'We Need a Broadband Internet Pricing Equivalent of Nutrition Labels' (slate.com) 94
An anonymous reader shares an article that's part of the Future Agenda, a series from Slate in which experts suggest specific, forward-looking actions the new Biden administration should implement. Here's an excerpt: Consumers in the U.S. face an infuriating lack of transparency when it comes to purchasing broadband services. Bills are convoluted, featuring complex pricing schemes. Roughly 7 in 10 U.S. adults surveyed by Consumer Reports who have used a cable, internet, or phone service provider in the past two years said they experienced unexpected or hidden fees. Unsurprisingly, 96 percent of those who had experienced hidden fees found them annoying. (To the other 4 percent: Are you OK?) We've been here before. In 1990, a similar crisis of consumer confidence prompted one Cabinet secretary to decry that "as consumers shop they encounter confusion and frustration." He said the market had become "a Tower of Babel, and consumers need to be linguists, scientists and mind readers to understand the many labels they see." While this diagnosis could apply almost word-for-word to today's broadband market, then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis W. Sullivan was talking about the grocery store. The solution then offers a ready-made formula for how the incoming Biden administration can help consumers now: add a label.
Before regulatory changes in the late 1980s and early 1990s culminating in the 1994 adoption of the now-iconic Nutrition Facts panel, consumers were faced with a variety of hard-to-understand food labels peddling often-misleading information. While labels were required to list calories, serving sizes, and other nutritional information, including such a label was voluntary except when a company made nutritional claims about a food (such as "low in fat" or "high in vitamins"), or a food contained added nutrients. Without standards for what nutritional claims actually meant, and with no uniform nutrition label with which to compare products, consumers were left to decipher labels that were, according to the nonprofit Institute of Medicine, "at best, confusing and, at worst, deceptive economically and potentially harmful." Today, it's difficult to imagine not having the ability to read straightforward facts about the nutrition content of our food and comparison shop between competing products.
The same could be true for broadband. As far back as 2010, our organization has been advocating for the adoption of a broadband nutrition label. In fact, labeling is such a common-sense measure that it has been adopted in the broadband context before. In 2016, the FCC and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau together rolled out their version of the "broadband nutrition label." "Broadband Facts" resembles Nutrition Facts, emulating a disclosure method the American public is already familiar with. It breaks down a plan's cost and performance, including all additional fees and taxes, so that people don't have to dig through complicated terms of service and contracts to find simple information.
Before regulatory changes in the late 1980s and early 1990s culminating in the 1994 adoption of the now-iconic Nutrition Facts panel, consumers were faced with a variety of hard-to-understand food labels peddling often-misleading information. While labels were required to list calories, serving sizes, and other nutritional information, including such a label was voluntary except when a company made nutritional claims about a food (such as "low in fat" or "high in vitamins"), or a food contained added nutrients. Without standards for what nutritional claims actually meant, and with no uniform nutrition label with which to compare products, consumers were left to decipher labels that were, according to the nonprofit Institute of Medicine, "at best, confusing and, at worst, deceptive economically and potentially harmful." Today, it's difficult to imagine not having the ability to read straightforward facts about the nutrition content of our food and comparison shop between competing products.
The same could be true for broadband. As far back as 2010, our organization has been advocating for the adoption of a broadband nutrition label. In fact, labeling is such a common-sense measure that it has been adopted in the broadband context before. In 2016, the FCC and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau together rolled out their version of the "broadband nutrition label." "Broadband Facts" resembles Nutrition Facts, emulating a disclosure method the American public is already familiar with. It breaks down a plan's cost and performance, including all additional fees and taxes, so that people don't have to dig through complicated terms of service and contracts to find simple information.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
After they got a law allowing them to yell "UNLIMITED" for a 5GB 3G-speed cell phone plan, you can see where this got confusing....
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Well, it's better off than letting "YOU!" repeat...
I don't really think of cell phone data (Score:2)
Still if it covers that I guess it could be useful.
