I wish the FCC would regulate how ISPs advertise their speeds and force reliability disclosures. It's impossible to compare two ISPs without actually subscribing. I know Comcast can offer me 10x the advertised bandwidth, but I know in practice that can vary widely.
I use Google Webpass (a microwave radio link). The speed is 100Mbps, and the service is phenomenal. I've had one outage in 3 years, only lasting about 6 hours. I had switched to RCN for about a month, as they had advertised 300Mbps for a cheaper price. The speed in tests was about that high (and actually even higher), but I was getting a lot of buffering when streaming videos, that made the service much worse.
When I worked at att I was really only estimating what your bill would be, I never actually knew what we would charge you for phone service cable or internet even with our internal tools. Bills would also be different from month to month for seemingly no reason
I love this idea because it would really help companies like my rural cable supplier. They advertise 300/30 for $80/month, but I regularly get 350/30, with as good as it gets ping and jitter. I'd love for their service to have some official recognition.
I've gone through some level of effort to try to document ISP reliability issues over the years and it's remarkably difficult to do anything comprehensive. SamKnows is the closest thing I've found but it's difficult to understand the distribution of their service and/or what all is done with the data they collect.
I wonder if this is going to go as badly as the net neutrality one went [1]. Filled with fake comments that celebrate the incumbents, and still used to justify policy.
A number of newspapers dug into it, but ultimately FCC and chairman Ajit Pai had the full trust of his superior, Donald Trump. Not much we the people can do, aside from complaining on the internet.
I live in a relatively rural area that historically has only been serviced by DSL from the local telephone company. When I first moved out here I was surprised that broadband available, but there’s been zero investment in infrastructure or capacity since then.
Starlink from SpaceX was just made available through a partnership with a state agency and it’s obvious that DSLs days are numbered. RDOF is also stretching the reach of cable and fiber broadband to areas previously only serviced by the telephone company.
The thing that occurred to me however is that many people don’t maintain dial tone at home, and once DSL alternatives are available I’m curious what the telephone companies going to do with all of this infrastructure and zero customers. As far as I know somebody’s on the hook to make telecom available to every home, does RDOF move that responsibility to the organization receiving the funding for Internet?
Basic internet should be a utility. The FCC should define a minimum standard and everyone should be wired for that and it should be a nominal fee. There can still be ISPs that provide faster services for $$$.
I think a good model would be splitting it up so the physical plant and internet uplink are run by separate entities.
Local government would run the fibre network and terminate everything to a central POP (or several). They're responsible to maintain the physical network and ensure every connection can obtain the minimum speed and latency standard. This could even be cable/DSL/wireless, so long as the minimum speed is hit. They can contract this out, but it's largely irrelevant to the consumer.
At the POP is where ISPs take over and provide the upstream connection to the actual internet, and this is who the consumer pays. The ISPs can compete based on whatever combination of price, speed, transfer limits and/or add-on services they choose.
Internet is probably least compelling natural monopoly out there. First, running more lines and multiple systems doesn't require the same impact as running two plumbing or gas systems, and secondly most of the natural monopolies in internet access I have seen are due to the government causing them not preventing them!
The scariest thing you can say to me is "we're the government and we're going to run your fiber" when almost all of my local municipally run services are barely functioning.
In my city, we have wooden sewers in some place over a hundred years old, gas pipes blowing up city blocks, streets which collapse into sink holes, and now you say "oh the government should surely get involved?". Preposterous.
Regulating delivery telecom as an open utility doesn't necessarily mean it is operated by the government.
If you want another big-city infrastructure example from the US, look at Empire City Subway. This is a company which has exclusive franchise from NYC to maintain a network of underground conduit in Manhattan, which they can use for their parent company (Verizon) but must also sell access to any other carrier who needs it.
I could imagine a similar approach that actually extends to the residential consumer. I live in a building which has FiOS in the street, but the landlord doesn't care to provide access to Verizon to wire the building, so I'm stuck with the legacy cable provider (which is far worse). If by law all buildings connected to a common utility-scale fiber network and I was simply buying transit from my ISP, I'd be much happier.
> but the landlord doesn't care to provide access to Verizon
Very generous words. I lived in a building once where the landlord flat out told me that we can only have Comcast because they paid him. Obviously, YMMV. In my experience it was more malicious than simply not caring.
I still laugh when I see this – although I'm not really sure where you live.
Where I live (Montgomery County, MD), the county municipal services are far, far superior to what the private folks do, whether it's refuse collection, leaf removal, or snow removal. I can't speak to their efficiency though since I haven't scrutinized the budgets.
MoCo is one of the most affluent and highly taxed counties in the entire country - a suburb of DC filled with lobbyists, lawyers, and doctors. Greenwich, CT has pretty good snow removal too, but that example doesn't help at all in Detroit.
Some years ago I would have agreed with you, but now I've got gigabit muni fiber for $80/mo with no caps. I never need to call them, because the service just works. Evidently most people feel the same way, as they haven't had the need to "optimize" the costs of providing support by outsourcing.
The problems of speed, transfer limits, and add on services are wholly created by incumbent ISPs, and no, we don't need the dinosaur business model competing to perpetuate them.
I've started to wonder if everybody should even be wired. Starlink is about to show us all that rural internet is better served with satellites than wires. In doing so, they'll show that 20 years of taxes paid to the government that the government paid to big broadband companies to build rural internet that big businesses just pocketed for profit - it was all a total waste. Not just a waste because the broadband companies are greedy bastards but also a waste because wires are the wrong way to connect rural areas. Another demonstration that government involvement in technology leads to extremely expensive and wasteful investments in the wrong places. And you want it to be a utility?
