FCC Wants Landlords To Stop Screwing Up Your Internet (vice.com) 90
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The FCC has announced (PDF) it's investigating deals the broadband industry strikes with landlords that block broadband competition in apartment complexes, condos, and developments. While the FCC passed rules in 2008 attempting to prevent such deals, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have exploited massive loopholes in the restrictions for more than a decade. "With more than one-third of the U.S. population living in condos and apartment buildings, it's time to take a fresh look at how exclusive agreements between carriers and building owners could lock out broadband competition and consumer choice," interim FCC boss Jessica Rosenworcel said of the announcement. "I look forward to reviewing the record."
The inquiry comes after President Biden signed an executive order in July urging regulators to take a closer look at competition and monopoly issues in several sectors. The order also mandated the creation of a competition council, which urged the FCC to take a closer look at the anticompetitive nature of these arrangements. The FCC's existing rules technically bar landlords and ISPs from colluding to restrict broadband competition. But in a 2016 piece in Wired, Harvard Law Professor Susan Crawford outlined the various ways big telecom wiggles around the restrictions -- often by simply calling what they're doing -- something else. "Sure, a landlord can't enter into an exclusive agreement granting just one ISP the right to provide Internet access service...but a landlord can refuse to sign agreements with anyone other than Big Company X, in exchange for payments labeled in any one of a zillion ways," Crawford wrote. "Exclusivity by any other name still feels just as abusive."
For example, to get around FCC rules expanding access to an ISP's in-building wiring, companies like Comcast or Charter will often deed ownership of these wires to a landlord, then turn around and pay that landlord to ensure that nobody else can have access. Because the landlord now technically owns the wires, the FCC rules no longer apply. ISPs also pay landlords to sign agreements that ban any other competing ISPs from advertising in the building. If you're a landlord that violates such arrangements, you can then expect a nastygram from a company like Comcast for violating your deal. In addition, many landlords will charge "door fees" to any company that needs access to a building to install new wiring, creating an additional layer of difficulty and expense for smaller broadband competitors trying to compete with dominant ISPs. Collectively such restrictions serve the same function as blocking broadband competition outright. Much as it does on the national level, this lack of block by block competition directly contributes to higher prices, slower speeds, and comically-terrible customer service.
The inquiry comes after President Biden signed an executive order in July urging regulators to take a closer look at competition and monopoly issues in several sectors. The order also mandated the creation of a competition council, which urged the FCC to take a closer look at the anticompetitive nature of these arrangements. The FCC's existing rules technically bar landlords and ISPs from colluding to restrict broadband competition. But in a 2016 piece in Wired, Harvard Law Professor Susan Crawford outlined the various ways big telecom wiggles around the restrictions -- often by simply calling what they're doing -- something else. "Sure, a landlord can't enter into an exclusive agreement granting just one ISP the right to provide Internet access service...but a landlord can refuse to sign agreements with anyone other than Big Company X, in exchange for payments labeled in any one of a zillion ways," Crawford wrote. "Exclusivity by any other name still feels just as abusive."
For example, to get around FCC rules expanding access to an ISP's in-building wiring, companies like Comcast or Charter will often deed ownership of these wires to a landlord, then turn around and pay that landlord to ensure that nobody else can have access. Because the landlord now technically owns the wires, the FCC rules no longer apply. ISPs also pay landlords to sign agreements that ban any other competing ISPs from advertising in the building. If you're a landlord that violates such arrangements, you can then expect a nastygram from a company like Comcast for violating your deal. In addition, many landlords will charge "door fees" to any company that needs access to a building to install new wiring, creating an additional layer of difficulty and expense for smaller broadband competitors trying to compete with dominant ISPs. Collectively such restrictions serve the same function as blocking broadband competition outright. Much as it does on the national level, this lack of block by block competition directly contributes to higher prices, slower speeds, and comically-terrible customer service.