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Who in the America has enough options to make something like this worthwhile?
Soon it will be everyone in range of StarLink.
Which is everybody.
We should either break up the telecom companies again
That solves nothing. Breaking up AT&T broke up a national monopoly. The problem with ISPs is that they are local monopolies. It doesn't matter to me if there is another ISP in my state or even on the other side of town. I need another option on my street.
make Internet a public utility freely available to all homes.
Or, the first time a street is trenched, lay a 12-inch publicly owned PVC conduit. Then let any bonded contractor pull wire through it. It can be used for Internet, power, and gas.
Si
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Should really go all the way. The internet impacts every single other business now, the more it costs, the more a tax on other businesses it becomes, ruthlessly exploited to deliver as little as possible, whilst charging as much tax as possible, the more it should be provided by government.
It should not be about the internet making money but about everyone else on it making money and the service to be provided as efficiently as possible, to maximise use and to advantage all businesses and individuals on it
Re: Why? (Score:2)
There was plenty of local monopoly going on with telecom too (when prices plummeted leading to the US had the lowest telecom prices in the world (90s), it's not because they all ran their own lines, it's because the line holder was forced to share.
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Didn't they force the telecoms to lease access for a reasonable rate when they broke them up?
Yes. Which led to plenty of foot-dragging, obstruction, and lawsuits.
Requiring competitors to "help" each other by being "reasonable" is no substitute for real competition.
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Only to start falling behind when a new type of telecom became the hotness and didn't have similar rules. You can't really have "real" competition when each house needs to be individually wired. The cost overhead of competition outstrips the competition savings. The wires themselves could be taken over with eminent domain maybe, but it doesn't seem obvious to me that the city/state will effectively manage all of the wires and upgr
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Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is for a service like this you can't just boil it down to a price figure... You end up with a race to the bottom, with customers flocking to the cheapest provider, and providers cutting corners because only price is considered.
In places where there is competition, the providers offering the cheapest and poorest quality service tend to be the most widely used. They will massively over subscribe the service, its slow and unreliable, there are very few if any value-adds, routing is poor, equipment provided by the isp is poor quality, support services are poor or nonexistent.
Eventually the providers that were providing a decent service end up going out of business because they had too few customers.
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In places where there is competition, the providers offering the cheapest and poorest quality service tend to be the most widely used. They will massively over subscribe the service, its slow and unreliable, there are very few if any value-adds, routing is poor, equipment provided by the isp is poor quality, support services are poor or nonexistent.
There are no monopolies on most European markets, and yet it appears that the quality of service is not markedly worse than what you get in North America. In fact, In fact, as companies try to optimize their benefits, a monopoly will be able to provide the bad service you describe and get away with it. If a company in a competitive market provides bad service to its clients, they will just change providers.
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Depends just how bad the service is, and whether users notice.
Take latency for example, most users probably won't notice if their provider has poor peering causing high latency. Yet high latency is a big problem for people trying to play games and a few other latency sensitive operations.
Re: Why? (Score:2)
Not seeing the problem with cheap services (Score:2)
I'm not seeing the problem with the situation you describe. If you want the cheapest provider, you accept poor service and oversubscribed capacity. If you value a higher quality of service, with perhaps a guaranteed minimum throughput, then you need to be willing to pay a higher price.
Where I am, we have 3-4 potential providers. Because I am WFH and anyway a nerd who uses a lot of bandwith, I am with probably the most expensive provider. Because I know they have good support, and my bandwidth is very nearly
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Problem is the higher quality service is a niche that you or I might be willing to pay more for, but most people will just go for the cheapest.
Ends up with the premium provider having too few customers and going out of business.
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America is close to that with $40-a-line family plans.
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Cricket has an unlimited 5-line plan for $125 ($25/line). It has been shockingly difficult to get friends and family interested in switching to something that doesn't advertise on television though.
I know a real good label (Score:1)
Common carrier. Let's start there
I miss the old days of... (Score:5, Insightful)
...Last mile unbundling.
