Cuomo Signs New York Bill Requiring Low-Cost Broadband Access (bloomberg.com) 80
Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill on Friday requiring all Internet service providers in New York to offer affordable high-speed access for low-income families. From a report: The providers can charge those families no more than $15 a month, Cuomo said during a briefing Friday at the Northland Workforce Training Center in Buffalo. He was joined by Eric Schmidt, former chief executive officer of Alphabet, who chairs a 15-member state commission focusing on using technology to help the state reopen better than it was before the virus. Cuomo also said an emergency fund from Schmidt Futures and the Ford Foundation will provide free Internet access to 50,000 students statewide through the 2021-22 school year.
The bill passed by the state legislature caps a basic broadband plan at $15 a month and a higher-speed one at $20. Currently, a basic high-speed plan costs on average more than $50 a month, according to a statement from Assembly member Amy Paulin. Schmidt, who praised the embattled governor for his "extraordinary" leadership during the pandemic, said universal broadband access is the first and most important priority of the commission. Members were concerned about the "hundreds of thousands of people who apparently had no Internet access at all," Schmidt said, an impediment to learning and tele-medicine.
The bill passed by the state legislature caps a basic broadband plan at $15 a month and a higher-speed one at $20. Currently, a basic high-speed plan costs on average more than $50 a month, according to a statement from Assembly member Amy Paulin. Schmidt, who praised the embattled governor for his "extraordinary" leadership during the pandemic, said universal broadband access is the first and most important priority of the commission. Members were concerned about the "hundreds of thousands of people who apparently had no Internet access at all," Schmidt said, an impediment to learning and tele-medicine.
Does the math work out? (Score:2)
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The providers are bound to wind up doing something here... Like limiting where it will be offered; and capping the data to 100 Megabytes a month or something.
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Ads shown to poor people are generally very cheap, as they have little purchasing power.
Mining for bitcoins is utter crap on non-ASICs due to massive glut of Chinese ASICs in the mining pool.
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Netzero tried that. Ads won't bring in enough consistent revenue. Advertising to users of a service for low-income users will also be worth less. Even
Youtube who has the most premium of Ad spaces, and their entire revenue is built on Ads - provides an Ad-Free Service for $12 a month. That... should tell you all you need to know... Advertising to will not bring in an average of even $12 per End user.
Broadband requires infrastructure - Including a Modem, and lines that have to be maintained.
Im
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Here on Long Island, most areas have a choice of two providers. This leads to constant price wars in the form of two year new customer only contracts. Currently, I can switch to Verizon FIOS Gigabit for 80$ a month. If I am currently a Fios customer, I could switch to Altice for about the same.
If I am an existing customer of either whose 2 year contract has expired, I'd be paying about almost double those prices. Many people just switch services every two years, which can cost about 100$ for installation ch
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Those prices are for Gigabit plans. Altice offers a 300MBPS plan at $35/month, and Fios offers the same for $40.
You can't currently sign up for a 100MBPS plan with Altice, but if you are an existing customer at that speed, you'll pay around $80 or more, and an extra $20 to move up to 300MBPS.
You sure that most have a choice? (Score:3)
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I don't know what the charges typically are in New York or if there's any kind of government funding going towards this, but unless the providers can actually afford $15 a month, even if it means profit is effectively $0, this is a completely empty gesture.
Spectrum offers a low cost $14.99/mo plan (up to 30Mbps) for low income individuals called Internet Assist [spectrum.com].
Xfinity (Comcast) offers a low cost $9.95/mo plan (up to 50Mbps) called Internet Essientals [xfinity.com].
Verizon offers a low cost plan (up to 200Mbps) for $19.99/mo [verizon.com]
If Spectrum, Comcast/Xfinity, and Verizon can do it, then I don't see why other providers in the NY area (Frontier? CenturyLink a.k.a. Lumen Technologies?) can't do the same. It's lack of competition why we don't see more affordable prices/plans.
