Cable Expands Broadband Domination as AT&T and Verizon Lose Customers (arstechnica.com) 104
The cable industry's grip on the U.S. broadband space increased last quarter, with Comcast and Charter gaining nearly 500,000 subscribers, combined. Phone companies AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, and Frontier, however, all lost Internet customers. ArsTechnica reports:The 14 largest ISPs, accounting for 95 percent of the US market, gained 192,510 Internet customers in Q2 2016, bringing the total to 91.9 million, Leichtman Research Group reported today. Cable companies accounted for all of the gains, adding 553,293 subscribers for a new total of 57 million. The phone companies lost 360,783 subscribers, bringing them down to 34.9 million. Phone companies' losses more than doubled since Q2 2015, when they lost about 150,000 subscribers. [...] Comcast and Charter, the two biggest ISPs, led the way in subscriber gains. Comcast added 220,000 broadband subscribers to boost its total to 24 million, while Charter (the new owner of Time Warner Cable) added 277,000 subscribers for a new total of 21.8 million. AT&T lost 123,000 subscribers, lowering its total to 15.6 million. Verizon lost 83,000, leaving it with 7 million Internet customers. CenturyLink and Frontier lost 66,000 and 77,000, respectively.
Re: But phone copper is the tops!! (Score:1)
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Care to share your findings?
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Care to share your findings?
Not the AC, but in my case, AT&T didn't even need to do that. They were my ISP at the time (Pacbell Internet was great before they were bought by SBC, who were in turn bought by AT&T), I paid my monthly bill on time, they then sent me a refund check for the same amount, thus putting my account in the red for that month, and then charged a late payment to me. Their billing department claimed never to have received my payment, even though I could see the canceled check on my bank's website, and I had
DSL shouldn't be considered broadband any more. (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course the companies that rely heavily on DSL lost customers to faster connections. DSL is today's dial up.
Re: DSL shouldn't be considered broadband any more (Score:5, Informative)
DSL has always been slower than cable, the only reason anybody ever thought otherwise is because the telcos spread FUD about cable being a shared medium. What they conveniently left out was the fact that the backbone is shared no matter what media is used, meanwhile DSL being on inferior voice grade copper has to use interleaving to prevent insane amounts of packet loss, which means retransmits that count against your rated speed with accompanying deliberate latency to compensate for jitter, in addition to the fact that they never heard of 802.1x, instead relying on PPP for authentication, which gave you about 15% layer 2 overhead that also counts against your rated speed.
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call it what you will, i'd rather have slower if it was actually cheaper.... and in relation to speed, NOT just 5 bucks cheaper for 5mbit vs 30... which is a fucking sham.
when we signed up years ago, we signed up for 3mbit speed. that's all we needed then, it's still all we need today. yet we went from $29 for 3mbit to somehow paying $69 for 30 (but only getting 15) without ever changing or upgrading anything. and that's the cheapest thing they have. WE WANT OUR SLOWER, CHEAPER SPEED BACK, CHARTER. FUCK YOU
DSL is fine (Score:3)
I had the same problem. AT&T refused to give me DSL on my AT&T copper line in CA because they had uverse and insisted on that or nothing. So I buy via a 3rd party provider, using AT&T's DSLAM and infrastucture, and actually pay less than AT&T would have charged me for DSL.
The root problem is that the ISPs in USA want to sell their non-ISP services, and price the services accordingly. E.G. Cable + internet is just a few dollars more than internet only.
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The root problem is that the ISPs in USA want to sell their non-ISP services, and price the services accordingly. E.G. Cable + internet is just a few dollars more than internet only.
Pretty much because the physical work is the same whether you cable cable only, cable+internet, or internet only. The same ground lines are used, the same data centers, the same infrastructure. The only thing that changes is you get a cable modem with cable internet, there's a bit more bandwidth usage, and they get to lock you in with more control.
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... relying on PPP for authentication, which gave you about 15% layer 2 overhead that also counts against your rated speed.
FWIW, not all DSL providers use PPPoE. At least not here in Canada.
Re: DSL shouldn't be considered broadband any mor (Score:1)
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Funnily, back in 1998, I had cable; I had a lot of lag playing Quake3, so I switched to DSL and actually got better results. Of course, that was almost 20 years ago
It may even still be true now, but it was DEFINITELY true back in the late 90s and early 2000s that cable had the bandwidth advantage, and DSL had the latency advantage. My download bandwidth is still pretty bad on DSL by broadband standards, but I still get 18ms pings to my game servers.