Its amazing how everyone in our beloved government continues to play stupid and ignore that many dont have a second choice for ISP.
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It's not "everyone" in our government playing stupid though, that classification was and is a Republican initiative and subject to much criticism.
wait wait wait (Score:2)
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No, only less so than they were previously.
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No, I believe they're saying the US economy has reached a point where the idea of free markets and true consumer choices no longer works, because corporations fake about anything and lie about everything in the name of profit. So much that consumers want to be herded and driven towards the good stuff with pretty labels and socialist ideas.
Perhaps everyone has forgotten how not to buy what they do not want, or perhaps the need for Internet access has become more precious than the need for a free economy or e
The Problem isn't labeling (Score:2)
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"The problem with internet service in the us isn't labeling".
Correct. The problem is that Comcast owns 40% of the broadband business in the US (and they're thieves). Correcting their disingenuous marketing practice and erroneous billing "errors" will fix a great majority of this issue.
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Re: The Problem isn't labeling (Score:2)
It isnâ(TM)t that hard to fix. You just deploy a rate commission like for electric power. It doesnâ(TM)t eliminate the monopoly abuse game altogether but does mitigate worst effects.
Even simpler... (Score:5, Interesting)
Really, they don't need anything nearly so extensive as a nutrition label. It really needs three things:
1) The advertised price should BE the price... as in the full price, inclusive of all taxes, surcharges, fees, and any and every thing else. If AT&T wants to break the taxes and such out in a detailed bill to try to get me pissed off at the government instead of them, fine. But if the advertised price says $49.99/month, what is billed to me should be EXACTLY $49.99, no more, no less, no exceptions. (Really, this should be the law for all goods, products, or services of any kind with, again, no exceptions.)
2) No "up to" speeds without the lower limit advertised right next to it. If there is only one speed on the ad, like 100Mbps or whatnot, that needs to be the absolute lower limit of my service, below which my bandwidth will NEVER drop. If they want to do "up to" advertising of, say, 1Gbps the "up to" must be the burst rate. And there needs to be a "800Mbps guaranteed minimum" right next to it on the ad.
3) All terms and conditions need to be upfront and in clear and plain (human-readable, not lawyerese) English.
There are a few other things that need to happen too. Data caps and throttling need to be banned. Any ISP monitoring or shaping of traffic needs to be banned as well... absolute true net neutrality. You're just a dumb pipe. Piss off about how I use it. Severability and arbitration need to be banned (From all contracts actually, not just ISP T&Cs.)... if you try to pull a fast one and slip in an illegal clause, that act of bad faith on your part wipes out any obligation that I have to you. And any changes to the T&Cs need mutual affirmative consent, none of that "If you don't refuse this change in 30-days, your consent is assumed." crap. But none of that is related to the ads themselves.
not a clue (Score:2)
EVERY connection is throttled to some degree by the very nature of the algorithms inherent in TCP/IP
everywhere has data caps its explained by the speed of your connection or contract, this is normal outside of the USA to put it in the contract.
nowhere is just a dumb pipe that stopped being the case a long time ago... they monitor the traffic because most of the time they have legal obligations to do some sort of monitoring even if it's for "quality" they measure the flows at the very least.
John Jones
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Data caps don't exist for landline Internet here - only for mobile. Even for that, once you go over the limit you are not charged more - just your speed is reduced to something like 128kbps until the next month.
All data is treated equally and the only prioritization that is done is based on the ToS field in the IP packets or something like this. i.e. type of traffic, NOT origin of traffic.
Traffic is being monitored only for
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These things however are symptoms born out of the lack of competition you guys have in the US. The focus should be ensuring healthy competitive market in all places. This type of BS won't fly once you have competing (and I mean really competing, not just fronts) providers.
Every provider should be allowed access to poles and underground passages for cables OR lease them with equal conditions.