Yep (Score:4, Informative)
I actually got into it with my landlord a coupla years ago because they tried to have someone from AT&T come by and install crap in the doorway to my apartment. I was told this was a "just in case I want service from them" sort of arrangement, but I made it clear they would not be allowed to enter and they went on their way.
I partly did this because out of spite because I was burned by AT&T and absolutely refuse to do anything to make their lives easier, and partly because I don't like the idea of this becoming a single-ISP building.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I live in a single-family house and pay $70 per month for Internet.
My daughter lives in a condo and pays $15 per month.
From what I can see, these single-ISP arrangments are a good deal for tenants.
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What's the mechanism that keeps the price that low?
Re:Yep (Score:5, Interesting)
What's the mechanism that keeps the price that low?
The real question is what's the mechanism that keeps "regular" prices inflated.
Re:Yep (Score:4, Informative)
Lack of competition... which is exactly why I'm asking this question. The *one* time I got a speed boost from Time Warner/Spectrum was when Google Fiber was sniffing around.
Re: Yep (Score:2)
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Electric companies can share the same lines because it doesn't matter who puts into the system or takes out of since they're all keeping track at the source, at the end point and the middle means nothing.. You can't exactly run spectrum's customers through at&t's hardware and expect that to work. If my net goes down what's stopping spectrum from saying not our problem? At least that's what a spectrum installer told me when I asked why they were the only cable provider in our area.
I know it could work, b
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What's the mechanism that keeps the price that low?
The real question is what's the mechanism that keeps "regular" prices inflated.
Looks at the low price of UK broadband... looks at highly competitive market... looks at sensible telecoms regulations that keep the barriers to entry low... What is the "inflated prices" you speak of. You can get unlimited fibre broadband (or A/VDSL if you're not fortunate enough to live somewhere covered by fibre) for £30, less if you want the cheaper DSL options. I'd be surprised if I couldn't get a plan for £9.99 a month.
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What's the mechanism that keeps the price that low?
The cables are already installed in the walls. The box is already in each unit.
So all the ISP has to do is remotely turn on the service.
The marginal cost to the ISP is minimal, so they offer the HOA a good deal.
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The marginal cost to the ISP is minimal, so they offer the HOA a good deal.
Ok. And what of that deal if when there's no competition in the area?
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That's not how any of this works. There's no competition, so what incentive does the ISP have to keep the rates low? You simply explained why it was cheap, for the ISP! Plenty of companies sell cheap products for all the market will bear. Why is this case different?
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If they don't offer the HOA a good deal, there would be no agreement.
Then they would not have access to the existing infrastructure and would have to run separate cables to each apartment.
The higher rates would also mean fewer people signing up. For many light internet users, it will be cheaper to use cellular.
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There's no competition, so what incentive does the ISP have to keep the rates low? You simply explained why it was cheap, for the ISP!
The higher rates would also mean fewer people signing up. For many light internet users, it will be cheaper to use cellular
Sigh.
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I am using wireless provider for 20 years now. At first this was antennae on the rooftop, beamed to station of the custom provider, then since they took away their branded mailbox, last couple of years I am on indoor LTE device from another provider. With modem paid off, now under 10 Eur per month. Very reasonable and healthy as a competition.
Thus, cable is not the only option for you to check.
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Okay, maybe this would work when there's a non-corrupt HOA (HA!) who can bargain on behalf of the owners. But not for most landlord-renter situations, which is what we were talking about here. And most HOAs would just take the kickback and screw the other owners.
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Double-NAT, low bandwidth, low caps...
Re: Yep (Score:2)
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> What's the mechanism that keeps the price that low?
They roll the difference into the condo fees. Then even people without internet are helping to subsidize people that do. And the people paying for internet are just paying a token amount to top off the difference from the condo fees.
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Does that mean the ISP is providing less data/bandwidth to the whole building than if they had individual customers?
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Simple, instead of having a connection for each unit, they provide a single fiber to a complex, the owner deals with the rest as simple as a decent router and a big switch with some WiFi AP strewn about the buildings.