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DSL has always been slower than cable, the only reason anybody ever thought otherwise is because the telcos spread FUD about cable being a shared medium.
It was not FUD. 10-15 years ago it was a real problem for cable, especially for @Home which was pretty popular before they went bankrupt. DSL often WAS faster due to the build-out architecture of cable, and consumer demand was often underestimated, especially with no data caps. That problem has mostly been solved, so you don't hear about it much anymore.
What they conveniently left out was the fact that the backbone is shared no matter what media is used,
Of course the backbone was shared, but backbone was not the limiting factor in either Cable or DSL... back then. In cable's case, the local neighborhood n
Re:DSL shouldn't be considered broadband any more. (Score:5, Informative)
It's not optimal but really it ain't terrible either. I have 50Mbps cable at my house, but I go over to my parents at least every other weekend and they live further out - 3Mbps DSL is the best available in their area (I'm surprised they even have that available).
Honestly - if I were to download a file, it obviously goes a lot slower, but as far as just browsing the web and even watching Youtube videos on their Roku: The difference isn't even noticeable vs my connection at home.
Whether you want to call it "broadband" or not, DSL is still a perfectly functional and usable Internet connection (unlike dial-up where just browsing the web is slow to the point of being unusable).
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I've had horrible experiences with Comcast in the long past, but over the last decade or so, their internet service has been top notch. I recently upgraded from 25Mbs to 75Mbs (and actually am getting 90Mbs). Even dealing with their internet departments on the phone has been pretty easy, and they upped their "caps" from 300GB to 1TB last month.
Verizon doesn't service my area, and AT&T base speeds are terrible, and while they've told me I can get fiber, it's brand new and untested in my area.... I have
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I had Comcast internet for 2 years in NJ. Technically, it worked great. But wait until you want to cancel because you're moving out; that part is a PITA. Also, if you used a debit card for payments, make sure to cancel it so they don't continue to try billing you; they're infamous for that.
Cancelling service (Score:2)
The only effective way to cancel is to go into one of their service centres, with any rented kit you have to return. Tell them you moving in with a friend that already has service, for a few months while you look for a new place. That's stops the can-we-transfer-your-account script.
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I didn't have to go to those lengths, I just called them up. But they sure kept me on the phone for a long time, and it took two separate calls for some BS reason I don't remember now. Somehow, moving out of the area to a place with no Comcrap service isn't enough to make things quick and easy.
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Comcast, aside from the industry standard 12 month agreement then threaten to quit to renew rates for 12 months billing system, hasn't been horrible for me. I get stuck with basic cable to get the low rate on internet and then use an antenna to get local stations anyway. I'd love to go to AT&T for their fiber and speeds, but I don't want to be fucking spied upon. The only way their rates are competitive is if you accept spying and extra ads and that's not competitive in my book. They also use their own
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Comcast TV, on the other hand, I've never had more problems with a company than them. Absolutely horrible, horrible customer service, and I'm sorry, but a $20 credit on my bill doesn't make up for a missed appointment when I took the day off from work, but their internet service has been great (in my case).
I wonder if they're feeling the pinch. I've noticed a lot of commercials on TV recently from Comcast telling me how important they consider it to be to make appointment times.
I've always had bad service calling into Comcast phone centers. The people you get there are not high quality, but it's worse than that, they're forbidden from doing certain checks unless the call is coming from a Comcast rep in the field. Recently I added HBO to my cable TV, but my Tivo wasn't picking it up. (Tivo's are always a probl
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Yeah, pretty much. Unless they put big money into large-scale VDSL2 rollouts (which needs short line lengths and even then barely matches cable in terms of throughput), copper phone line methods of delivery are fast becoming obsolete. Cable still has some life left in it. But eventually we will need proper fibre rollouts.
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Broadband refers to the bandwidth, not the technology. As of January 2015, the FCC defines "Broadband" as a minimum of 25/3 Mbps. Prior to then it was 4/1 Mbps.
There are technology efforts to boost DSL speed to Gigabit. Personally, I look forward to that as my cable provider needs a bit of competition.
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Which makes my DSL broadband (45/5 Mbps).
I suppose I should be glad I have this alternative to the cable giant.
I might add that for my purposes this is more than I need about 95% of the time. The uptime beats the crap out of the cable giant.
Their customer service and pricing are as bad though.