Before
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Spectrum offers a low cost $14.99/mo plan (up to 30Mbps) for low income individuals.
It's not for "low income individuals", it's for families with kids on free/reduced lunch programs, and 65+ individuals on Supplemental Security Income. Oh, and you also can't currently be a customer of Spectrum, which means they expect you to keep paying through the nose for service if you're already doing so.
Cable companies just suck.
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Eric Schmidt (Score:3)
Maybe he can use his leverage from his new political power t have Google Fiber reduce their rates.
In San Antonio, it started at $55 and now is $75. You'd think it would cost more at the start of entering a city
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Which raises the question: If Google was losing money at $55/month; how does Cuomo expect whatever random ISPs that are nowhere nearly as rich as Google to feasibly meet these $15/month and $20/month price points? Subsidies or vouchers, ala section-8, would be the obvious way. But the article (Or at least the bits I was able to skim before Bloomberg's paywall notice popped up and blocked it out.) doesn't mention anything of the sort.
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They will be looking to unload this money losing venture in the next few years.
Just like Verizon did a decade ago, selling off money-losing FiOS plants to Frontier Communications.
Unfortunately for Verizon, New York City and Washington DC sued them to keep rolling out FiOS in their respective cities.
Fiber-to-the-home is prohibitively expensive. Google and Verizon found out the hard way. The only sustainable model is hybrid fiber coaxial, i.e., the cable modem. Like it or not, nobody needs theoretical gigabit speeds at the home when download and upload speeds rarely exceed 20 megabits
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Why is fibre to the home more expensive then hybrid fiber coaxial if you have to run new cables for both?
Sunk cost (Score:2)
I'm guessing it's because the coaxial has been run for providing pay TV (back when that was important) and the fiber hasn't.
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In my area the 40-year-old coaxial cable plant was augmented with hybrid fiber/coaxial, which was fantastic, and they eventually replaced everything with newer cabling for even better speed an reliability.
This happened about ten years before FiOS came to town. I have FiOS since it was deployed, but my download and upload speeds are not the 150 Mbps they are claiming which got me wondering.
Of course, using Speedtest.net it shows me the amazing speeds I can get, but I rarely see more than 20 megabits in the
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You don't need an expensive device to convert the fiber optic cable to coaxial or ethernet on each and every house. Plus, deploying coaxial cable costs a fraction of fiber optics, both in materials and the human time cost of terminating and splicing fiber optic cable. It costs pennies to terminate coax, where fiber costs hundreds of dollars.
Sure, upload is slower than download on copper coaxial, but it's not enough to justify the expense of fiber to each and every home in the local loop. Verizon learned t
Re: Eric Schmidt (Score:2)
It's called an "introductory price" - very, very common with ISPs, Cable TV companies, and street drug dealers ("the first one is free")
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It's called, "I murdered your granny and gramps here have some cheap internet and forget about it", eww, just really awful. The arsehole should be in prison already.
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Or maybe Schmidt can figure out how to recognize good leadership:
praised the embattled governor for his "extraordinary" leadership during the pandemic
Sorry, but sending infected folks into nursing homes wasn't good leadership. Neither was using state police and health resources during the pandemic to do favors for his relatives and friends. Certainly not having the worst state Covid death rate in the country, next to only similar New Jersey.
But hey, he did manage to accomplish all that while sexually harass
So who pays for this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So who pays for this? (Score:4, Interesting)
It isn't going to be the Internet providers. Everybody else's bill will go up to pay for this subsidy.
For some products, the biggest component of the price is the unit production cost.
For other products, it is the development cost.
For Internet service, it is the sunk-cost of the trenching and running cables.
Since the trenches are already done, and many of these people already have cable-TV, there is little additional cost to the ISPs. Even at $15, they may make a marginal profit on new customers. The biggest downside for the ISPs is low-income customers currently paying $70 per month can now switch to paying $15.