The closest thing you might have to this is the "municipality networks" that are popping up
Your government should already be providing this (Score:2, Informative)
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1) Can't be done. AT&T provides service in hundreds if not thousands of different local jurisdictions, each with their own unique taxes, mandated surcharges, and fees.
sure they can. Just charge one price and let the customers in the less taxed jurisdictions subsidize those in the more heavily taxed regions. They have no problem figuring out which bills to tack those charges to as it is, so any inability to be able to calculate the sum total of fees and taxes they should collect is only a failure of their own bookkeeping.
In any case, most of those line items are not taxes, but BS like "franchise fees" and "CEO yacht payment surcharge" that the companies add on their ow
Re:Your government should already be providing thi (Score:4, Interesting)
1) Can't be done. AT&T provides service in hundreds if not thousands of different local jurisdictions, each with their own unique taxes, mandated surcharges, and fees. Requiring AT&T to provide service at a single advertised price of $49.99 means someone in a jurisdiction where there's $20 of taxes and fees is actually paying $29.99, while someone in a jurisdiction where there's $10 of taxes and fees is paying $39.99 for the same service.
Oh, you mean they will be forced to advertise locally instead of nationally. No big deal there.
2) A lot of people don't seem to understand how cable Internet service works. You're not getting dedicated bandwidth. If you were, your monthly bill would be about two orders of magnitude higher than it is (a 43 Mbps T3 is about $3000/mo, a 155 Mbps OC3 is about $10k-$15k per month).
If they are physically incapable of providing the bandwidth they sell, then they are committing fraud. They get around this by using "up to". Basically, you are saying it is OK to sell 100 people in a neighborhood "up to 400 Mbps" and actually be able to provide 400 Mbps to the total group meaning the only way one can get 400Mbps is if everyone else is off line completely. You are literally defending fraud.
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You can whine all you want. But if we go by your definition, we'd all be getting 1mbps.
If you were correct, someone would have sued them AND won. It's been the norm for over 2 decades. It's stated in the contract (which you didn't read). So stop pretending you're a lawyer. Shared bandwidth is the reason you get gigabit speeds.
Also, the fact that most people can't be bothered to plug stuff into their router and want only WIFI is another reason you get gigabit: wifi can't do gigabit. They're not lying: you DO
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Also, the fact that most people can't be bothered to plug stuff into their router and want only WIFI is another reason you get gigabit: wifi can't do gigabit
802.11ax would like to have a word with you.
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Oh yes the 802.11ax enabled router provided by your ISP. Get real.
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If you were correct, someone would have sued them AND won.
That is why they word it as "up to 400Mbps". Don't guarantee the 400Mbps. They don't even guarantee 1Mbps.
It's stated in the contract (which you didn't read).
See I did read the contract.
Shared bandwidth is the reason you get gigabit speeds.
No. It is why we are sold gigabit speed and
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Shared bandwidth is the reason you get gigabit speeds.
No. It is why we are sold gigabit speed and only get speeds in the low hundred Mbps range.
And you'd prefer to be sold 1 Mbps and be guaranteed to always get it?
FWIW, I have an SLA that guarantees my bandwidth. It's nominally 100 Mbps symmetric, though the contract only guarantees that at any given moment I'll get at least 85% of that -- and says that for every minute the SLA is not met, I get 8 minutes of free service. Is that the kind of contract you'd like to have? If so you can buy it.
Would you like to guess what my connection costs per month?
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But that is how networking works in general.
I have a 24 port switch at home. All ports have gigabit connectors, but the fabric is less than 24gbits. It is very unlikely to have all ports at 100% saturation for any meaningful length of time.
Take CDMA for example. The entire reason we switched from TDMA 2G GSM networks was lack of utilization. If the cell tower has 100 phones connected, it should not divide the time equally, and give everyone a miserable 56kbit line. Most phones stay idle most of the time.