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Of course the companies that rely heavily on DSL lost customers to faster connections.
Not just that:
- AT&T tried to migrate their DSL customers to their next generation "U-verse" fiber-to-the-curb technology - but only with new contract terms of service, "triple-play" bundling, tarbaby can't-go-back contracts, no third-party equipment available, a special locally-powered (i.e. phone out in power failure) long-reach box at my slightly-longer-than-standard distance from the fiber-copper transition
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AT&T tried to migrate their DSL customers to their next generation "U-verse" fiber-to-the-curb technology ...
If you're forced to move to a new service anyhow (incurring the extra expense, outages, hassle, etc. of a move), it's a good time to examine the competitive landscape and see if a change to a different carrier now makes sense.
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DSL is faster than Comcast in my city.
I got 100 megabit down / 25 megabit up VDSL2
VDSL is soon going to G.Fast
G.fast over copper = gigabit dsl
G.fast has already rolled out in Europe in few cities as it was recently standardized after several draft versions.
VDSL2 is now slowly upgrading to VDSL2+ to give 100-500 megabit dsl
but im happy with 100 megabit dsl... Comcast in my town don't even offer half of that.
and DSL is unlimited with free newsgroups access unfiltered here.
my usage just from 1 pc on lan from d
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Only if you can throw a rock out your window and hit the DSLAM, are you going to get gigabit speeds over DSL. In a realistic scenario, even the best-case is less than half that... data rates of 500 Mbit/s up to 100m from the DSLAM.
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broadband
(ËbrÉ"ËdËOEbænd)
n
(Telecommunications) a transmission technique using a wide range of frequencies that enables messages to be sent simultaneously, used in fast internet connections. See also baseband
When DSL stops using multiple frequencies, you can stop calling it broadband. And don't forget that Ethernet is baseband, no matter how fast or slow it may be. /. used to have a technical audience... I guess this place is all but abandoned, now.
No broadband competition where I live (Score:3)
.
It's Information Highway robbery!
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Same thing here. Charter has been a pretty good company (if you aren't trying to get a cable card) but I'd still like options.
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Re:No broadband competition where I live (Score:4, Insightful)
We need the government to build the infrastructure once, and then lease capacity to any ISP.
The government, or a commercial "last mile" provider, wires the area, then leases it out.
Re:No broadband competition where I live (Score:5, Insightful)
Last mile is the problem. Last mile brought back to an aggregation point (COLO Facility), where MANY vendors vie for customers would SOLVE just about every problem we have with regulation and franchise agreements (government granted monopolies).
Imagine for a second, that the municipality owned that last mile, and leased it based on the customer/subscriber and the Vendor having a contract for service. Customer could order Comcast, Verizon, Charter, Netflix/Hulu, HBOnly or whatever . It might bring in the a la carte CATV we've all been wanting. I ONLY want ESPN and News, I don't want the 85 Shopping channels that you currently offer, unless you PAY me to take them.
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Okay:
* Network build-out goes slower, and is even more strictly limited to those politically and financially influential areas.
* Your city goes into bond debt, which doubles the cost, and raises taxes to fund what build-out they do.
* Internet prices are higher, as the government insists on getting all their money back, up-front.
* Service is worse, as y
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Most of those issues CAN'T even possibly happen with a corporation, others won't because of the profit motive, etc. So you're just making a fool of yourself trying to hand-wave away those problems.
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* Network build-out goes slower, and is strictly limited to those financially influential areas, with some concessions to politically connected people. * Company overpays due to incompetence and make this up by overcharging, which doubles the cost. * Internet prices are higher, as the company needs to recoup quickly due to short attention span of markets. *
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Most of those issues CAN'T even possibly happen with a corporation,
They absolutely can, almost all of those issues you brought up CURRENTLY happen with Comcast, who in many areas has no competition. I love competition as a way to give the customer choice and find a company which fulfills their needs, but you can't have competition in local utilities; it makes no sense.
The gas and water lines running under major cities are notoriously over a century old, only getting replaced when they fail in spectacular fashion.
Good Lord, I wish ISP/network service in the US worked half as well as gas and water utilities do.
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The government, or a commercial "last mile" provider, wires the area, then leases it out.
No. The main expense is the trenching. The cost of the cable is trivial by comparison. A better solution is to trench once and install a 6" conduit between the street and the house. Then this conduit belongs to the homeowner, who can give anyone permission to run cable through it. A corporation or government should not own the conduit, just like they should not own my driveway.
