[HR 3557] “Eliminates cable franchise renewals and eliminates the ability of local governments to require rules such as an ISP having to serve the whole community, the local government requiring PEG channels, or the local government requiring customer service standards.”
This is a federal bill, but aren't federal powers limited to regulating inter-state commerce? Yet the powers it strips from state legislatures are clearly aimed at intra-state commerce.
Wickard v Filburn broke that, in ruling that a man growing more than the “legal limit” of wheat for his own use was nonetheless “affecting” interstate commerce.
Congress's Commerce Clause power in the Constitution is notorious for being very broadly interpreted in the modern era. Here, Congress is either regulating a "channel" of interstate commerce (the internet) or intrastate economic activity that interferes with interstate commerce (local ISP rules making nationwide ISP business more burdened).
It's fascinating that the author implies more regulatory power over telecoms would solve this, even though they're plainly buying that same regulatory power when it's advantageous. If "the vast majority of politicians are feckless cardboard cutouts with little real interest in market or consumer health" anyways, it'd seem a superfluous effort to give an agency more power only to sell it out later, right?
The Telecom Act of 1996 started the current mess. I argue it was partly responsible for the dotcom bust. It killed the incentive to create broadband, and the internet without broadband is not that useful. It's a regulatory mess.
You're probably being unfairly downvoted by people associating this act with the CDA but you're absolutely right. That act basically killed the booming industry for last-mile fiber by forcing the incumbent companies to lease out last mile access. Fast forward a few more years to 2004, the startups that put those lines in are gone and the incumbents won the ability to stop leasing most of their infra out: https://web.archive.org/web/20160818001129/http://www.ictreg...
in Israel similar regulation created a bunch of ISP that were riding on infrastructure of the only incumbent telecom and cable companies. What resulted in lower prices for everybody without stalling upgrades of infrastructure. I got 2013 vdsl2 i think with 150/20 or something. Nowdays it's same with fiber deployment.
In same way mobile companies got regulated what created a big market for mvnos what dropped prices by factor or 3-4.
The problem not with unbundling but with how regulation was done and what loopholes it created (no idea what went down, but based on article many people spent a bunch of time in court fighting it). Though, my personal guess that incumbent telecom that were unbundled had also mobile businesses and decided to go for mobile broadband and just to let copper die. In Israel telecom/cable companies were forbidden from operating mobile network.
As anecdote, after I moved to states I had a chat on some network conference with somebody who claimed that he is very liberal and was complaining about quality/price of broadband/mobile in USA. I suggested to do same reforms as in Israel to what he replied that this is extremely crazy approach.
The author actually implies that banning local municipalities from having any regulatory capacity when it comes to broadband (and, it seems cable) is a bad idea.
They already have that capacity now; the proposed house bill would remove it.
It's instructive to consider why local politicians are so much more hostile to ISP monopolies than the centralized, federal politicians. I think it's a combination of being closer to your constituents, legislating for people you meet every day, and economics - there are many local politicians to brib-lobby, but relatively few federal ones, giving orders of magnitude better return on investment.
You make the claim that local politicians are "much more hostile" to ISP monopolies that federal ones. But what's the evidence for this?
I know of several members of the house & senate who are severely hostile to ISP monopolies, but power at the federal level lies mostly with the FCC, thus blunting the effectiveness of any particular elected representative.
At the local level, get the mayor pissed off at you (and a legal framework that allows it), and you (may) have a problem.
Having access to fast municipal internet is going to be a requirement for every home I buy going forward. That restricts my possible relocation options, but it's worth it to not have to deal with monopoly companies that can simply dictate whatever terms they like. Imagine if other utilities were private and had similar powers.
There's been a couple of stories about people (usually fairly young couples) that brought houses, on the specific guarantee from their local "broadband" monopoly, that they would have the service, and found out only after moving in, that they did not, in fact, have the service, and would need to pay many thousands of dollars, to get substandard service.
The companies that made the guarantees were allowed to say "oops, we goofed. Our bad.", without having to pay a dime, or even say sorry.
This literally happened to me. Looked at a house, Comcast said they serviced the address. First I checked online, then I called in on top of that just to make absolutely sure. Bought the house, ordered my Comcast, tech shows up on the day of install and says: "Sorry, we don't actually service this address, not sure what happened". I call in and they basically said tough shit, there's no way we're ever running service to that neighborhood.
Before I bought house I opened access panel on a side of the house to make sure that there is coax/etc going into the house and asked neighbors about availability of the service
Wow, the gall of those people. It should be punishable for a business to lie to you like this. You made a financial decision based on information that the business should have on file.
Apparently, the reason they do it, is that it qualifies them for some kinds of favors/kickbacks, if they are listed as serving an area, and it also may prevent rivals from serving that area.
They tend to have a lot of local politicians in their pocket.
Ars Technica tends to cover this crap. They were not fans of Ajit Pai.