Sim
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ban forced hardware rent (if you must use there hardware then that price must be part of the basic price) (and you can use your own then have an added discount for owning your own)
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Then, statistically, they ought to be able to make a statement along the lines of "95% of the time*, your bandwidth will be >= X". At the very least, the FCC (or CFPB, or whoever) should be able to enforce the following: you cannot advertise the "Up To" speed unless you can actually achieve that at least some significant percentage of the time.* Even better I would like
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Minimum speeds are a tricky thing to measure, they depend on what server you are measuring from as much as anything. Also they ignore minimum latency and the variability of latency, which is an issue I had many years ago.
In the UK all ISPs are required to advertise the average speed their users get, measured independently on undisclosed consumer's lines. They are also required to tell you what your line is capable of (DSL often can't reach the maximum theoretical speed).
That's a reasonable way of doing thin
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This.
Do note that this is a general problem in the US. Basically every shop you walk into has fake prices. $2.99 - but actually you pay $3.24 because they neglected to tell you about the sales tax. Or restaurants: Go to a restaurant nearly anywhere else, and the menu price is what you actually pay. Not 20% extra, because the restaurant doesn't pay it's personnel proper wag
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It's really not that simple.
2) Guaranteeing a lower limit is very difficult. Consider roads. Can the government or any operator guarantee traffic to flow at a minimum speed? They can set a maximum speed and enforce it, but how to do guarantee a minimum speed? If there's too much traffic, congestion, accidents, closures for repairs, erratic users/drivers...
3) Agree that terms and conditions for sure need to be in plain text. But I think you have a tension when you say you want guaranteed minimums, but then w
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It is difficult to know what the price is, or even what you are buying for whatever you are charged. These are called "deals", which appear to be designed to confuse the customer as far as is possible. I have no doubt a "deal" could be devised which complies with all these stringent requirements, but still bamboozles the customer, because of how people are encouraged to interpret the terms of the "deal". You have to bear in mind that the average consumer is up against professionals in the matter of advertis
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The US Supreme Court just took the case of the voting discrepancies. They usually don’t take cases unless the lower courts got it wrong, which means there’s a good chance many fraudulent votes will be thrown out and Trump will be re-elected.
I think you've gotten two cases mixed up. This is not a certiorari situation. The Supreme Court already denied certiorari to the only case that came up from lower courts, apparently with a 9-0 decision against, in what has been termed as a resounding rebuke.
The case that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear is an original jurisdiction case, which means that the Supreme Court is the *only* court that *can* hear the case. There are no lower courts that got it wrong, because no lower court has heard the cas
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The US Supreme Court just took the case of the voting discrepancies. They usually don’t take cases unless the lower courts got it wrong, which means there’s a good chance many fraudulent votes will be thrown out and Trump will be re-elected.
I think you've gotten two cases mixed up. This is not a certiorari situation. The Supreme Court already denied certiorari to the only case that came up from lower courts, apparently with a 9-0 decision against, in what has been termed as a resounding rebuke.
The case that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear is an original jurisdiction case, which means that the Supreme Court is the *only* court that *can* hear the case. There are no lower courts that got it wrong, because no lower court has heard the case or would ever be eligible to do so unless the Supreme Court finds that the claim of original jurisdiction was incorrect for some procedural reason. No, the court isn't obligated to hear the case, but it would have been surprising if they had rejected it.
Because this is not an appeal, the court's decision to hear the case provides exactly zero hint of how the court will rule, beyond that they do not believe any other court should have jurisdiction and that they do believe that hearing the case quickly is important (for obvious reasons; in a few weeks, hearing the case would be moot).
Hold on just a second. I just realized that I was way too quick to believe what the GP said in the very first line of that post. I'm not sure where you read that they "just took the case", but according to the court's website [supremecourt.gov], they have *not* certified the case. They agreed to allow President Trump to join as a co-plaintiff. That's not the same thing. Short of a serious procedural reason not to do so, they just about had to agree to that. To the best of my ability to determine, the Supreme Court has *
Re: New Biden what? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, today is when they could decide to actually take up the case. Personally, as someone who lives in one of the 4 states targeted by this lawsuit, I feel like I should file a lawsuit against the Texas AG for trying to disenfranchise me.