The company bills them $2000/month guaranteed, no dealing with the no-payers or sending a tech to fix it, they add it in the rent, everybody gets WiFi (or wired for an extra fee).
It's a HUGE savings for the ISP, it's a huge savings for the end-user.
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Correction: It *can be* a huge savings for the end-user. I get the cost-efficiency advantage of this approach, but that's not an explanation of why the ISP can't/won't double the price next month.
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Depends wether the user deals direct with the ISP, or if the building resells the service to the user.
It's likely that the building will have subscribed to a business service with a long term contract and SLAs, the ISP won't be able to change the terms of the deal until the contract expires and from their perspective it's a single high value client instead of a number of low value clients.
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As an owner, I can just get a different fiber from another company. We're dealing with Level3, AT&T and TWC Business even in markets where they don't have a consumer-level presence. You can get 2 different ISP's just for redundancy. This isn't your regular Comcast, for businesses these carriers will stand on their head to fix issues our just to get the customer, it's cut-throat competition because it's largely unregulated.
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I suspect that the landlord is paying for X-number of connections and actually allowing tenants to make 3x-number of them.
Re:Yep (Score:5, Informative)
CWhat's the mechanism that keeps the price that low?
Condo Fees. My building did something similar, with a deep discount on Internet access, because the balance was made up from the $350 month condo fees.
The paid X amount to Comcast for every resident, whether they got service or not, and if they did want service, the resident paid the balance.
There is no free lunch and it was not a good deal, IMHO, since we all paid full price, it was just bundled and backed-doored. I'd rather the fees have been less and I could have purchased whatever connection I wished.
They wanted it to look like a good deal, though. I'm sure some people bought it hook, line, and sinker, but many were also opposed. Service went down pretty often, and every time you called to report it, they blamed your modem, then offered to send you a brand-new modem with an XFinity Wi-Fi secondary network enabled, thus allowing you to pay for their infrastructure.
Each time, an hour or so later, the general outage message got posted to their website. It was never our modem, despite being told it was over 30 times.
Yeah, what a deal.
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Depends how the service is provisioned.
Sometimes the block will buy a service and resell it to residents, sometimes this can offer good value for the residents and will scale depending on the number of users. Effectively the block becomes their own mini-isp.This worked quite well back in the days when most users were on dialup and a permanent line was too expensive, but split the cost between all the residents of a block and it works out ok. ISPs will typically also install a business circuit anywhere, wher
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Is your daughter's Internet service shared within the building? If she has a cable based Internet connection this probably won't matter much but if it is a shared fiber connection others in the building could theoretically limit her access by hogging bandwidth.
Also, if it is a shared connection the $15 might not be such a good deal (depending on how many residences share the same connection).
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Is your daughter's Internet service shared within the building? If she has a cable based Internet connection this probably won't matter much
I presume it is shared. Why wouldn't it be?
Her connection is coax. Cable TV arrives on the same cable and is included in the $15.
theoretically limit her access by hogging bandwidth.
She lives in a large building with many condos. The probability that they will all need bandwidth at the same time is negligible.
Even if there is contention for say, an hour each year, who cares? She isn't doing remote heart surgery. The TikTok video can wait.
Also, if it is a shared connection the $15 might not be such a good deal
It is a way better deal than the alternative. $15 < $70.
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Is your daughter's Internet service shared within the building? If she has a cable based Internet connection this probably won't matter much
I presume it is shared. Why wouldn't it be?
Because the rest of us are taking in general, not about your daughter specifically.
Seems to be a pretty specific thread to me.
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She lives in a large building with many condos. The probability that they will all need bandwidth at the same time is negligible.
This all depends on what the bandwidth into the building is. If you are getting 100mbps to your home and your daughter's building is also only getting 100mbps to the entire building your bandwidth is much better than hers.
It is a way better deal than the alternative. $15 [less than] $70.