Well, story time. Because I went through this process.
I purchased a condo in a building that Comcast (A cable internet ISP) claimed to service. I even called ahead before putting an offer on the unit to verify I'd have them as an option, since they were the only high speed internet option available besides slow DSL or 4G. Sure enough, Comcast told me they service that address.
Fast forward to near the move-in date, I call Comcast to transfer my service to this location. They tell me sorry, we can't do that, we don't service this address. I tell them this is impossible, because not only am I on your coverage map, but I called a month ago and you told me you service it. They said sorry, nothing they could do, and that I should try Comcast business or pay something like $4000 for a build-out.
Well, I was desperate and called Comcast business to see if I could get a business line in my very residential condo. Weirdly, they allowed it. But I had to pay $200 for a setup fee and then roughly $100/month for what was basically 50mbps internet, locked in a 2 year contract. I had no choice, so I ate the cost - which looked much better than the $4000 option. But then Comcast said "Hey, we want to install a distribution box in your building, can we do that?" and I had to wrangle with the condo board to get that thing installed. About 3 months later I finally had Comcast internet, locked into an expensive contract. But because Comcast had installed a distribution box in the building, at least my neighbors could now actually get the service Comcast claimed they offered on the map (even for regular home internet). After 2 years my contract was up and I was able to switch to residential internet at a lower rate.
I suspect if this was a SFH rather than a single unit in a 28-unit condo building I'd be screwed and have to shell out the $4K.
probably not easy to achieve, but i think the contract needs to be made with the property owners, that is, if their property doesn't have the required internet service, they need to pay to fix it or allow you to cancel the contract.
A legally binding guarantee? I doubt anyone will give you one.
But if you're buying a home you have other options - for example, you can just buy a house that already has a working broadband connection. The homeowner will give you the wifi password to run a speed test if you ask nicely.
If the property doesn't have broadband already, there are other signs you can sometimes spot - cables going into other people's properties, street cabinets and handholes with the company's branding, nearby wifi networks with supplier names in the SSID, and suchlike.
You can't. Several people have shared stories about trying to get it in writing from Comcast (and it is always Comcast) that service is available at a particular address before they move there, specifically to avoid this issue, and the CSRs will not do it. They're very careful not to make a paper trail with discoverable evidence.
Honestly infrastructure itself like fiber to the homes should be operated separately from the ISPs. Would be far easier to have a competition if new player in town would have to only get their connectivity up to some central spot and then pay per client connected, rather than have to manage their fiber anywhere they go.
Yeah, there's a good argument to be made that the wire (be it fiber, coax, or whatever) itself should be treated as a public utility, since it is a natural monopoly. Several countries do operate like that.
This is in effect the regime in the UK for example. The incumbent Telco, BT Openreach, are regulated to offer "last mile" for the same fee to their closely related customer business BT and to third parties.
In rural areas BT are required to offer service, if you live somewhere really crazy (like up a mountain) they can make you pay costs, but they can't say "No". On the other hand in a city where a dozen outfits might want to run cable, BT automatically are allowed, everybody else needs to get an OK.
It's not perfect but it means that for the actual Internet stuff it's irrelevant, everybody can get a choice, I pay a lot for great customer service, static IPv4 and v6 and zero censorship, there are cheaper options, there are options with so-called "unlimited" usage, but the choice doesn't impact the cable in the ground.
Because I live in a city I could buy faster but crappier service from a cable company, or a dedicated fibre Internet company but that wouldn't be an option in a village somewhere.
And yes, nobody is building new copper. If a company tells you fibre is too expensive they're telling you they can't afford to be a Telco, they're a badly run business, chances are the unacceptable costs are in their C-suite not buried in the street.
Neither Openreach nor City Fibre have laid fibre in my area of a big city, the only date given for when they will do it is sometime before 2026. A dedicated fibre internet company has cabled my street though.
I just switched from an ISP that uses the Openreach infrastructure, probably the same one you are using from your description, to the dedicated fibre internet company as it was the only way I could get a faster connection.
The UK is a bad example because Openreach have done a shit job rolling out fibre. The govt bottled it and stopped them fully separating from BT after lobbying.
NZ is a good example: our BT was actually forced to fully separate retail and wholesale businesses (Spark and Chorus). They have a national fibre network that operates as a utility and fibre internet is ubiquitous and cheap.
I'm much less bothered about "fibre Internet". It's a bigger number, people like bigger numbers, but they generally don't matter very much.
1Gbps symmetric would be cheaper here than my current 40Mbps. But, it would come from a typical mediocre "CGNAT is fine for reading Facebook and watching Netflix" company, whereas my ISP gives me a /48 to put all my stuff in so I can use it from anywhere without some dubious tunnelling hack.
