
Comcast Has Always Opposed Internet Freedom - joeyespo
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/dont-be-fooled-comcast-pr-machine-it-has-always-opposed-open-internet
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colanderman
If you are, like I once was, hesitant to leave Comcast for a competitor
because of their IPv6 support: just do it, and get a (free) IPv6 tunnel via
Hurricane Electric:
[https://www.tunnelbroker.net/](https://www.tunnelbroker.net/)

~~~
larrik
It must be nice to have reasonable competitors. When I first moved into this
house 2 years ago, I needed to wait for Comcast to dig me a new cable line,
and in the meantime I had to use Frontier "fiber" DSL (it's not fiber). What a
joke that was. The idea that my internet, phone, AND TV all came over a single
telephone line was fascinating, but the internet was total crap.

Those are my options, so I'm stuck with Comcast.

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colanderman
Only since recently do I live somewhere with actual competition (RCN, Comcast,
and FiOS; only Comcast providing IPv6). I do count myself lucky.

It's amazing what a difference competition makes; I pay the same price today
($40/mo) for 50 Mbps from RCN as I did a month ago for 3 Mbps from Comcast.
Regulation cannot come soon enough; we as a tech community must do all we can
to oust that corporate capitalist tool Ajit Pai from the FCC.

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ajmarsh
Uh, what you seem to have is actual competition going on in your area. More
regulation will not necessarily help bring about more of that. I do agree that
Ajit Pai seems to be a giant toolbox.

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colanderman
It was regulation (specifically, antitrust) that broke up Ma Bell.

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juliangoldsmith
Regulation has also been used by companies like Comcast to stifle competition,
in addition to the large initial cost to starting an ISP.

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SAI_Peregrinus
It's almost as though regulation is a complicated subject and can have more
than one type of effect...

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RunawayGalaxy
I'm quite ignorant on how the industry has gotten to this state. I don't
understand why the cable companies are private in the first place. Wasn't the
infrastructure they leverage heavily subsidized by the public? There are no
consumers I can think of who are against net neutrality if given the option,
yet it's still a battle. What can we do about this? I'm not asking
rhetorically.

~~~
dsr_
How did we get here? History.

The original cable companies were community antenna television (CATV)
providers. They would find high ground with good signal reception, or make it
with antenna masts, and send an amplified signal to their subscribers. The
service was relatively cheap and very desirable in areas where putting up your
own antenna wasn't useful. Towns easily granted licenses to their local
companies to put up wire on the telephone poles.

The first added services were satellite channel reception and local channel
insertion. These cost little to add.

Then pay channels were invented - HBO among the first. In order to
differentiate non-subscribers from subscribers, the cable companies came up
with a clever idea: they would add a transmission to each pay channel that
would interfere with the signal. Subscribers would get a notch filter that
would cut out the interference.

It was easy when you only had one channel to block or allow, but handling
several meant multiple filters. It was much cheaper to maintain a few sets of
multiple-filter enabling devices than to customize them for every subscriber,
and that's where tiers of channels originally came from.

All of these things were handled by more or less local companies, and towns
and cities didn't have a problem handing them pole access. But the companies
consolidated into larger franchises, 800 becoming 20 or so companies covering
populations of a million or more subscribers each and 82 much smaller
businesses. The top five have about 235 million people in their coverage
zones. The next five cover 43 million. And the next ten have about 15.

Now, once you have wired infrastructure covering that number of people,
coupled with a tradition of granting local monopoly access to the wires, you
get to hire lawyers and lobbyists who convince legislatures to make your
traditional de factor monopoly a de jure monopoly.

So that's how we got here.

What can we do? Mostly what we have to do is to make net neutrality and
infrastructure reform a priority for our state legislators and congressional
reps and senators. Talk to them about your concerns. With Republicans,
concentrate on arguments about enabling small business innovation and
improving the economy. With Democrats, use arguments about freedom and
consumer rights. Talk to your neighbors. Nobody wants a high cable bill, and
the only way to lower it is to break the monopoly.

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blackflame7000
Excellent historical summary. I wonder, in your opinion, how do you envision
new VHF/UHF technology impacting wired monopolies? Do you see it shaking up
the local wired monopolies or do you expect airwave frequencies to be snatched
up by the big guys in order to maintain status quo (ie limited choices)?

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exelius
That's generally how telecom works. You can always try to compete against the
big guys, at least for a while, but in the long run they will own you one way
or another. It's not an accident that the two biggest wireless companies are
also the two biggest wireline telecom companies (and both former parts of Ma
Bell).

