
US cable giants calls on FCC to block cities' expansion of high-speed internet - primelens
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/aug/29/us-telecoms-fcc-block-high-speed-internet-chattanooga
======
sehrope
> Chattanooga has the largest high-speed internet service in the US, offering
> customers access to speeds of 1 gigabit per second – about 50 times faster
> than the US average. The service, provided by municipally owned EPB, has
> sparked a tech boom in the city and attracted international attention. EPB
> is now petitioning the FCC to expand its territory. Comcast and others have
> previously sued unsuccessfully to stop EPB’s fibre optic roll out.

I did a quick search to see pricing for EPB's internet service and wow is it
cheap[1]. The two plans listed on the site are 100 Mbps for $57.99/mo or 1Gpbs
$69.99/mo. Oh and both plans are _symmetric_ so you get that for upload as
well.

I don't know of any city where the local cable co offers anything like that,
let alone at those price points. No wonder they want to block this through
legislation; competing in the market would not be pleasant for them.

[1]: [https://epbfi.com/internet/](https://epbfi.com/internet/)

~~~
sitkack
Cable could easily offer these rates by using the bandwidth currently occupied
by their tv channels. If comcast had a unified digital backbone it wouldn't be
a problem. It is only because they have monopoly power. I find it completely
distasteful the number of laws that prevent other entities from passing laws
in certain domains. Washington state has a law that prevents cities from
legislating any form of rent control.

We need to clean out these bullshit laws.

~~~
rayiner
> I find it completely distasteful the number of laws that prevent other
> entities from passing laws in certain domains. Washington state has a law
> that prevents cities from legislating any form of rent control.

Are you serious? Rent control laws are awful, destroy the incentive to
maintain housing stock or build new housing stock, and ultimately raise rents
for everyone except the lucky few who can get rent controlled apartments.

Municipalities are just organs of the state, and state legislatures are
entirely justified in preventing them from enacting myopic legislation.

~~~
encoderer
Honestly I think you're way off base on rent control. I'd love to know what
experiences you've had with rent control that have led you to such a negative
POV? Perhaps living in Philly, as you profile mentions, has blunted you to
some of the benefits of RC in housing-crunched cities.

The biggest fallacy I hear from people who don't live in one of these housing-
crunched cities is the line.. _everyone except the lucky few who can get rent
controlled apartments_. Rent control laws in SF, for example, are very
inclusive. I mean, RC apartments can't be both rare AND pervasive enough to
"destroy the incentive" to invest in housing, right? And every RC law I know
of (which is only a few) has exemptions for new construction. In SF it's
anything built after ~1980. In NYC I know it's back much further than that. So
it doesn't do anything specifically to depress new construction.

Fundamentally, the question is do tenants have rights or are they at the mercy
of the property rights of the building owner? In SF we believe tenants DO have
rights. And you know what? RE investors here, where a rent controlled 2br
apartment will set you back at least $3k a month in the city, are doing quite
alright. They don't seem too desperately in need of expanded protections under
the law.

~~~
cbr

        everyone except the lucky few who can get
        rent controlled apartments
    

No, that's not the problem. As you say, rent control can't be both pervasive
and rare at the same time. The real problems with rent control are:

* It's hard to move. Say you change jobs and now work in a different part of the city, or your kids move out, or you'd like to move in with a partner. Normally one of the benefits of renting is that you can move, but with rent control that means switching to a place that's much more expensive.

* Landlords benefit from having their long-time tenants leave. Without rent control landlords love long term tenants because they're reliable and they mean less work finding people for the apartment. Rent control reverses this, and the landlord loses the incentive to upgrade the apartment and otherwise keep the tenant happy. Yes, the landlord is being a jerk when they do it, but sometimes the best fix for widespread jerk-ness is changing the incentives.

* It keeps out outsiders. People who want to live in your city enough that they're willing to give up their existing local connections and start over in your city are really valuable, and rent control means they pay a lot more than people who've lived in the city longer.