A long time ago now, 1996, I moved into my first shared student house. We had Always On, because we were a household of nerds and we knew that's what we wanted. That's a shared (between maybe five people, more when girlfriends are in) 56kbps Internet link. But what matters isn't bandwidth it's the Always On nature of the connectivity. Within months, modern habits like searching for the answers to questions on the Web as a reflex, became normal in that house, because everybody had Internet all the time.
Now, I'm not suggesting 56kbps is good enough in 2023. But I don't find I have ever wished for 1Gbps rather than 40Mbps. Not even "Sometimes I wonder if it's worth it". It just never arises as a consideration. 1Gbps is more, but more than plenty is just irrelevant. It's like I've never been bothered that my electricity supply is only 100A. I've never felt like I'd need more, so, who cares ?
It seems like the misunderstanding / issue you have is that you don't appear to download anything. As someone that downloads plenty (video games, large binaries in general) I'm at 1.2Gbps and would definitely need more in the next few future years. Would I be fine with 500Mbps/500Mbps? Sure but I'd be grumpy but at least it would be symmertrical.
Agreed. But you are 27 years late to this argument at least in the US. In 1996, when the Internet was hot, telcom providers promised to spend tens of billions building out fiber infra US-wide as long as Congress guaranteed them they owned the fiber and would not have to act as a public carrier as they had to do with their copper (phone, xDSL internet). My understanding is that was granted in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. I confess I am finding it hard to find the smoking gun making this so clear but it was moderately clear at the time. The legislation did require unbundling of the copper elements to competitive local exchange (telco) entities which then sprung up but slowly died under the onslaught of Baby Bell marketing and technical neglect.
A personal anecdote illustrating the technical neglect: In the competitive DSL era pre-fiber, I once spent weeks trying to get my local CLEC to fix my intermittent DSL connection in my suburban dwelling and their hands were tied because they were in turn dependent on the local Bell company to actually service/debug last-mile issues and the local Bell company was not really incented to debug intermittent issues for others' customers promptly if they could keep their ticket-closing metrics up. They also didn't really want to invest anything more than absolutely necessary in the copper they had to share with others when they could spend their capital on new fiber. I was able to show them the packet and ping drops in service on my connections and even the DSL modem's outbound connection logs along with timestamps proving the intermittent nature of the issue but it took about a dozen calls and several in-person visits to get the copper fixed. I spent maybe... 20 hours trying to get it fixed and I cannot imagine any but the smallest fraction of people being both aware and persistent to overcome such obstacles.
In subsequent years, the telcom providers made a point of disabling copper whenever installing fiber so once you were upgraded, you were fully locked in and could no longer competitively downgrade and shop for copper DSL once you went fiber.
Yeah, that doesn't work. Or rather, that's both not necessary and not sufficient.
You are now at the mercy of the fiber operator. He will be the one that gets all of the profits, and who is going to crush you. You just added some random extra parties that add almost no value, but you are required by law to deal with them... what is not a big issue, because they are in a competitive market and won't give you any trouble.
What does work is regulating the hell out of the fiber operator. At the extreme, making it answer to you instead of to profits. And that works the same whether the internet service is bundled or unbundled. (But then that creates some other problems, nothing is trouble-free.)
> You are now at the mercy of the fiber operator. He will be the one that gets all of the profits, and who is going to crush you.
The proposal is that last mile fiber is considered a public utility. You may have noticed that other public utilities (e.g. water, gas, electricity) are tightly regulated.
It works when the company that takes care of the fiber is owned by the city and have more goals than to make money. Just like the company that create the electricity grid. When they have goals both in terms of how many people they reach with fiber within the area aswell as making money. Then you have a way of creating fiber and an open market where any ISPs can connect to the city-wide or region-wide fiber network and sell their services. Instead of competing in regards to the physical network close to the customer they compete when it comes to redundant connections to the city, quality customer support, prices, public IPs etc. This model is used all over Sweden (and I assume other countries in europe) to provide affordable internet. There are ofcourse still areas here that are only served by a single ISP with their own network. Often there can be a combination of those monopoloy networks and open networks within a single city. Depending on when the houses where built and who the estate owner is etc. Its sometimes cheaper for a smaller estate owner to sign with a single ISP since the initial installation cost may be lower. The end customer will of course pay higher prices for the services going forward.
The electricity works the same. One company owned by the city builds the electricity infrastructure. Then you pick whatever company you want to buy the electricity from.
I can pick between 10+ companies for Internet and many more than that for electricity in my town of around 60k residents.
Works fine as long as the company that takes care of that part does its job. You do put all trust in that one company to not be a douchebag. But seems to work here. Does of course not mean that it will work everywhere.
We had a local ISP that ~10 years ago was doing fiber build outs in new neighborhoods (they had been around for 20 years as dial-up, DSL, and Colo). They told me they had slowed down on that because of the amount of manpower required for doing locates was killing them.
