Still Little To Do About a Bad ISP 178
theY4Kman writes "The Washington Post reinforces the grim situation on Net Neutrality and limited ISP choices faced by Americans: 'The FCC's research shows that 78 percent of American households have access to only two land-based broadband providers and that 13 percent have one. Don't expect that to improve. Many competing DSL services have left the market, spurred by the end of line-sharing in 2005 and other corporate consolidations. A few months ago, for instance, AT&T elected to close its WorldNet DSL service. Meanwhile, technologies that were once promoted as alternatives to phone and cable-based services have flopped. City-wide WiFi access ... turned out to be a business bust. The power-line broadband that then-FCC Chairman Michael Powell lauded as having "great promise" in 2004 fared no better: Last week, Manassas voted to unplug its pioneering service. ... We have a situation full of lawyerly jargon, with risks that can't be dramatized by putting a sick kid on a stage. I hope you like your Internet provider, because you may be stuck with it for a while.'"
3G (Score:3, Interesting)
No kidding (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Of course. (Score:4, Interesting)
What this country needs (will never happen) is for FttH from a municipal owned central office. Your local town owns the fiber from your dwelling to the central office. Then the municipality allows "vendors" into the CO to provide service to its residents over said fiber. Voice, Video, Data all runs over this fiber and "vendors" get to compete house to house for your money. You then pay a small fiber fee each month for the municipality to maintain the fiber and the CO, like a water bill. No more coax, no more copper.
Separate the wire carrier from the content provider.
Re:What about other services? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you don't like your electricity supplier, you switch to another one?
In California, I can do this. PG&E is required to carry someone else's watts for me, which of course only happens on paper. But still, I don't have to buy power generated by PG&E.
Or if you don't like your local telephone company?
Well, there's vonage... unless you can't get decent internet :p
There's also cellular; I terminated my land line and got cellular because SBC (at the time) was suffering from a strike, and they told me it would be minimum three days before they could come out and fix my phone line that had spontaneously, mysteriously gone bad. It was always SOP at Pac Bell and by extension SBC (and probably still in those regions, even though they're now called ATT) to steal pairs from one residential customer to give them to a new one, and to endlessly splice wire until it was amazing for it to carry any signal at all; they probably stole my copper for someone else. I went to an alternative and haven't missed a land line since. Actually, we have one now, but I try not to answer it. It's mostly spam.
Or what happens when the gas company doesn't suit you?
I have a tank from Suburban propane. I'm a renter so I'm not changing it, but as an owner I could change my tank, and get gas from someone else. If I were upset enough, I could mount a tank on a trailer and get appropriate licenses and placards to haul it around, so I could also handle the transportation part of the equation, and not pay delivery fees. Not that you usually pay those anyway, unless you are an on-demand customer, and demand gas before it is convenient. I have up to a month lag time between my request and the appearance of the truck, but one of the things Suburban does is they will wait until the price of gas is high to send out the trucks, and then they tend to charge vastly more than the national average, hoping you won't notice. We're using the BBB against them for the SECOND time right now; it worked the first time, let's hope for two out of two.
Or when your water supply isn't pure enough, do you switch to another water supplier?
You can build a catchment, although in my county, you are billed both for water you pump from it, and for evaporation. Can that even be legal? As in, constitutional? Anyway, I have a well. I produce my own water. Can't do this in the city generally, but that's the price you pay for living in an artificial environment.
Make it a highly regulated, government controlled local monopoly so we can all stop griping. Because that's the only way it's going to get fixed, unless a wireless magic bullet comes along.
It might not be a bad idea. We have the best and cheapest postal service in the world. We could cut out half the days of service and that would still be true (and might keep it afloat longer at current rates of utilization and cash flow per day.) There's no security without encryption anyway; so what's the harm? It's not like they don't already have all the keys to the castle, making them the effective owners anyway. Might as well just let 'em hang a shingle.
Be careful of what you gripe about, someone might just do something about it.
Someone is already doing something about it. Consumers are getting boned by corporations. That's "something".
Re:Of course (Score:2, Interesting)
re: Still little to do about a bad ISP... and BPL (Score:2, Interesting)
Addressing Manassas, BPL was never well-conceived, and Manassas was destined to fail. I'm sorry, but you transmit an RF signal along an unshielded random wire length without radiation and susceptibility problems. The BPL folks wanted regulation to prevent interference from all the existing users out there, and then lied to their potential customers about the impacts. Good engineering practice, and adherence to solid engineering won out here. It's not like BPL was going to do great things: It's expensive, complicated and requires regeneration at each transformer, and a variety of other points along the way. It's bad engineering done poorly.