* It depresses new construction. Yes, I know new buildings aren't subject to rent control, but in a place where everything is already built out you can't put up a new building without taking down an old one. Rent control means you either have legal restrictions saying you can't replace buildings, or you have protests against people doing this and displacing existing tenants. But in a growing city, without new construction housing is going to get more and more expensive.

* Rent control puts off dealing with the problem of housing costs. If everyone in SF rented, and everyone had to pay market rates, then there would be the political backing for changes that would make housing more affordable. Rent control means that the long-time community members who would be best at this political change don't really feel much urgency because they have nice cheap places with rents set a decade or two ago. (But to be fair, homeownership is also a problem here, because rents and property values move together and homeowners want their property to become more valuable.)
    
    
        RE investors here, where a rent controlled 2br apartment
        will set you back at least $3k a month in the city, are
        doing quite alright. They don't seem too desperately in
        need of expanded protections under the law.
    

Rent control hurts renters. I don't care about real estate investors. That $3k
isn't why we need rent control, it's because we have rent control.

~~~
andy_ppp

        If everyone in SF rented, and everyone had to pay market rates, then there 
        would be the political backing for changes that would make housing more 
        affordable.
    

This is demonstrably not true in London where rent just keeps on going up and
hardly any new housing is being built. For example, an MP has just resigned
his £130k+ (total remuneration, that's $215'000) job because he can't afford
to rent a 4 bedroom house anywhere near Westminster [1].

Sometimes the state just needs to step in and actually help people (by
directly building high quality housing and selling it to people below market
value). Currently if you buy a new build in London it is priced so high that
you can expect it to be under water for a few years (the builders provide
special mortgages because banks refuse to do them directly in many cases - the
flats are not worth what they are being sold for).

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/aug/11/tory-
foreign...](http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/aug/11/tory-foreign-
office-minister-quits-intolerable-expenses-rules)

~~~
cbr

        This is demonstrably not true in London where rent
        just keeps on going up and hardly any new housing
        is being built.
    

[http://www.london.gov.uk/priorities/housing-land/renting-
hom...](http://www.london.gov.uk/priorities/housing-land/renting-home/rents-
map) claims only a quarter of people in london rent? So the "if everyone
rented" bit isn't being met. Because property values and rents mostly move
together, as long as most people own their homes you have more people backing
policies that push them higher than lower.

I don't know the London political situation very well: what makes it so
expensive to build new units? Are there strict historical preservation laws?
Rules that let neighbors veto or slow nearby construction? Permits and taxes?

    
    
        He can't afford to rent a 4 bedroom house
        anywhere near Westminster
    

"Anywhere near Westminster" apparently means "within walking distance". A
30min public transit commute covers areas where renting a 4br would be
~£26/year.

    
    
        you can expect it to be under water for a few years
    

I'm not sure what you mean by this. You're saying if you build a flat and sell
it then people are buying them at prices at which they wouldn't be able to
resell them? Is this just because there's a premium for new construction?
(Cars in the US, for example, lose ~20% of their value when they're bought for
the first time because they stop being "new". So you could say that if you buy
a new car you expect to be "under water" at first, but no one would say that.)

------
acjohnson55
My opinion of those companies is so poor at this point that my knee jerk
reaction is to assume that whatever they want is the opposite of what's good
for me.

~~~
sitkack
At least they are consistent.

~~~
atmosx
word

------
raarts
I think by now it's hard to deny that Comcast & friends are stifling the
progress of the US economy. The US is 31st worldwide on bandwidth speed (which
really can't be explained by the US's size alone), consumers and businesses
are complaining across the board about high pricing, bad service, and lack of
options.