The conduits along the streets should be at least 12" in diameter, and should be owned by the local government. Any bonded co
Re:No broadband competition where I live (Score:5, Interesting)
They also will pad their cable TV numbers by pricing Internet Only plans above Internet+TV plans. So to save money, you need to be counted as a cable TV subscriber even if you put the box in your closet and never plug it in.
I'm not in Comcast territory, but I'm not much better off. Time Warner Cable... I mean Charter is my only high-speed wired option.
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I'd give anything to have Time Warner as "my only high-speed wired option". They're the only ones offering $15/mo internet service to everyone (other providers have $10/mo service only for a few low-income families). When I moved-in here, I had the choice of $65/mo FIOS or $50/mo cable.
Now that the idiots who are supposed to be helping the public instead just let Charter buy Ti
still with cable (Score:2)
How does AT&T not go broke? (Score:2, Informative)
I called AT&T to consider their DSL against my cable company's attempt to hike prices a little. Usually, the sales department of any organization is exceptionally strong. Not AT&T.
Me: I'd like to sign up for service.
AT&T Guy: [Babbles on about service area something or email accounts or the AT&T web site for 2 minutes. Nothing to do with price or signing me up.]
(After getting tired of the script reading which has nothing do with what I want ...)
Me: "Stop right there. AT&T has a pric
Re:How does AT&T not go broke? (Score:4, Interesting)
How does AT&T stay in business?
Because, they pretty much own the Copper Cable Plant in the ground. Additionally, they really can't just "quit" copper, because all the old people with Landlines would freak out. They stay in business because the consequences of pulling out of COPPER landlines would be political suicide.
Re:How does AT&T not go broke? (Score:5, Interesting)
they really can't just "quit" copper, because all the old people with Landlines would freak out.
Which is why they have an army of sales people trying to switch everybody to "u-verse". Yes, it's copper for the "last mile". But then it switches to fiber at a curbside box.
Because DSL here sucks (Score:1)
Lack of investment in deploying DSL, the highest speeds I see advertised are "up-to" 40mbps. Meanwhile on cable my 150mbps package tests out to 170-180mbps every time I test it.
Using myself as an example (Score:1)
It *may* depend on the timeframe measured. I change between cable & Verizon dsl or fios depending on price. Once one gets too pricey (always do) at end of a year long contract I switch to the cheaper one(s) until they rise in price & I do it again.
* I'm sure this is done in waves by many people probably at the time I do it for the same reasons, money/cost - & this pattern of MINE? It's being reflected in the article above via the 2 ISP/BSP providers I do this with every year too.
(I say this sinc
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I change between cable & Verizon dsl or fios depending on price.
I don't believe you. When you subscribe to FiOS; they disconnect your copper and have no way of going back to it. It is *extremely* difficult to keep copper unless you are a business, or have some major legitimate reason for keeping copper. In which case; they will charge you for an extra line.
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I change between cable & Verizon dsl or fios depending on price.
I don't believe you. When you subscribe to FiOS; they disconnect your copper and have no way of going back to it. It is *extremely* difficult to keep copper unless you are a business, or have some major legitimate reason for keeping copper. In which case; they will charge you for an extra line.
Huh? Oh you mean for the phone line... Yea, if Verizon/Frontier is your LEC and they have installed FIOS and you didn't have another cable option, then you are up the optical creek. But I dare say that's not very common. I know of new construction areas where this is true, where they never put in copper, and they are stuck with one option, but this is not very common around here.
At my home, they installed FIOS about 10 years ago. They left the TWC copper connection dangling and just hooked up the FIOS ON
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Going between cable and FiOS isn't an issue...move the coax from one to the other. They shouldn't have done anything to TWC's copper; as that's technically owned by TWC and they legally can
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It *may* depend on the timeframe measured. I change between cable & Verizon dsl or fios depending on price. Once one gets too pricey (always do) at end of a year long contract I switch to the cheaper one(s) until they rise in price & I do it again.
This is a pretty good idea,and sometimes you don't need to actually quit to get a lower price. Just threatening to quit can sometimes put you back on their promotional offer or some other deal.
Be a new customer or they don't care about you (Score:1)
I was on Verizon Fios for 10 years ... They jacked my rate up to $83/month for internet only at 10/10mb ... They offer Triple play with 50/50 to new customers at $59.99, but they couldn't offer me jack because I'm not a new customer. Now I'm not their customer at all.