From a consumer perspective it's the worst of both worlds - they operate like a utility in that there's physical infrastructure needed to provide service to your home, but unlike a utility there's little to no regulation and oversight.
You're underselling the problem! That would limit you to a handful (or a fistful, if we're being generous) of municipalities in the whole country.
I've lived in places where there was no municipal internet, but had two or three competing broadband providers. That kept prices down and services fast, and may be a suitable alternative.
Come live in Sweden! Most cities have a "City Net" which is municipal fiber. I recently moved apartments and the new place had both coax and fiber. I just went on an ISP website input my apartment details and two days later I had 500/500 Mbps for $39.14 / month.
Full disclosure: I represent telecom companies, but I’m speaking only for myself.
> [The bill] eliminates the ability of local governments to require rules such as an ISP having to serve the whole community
Such requirements kill fiber development. Laying fiber is expensive, and having to lay it through neighborhoods where most people won’t or can’t subscribe just increases the price for everyone.
It’s not just the traditional telcos or cable companies. There is a reason Google Fiber has this concept of “fiberhoods” where you need a certain level of demonstrated interest in subscription before they’ll build in those areas. The city of Baltimore wanted to kick out Comcast and have someone build fiber across the city. Verizon wouldn’t do it because of the coverage requirements. Google wouldn’t do it either. The city is now looking at building the network itself, but it has no money: https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/politics-power/local-gove...
Many of the other things the article complains about are similarly roadblocks to development. It’s actually the same exact thing as NIMBY regulations that stop housing development. Again, look at the places Google ended up deploying fiber. If you ignore webpass, every deployment is in states that are low-regulation generally (Utah, Georgia, Colorado, Texas, etc.)
>Such requirements kill fiber development. Laying fiber is expensive, and having to lay it through neighborhoods where most people won’t or can’t subscribe just increases the price for everyone.
Odd, laying fiber was deemed "too expensive" to lay in a community where we have a family cabin. Instead, someone formed a co-op. Everyone is getting wired, and the speeds:price is SIGNIFICANTLY less than Comcast, with symmetric up/down to boot.
I appreciate you've got a job to do and a talk track, but it's simply not accurate. What you MEAN to say is: wiring everyone in a community results in a margin profile that's below what large Telco executives find acceptable, so they focus on areas with high adoption rates and low deployment costs and tell community's that it's just "too expensive" to do anything else.
I wish we gave companies even 1/10th the flak that we give people for acting entitled. This right here is a perfect example, but it happens all the time.
You seem to be saying that your cabin community was able to find a solution that would not be acceptable to a large telco. Why isn't that OK? Why should the large company be forced to do something they don't want to do if, by your example, other organizations are capable of servicing those communities?
To rephrase the question: What, if anything, prevents smaller organizations or non-profits or niche companies from servicing areas that large telcos will only do through regulatory mandates? Can the business/regulatory climate be improved to facilitate these smaller organizations? Are there existing regulations (for example access to poles or conduits) in some areas that block smaller organizations?
>You seem to be saying that your cabin community was able to find a solution that would not be acceptable to a large telco. Why isn't that OK? Why should the large company be forced to do something they don't want to do if, by your example, other organizations are capable of servicing those communities?
Because they're also actively lobbying to kill any local co-op formation. Successfully in many states. They tried here and got shot down, then proclaimed they were going to build out fiber themselves in the co-op's targeted service area (they didn't).
There are states where they were successful in getting laws passed preventing "wasteful government spending on broadband networks" - the end result of this will be people who literally have no possible way to EVER get broadband.
> There are states where they were successful in getting laws passed preventing "wasteful government spending on broadband networks"
The devil is in the details but arguing that municipalities shouldn't compete with private businesses is not the same thing as arguing that private businesses shouldn't have other private competitors.
I have no doubt that telcos lobby heavily to restrict competition. Last mile infrastructure regulation is complicated but I'm more in favor of a level playing field (i.e. regulation) for access to poles/conduits/rights-of-way than having municipalities operate their own broadband architecture or even worse operate and then protect themselves from competition by other providers.
I suspect the same way PG&E has fought public power expansion: channel corporate propaganda through astroturf taxpayer groups misleading about the costs.
In all the various ways that corporations manage to get legislation passed.
These corporations are not stopping local co-op formation. They are lobbying for laws that severely limit (and in some cases, prevent) their ability to operate.
>That's what I'm curious about. What's in those laws they're lobbying for?
See[0] for yourself. You keep "asking questions" about stuff that's decades old. It makes me wonder if you're not asking in good faith. Please prove me wrong.
Sure, small co-ops can have cost structures for smaller projects big companies often cannot match. That’s true of any kind of business. That doesn’t change my point.
Again, you don’t need to rely on assumptions about the motivations of “large Telco executives.” Look at what Google did with Fiber.
>Sure, small co-ops can have cost structures for smaller projects big companies often cannot match. That’s true of any kind of business. That doesn’t change my point.