These companies do the country and its inhabitants a big disservice. I think
the only reasonable option for the FCC and the government would be to increase
competition, and remove existing roadblocks.

~~~
rayiner
> The US is 31st worldwide on bandwidth speed (which really can't be explained
> by the US's size alone)

By what measure? Certainly not Akamai's
([http://www.akamai.com/dl/akamai/akamai-
soti-q114.pdf?WT.mc_i...](http://www.akamai.com/dl/akamai/akamai-
soti-q114.pdf?WT.mc_id=soti_Q114)). The top 10 U.S. states (much of which are
in the Northeast and are Comcast territory), would appear comfortably in the
top 10 of the global rankings (compare page 14-15 with page 18).

On Ookla's ranking, the U.S. is quite comparable to other big western
countries (France, Germany, UK):
[http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries](http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries).
Compare the U.K., at 29 mbps, with comparably-dense northeastern states like
New York (35 mbps), Massachusetts (33 mbps), etc.

Indeed, if you look at Ookla's rankings, you can see that density/wealth is a
driver of internet speeds: [http://www.netindex.com/download/2,1/United-
States](http://www.netindex.com/download/2,1/United-States). Sparsely
populated or poor states like Wyoming or West Virginia are down in the 15-20
mbps range. Rich, dense states like New York and New Jersey are at 35+. The
U.K. and Germany are ~600 people per square mile, somewhere between New York
State and Connecticut in density. The U.S. as a whole is only 90 people per
square mile, and states like Wyoming are less than 10 people per square mile.

EDIT: I don't normally get annoyed at down votes, but I point these facts out
every time someone repeats the trope "the U.S. lags in broadband speed!" but I
never get a real answer, just down votes. The narrative that the U.S. lags
behind in broadband speeds seems pretty central to criticisms of U.S.
broadband policy, but the surveys I've seen that measure actual speeds (as
opposed to advertised speeds), contradicts the assertion that the U.S. lags
behind its counterparts. Can someone explain why they disagree with this
analysis?

~~~
foobarqux
I have challenged you about this topic several times and backed it up.

I still think the best public data is the FCC international broadband survey
and report which I have previously referenced. The Ookla "promise" figures can
be used to validate the advertised speeds in that dataset versus actual
speeds.

The issue is not merely of availability of very high speed (>25mbps)
connections but its price, an area in which the FCC study demonstrates the US
is not competitive. [This information cannot be obtained from the data sets
you mentioned].

Moreover, most people, certainly most people here, don't care about nation-
wide or even state-wide averages, and they distort the figures, in favor of
the US no less (rural Wyoming probably has better access than rural Romania,
nobody cares about either). What are the figures for the main urban centers?
As a datapoint, based on the FCC data I don't think there is a major US city
which is competitive with Warsaw, Poland except possibly for Austin due to
Google Fiber.

What would help settle this issue is if someone like Netflix , Google or
Dropbox incorporated a speed test (they don't seem to test beyond their stream
rates currently) and made the granular data public.

Finally, it is anecdotal but I have found those who have lived in Scandinavia
(or Eastern Europe) and the US say pretty consistently that the broadband is
much worse in the latter.

------
rayiner
This is a really good example of how lobbying works. On one hand, these
telecom companies have a clear interest in not having to "compete" with cheap,
publicly funded broadband. On the other hand, their position just happens to
tie in with a broader political debate: states and municipalities are on the
verge of bankruptcy, and municipal infrastructure projects are a disaster
outside a few well-managed cities like NYC. The telcos aren't incorrect in
saying that these sorts of projects often turn into boondoggles, or
disproportionately benefit parts of the population,[1] or cost too much and
end up underfunded and poorly maintained in the future.

With these lobbying measures, the telcos can tie something that benefits them
to a position (municipal infrastructure projects), that many people oppose for
entirely different reasons.

[1] It is worth noting that only 1/3 of adults 65+ subscribe to broadband at
home, and that many poor people access the internet through libraries or
cellular phones instead of home computers.

~~~
nitrogen
Honest question, does your repeated support of the cable companies' excuses
have anything to do with your living in Philadelphia (per your profile) near
Comcast HQ?