Now I've got Cox (cable) for $39.99 15/5 and I'm receiving offers from Verizon 2-3 times a week. Higher speeds available ... The base speed is fast enough for my needs.
If only Verizon 1) respected/valued their current / long-time custo
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I'm only paying $15 more than I was 6 years ago. I've gone from 25/25 to 35/35 to 75/75; I've gone from the lowest HD package to the largest HD package with Starz and HBO completer.
Ok...the TV hardware got more expensive when I added more TVs...but even then I was able to negotiate.
You just never learned how to deal with these people. You're one of those "they're not offering it to me so I gues
Att capped bandwidth, and then lost customers, duh (Score:3)
I didn't want to pay 30 dollars a month for an extra service that I won't use, so ironically I had to call up the TV provider, and subscribe to their internet only plan, for cheaper than AT&T.
They tried forcing their customers to pay for their dumb mistake of acquiring Direct TV, and it didn't work.
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AT&T here is cheaper than Comcast for me. And the advantage that it's not Comcast.
Verizon is probably going to lose me to Comcast. (Score:2)
As much as I don't want to -- after almost 20 years of being on Verizon DSL, I'm going to have to switch to "xfinity".
I can only get ~3Mbit via DSL, due to my distance from the CO, combined with Verizon's aging equipment (circa 1992!) in my semi-rural location. There are people in all directions about 10 miles away from me that have FIOS as an option, which I'd gladly pay more for, but Verizon (in a surprise bit of candor) has told me that we'll "never get" FIOS at our location.
I can pay about the same for
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I've got some very sad news for you.
When the real high speed super wifi finally comes out, there will be rumors of development on something even faster and the phone companies will wait, and wait, and forever wait for the next even faster technology.
As it is, fiber solves every known bandwidth issue for all residential connections. At 100 mbps you are unlikely to need to move faster for the foreseeable future, at 1 gbps a 5400 rpm hard drive is probably going to start having trouble keeping up. And fiber ca
Pay TV subs drop 665,000 in 2nd quarter (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.leichtmanresearch.c... [leichtmanresearch.com]
Maybe many those slow DSL and satellite video subscribers moved to cable companies to get the speed they need for streaming video entertainment.
Meanwhile in other countries... (Score:2)
Around here the cable company is losing customers hand over fist to the telco.
Those talking about how cable is a superior technology to DSL don't know what they're talking about. What makes either technology superior or inferior is the implementation, both technologies are capable of good solid high speeds if implemented right. Around here that means DSL is the way to go, the cable company advertises speeds they can't possibly provide due to oversubscribed nodes and lack of infrastructure upgrades, while th
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Those talking about how cable is a superior technology to DSL don't know what they're talking about. What makes either technology superior or inferior is the implementation, both technologies are capable of good solid high speeds if implemented right.
There is an inherent problem with twisted pair. If your local DSL loop is over 2.5 km, you will never get over 5 Mbps. The average US local loop is 4+ km.
It is true that if your DSL loop is shorter, say 600m, VDSL2 can get you 100 Mbps, and if it is crazy sh
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I could just as easily say there's an inherent problem with coax that if you have too many subscribers on a node you'll never get full speeds.
The issue is that twisted pair has less congestion as it's not a shared medium and unlike DSL with DSLAMs out in the community, coax only has a few nodes in central locations.
I think you completely ignored my sentence about implementation. If implemented correctly DSL can do great speeds. The telco here has spent the last decade moving DSLAMs out in to the field close
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Who gives a shit how congested it is if you're getting 5.0/0.5 on twisted pair DSL and 250/20 on coax?
DSL: Oh! Coax is so congested! Boo hoo! It'll only take me a day and a half to download this!
Cable: Oh crap! I'm so congested! It's going to take me 20 minutes to download this!
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Who cares how far from the CO you are if you get 100/25 on DSL and 10/2 on coax?
Cable! Oh! DSL is so distance limited! Boo hoo! It'll only take me a day and a half to download this!
DSL: Oh crap! I'm so distance limited! It's going to take me 20 minutes to download this!
You continue to completely ignore implementation. Your complaints have zero to do with the underlying technology, and everything to do with how it's implemented. Just because the cable company got it right in your location while the telco scr
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You're ignoring the original point that, in general, the cablecos are delivering more of what people want and doing better than the telcos.
The arguments against the cableco model are primarily technical trivialities that generally make zero real difference to those actually using the technology.