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Too bad not enough people will feel that way to make a difference, in all likelihood.
Personally, I'm more interested in supporting an effort to take that list of 106 Republican representatives who filed amicus briefs in favor of hearing the case, hire 106 teams of private investigators to dig up every bit of dirt they possibly can on all of them, and launch multi-million-dollar PAC-based ad campaigns two weeks before their next election to bury all of them so badly that none of them can even be elected as
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A price list ? (Score:2)
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Find a better comparison (Score:1)
Food nutrition labels suck. "Serving size" is too arbitrary. "Nutrient density" is a better metric, or at least some kind of ratio or percentage.
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Food nutrition labels suck. "Serving size" is too arbitrary. "Nutrient density" is a better metric, or at least some kind of ratio or percentage.
We Nerds often speak in Analogy. Like Klingon, it's sometimes found to be used excessively, be technically inaccurate, and not all that impressive.
Unfortunately, our oldest dialect (Car) is becoming more and more difficult to speak accurately. It's not like "Crank it up, mash the clutch, and put it in gear" really applies in our future driverless electric world. That said, we should have probably stuck with it. Food we many know, but nutrition? Pfft. Yeah right.
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Well, it's not like advertising is any better. So many fast food places advertise their "meals", when they absolutely are not. You can't provide nutritionally empty fat, sugar, and carbs and call that a "meal". Often the calories, fat, and carbs are so insane that the average person wouldn't be able to eat much else that day to try to make up for the nutrients they missed.
A lot of fast food offerings clock in closer to dessert than they do to real food.
And then their actual desserts? Holy shit! Sonic has a
Without competition what use are labels? (Score:2)
Here's what we actually need: (Score:2)
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Simpler Than That (Score:4, Informative)
As I have noted in comments against previous articles [slashdot.org], if you went to buy gas for your car and the pump gave you 120 fluid ounces for every gallon that you *thought* you were buying (a gallon is 128 fluid ounces), then that gas station could be prosecuted under the "weights and measures" laws of your state. The same with groceries - if you went to a store and bought a 2lb pack of bacon but it only contained 1lb 12oz, you have a legitimate claim against the retailer, under the law, because they are advertising one thing but actually delivering another. It's like a "breach of contract".
Telco's get around this by advertising speeds of "up to" and then some fancy quoted number. Their contracts are written to absolve the telco of any obligation to meet the speeds they claim they can deliver. For the icing on the cake, they then include terms in their contracts that make it pretty much impossible for you to sue them for breaks in service or failure-to-perform. That, incidentally, is a textbook example of an unconscionable contract [legalmatch.com], but that would take us off topic.
There is a solution to this, of course. It's one that the telecommunications industry would absolutely *hate*, but it would also be relatively simple to implement:
Enact a law that says that whatever price-for-quoted speed the telco advertise, they are required by law to bill customers on a pro-rata basis, based on the average speed delivered across the billing period. In other words, say you're paying $80/month for gigabit ethernet, but on average you're only seeing 500Mb/s across December. Applying this suggested rule, your telco could only charge you $40 for your services in December, because they had failed to meet their contract.
Now, there's an important distinction we need to make if this starts to sound interesting, which is the difference between line speed and . Say you're paying for a gigabit download speed. You go to your modem's administration panel and check the actual line speed that you're getting over the physical link between your modem and the rack modem at your telco's nearest PoP (Point of Presence). You can see you're getting the full gigabit. You pay $80, right?
Well, no. That's because, thanks to Ajit Pai, the telco's are now permitted by law to "throttle" your services. In other words, even if you are paying for gigabit and even if the remote server you want to access has the capacity to give you a gigabit connection, your telco could throttle you to, say, a 256Mb maximum rate, just because they can.
Worse, thanks to Ajit Pai, they can do this without any obligation to notify you. They can do it and then charge you *more* money to unlock the extra bandwidth. This becomes particularly relevant if you want to stream say 4K video content from a provider that is a competitor to services offered by your telco. Thanks to Ajit Pai, your telco now has a legal right to degrade the service you get from the content provider you *want* (say a sports or movie channel) in the hope that you'll get so fed up of the poor picture quality or "hanging" frames that you'll switch to a service they provide...
