governmental nudge to force these giant companies to serve outlying areas is out of line.
Oddly enough, there's a small regional telco out here in Utah that services the areas Qwest (formerly US West) has decided to ignore. I have a decent DSL connection on the outskirts of a town of about 200 residents, located ~35 miles from the nearest "real" city. I can't complain. The extra $25/month on my phone bill was a steal when compared to the satellite options was expecting I'd need to utilize when I moved out here.
Re:You say that like it's a bad thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a scam, plain and simple. If they were financing it all themselves in a totally free market then I'd agree that it's just capitalism at work.
This is bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Too bad if the data makes the cable companies look bad. It's their fault for making (obstensibly) smart business decisions, now they'll have to defend their decisions.
It would be nice if just once they'd come out and say "Look, that block is a ghetto full of poor people who're on welfare, do you really think we're going to get a return on investment by wiring the whole place? At best we'll end up with tons of people who'll get service and never pay their bills!"
It's not fair and possibly it might not be right, but in a market driven economy, you live by the blade, but die by the bullet.
Re:You say that like it's a bad thing... (Score:3, Insightful)
Capitalism also requires open competition and equal information between buyer and seller so that an informed choice can be made. The article is about broadband providers trying to avoid having to provide information to customers. Much like the cellular companies several years ago, where it took a law to force actual coverage maps to be made available, rather than marketing-speak of coverage that may have no bearing on reality.
If they only want to service rich areas, that's fine, just say so. Step aside while another company comes in and takes the lower-margin, higher-volume poorer areas of the market. THAT is capitalism. You can't have it both ways.
Re:Marketability? (Score:3, Insightful)
Telcos and Cable Companies have, for years, promised faster, cheaper, more innovative and more widespread services in exchange for deregulation, rate increases, and government-approved monopolization. In many cases they have failed to deliver on these promises, instead cherry-picking neighborhoods with high income and all but shunning lower-income and even blue-collar middle income neighborhoods. But through very creative statistical manipulations, they can make their coverage appear on paper to be much better than reality. The last thing they want is for this Emperor to go on parade.
But let's say that telcos are allowed to cherry pick on broadband. Is this such a bad thing? Imagine if we were just deploying the national telephone system today and Bell Telephone was allowed to cherry pick among modern neighborhoods. Would they invest in communities that could afford to pay the top rate and subscribe to all the optional features? Of course they would. But then would they invest in communities where even basic service might be unaffordable, where maybe 1 in 1,000 would subscribe to a value-added feature, where people struggling to pay for rent and food and healthcare might wind up going months past due on their phone service? Certainly not. And this is more-or-less where the broadband market is at today.
So what happens is the gap between Rich and Poor widens, and the slope one needs to climb from impoverished to self-sufficiency becomes steeper and higher. If I can't get Broadband access it will cost me a minimum of $30.00/month for a phone line and $15.00 for a dial-up ISP, plus long-distance charges. If I CAN get Broadband, I can spend $30/month for Broadband and $15.00 for VoIP dialtone service, which includes 500 minutes/month long distance, plus I get better on-line access to research sources, government agencies, school system websites, and more. With broadband I can potentially work from home using VPN or Citrix-based applications to escape the salary limitations of a depressed, urban area. Hell, if the commercials are to be believed, I can get rich selling merchandise on eBay that I never have to see, touch or pay for.
The point is that the telcos and cable companies are given franchise by the government to operate as a de facto monopoly within a certain community because of the expected, indeed promised benefit to the general public. These companies should be accountable to the public to demonstrate they are operating according to their contractual obligations. Moreover, since these are all PUBLIC CORPORATIONS it is even more important that their activities be subject to public scrutiny.