Why? To build a telecom, you need billions in capital. To raise that much
capital, you need shareholders with deep pockets. If you do very well with
those investments and threaten the big telecoms, they'll just buy you out.
Those investors with deep pockets will be happy to sell for a profit.

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chii
What if the investors are the people that are going to be using the service?
Like a co-op?

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exelius
Eventually, the scale advantages when it comes to things like network upgrades
will plow you under.

Let's compare Comcast (30 million subscribers) with a local cable operator
(and let's say it's a co-op with 50,000 subscribers):

If Comcast wants to upgrade from DOCSIS3 to DOCSIS3.1, they have to come up
with an upgrade / migration plan for probably 3 or 4 different configurations
of their CMTS platform. Let's say this costs $10 million per platform, so $40
million overall. Spread across 30 million customers, that works out to about
$1.25 per customer.

If the local co-op wants to upgrade from DOCSIS3 to DOCSIS3.1, they have to
come up with one migration plan for their single CMTS platform (this includes
things like lab equipment, etc because you absolutely have to test and tweak
this stuff). But the local co-op probably doesn't have a bunch of on-staff
CMTS integration experts, so they have to hire an integrator at probably 1.5x
the cost Comcast would pay. $15 million across 50,000 subscribers is $300 per
subscriber.

Tell a co-op board that they have a choice: a one-time $300 fee across all the
customers to cover the upgrade, raise prices by $10/mo, or accept a buyout
offer from Comcast who will perform the upgrade for free. And this is just for
one component of the system. Costs are simply higher across the board, and
that has to get passed along to customers.

Scale matters in telecom. A lot. A lot of the investment is in non-variable
costs, or at least costs that scale logarithmically to number of customers
rather than linearly. Comcast/AT&T/Verizon can afford to undercut any smaller
competitors because their scale enables a cost structure with much lower
overhead maintenance costs.

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microDude
My only other option is a 3Mb DSL line.

For the past few years I have subscribed to DSL, just to avoid feeding
Comcast. Comcast/Cable Internet should be regulated like a utility.

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kevin_thibedeau
I had 4Mb DSL once. It was okay, then water got into the line somewhere and I
was moved to a different pair that could only manage 2Mb. Naturally the phone
company couldn't GAF and I had no way to remedy the problem other than cable.
The existing utilities should be forced to maintain a suitable quality of
service.

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doctorshady
Yeah, the way they neglect their infrastructure is an incredible load of shit.
If you have phone service (real phone service; a voip service like the one
AT&T tries to push with Uverse is basically unregulated) on the same line and
it's experiencing problems however, you can get the FCC involved if they
refuse to fix it.

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rch
Comcast is currently working on LoRa networks and lobbying for control. The
economics of a low power wide area network don't really favor a monopoly, but
they might get one if nobody is paying attention.

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infocollector
In our locality, unfortunately, Comcast is a monopoly. Is there a way to
complain about ISPs (about Comcast) to FCC or another regulator?

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youdontknowtho
Literally, they have opposed an open internet for as long as they have been
involved with it.

They have been one of the larger IPv6 deployments, which is good for the
network. That being said, they have always wanted to use "Qos" to bias some
traffic against others.

I really think that the answer here is non-profit carriers providing fiber to
everything. As long as carriers can compete in the content space they are
going to have a monetary incentive to screw people.

~~~
colanderman
They don't just want to use QoS, they actively do. All non-Comcast TV traffic
entering a Comcast customer's network is tagged with DSCP 8, which basically
means "bottom feeder" in terms of network priority (below even untagged
traffic).

For many this is not a problem. But if you have a router with WMM (WiFi QoS)
enabled, the above setting _destroys_ your connection quality, since inbound
data takes a back seat to basically anything on the airwaves. I had to start
stripping DSCP off of incoming packets to regain any semblance of a
functioning internet connection.

And of course Comcast doesn't care about this, it combined with their
bufferbloat problems just serve as a means to convince subscribers that the
really need to upgrade to some $100/mo package to be able to browse Facebook…

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youdontknowtho
I did not know that. I haven't been a Comcast customer for years because the
last time I used them the bill was never what they said it would be. I had the
worst time getting it turned off too. It was really weird.

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speedgeek
In other news, Exxon Mobil opposes the use of non fossil fuels and water is
wet.

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raarts
I don't know if I should flag this or not. Most every post gets the obligatory
reply like this one, stating 'this is not news', 'what do you expect', maybe
there's even a term for it.

Does this really add value to the discussion?