Re: So who pays for this? (Score:3)
If you actually look at the financial statements for any ISP (or hell, just compare bond costs vs service costs for a muni), about half the cost is the initial infrastructure.
That's why with a muni everyone pays $50/month toward the bond whether you want the service or not, and to get the service you pay another $45-50/month.
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That doesn't mean the "real" cost is that high.
In some countries, $15 is the normal price for Internet service. In Korea, you can get gigabit for $20/month.
Why is Internet so much more expensive in America?
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it is so expensive because of government granted monopolies. Get the government out of the way and let markets work.
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Get the government out of the way and let markets work.
Okay, let's play a little game here: You're sitting on an unimaginably big pile of cash and want to invest in a new business. Do you spend most of it to roll out new infrastructure so you can be an upstart competitor in an already saturated market, where the primary means of obtaining customers is by convincing them of the need to switch from your competitor (which of course, requires spending additional money on advertising), or do you invest that money in literally anything else?
There's no rule in capit
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If the market is big enough then there's plenty of motivation.
I don't think getting the government out of the way is the right answer, though. They should manage or at least regulate the infrastructure for wired internet, and continue to manage spectrum allocation, because someone has to do those things.
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Do you spend most of it to roll out new infrastructure so you can be an upstart competitor in an already saturated market
If the market is big enough then there's plenty of motivation.
As I understand it, Powercntrl is claiming that no, several markets are not in fact big enough for an additional player.
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That may be true, although I suspect that most markets small enough that it's not worth competing with wired infrastructure are small enough that you could do it with wireless. As long as there are not unwarranted legal hurdles placed in the way, it doesn't have to be excessively expensive.
The FCC won't let me be or let me be me, so... (Score:2)
I suspect that most markets small enough that it's not worth competing with wired infrastructure are small enough that you could do it with wireless. As long as there are not unwarranted legal hurdles placed in the way
One such legal hurdle is that Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile own exclusive licenses from the FCC to do anything with wide-area wireless.
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It's actually the exact opposite. The way it worked here in Finland is that we had very expensive internet in free market due to natural monopoly of "whoever has the cables in the ground can charge whatever they want, as laying new cables is astronomically expensive". Monopoly is not government mandated but natural. Whoever has the cables has the monopoly.
So government stepped in and mandated separation of "delivering ISP services" and "delivering cabling". Right now, if you have cables in the ground, you h
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A market needs to be regulated by the people for the people.
And not by some politician who is allowed to solicit big money for his next campaign.
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It needs to be regulated by a combination of political class directly responsible to the people on small/local enough level that instructions and rules are fit for the local culture and that laws do not impact so many people that bribing politicians with large sums of money is a profitable endeavour.
That and a well tuned bureaucracy that actually serves the people and has a culture of serving the people being overseen by said politicians.
Corruption is a problem that tends to warp this process, resulting in
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I'm curious where you got your example numbers from.
Longtime independent private ISP Sonic.net [sonic.com] manages to deliver unlimited gigabit fiber and telephone (plus extras like web hosting and VPN) for $40-50/month with free installation in expensive California.
They also offered pandemic discounts this past year.
Where are you getting those prices? From what I can see internetadvisor.com/sonic [internetadvisor.com] it is $80 a month for gigabit service. Plus I'm sure it is only available in limited areas (high density, high income).
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I donâ(TM)t know where you are but I just price them here in Menlo Park California in the San Francisco Bay area and itâ(TM)s $66 a month including a $20 a month discount for the first year making the regular price $86 a month not that different from my current $90 a month AT&T fiber to the home. I really do get gigabit speedâ(TM)s in for a few extra dollars a month I can even get static IPâ(TM)s and their IPv6 address is donâ(TM)t jump around every week like Comcast it. If you
Re: So who pays for this? (Score:2)
This will be crap service, lowest speed possible. Almost no one that pays $50-75/month will drop their more-expensive service for this, and those that do sign-up will quickly realize they can't steam HD TV snd upgrade.