For straight price sure $15 is better than $70 but...
if you are both getting 100mbps into the building then you are paying $70 for that 100mbps ($70/100=$0.7 per mbps) but your daughter is paying $15 for her fraction of the 100mbps. If there are 5 or more units in the building then she is
Re: Yep (Score:2)
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You can shop around (well hopefully, that is also an issue that needs fixing). Your daughter not so much. Price isn't the only thing people look for in an ISP.
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You can shop around (well hopefully, that is also an issue that needs fixing). Your daughter not so much.
She can shop around. Residents aren't restricted to the collective deal.
But why would she pay $70+installation instead of $15+nothing?
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"From what I can see, these single-ISP arrangments are a good deal for tenants." - ShanghaiSHILL
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
- Anecdotal - CHECK
- Sample size of 1 - CHECK
He sounds like a reliable source.
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Who does she pay to, the landlord?
Let's see... landlord signs up for a single lease for, say, 50 bucks a month, charges tenants 15 bucks a pop to be linked up to it... if you have more than 3 tenants, it's a pretty sweet deal.
Of course, for the landlord, not necessarily for you who might have to share their DSL with some torrent freak...
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Yeah, no. You are probably one of those people that think the 50% off sales are really 50% off.
They raise the rent/maintance by $80, and charge her '$15'.
Competition? (Score:2)
How often does this even come up? In my entire state (NH) there isn't a choice of ISPs (except maybe in a couple of cities bordering MA., and even then it's only a choice between two). Never mind the landlords, I'D love to have options.
Re: Competition? (Score:2)
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Not only that, but as someone who owns a house, there's a pretty reasonable explanation for wanting to prevent any fucking yahoo from showing up and drilling holes in your building. It's one thing when there's good access already. If there's conduit to run wires through. But if any holes need to be drilled?
The current house I'm in, some fucking dipshit former owner/contractor drilled holes through THE FUCKING CONCRETE FOUNDATION to run their satellite wires through. 6" above those holes is vinyl siding over
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There really is no excuse for an apartment building housing a significant number of tenants not to have conduits already in place to provide services.
For a single standalone house it's different.
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If I owned a commercial property I was renting out, I would not want my tenants hiring companies to do this sort of thing. I do not need some dumbfuck field tech drilling into a power, gas, or water line, or doing structural damage to my building.
A tenant can't give authorization to a broadband installer to do an install if work that like is required generally. They can have the provider some out, run their drop, and then connect to the premises wiring that's there already going into the home, but if there is no wiring to connect to in the home and wallfishing, etc needs to be done the tenant has to get paperwork signed off on by the property-owner.
On the flip side of this, that also means the service can only be guaranteed/repaired as far as the pr
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You guys need a regulator. Here in communist UK, I can pick from about 2 dozen broadband providers, all of whom will deliver service through the phone line I already have. None of them will need to drill any holes for anything. My monthly cost is about £20/month - for a pretty decent service.
If you really do want someone drilling holes, then we do have a cable company to pick from too. They do need to run cables from the street to your house somewhere, and yes, they're about as terrible at it as you'd
Can the FCC go after municipalities instead? (Score:2)
I mean, that's great that they're doing it somewhere, but can't they start with (in my opinion) the worst offenders? My hometown, you either had Comcast or dial-up. My best friend still lives there, still either has Comcast or dial-up.
City I live in now, we have 3 or 4 "broadband" options and I have never had better internet service. The customer service from any of the companies is still abysmal, but in the 9 years I've lived here, I've had to call my ISP a grand total of 5 times (I think? I might be
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It's a matter of SLAs how good the customer service is. Me, I pay a fortune for my ISP (roughly 70 bucks for 100mbit synchronous), but my SLA basically says that as soon as it's down for 5 minutes, I get money from them.
Let's say they are VERY quick when it comes to fixing stuff.