This [1] is the actual page for consumers. The link to the form you're supposed to use to submit your broadband experiences just links to the generic FCC consumer complaint form, though.
It links to [1], which appears to be their meta "fill out a form" web page, but has specific fields for more information that differ from, say, their generic Internet Problem form [2].
If you live in Urban areas, you expect to have Water, Electricity and sewage pipes as standards in building. Why cant you add Fibre to that list? Standardising Fibre in the building and ISP only gets to FTTB. Effectively making it like DSL.
Water, electricity and sewage are all part of building codes for safety. Internet is not a safety device.
Of course, there is nothing stopping local governments from forcing broadband into new construction... It just isn't on the same level as water / sewer / electricity.
Yup. Emergency lighting in hallways for multi-family housing, plus electric lights within houses.
Zero electricity invites excessive use of open flame, creating fire hazard. It is at least part of why going off-grid is difficult unless you are deep in the country in s state that isn't too hostile to it.
Will this data be used to validate the data on their broadband availability site [1]? Asking because I am using that site to figure out where to buy a home in a rural area and I am hearing that the data is misleading.
The FCC site isn't very accurate. It really only tells you that a particular service might be available in that area. But you have to check with the actual ISP to verify. The FCC claims that AT&T DSL is an option at my home address, but if you go to the actual AT&T site it says "AT&T no longer offers DSL service".
The FCC is a victim of regulatory capture and the current Republican theory of government. If you've missed it, here it is: the government should not do anything besides courts and armies and tax policy.
The FCC was also hindered by the majority Democratic position that regulation of monopolies is a dangerous precedent and that positive economic incentives will work to encourage policy objectives.
It's never 20 years too late to adopt the reasonable position that Internet-connected bandwidth is a prerequisite for participation in the current economic and civic life of first-world economies.
Why should the Democrats support non-means tested welfare for people that overwhelmingly vote for the party that only thinks government should do courts and armies? Why not give people what they vote for?
While I agree, some people will never learn and grow regardless. "Touching the hot stove" doesn't work at national policy scale imho. It's like asking sea creatures to evolve fast enough to be able to exist at the rate of acidification due to CO2 saturation. It just ain't gonna happen. Poor decisions will catch up faster than folks are going to learn.
The consequences of people’s votes don’t matter when political affiliation is handed down within families similarly to religious affiliation. The number of people that say “I vote for X because my family votes for X; we’re X people” is simply astounding.
Expecting rational behavior from irrational beginnings doesn’t work well in my experience.
That Democrats worry about their constituents instead of voting for programs where the benefits go to groups that are overwhelmingly Republican. See for example coal miner pension bailouts.
They aren't pretending anything. I was stuck in DSL hell for the better part of the last decade. There was a shop running fiber all over that told me they wouldn't be servicing our area until there were more Rural Broadband funds made available (to fund the ~2 mile run to our neighborhood). As of last year I'm finally on fiber... RBF works. It's just a matter of ensuring the funds get directed to ISPs that are ACTUALLY laying fiber instead of giving it to companies like Frontier.
Frontier - sold 7Mbit down that actually operated at about 1.5mbit during business hours and would peak at 5mbit from 2a-4am if I had to download something - that despite the modem actually syncing up at 7mbit. It was entirely their network too, my SNR was good enough to do 25mbit+ if they had offered it.
Latency generally in the hundreds of ms because their network was so congested any traffic leaving it was a joke. Netflix was literally the only thing that worked for content (sometimes) and I'd assume that only worked through a combination of excellent bandwidth management on the part of Netflix and a caching server somewhere local on the Frontier network.
My dial-up in the 90s was better from a reliability and consistency perspective. I ended up having to install mosh on all of my systems because SSH sessions would timeout so frequently on Frontier's garbage network.
It looks like this is part of an effort by the new Presidential administration. I Googled the "Broadband Data Task Force" in the "Share your experience" link, and found this press release from February 2021.
I feel like I'm living the dream currently. I have AT&T fiber with gigabit up and down that runs through my backyard and Google Fiber with gigabit up and down running along the street in front of my house. But many other homes even in my neighborhood have neither and that is not right.
Here in southern central PA right close to the MD line a lot of us have access to Comcast. Though that was it until recently I discovered and now have T-Mobile 5G Home Broadband at $50 a month (no promotion); speeds up to 100Mbps. Verizon will probably within a year or two offer a similar service.
I called Comcast to cancel my Internet and was surprised their retention deals currently do not match what I have with T-Mobile 5G. In time im sure they will and finally have to compete.
- IRS+SBA support for research/grants/development for new smaller, smarter, faster ISPs. Additional emphasis security and decentralization.
- Removal and ban of any laws that hinder/outlaw small businesses, municipality, city, town, school/universities, or states from starting their own ISPs. [Comcast+ATT have lobbied heavily in making sure bills have been passed in most states banning municipalities from starting their own ISP.]
IMO the FCC should focus on adding competition where there already is internet and adding minimum speed requirements for areas with low competition (eg require 50/10Mbps down/up speeds for anyone with N miles of a metro with X population, where N could be 100 and X could be 100K)
I also think a concept of inflation should be added to speed minimums to bake progress into the law.
I use Google Webpass (a microwave radio link). The speed is 100Mbps, and the service is phenomenal. I've had one outage in 3 years, only lasting about 6 hours. I had switched to RCN for about a month, as they had advertised 300Mbps for a cheaper price. The speed in tests was about that high (and actually even higher), but I was getting a lot of buffering when streaming videos, that made the service much worse.