The Best Government Money Can Buy Did This (Score:5, Interesting)
I operated a small ISP for nearly 8 years and was finally driven out of business by my upstream provider (a municipality in the form of a PUD) which illegally subsidized a competitor and illegally created another competitor. This PUD had invited a competitor into the area and created fake "contracts" that covered up a secret agreement to repay the competitor for 110% of its costs to compete with me. The competitor created invoices for "work performed" under the contracts that just happened to cover their costs; plus ten percent. The PUD also sent their own employees to work on the competitor's systems. This was (and is) actually against the state constitution, not just illegal. Unfortunately no state entity was willing to investigate this activity or prosecute the perpetrators and when we tried to sue we discovered that municipalities are protected from pesky problems like anti-trust and racketeering so the suits were dismissed.
Only four of the managers of the PUD were discharged over this and no one went to jail or was even prosecuted despite having substantial written evidence provided by whistle blowers inside the PUD (who released documents before the PUD could act to cover them up).
We sold out for pennies on the dollar of our investment and felt lucky to get even that because by the time we bailed virtually all the other smaller ISPs had also been driven out of business.
Would regulation have helped me? There was (and is) plenty of regulation but there was not even a token attempt to enforce them. We were told, off the record, by a state investigator that the problems were so big that it would have been economically disastrous to the entire state if they regulations were enforced.
This, mind you, in the state (Washington) which has had numerous scandals involving public utility districts; including the infamous Washington Public Power System repudiating $200 million in municipal bonds some 30 years ago. (WPPS still exists under a new name.)
Polyopoly -- cured in Britain in the 18th century (Score:3, Interesting)
Polyopoly is a term for local monopolies, due to high cost of relocation. Historically seen in factory locations in industrial-revolution-era woolen mills in England, in modern times ISP local monopolies.
Solved by creating a mechanism for farmers to sell their wool to remote mills, not just their local ones. This became, by repute, the British Woolen Marketing Board, and a good attempt a creating a monopsony (;-))
--dave
We need a new Telecommunications Act (Score:2, Interesting)
Speaking strictly to the US population, this should be no surprise. To the best of my knowledge, this situation is exactly what you have been warned about for 10 years, and so I assume is what you want. If it is not, you had best get involved.
To briefly remind people, it was during the Clinton Administration that the 1996 telecommunications act was passed. This was very controversial, and just like today, there was much misinformation and propaganda that was spread about it. I'm not saying everything about the bill was good, but it did give a start to competition in the telecom/Internet industry.
If you will recall, before this time, the baby Bells and GTE (now called Verizon) were very hesitant to adopt any new technologies for Internet access. There was a huge fight to get telco's to adopt ISDN. After this bill passed we started to get new companies like Northpoint, Covad, and others, trying to sell DSL and other services. In response, the baby Bells and GTE were making deals with ISPs to provide the copper lines and DSL signaling, while the ISP provided the IP (and up) layers. The telco's made promises to not enter the ISP market.
Then we had the dot com bust, the election of the Bush administration, and 9/11.
The Bush administration then emasculated the 96 telecom bill, removing the parts that fostered competition to the large telco's. Soon after, Northpoint, Covad, and virtually every other similar type of provider went out of business. (Covad did eventually re-organize and return.) The telco's now broke their deals with the ISP's, and became ISP's themselves. The telco's would allow ISP's to resell DSL services to end customers, but the telco would charge the ISP the same rate the telco's sold services to end users, and would expect the ISP to be the first level of support. The telco's successfully cut off the air supply to ISP's and the ISP's that were not diversified enough, quickly failed.
Now you have Ma Bell back together again, and few choices for an ISP. Now we have concerns over net neutrality, or our ISP behaving like the big telco's (we don't care, we're the telephone company).. What did you expect?
The answer to net neutrality and a lot of other related problems is not to regulate ISP's. The answer to provide end users a choice of Internet Service Providers. Your choice should not be limited to the republican idea of land line, satellite, or cable. We need a telecommunications act of 2010.
Re:Broadband over Powerline (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, it interfered with a lot more than Amateur Radio spectrum: There were issues with DoD, DHS, public safety, SCADA operations, marine and petroleum. The multiple carrier aspect of it was interesting to examine on the spectrum analyzer, as it indicated a seriously broad-spectrum threat to RF services.