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It probably wouldn't be the municipality's fault, the local monopoly contracts pretty much all expired two decades or more ago (yes, there are still a few, but very few). Most likely is the cost/benefit to a competitor of building out a new cable plant there, if it's even possible. In some areas Comcast owns the utility poles, or at least a portion of them, and they're not required to allow anyone else to use them if they don't feel like it. Some small utility companies have contracts that allow only exi
and then comes Starlink (Score:3)
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Starlink really won't bypass the issue at all. I doubt that a landlord that doesn't allow multiple ISPs now would be willing to have multiple Starlink antennas attached to the roof. If you don't put the antenna on the roof at least half of the building wouldn't be able to get coverage anyway.
This all assumes that you are in a small(ish) town or rural multi-unit dwelling also since Starlink isn't designed to work in highly populated centers.
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Eventually this may be the case but currently you need to see a very wide section of the sky*. If you want to see how much clear sky you need you can download the Starlink app and check out a few areas.
* I am basing things on the current setup of Starlink since there is no guarantee that there will ever be enough satellites that you can just point the dish at any clear section of sky and hope to get a reliable and consistent signal.
the laws say's you can have sat tv so just use tha (Score:2)
the laws say's you can have sat tv so just use that one as well.
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Re:and then comes Starlink (Score:4, Informative)
Thanks goodness Starlink will bypass all of this bullshit.
StarLink will be a godsend to farmers and others living in remote areas.
It makes no sense for an apartment building in a city.
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I would say saturation is the reason it doesn't make sense. Each satellite can cover only so much area - call it 500 square miles just to pick a number. In farm country, that may equate to a couple of hundred people. Not all on at any one moment, so maybe there's dozens of active connections - all sharing what that satellite can provide. Not too bad - you can get something reasonable for bandwidth.
In a city, you'll have a couple of hundred THOUSAND people (or a couple million) in that same area. Sharing
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Sure, 20,000 Starlink satellites is 50TBps. Giving all of the NYC population Starlink with a 100:1 oversubscription will give each of them 4Gbps of bandwidth. Not bad, but you have the ENTIRE global constellation hanging above NYC to do just that.
Each Starlink satellite has a PLANNED 20Gbps worth of capacity, which even that is a great overestimation to what you'll actually get on the ground.
HughesNet's Jupiter 2 currently provides ~150Gbps (7x capacity) in ~15x more weight. Presumably HughesNet isn't wasti
Re:and then comes Starlink (Score:4, Informative)
You can actually watch the current stats on this site. That might help you understand the issue: https://satellitemap.space/ [satellitemap.space]
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Node congestion.
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Why? What does location have to do with it? Please explain. Thanks!
The cost of StarLink is $99 per month plus a $500 installation fee for 100mbps.
That is a very good deal on a remote farm.
It is ridiculously expensive in a city.
Re:and then comes Starlink (Score:4, Insightful)
On the one hand you are right. Absolutely. There are a lot of poor rural inhabitants who are NOT going to be getting starlink. But there are a lot of homes in hilly rural areas where people would happily pay to get fast internet because right now their only option is something like Hughes satellite service. That is a big enough market to make some money, for sure. In flat areas, farmers with money can just run fiber for miles. They can do most of the work themselves, so they may not need or want satellite. Also, in flat areas it is not hard to build radio links because you have good line of sight from tower to tower. But hilly areas are a real challenge both for radio and also for fiber.
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Basic Internet is a required utility. Your disposable income would be paying for the marginal difference in cost between that basic Internet and the $99. Back when I grew up in rural America, quite a few people were spending nearly $100/mo. on satellite TV packages. There's not a lot to do in the middle of nowhere - disposable income goes to entertainment at home rather than out of the home.
Oh, and the cost is not $1700/yr. It's $1200/yr. after the first year. Starlink will be great for large farm oper
Re:and then comes Starlink (Score:4, Insightful)
Until about 2 years ago I had a T1 line. It was about 500 dollars per month. No caps but only 1.5 Mbps (true 1.5 Mbps that you can count on no matter what, but still, only 1.5 Mbps).
Right now I have multi-hop wireless service from a local rural WISP. MUCH better. Over 100 per month, but now I get anywhere from 30 to 70 Mbps. Hopefully you can see that for someone like me, Starlink is a potentially viable option. It is just because of luck and determination that I was able to get the WISP to connect me. I had to convince some of my neighbors to sign up and act as relays so that we could get the line of sight (there is no direct line of sight to his equipment).