~~~
rayiner
I was in Philadelphia for a one year appointment to work for the federal court
here. I have no personal affiliation with Comcast. As for my views favoring
cable companies, it's because I'm a disgruntled urbanist. If you think Verizon
or Comcast are bad, wait till your internet service becomes the subject of the
absolute batshit insanity of American municipal politics.

~~~
beedogs
The people in Chattanooga don't seem to be complaining one little bit about
"American municipal politics" with their 1 gigabit symmetric connections.

We've had to put up with this bullshit from Comcast and TWC for decades. I say
let's try the alternative.

------
golemotron
> “The success of public broadband is a mixed record, with numerous examples
> of failures,” USTelecom said in a blog post. “With state taxpayers on the
> financial hook when a municipal broadband network goes under, it is entirely
> reasonable for state legislatures to be cautious in limiting or even
> prohibiting that activity.”

That's the cable companies for you - always looking out for the consumer. It's
almost as if they see themselves as a public utility.

------
astrocat
Nothing, not even the risk of municipal-infrastructure-shennigans-leading-to-
disaster, should stand in the way of more competition entering the ISP market.
Google Fiber is awesome and all but they're pretty much the only company big
enough to tackle large-scale rollouts nationally. These smaller, municipal
efforts have much lower barriers and will ultimately provide the market the
kind of competitive landscape it needs to begin improving.

------
djokkataja
2 questions:

1\. Why aren't cities everywhere doing this?

2\. Who do I have to bother in my city to get this to happen?

~~~
cldellow
Big telcos lobby for laws to make it illegal, e.g. Louisiana 844.42 [1]:

"To ensure that cable television services and telecommunications and advanced
services are provided through fair competition [...]"

Advanced services are defined in 844.43 [2] to mean Internet that's faster
than 144 kilobits per second.

This means that the wifi in MSY (New Orlean's airport, a government facility)
is utterly unusable.

I can understand the narrative: having government skim the good stuff is a bad
deal for corporations since government can do things corporations can't (e.g.,
taxes, zoning, land use permits, seize land). Presumably, this discourages
corporations from providing comprehensive services since they cannot subsidize
poorly-performing areas with great performing areas. I'm skeptical that that's
a valid reason to have such a law, but c'est la vie.

[1]:
[http://www.legis.state.la.us/lss/lss.asp?doc=285523](http://www.legis.state.la.us/lss/lss.asp?doc=285523)

[2]:
[http://www.legis.state.la.us/lss/lss.asp?doc=285524](http://www.legis.state.la.us/lss/lss.asp?doc=285524)

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> I can understand the narrative: having government skim the good stuff is a
> bad deal for corporations since government can do things corporations can't
> (e.g., taxes, zoning, land use permits, seize land). Presumably, this
> discourages corporations from providing comprehensive services since they
> cannot subsidize poorly-performing areas with great performing areas.

The think I can't understand is why we should care. If the government is
providing reliable gigabit fiber at a reasonable price, who cares if Comcast
can't profitably offer service in the same geography? If the city is doing a
good job then you don't need them. Meanwhile if the city does a poor job then
Comcast will have no trouble providing better service and winning all the
customers, right?

------
orbitingpluto
Law of unintended consequences. Cable giants lobby to abolish net neutrality
and for the FCC to not designate Internet service as a common carrier.
Consequently other people band together to provide their own service.

Now the cable giants, one pure local geographic monopoly, lobby to control
municipal remediation of the crappy service. The hypocrisy is, unfortunately,
unsurprising.

------
davesque
Telcos are a disease in the American economy.

~~~
sitkack
Unconstrained corporatism.

~~~
hayksaakian
literally state sanctioned monopolies

there was a website posted to HN a while ago that described the hurdles for
municipal fiber in each state, i don't have the link any more, but it seems
very relevant to this discussion

~~~
sitkack
I think state sanctioned monopolies are _probably_ ok if regulated well.
Natural Gas falls in that category here and I think they do a pretty good job.
I'd say Comcast falls into state sanctioned monopoly-power-abuse which is
different.

~~~
atom-morgan
> I think state sanctioned monopolies are _probably_ ok if regulated well.
> Natural Gas falls in that category here and I think they do a pretty good
> job.