That's just ridiculous across the board. I guarantee, with 100% confidence, that a small local co-op does not have a cost structure below the big Telco's. My co-op pay SIGNIFICANLTY more for:
Routers
Switches
Conduit
Fiber
ONTs
Trenching Crews
Support
They pay less for:
Executives
???
It's laughable that you say it's true of any business that small businesses pay less than large. I can tell you what the discounts are for switches that I've sold in the past to a Fortune 500 vs. Joe Shmoe's Trucking - large corporations are frequently paying HALF of what a small business would for the same thing due to their volume.
Wal-Mart also gets large discounts because of its size. But that doesn’t mean it can open a small grocery store in a town that’s too small to support a normal Wal-Mart. That’s also true of Walgreens, or Best Buy, or lots of other large chains. Big companies have high organizational overhead that makes it hard for them to do small scale projects.
And it’s not a matter of having fat margins. Wal-Mart’s margin is under 3%. Verizon’s wireline operating income margin is usually under 10%, often under 5%.
That's not a small grocery store despite the name. And there's a supercenter less than a mile away from that, so that example is not even relevant to their point.
Yeah, Wal-Mart Neighborhood Markets are average sized standalone supermarkets, like Safeway. And that area is obviously quite populous—there’s a Sam’s Club (also Wal-Mart), and Aldi, a Food Lion, and a Fresh Market all within a quarter mile it looks like.
I'm more-or-less convinced that people who complain about executive pay and its impact to end users don't know how to do basic math. Let's take AT&T as an example. From a rough search[1], they make let's say $70m total. Now let's see the number of subscribers they have using another rough search[2] - 217m. That's about 30 cents _every year_ from each sub for executive pay.
What's likely is the co-op doesn't have the same level of support, uptime, or redundancy major telcos need to sustain. Every bit of which adds a hefty amount to the overall cost.
The point of Google Fiber was to spur broadband development to benefit Google’s other businesses. I don’t think Google Fiber has ever made a profit. https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/09/18/reports-of-google-.... I haven’t seen Fiber numbers broken out specifically, but the “Other Bets” segment which is mostly Fiber and Verily looses about $900 million per quarter.
Google, the surveillance company with the attention span of a gnat? Why are you holding them up as an exemplar? They can't even stick with software projects that create returns over years, of course they failed at infrastructure that creates returns over decades.
What does “positive” mean in this context? What’s relevant is that Google has a tremendous financial incentive to prove fiber can be built cheaply, because it has a much more profitable product built on top of broadband. And they couldn’t do it.
Uh huh, so is that the only thing the bill does not let local governments decide? Of course not.
Let local governments regulate for their city. If they make bad decisions, they will reap the consequences.
In any case, telcos should never get immunity from any local laws and regulations.
Edit: And it's not like telcos can't go to city council meetings and explain, with numbers, why certain regulations are bad.
In addition, I bet that if the telcos were forced to build an entire neighborhood, they would actually lower their prices to get more people to sign up in order to better recoup their costs. That would be a good thing!
Telcos want the monopoly without regulations. But if you're a monopoly, you have to be regulated or you're going to abuse your position.
Why is running fiber somehow more expensive than dsl, cable, or power cables? Spoiler; It's not. Chattanooga's EPB runs fiber to every home that has power.
Internet should be treated like the essential utility it is. If we were successfully able to run electricity to farm houses in the 1930s, I see no reason at all they shouldn't have fiber internet in 2023.
The fiber is, to my knowledge, cheaper than the equivalent copper per mile. There's bigger than you'd think costs basically every step of the way to lay a new line regardless of the medium, with the local power utility often times being a major hangup. The question is almost never about the cost of laying fiber vs laying copper, it's about laying a new line (fiber) or laying nothing (use existing copper).
You have to get permission from every land owner whose ditch/yard you need to dig up. Using poles is usually not an option because they're typically owned by the local power utility who either won't let ISPs use them at all or drastically increase operating costs to the point where it's not feasible. Power supply for actively powered equipment can be hard in lower density (ie. rural) areas (from a bureaucratic standpoint). Copper nodes can sometimes be passively powered, but there's not much in fiber optics that can outside of GPON splitters.
> The question is almost never about the cost of laying fiber vs laying copper, it's about laying a new line (fiber) or laying nothing (use existing copper).
Yep, exactly. 99.99% of the cost of laying anything (underground, above ground, wherever) is in the permitting and digging/hanging. The cost of the material itself and the labor of handling it is rounding error.
> Why is running fiber somehow more expensive than dsl, cable, or power cables?
Because we’re running fiber in the 21st century while DSL, cable, and power have mostly already been in the ground for decades. The cost of building any kind of infrastructure has increased exponentially over the decades. We literally could not build today a lot of the infrastructure we already have in the ground—e.g. the New York subway.