Granted, YES, there ARE situations where local loops are so badly oversold by cablecos that their performance degrades. But that isn't the general use case.
Now, ARE there areas where the telcos are getting it right?
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And AGAIN you're completely ignoring the central point of the argument.
You're extrapolating your one small corner of the planet and trying to say that the rest of the world is the same, it's not.
Yes there ARE situations where DSL is done wrong, but that isn't the general use case where I am. I'm even willing to grant you the concept that there may be a cable company somewhere that's implemented their system right, though I've never seen it.
But your claim that it's inherent to the technology and that Cable h
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I didn't say cable was universally superior to DSL.
I essentially said that, in the US, whether it's technologically superior or not, from a customer standpoint, cable is the superior product.
But hey, keep trying to put words in my mouth...
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So you ignored not only the content of my post, but the very subject line you're replying to... I know it's considered bad form on slashdot to read articles, but you could at least get as far as the subject line before you reply....
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In the USA Cable outsells DSL, so in the USA it appears that the cable companies are doing a better job delivering on their promises. However in the rest of the OECD countries DSL outsells cable by a large margin with very few exceptions.
American Telcos have screwed up, that's not the technology's fault, it's the companies' fault for how they implemented it.
People don't flock to DSL because it's slower, they flock to it because it's faster. But as I said before, it's all business decisions, any company can
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However in the rest of the OECD countries DSL outsells cable by a large margin with very few exceptions.
American Telcos have screwed up, that's not the technology's fault, it's the companies' fault for how they implemented it.
My theory is that in the US, earlier adoption of digital telephony switching allowed earlier consolidation of telephone central offices, thus longer local loops (which didn't matter for telephony).
In other countries, the consolidation of central offices was delayed for some reason, whi
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Basically American Telcos, while the government was still bribing them to increase internet speeds, chose to minimize their investment in infrastructure to support future generations of technology. And, considering the size of the American telco infrastructure, it's kind of understandable. That's a LOT of area to cover, and it's expensive as fuck.
Still, they took the money, and then a bunch of execs got big fat bonuses.
Now, they still have the same shitty, old, worn out infrastructure, it's just a decade
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And, generally, other countries don't generally have the sheer landmass that the US does. That's why the push for CO consolidation wasn't felt as greatly as it was here. This happenstance was lucky in that it left most of these countries as prime targets for truly high speed DSL implementation.
I hate to break it to you, the country I'm talking about here is Canada, more landmass and less population density than the USA... Australia also has tons of landmass and low population density and they also have good DSL service.
The American Telcos placed short term finances ahead of long term success, it's not a technology problem, it isn't even really an infrastructure problem, it's a business decision problem.
The main Telco here was skewered by investors when they said they were going to re-invest profi
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More landmass sure. But where's most of the population concentrated in Canada?
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The same could be said of the USA, all concentrated on the coasts.
Face it, the problem in the USA has nothing to do with size of the country, or population density, it has to do with the Telcos not looking past their quarterly earnings report.
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Sorry, that reason doesn't work.
COs everywhere are spread out and serve huge geographic areas. What people are ignoring is that there's no reason that the DSLAM has to be in the CO, in many cases they aren't.
Where I live extremely few DSL customers are served from the CO, sure there are some DSLAMs in the COs, but most of the DSLAMs are out in the field. It's not that these other telcos didn't consolidate COs, it's that they've spent the money since to get the DSLAMs out in the field closer to the customers
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Comcast is in the TV business, selling you to the premium programming providers.
Don't forget, Comcast owns 100% of NBC and a large portion of cable TV channels.
They're also in the movie business; as they own a number of studios as a result of Universal ownership
They're also in the sports business, as CSN has an unholy amount of agreements and prior to the agreement with the FCC over buying NBC/Universal, they were distributing them by fiber. Why? They have to negotiate carriage if it's uplinked by satellite. (FCC may have changed this, I haven't kept up.)
They own a chunk of Hulu
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My mother in a small town could only get 1Mbps DSL. Which was much preferrable to her dialup or a spotty signal from a neighbor (with permission). No other options available without going to cable which was very overpriced and would require extra installation costs. But 1Mbps is plenty for just browsing the web.
Cable companies are happy with Internet service... (Score:2)
Stupid phone companies! They could had taken over too, but they decided to give up because it is too costly. :(
Frontier Doesn't Seem to Want to Be In The Busines (Score:1)
They just have the biggest pipe right now (Score:1)