How would you ever know since they literally have no competition?

~~~
sitkack
Competition isn't the only way to calculate efficiencies.

But yes, my opinion of not feeling gouged is not a scientific indicator. I
don't want 2 gas companies or 6 electric utilities.

That picture on the left,
[http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/jamesfallows/189...](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/jamesfallows/1890sWires.jpeg)
I have seen that in Vietnam. Everyone gets their own wire.

------
a3n
Good thing we don't get our water from Comcast.

~~~
shmerl
Or air...

------
ams6110
Ugh. The answer is not municipally owned ISPs.

Sure it's easy for a municipal ISP to have "cheap" rates when you consider
that they are taxing authorities and don't have to run a profit. How exactly
would this service be put into place? It would take a massive capital
investment by the municipality, full of opportunities for fraud. I live in a
fairly small, highly liberal town and yet in the past few years we've had
financial scandal after financial scandal, from city staffers abusing credit
cards to money losing investments in everything from technology parks to
parking garages to outright fraud by contractors with inside partners in the
government.

And what does your typical city council know about running an ISP business?
Nothing. Where I live, they can't even stay ahead of the pothole repair. It
takes a team of a dozen laborers a month to install a block of sidewalk. The
incompetence and inefficiency is just staggering. I'm simply unwilling to
believe that they would do any better trying to offer internet service. I also
don't buy the arugment that municipalites provide better "utility" services
than businesses can. My parents lived in a neighborhood with poor water
pressure for nearly two decades before the city finally got around to
installing a booster pump station that resolved the problem.

I'm not in favor of the status quo either. Regulated monopolies have given us
the current mess with indifferent and expensive providers, product packaging
that forces you to buy services you don't want, and little competition.

Remove the monopolies. Let providers provide backbone, last mile, or both. Let
them buy and sell bandwidth in bulk, and compete over customers from house to
house. I don't see anything else that can possibly resolve the problem.

~~~
wnevets
> Sure it's easy for a municipal ISP to have "cheap" rates when you consider
> that they are taxing authorities and don't have to run a profit.

why is this a bad thing?

~~~
Roboprog
The implication is that the municipals are not just "non profit", but
operating at a (significant) loss. Is this "funded by taxes" aspect usually
true?

At least for the case of the Sacramento area electrical company, no. PG&E is
substantially more expensive, although I don't know how far-flung rural
distribution is funded - by all rate payers, or if there is some kind of govt
subsidy to encourage rural distribution. (by rural, I don't mean the parts of
Yolo and El Dorado counties that are 10 to 15 miles outside of Sacramento
county, I mean areas like the Sierra and Siskiyou mountains)

------
jgalt212
I remember the day in US when the consumer was king, and its interests were
second to all others (govt, big business, etc). Sadly that day has passed.
Without getting too political, the root cause is unrestrained campaign giving.

~~~
baddox
It's interesting that most people (at least around here) point to unrestrained
campaign giving, rather than the fact that government even has the regulatory
authority to do what it does. Of course, we have both, and stopping either one
would in theory stop the other, but it's interesting that people always seem
to point exclusively at one or the other. I wonder if there's some correlation
between what angle people take and what their broader political leanings are.

~~~
jgalt212
Well I don't think it's a left/right thing as campaign finance reform has been
proposed by both major parties.

------
pessimizer
I wish there had been a lot more stimulus, and a lot more projects like
Chattanooga.

------
noisy_boy
Atleast in areas where the laws permit, why isn't a competitor, e.g. Google
Fiber, not taking advantage of this clearly prevalent customer dissatisfaction
with Comcast/TWC etc?