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Yes. According to the FCC, 200 kilobits or more constitute "broadband".
Mandated to report to Congress on deployment, the FCC, in its 2000 report on broadband deployment,3 defined an “advanced telecommunications service” as one that is at least 200 kbps in each direction. The speed and two-way requirement attempted to capture the intent expressed in the Telecommunications Act of 1996—that the speeds of what the act terms “advanced telecommunications services” should exceed the rates offered by the technologies available to residential customers at the time of the act’s passage.4 At the time of the act’s passage, residential customers were generally limited to dial-up service (then typically no more than 33.6 kbps). Hinting that a definition should also be, at least in part, driven by the requirements of user applications, the FCC report also observed that the 200-kbps threshold it selected is roughly the threshold above which the time it takes to load a Web page becomes comparable to the time it takes to turn the page of a book. But a 200-kbps service would be inadequate to support even a single TV-quality video stream to each house, let alone the multiple such streams that a family might reasonably use, which would require multiple megabits per second. Nor do TV-quality video streams represent the most bandwidth-demanding application one could imagine in the future.
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Sorry, it's been updated, but still not enough for HD:
The FCC defines broadband as any connection that provides at least four Mbps download speeds and upload speeds of at least one Mbps (U.S. Federal Communications Commission, 2010). An upgrade from the previous FCC definition of broadband at 768 kbps, this minimum speed for broadband does not accurately define the speed needed to utilize applications requiring large amounts of bandwidth. As will be discussed in the following sections, many current and developing applications require speeds of 10 Mbps or more to operate effectively. Traditionally, application effectiveness is determined through the analysis of user perceptions that are influenced by the length of time it takes for critical files to download to a user’s workstation to allow the user to operate the application and accomplish designated tasks (Etezadi–Amoli and Farhoomand, 1996).
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Analysis of the FCC’s Broadband Internet Benchmark of 25/3 Mbps, and why it changes over time. The official FCC broadband definition is a minimum of 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload.
This standard was introduced by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler in 2015 as an increase to the previous standard of 4 Mbps download, 1 Mbps upload. The benchmark increase was justified as necessary due to “advances in technology, market offerings by broadband pr
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That and they already ran off laughing all the way to the bank with the subsidies we gave them before.
If they're getting ripped off this time around they had it coming.
Re: So who pays for this? (Score:2)
Since the trenches are already done, and many of these people already have cable-TV, there is little additional cost to the ISPs.
so you imagine low income people can afford cable tv, but not internet service?
Interesting.
Coming soon to your telecom bill... (Score:3)
"NY low-income internet fee"
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Yes the Tax Payer will pay for this. I don't know why people ask this question thinking that we are idiots, and that we are getting a service for free without someone flipping the bill.
However the real question is would their be a return on investment?
Will offering Cheap and available Internet help NY State residents become more productive, possibly giving a lot of people jobs which they couldn't have before because they needed Internet to Apply and or to Do their jobs, in which they move off welfare and be
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This could actually force prices down. At the moment you pay what they ask or you have nothing. Now you can always opt to pay $15 for basic service so they need to complete with that.
Remember the price they charge is what maximises profit, it has nothing to do with their costs in most cases.
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There has to be a way to make this possible, although I would also concede that there may be issues in terms of the
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I don't think SpaceX is looking for densely populated areas.
Big business lobby? (Score:4, Insightful)
The two largest providers in NY state, Spectrum and Optimum, have been required since 2017 to offer $15/mo plans to low-income households. This bill now mandates the change for all ISPs in the state. I'll bet that Spectrum (Charter) and Optimum (Altice) were very interested in having this regulation applied to their smaller competitors.
Show Me The Small Print (Score:4, Insightful)
What does the $15/month "basic" broadband plan provide? 80/20Mb/s? Less? More? What about the "higher speed one"?