> Chattanooga's EPB runs fiber to every home that has power.
EPB got a $110 million grant from the ARRA ($1,000 per fiber subscriber), and also leverages economies of scale because the fiber network is used both for the electric grid and the fiber service.
I think that’s actually a great way to deploy fiber, but it doesn’t tell you anything about the economics of a fiber provider that isn’t the electric utility.
The bill does way more than that, all horrible things. Care to comment on them?
Also, I lived for a time in Irvine Ca, one of the nation’s high tech hubs. Apparently Irvine did not have a whole community requirement on fiber. Parts of the city had google fiber and also att fiber. But Guess what att offered my neighborhood?
My neighborhood was one of the fairly central areas developed in the 70s and they only offered 5mb/s DSL.
In one of the highest tech areas of the nation and surrounded by fiber networks, my neighborhoods internet options was cox cable or att DSL that they happily charged the same price for their 5/1 DSL service that cox charged for 50/10. Not only that, they spammed adds for att fiber just to add insult to injury.
Sounds like community requirements are very much needed to prevent neighborhood red lining.
Why do people try to make everything about red versus blue?
Are you saying all red states are 100% fiber covered meccas? Sounds like your area is good but so was the block half a mile over in irvine. Congrats on living half a block over?
The point about internet companies having more lobbying power is odd as internet companies should want more connectivity not bad DSL.
And the OC is traditionally a Republican stronghold in CA and only recently changed. The city of Irvine has switched back and forth between dysfunctional politicians from both parties.
Why are you jumping to an us vs them red blue scenario in every situation?
Hashtag completely ignores that my example was of google fiber and att fiber both in Irvine CA. Got to score those sweet red team points, facts won’t stop the points!
Good. Because the end result is that someone eventually WILL bring fiber or a fiber alternative and the other company will be SOL for having a service that is never available for part of the community.
Right now I have a situation where AT&T has fiber across most of my city, but not my neighborhood. And Spectrum has fiber in my neighborhood, but not my side of the street. So I'm stuck with T-Mobile wireless after having used AT&T DSL for the past 4 years because neither Spectrum nor AT&T will run fiber
The aforementioned requirement would have pushed fiber everywhere. There's zero difference between the homes on my side of the street and the other side. Or the homes in my neighborhood and the next one over. Same size, same prices, same sort of people in the same tax brackets with the same economic conditions.
I'd rather see a company lose out on an entire market than establish itself only over part of it. Internet access is opportunity.
I'd think the local governments know what they're getting into, and if not they figure it out after a few years. Nobody is requiring providers to enter those local markets and be unprofitable.
Telecoms could raise local prices until covering 100% of the area is profitable. "Local government requiring customer service standards" might be a harder thing for them to comply with.
Local governments don’t care if their regulations keep out fiber, just like they don’t care if their regulations keep out housing development. When I lived in Baltimore, Verizon was trying to wire it up with fiber. The city wanted Google to come in and it wouldn’t. A decade later, there’s still no fiber in Baltimore. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/snubb...
Raising prices doesn’t work, because the other customers won’t pay that much more for fiber versus cable. My parents just switched from fiber to cable because they liked the TV packages better.
The communications monopolies are quasi-governmental entities whose primary business is crafting plausible sounding narratives about why they can't be bothered to do anything without one-way handouts from the de jure government. In reality municipal fiber has no problem building out out complete cities and towns, with obvious mandates to the serve the whole population, and from what I've seen they're doing a great job. Regardless of density, infrastructure has an intrinsic capital cost that needs to be accounted on the order of a decade, and moribund dinosaurs based around short term revenue extraction aren't capable of doing that.
It sounds like Baltimore's problem is, as you said, having no money. Getting an advance from a loan shark when you have no money is a poor idea, as you will be under their thumb and paying it back forever.
My own experience: GPON. moderate density (power goes out at least several times a year due to trees), under $80/mo fixed (no continual price hikes, no deliberately confusing fees, no contract), full gigabit up/down with no usage-based gouging, no incentive to surveil my traffic and sell the proceeds. If in 30 years 1Gb is considered slow and it's stuck there because "government", I'll let the municipal fiber doomers say I told you so - assuming Ma Bell isn't still offering 384k ADSL on the two pairs of copper they'll have left.
> It sounds like Baltimore's problem is, as you said, having no money
That’s true of most municipalities. And they have higher priorities for infrastructure expenditures. Cities and states need to spend $745 billion just to bring water infrastructure up to existing health and environmental standards. Broadband is way behind lead pipes or crumbling bridges on governments’ list of priorities.
> Regardless of density, infrastructure has an intrinsic capital cost that needs to be accounted on the order of a decade, and moribund dinosaurs based around short term revenue extraction aren't capable of doing that.
I heard this a decade ago, when Google was going to show up the “dinosaurs.” How is that going?