Also, some people seem to say that laying Fiber/infrastructure has costs which
may be the reason. Then what happened to the wireless technologies which were
presented as options for covering a city with connectivity? There was so much
chatter about Wi-Max and such technologies - why are they are not being
researched/refined/pushed? One of the best example of the vast advantage of
penetration of wireless vs wired in terms of speed of deployment and impact is
in India - especially rural areas where one can't expect clean drinking water
but the cellphone signal is strong. Everytime somebody complains that in
smaller towns in US that Comcast is the only choice in such places due to
their infrastructure, assuming there are no laws prohibiting wireless
competition, wireless should be the best option, no? So what am I missing
(seriously)?

~~~
XorNot
Well for one thing, there's a big difference between a 9.6kbps cellphone voice
call (and thus data channel) and 20 mbps+ data.

Wireless _sucks_. It is a bad solution to everything _except_ where some much
larger problem exists (i.e. you are on a plane).

Wireless seems good in India because the networks are not highly demanded -
and are expensive to boot so volume is managed. Wireless seems to grow quickly
because you throw up a tower and declare "50,000 people now have access!", and
telephone service is still kind of a big deal.

But that's all you get from it. You can't provide a 20mbps pipe to those
50,000 people - not even close.

But India is poverty stricken. The electricity grid is bad. And there's the
lawlessness that comes with poverty (heard of copper thieves?). Wireless
towers are easy central locations to power and protect. Thousands of miles of
copper or fiber is not.

------
stretchwithme
I'm all for people owning their own last mile for all kinds of services, if
that's what they wish to do. Cooperatives are a great thing.

And the marketplace where these coops buy their internet access, electricity
or water can still be competitive. It would actually be MORE competitive than
the monopolies handed out by governments that you cannot easily leave.

And the decision to grant such a monopoly or revoke or allow an increase would
not be in hands of the few. It would be in many different collections of hands
and be much harder to pay off all those hands for some sweetheart deal.

------
shmerl
They bought corrupted laws and now they are brazen enough to complain that
someone dares to oppose them? It's really disgusting.

------
dsjoerg
Most interesting part of the article: USTelecom would like "public entities
[to] bear the same regulatory burdens as private service providers".

What's that about? What regulatory burdens are these public providers
avoiding, and are those burdens in the public interest or not?

------
acd
horse vs unicorn

US cable wants to keep monopoly over subscriber base and keep things as they
always were. Nice steady revenue per cable subscriber per month.

High speed internet access is disrupting their business model. Pick any
streaming service you like as long as you have fast broadband.

------
Tloewald
And then, in a fit of pique, he napalmed Cheltenham. Even the police began to
take notice.

------
hoilogoi
Counterpoint: try googling "Volstate EPB".

I'm no expert, but I think it would be a shame if small struggling ISPs get
the short end of the stick. It's hard for me to make a judgement on this
specifically.

~~~
radicalbyte
OT: this post is the 4th result in Google. Comment on HN indexed within 35
minutes. Crazy.

It kind of sucks for companies like that, but competition is good.

In an ideal situation you'd have "the people" own the pipes which they then
rent at cost to commercial providers. In practice this would usually be via
local government, but I'd prefer it via some kind of mutual society (where
residents own a share, is open only to residents, and which is sold along with
the property).

The UK has a variation of this model, called "local loop unbundling"
([http://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/home/products/llu/llu.do](http://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/home/products/llu/llu.do)).
The infra was originally built by the state telco BT, which was then
privatized. To create competition they introduced LLU, which forced BT to
allow competition access to the pipes.

~~~
sitkack
The last mile should be open to the people and supported as infrastructure. I
should be able to send packets across town for zero cost.

~~~
kordless
You should also be able to host your own services. These two things are more
closely related than a lot of people realize.

~~~
sgt101
Two points - someone has to maintain the network; holes need digging, kit
needs buying, upgrading and monitoring. This cannot be free. It could be a
government utility, but paying for it would then come out of taxes and the
choice would be between paying for that, aircraft carriers or incubators.

Second, networks are designed to deliver different things at different price
points. Running a web service at the end of a residential connection does not
make economic sense compared to running it in a datacentre connected directly
to a peering point on 40gig-e.

~~~
kordless
> end of a residential connection does not make economic sense compared to
> running it in a datacentre

While I agree with you, I believe there exists an in-between solution.

------
whoisthemachine
* sigh _