Unfortunately, the broadband market is almost perfectly designed for abuse. Let's hope that Biden re-instates the Wheeler-era Net Neutrality provisions *and* tightens up the law on charging.
No you don't (Score:2)
You need consumer protection laws and a consumer advocacy ombudsman to royally screw companies who engage in even slightly misleading behaviour. You could learn a lot form countries like Australia where any asterisk attached to the word "Unlimited" results in multi-million dollar fines, as are prices listed as a result of bundling, or not advertising straight up that there's a hidden fee.
what grings my gears about ISPs (Score:3)
Once again it boils down to advertisers. (Score:2)
Telecom criminality (Score:1)
The telecom companies are basically criminals perpetrating constant fraud with their deceptive practices. They simply need to be much more tightly regulated, with teeth, like other oligopolies.
Incidentally, that's the final equilibrium state of breaking up AT&T in the 80s: losing what was good in a high integrity monopoly, such as quality research, ending up with a consolidated oligopoly of criminal rent-collectors.
Don't do a thing (Score:3)
Let these monopolistic dinosaurs fail. Broadband companies are just one example of the many that charge too much and provide lousy service. The government won't do a thing about it, at least not anything useful.
This is right out of the Elon Musk playbook - find an industry that is poorly run and provides shitty service and come up with a better way. He has done this with banking (PayPal), automobiles (Tesla), solar (Solar City) and most recently with broadband (Starlink). With Starlink he is simply going to leapfrog the physical cable internet providers. I suspect he will learn the lessons that Comcast and others have failed to learn, with regard to pricing and customer service. By the time these dinosaurs figure it out it will be too late.
With Starlink he is about to do something that has never been done before in the US - democratization of internet services regardless of location. Despite years of government promises to get the internet providers to toe the line and own up to their promises to build out rural internet, customers living there are left with embarrassing slow options.
Yes, Starlink is still in the early stages but many people have started posting videos on YouTube showing real world results and it is light years ahead of what they had previously. In some cases, the cost is even lower than what they were paying and the service quality is far better.
So long Comcast I hardly knew ya!
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Unfortunately you are 100% wrong here.
Starlink will never be able to handle any significant population density. It's not designed to. It will never have the bandwidth to compete in even a small city.
If you're out in the country where the bandwidth is low, Starlink might work out great for you. If you're in a city, you'd better hope you luck out and are one of the tiny percent of the people who will be able to use it.
Here's some light reading on the subject [arstechnica.com].
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Musk has stated that Starlink is not designed for densely packed urban areas. If you live in such a place then Starlink is not for you. But if you do live in a big city then chances are that you already have at least one choice for broadband internet. For people in rural areas their choices are often limited to legacy satellite internet (expensive, very slow, data caps, unreliable) or DSL (very slow, unreliable).
So Starlink is clearly not for everyone.
For people in big cities, 5G might be the better alterna
US Broadband sucks with a big "S" (Score:2)
the FCC needs to force all the internet providers to at least use a rational datacap.. WHICH IS NOT 1 TB WHEN EVERYONE"S STREAMING!!!! the minimum datacap should be like 3 TB. If you go over that pay overage. Normally I wouldn't want the Govt involved in that, because of the govt there is no competition for broadband, so they need to step in. Truthfully if the FCC had a sack, they would just get rid of datacaps all together. That will never happen.
Truth in Lending laws (Score:2)
Although more people are probably familiar with nutrition labels, as they've been around for decades, there are other regulations that are even more similar to what's being proposed.
Such as the documents that banks are required to give prospective borrowers for mortgages under the Truth in Lending Act: https://www.consumerfinance.go... [consumerfinance.gov]
Warning Label (Score:2)
Internet contains nuts.
bit unrelated, but (Score:1)