Yes, the problem of looted local institutions is pervasive. This doesn't mean that a Faustian bargain with the incumbent communications monopolies is a good thing, especially when they're insisting on offering a substandard product - lack of coverage area, hostile billing practices, DPI based surveillance/throttling, etc. Such crap was passable for cable TV, which was essentially an elective entertainment service, but is utterly unacceptable with the importance of Internet connectivity in the 21st century.
I said this in another comment, but I don't know why you're holding Google up as an exemplar. They don't even have the attention span to follow through on software projects that bear fruit over a few years. Meanwhile my electric company has been providing electricity for well over a century, with de jure government successfully preventing it from running away with extractive customer-hostile dynamics.
From other comments I believe you live in an area where you have a choice of several competing corporate wired providers. That's fantastic, and I'm glad your own needs are taken care of that way - where a functioning market can exist, we should celebrate it. However, most people don't live in such an area, including even people in dense areas with horror stories about their buildings signing monopoly contracts with a single provider.
> I said this in another comment, but I don't know why you're holding Google up as an exemplar.
Because Google has enormous financial incentives to disrupt the industry and drive down prices. Google delivers their product over infrastructure owned by other companies, and thus has tremendous incentives to commoditize that infrastructure. https://marginalfutility.substack.com/p/11-commoditizing-you...
If Google is complaining that build out requirements make building fiber too expensive, that tells you an important fact about the economics of building fiber.
> Meanwhile my electric company has been providing electricity for well over a century
… over last mile infrastructure that pretty much hasn’t changed in that time. The fact that public utilities can maintain that infrastructure doesn’t tell you much about how to build completely new infrastructure. The difference in costs is massive. We couldn’t even build the electric grid again at today’s costs.
That also means that public utility infrastructure in this country is a ticking time bomb. For the stuff that does need large scale replacement, like water and sewage pipes, there’s a multi-trillion backlog because public utilities have not invested sufficiently in the infrastructure.
> From other comments I believe you live in an area where you have a choice of several competing corporate wired providers.
Because it’s a county that makes it easy to build stuff. We also have pretty affordable housing, for the same reason.
> However, most people don't live in such an area, including even people in dense areas
It’s especially the people in dense areas that have the most trouble getting broadband. What do these dense urban areas have in common, I wonder.
This argument doesn't follow. Internet access is already mostly commoditized. Pushing Google's complements to be even better commodities are things like DoH, Net Neutrality, and free-as-in-beer Android. Taking on the business of running an ISP doesn't make Internet access more of a commodity. The adage is "commoditize your complement", not "enter the business that is your complement" - the point is to squeeze their margins while growing yours.
> What do these dense urban areas have in common
Higher population density such that any activity in the public right of ways affects proportionally more people and thus receives more scrutiny and review?
I honestly don't have any easy prescriptions for facilitating new Internet buildout in dense areas. I do agree that zoning and permits have gotten us to a condition where it would be effectively impossible to rebuild what has already been built (eg the common example of most walkable duplex/triple deckers not conforming to the lots they currently sit on). FWIW this would imply that the incumbent communications companies should continue to be highly regulated due to new entrants being unable to duplicate their existing buildout.
My comments are focused on the not-dense areas where laying/stringing new lines is perfectly straightforward, but there are no incentives for Ma Bell or Ma Coax to build new infrastructure (aka FTTH) as they're perfectly content milking a captive market. There are multiple comments in this thread of people suffering Ma Coax with some ridiculous bills, fiber being promised but not available, etc. Then a newcomer enters the market, whether municipal or private, and then all of sudden Ma Coax snaps to attention and starts competing. As I said, in places that new privately-funded competition actually does enter we should celebrate. But that shouldn't involve municipalities abdicating their own interests (eg mandates to build out the complete city/town) in the hope that it might make competition magically appear, since that's a race to the bottom - especially if we're talking about relaxing requirements for the incumbents, meaning competition still hasn't arrived.
Furthermore for many places (my own included), the needle was only ever going to be moved by the municipality getting involved. Internet access is basically a solved problem for me now, so much so that I have to wonder why I even started commenting in this thread, apart from saying to people who are wondering if pushing for municipal fiber is worthwhile - yes, it really is.
(And as far as electrical lines and infrastructure in general, I certainly have my complaints but overall I feel it's being decently maintained in my area. Trees are trimmed often, and I often do see lineworkers replacing poles and upgrading lines. Electricity distribution certainly has advanced in 100 years. Looking at the overall national statistics, I see the trends behind the narrative. But I'm also not going to let those general narratives destroy my faith in my local institutions, because that too is a cause of the problem)
The town doesn't want to connect few streets to the internet.
The town wants internet available everywhere because even if boomer parent might not care, their kids when grow up might want to have stable internet for work, same with any new developments, good internet becomes number one priority for many people buying homes.