So, to summarize, location matters because people out in rural areas, especially hilly rural areas with line of sight obstructions, have few options for internet.
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Thanks goodness Starlink will bypass all of this bullshit.
StarLink will be a godsend to farmers and others living in remote areas.
It makes no sense for an apartment building in a city.
This,
Any form of wireless, be it mobile (4/5/6/eleventy Gs). satellite or even LOS technologies (I.E. microwave/laser) are ultimately going to be congested in an urban environment as you have to share limited bandwidth (I mean in terms of MHz, not Gbps) as you only have so much bandwidth available and the more people trying to get a slice of that, the fewer slices there are to go around, hence the longer you'll be waiting for your slice. 4/5G are actually making it worse. To achieve their posted speeds
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To a point... The same issue (albeit to a lesser degree, HOPEFULLY) will rear its head when apartment dwellers and condos remind people they can't slap dishes to the sides of their buildings, and then the "comm closets" aren't available for the wiring necessary to get the service into their units.
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Well there's the problem with setting up a spot where the dish can sit/be mounted... But the problem I was focussing on is the cabling needed to power it and bring the signal into your unit. So, yeah, it may be one wire for power-over-ethernet, but if the roof is 39 floors above you, it's gonna be a hell of an endeavor to get the other end in your unit, or even one of the comm closets the building will have. The same "games" with access and exclusivity will still be played.
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My Condo HOA did This (Score:1)
I used to live in Herndon, Virginia and my condo associated negotiated a 10 year $50k deal to have a really bad midwestern ISP run the complex. The money the HOA got was used legally in that they lowered our condo fees. The members did not get to vote on it and it was a board decision only. Believe me, it was a crappy deal in that 50 down / 40 up was the standard for a long time until that ISP was bought by Cox. Even then, we had to have Cox until the deal ran out. I just do not know how these are legal.
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I just do not know how these are legal.
What kind of people do you think most lawmakers are, and whose perspectives are they most familiar with? Yours, or money-hungry corporate execs?
Honestly, it's not that hard to figure out. Depressing maybe, but not hard.
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Probably. If you want to pay the insanely high costs of permitting, adding new mains, new lines, etc.
water is an utility and is regulated locally now I (Score:2)
water is an utility and is regulated locally now ISP need to go the same way!
I think some Senior homes do this and rip people (Score:2)
I think some Senior homes do this and rip people off.
In some cases it's pre wired and all they to do is plug in cable box. But what they do is the cable changes the Resident an FULL install fee.
hopefully 5G will be good enough (Score:2)
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We've got it already and it works really well, although admittedly we can see T-Mobile's headquarters from our front yard. They sent us a device the size and shape of a small coffee can, we set it in the window closest to the nearest cell tower, and I plugged it into the CAT-5 that I wired the whole house with two decades ago (I could have used it as my WAP or wired router). Three days later I said goodbye to Comcast, which had been averaging about 3 disconnects of 1-15 minutes per day (up to 7 one day, w
Though Shall Not Interfer! (Score:2)
Not if the board is full of Rs (Score:1)
It'll be hard for the FCC to do anything helpful for consumers if Joe Biden doesn't get off his ass and nominate some new board members. It's about to become a 2-1 R majority if the senate doesn't confirm new appointees before the end of this session of congress.
99% of landlords will illegally refuse DirecTV... (Score:1)
... installations. FYI despite this nearly ubiquitous usury taking place amid massive kickbacks from shitty providers like Time Warner is actually illegal for them to do unless the property is registered officially as a historical landmark.
Homes don't have a choice either (Score:2)
The whole system is monopolistic because of the Government...
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It's September (Score:2)
Executive Orders (Score:1)
Translation: Biden signed an executive order today urging regulators to shake their fists and complain bitterly at landlords that are doing nothing illegal and complying with the letter of the law.