What is being measured in terms of "speed"? Is it the rate negotiated from the home modem/router to the frame in the nearest POP, or is it actual experienced bandwidth?
If it's bandwidth, how will this be calculated? Averaged? Across what time window? How will it be calculated?
What will the contention ratio be "per line speed". It's all well and good having a 1Gbps cable service to your home, but if the contention ratio is 250:1, don't expect to see much in the way of throughput...
I want to believe that this is going to be good for the people of New York, but the sad fact is that history is replete with stories of telecommunications companies using dubious advertising, weasel words, shoddy customer service and downright dodgy practices to put "hidden charges" in service plans. Has someone from a consumer protection group had a good look at this law to confirm that the telcos aren't just going to drive a cash truck through it on their way to bank their profits?
If Cuomo wanted to do something really radical/helpful, how about setting up a municipally owned local network that runs decent infrastructure to every home, then ensuring that there are multiple providers given access to the POPs, so that customers get a choice - and so that they don't get screwed over with excuses about "line speed" problems. If Cuomo can set things up to make it easier to isolate "slow down" problems to the teclo network [and not the last mile] that alone would be a transformative improvement in the way people access the internet.
Sadly, too much to hope for, I suspect.
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By FCC policy/law, at least 4 Mbps in each direction as of 2010.
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Wow I need to quit for the day. 4 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up. Fuuuuck meeee.
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So in other words, In 2021, we're suggesting that *New York*, one of the wealthiest cities in the world, is struggling to give a broadband service to citizens equal to half the speed available to early adopters of 3G wireless nearly 20 years ago.
Meanwhile...
Paris, Fran
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Though, from what I hear, NYC doesn't exactly have great options for high-speed service.
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This standard was introduced by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler in 2015 as an increase to the previous standard of 4 Mbps download, 1 Mbps upload.
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You're missing the biggest weasel words, "low-income families": Does that mean nuclear families, single-parent, childless couples, jobless singles? And when does "low-income" stop: $200/week, $250, $300? Is that income referring to employment-only or employment plus welfare cheque? Is that state or federal cheque or total welfare payments?
"Offer" (Score:2)
All this mandates is that ISPs offer some service that resembles broadband connectivity for $15/month, or $20 for a 'premium' offering.
Big deal.
Notice what's left out - not one penny, not a single requirement to offer access where there is no access.
So the idea is, someone that lives in an apartment building that is served by an ISP and previously chose not to subscribe, now has a $15/20 option.
For the person in rural upstate NY that has no ISP offering broadband service this does nothing.
This is just one m
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It is untrue that a "person in rural upstate NY" would have no "broadband service" available. There is satellite internet. Yes, it's slower and more expensive, but you can't choose to live way outside of the major population centers, then expect to have all the amenities of those population centers. You're not going to get four grocery stores or a major hospital either. Which has to be more "essential" than internet.
Not everybody chooses where they live (Score:2)
you can't choose to live way outside of the major population centers
Children who need Internet access for K-12 school don't choose where they live. Nor do many college students when classes aren't in session. Nor do the farmers who need to upload soil metrics to a crop advisor so they can grow the food that you eat.
Ha ha Comcast (Score:2)
I bet Comcast is regretting being an entrenched Democrat corporation now, ha ha!
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Comcast has been offering a $10 a month "Essentials" package for years now:
https://www.internetessentials... [internetessentials.com]
It's not fast (I think that it's 10 Mb/s in most areas), but it works.
The are 114 countries with less expensive internet (Score:2)
Cuomo signs bill... (Score:2)
Cuomo signs bill requiring most customers to pay more for internet in order to curry favor with certain pressure groups.
Installing internet in low income homes? (Score:1)
Sucks to be the poor schmuck who has to install this stuff in some rat infested Section 8 hellhole... then the customer service people getting yelled at by some welfare queen because the connection isn't fast enough for her liking.