It might be difference between small town slowly dying and prospering (because people moving in to work remotely will spend in local economy).
Yeah there will always be cases of cities not being reasonable and wanting telco to fork in on putting 10km of fiber per farmer living in vast area (which would be better served by radio), but overall giving for-profit big corporations so much power for city development is insane.
> Such requirements kill fiber development. Laying fiber is expensive, and having to lay it through neighborhoods where most people won’t or can’t subscribe just increases the price for everyone.
I'm sorry, but I just don't see it. I've worked with and for several telcos, I know the value of a customer that is locked into older infrastructure. Fiber is not more expensive, it's upgradable and properly done it's reasonably future-proof and Telcos know it. So no, these requirements do not kill fiber. These requirements force telcos like comcast to be competitive and not selective where fiber is installed. I know this because directional drilling is a very low-cost installation at about $10 a foot, permits for a neighborhood run you about $5000 and fiber runs will cost another $6 a foot. Now fiber network gear can be expensive, but again I remind you that I've worked with telcos... they already have most of the big bad gear in place and only need to put in more expensive singlemode runs to rural areas. So I call bullshit.
So heres my life because of telcos that make these complaints and politicians just don't give a shit:
I've been in my house for a few decades and until this year my only choice was Comcast for anything over 100mbit internet. I spend $250 a month because Comcast forces me to bundle my internet with TV and Phone (and they call often to have me add cell and security). Then a local company came into the neighborhood this year offering Gigabit fiber for 1/4 the cost I'm spending now.
All of a sudden, Comcast, Centurylink and even the local utility company are out spending money I guess they didn't have to upgrade their networks to support fiber. 7 months of my yard (easement and telco junction) has been home to a variety of heavy machinery, as they run new upgraded infrastructure using directional drilling.
Somewhere in June I get an email from comcast that my internet was upgraded "for free" and now I have 1.2gb/40mbit, doubling my paid speed and if I sign a 2-year term today (with 6mo payment penalty for canceling), I'll pay 50% less and receive unlimited internet if I put in their modem. Let's just say I signed up with the local company and that activates this next month for synchronous 1gb fiber for $59 a month.
> It’s not just the traditional telcos or cable companies. There is a reason Google Fiber has this concept of “fiberhoods” where you need a certain level of demonstrated interest in subscription before they’ll build in those areas.
You know why google fiber wasn't successful? It's because people are lazy. If I wasn't motivated to kill off TV and Phone services that I NEVER use, I'd just stay with Comcast. Comcast will match the Internet only service price of $59 for 1gb internet the day I call to cancel. I have zero reason to change, but amazingly I can and NOW Comcast is flexible with pricing and options.
> All of a sudden, Comcast, Centurylink and even the local utility company are out spending money I guess they didn't have to upgrade their networks to support fiber.
It doesn’t sound like Comcast built fiber in your story. 1.2 gig down/40 meg up sounds like cable.
> You know why google fiber wasn't successful? It's because people are lazy
I didn’t say anything about Google Fiber being successful or not. I’m asking why Google wouldn’t agree to these community coverage requirements.
Speaking of telecom regulation, whatever happened to net neutrality? Why has the Biden administration not managed to install a new FCC commissioner (so I suppose we're still technically in the Ajit Pai era)? I mean, we're already starting to get into the next presidential election cycle, for pete's sake.
It seems pretty clear to me that doing the right thing on this stuff isn't a priority for anyone.
The US, qua US, doesn't, but California and a number of other states have taken action on it, and for that and some other reasons, general practice is basically neutrality-ish in the US.
> But US states can't regulate interstate commerce.
This is wrong: so long as it is neither discriminating against interstate trade (that is, as long as it treats interstate and in-state trade equally), nor acting in areas where Congress has explicitly or implicitly, by adopting its own regulations, prohibited state action, yes, they can.
And while the FCC anti-neutrality regulation was asserted in court to preempt state action, that arguement failed to prevail.
The California market is so large it's often more cost effective for companies to just adopt CA standards instead of creating split markets. We've seen ripples throughout the auto industry due to CA laws. Complaints from farmers about how they treat their pigs was also due to a CA law.
> "California is the nation's most-populous state, and the producers say that the way the pork market works, with cuts of meat from various sources being combined before sale, it is likely all pork will have to meet California standards, regardless of where it is sold."
> Because the Senate is a thing, and a very dysfunctional one at that.
Tom Wheeler was confirmed with without a filibuster-proof Democratic majority. I don't think the reason is "the Senate sucks."
It seems to me that the Biden administration initially nominated someone who wouldn't get confirmed, but the FCC is such a low priority for them so they didn't course correct for years.
> Tom Wheeler was confirmed with without a filibuster-proof Democratic majority. I don't think the reason is "the Senate sucks."
Tom Wheeler was confirmed in 2013; the degree and nature of dysfunction in the Senate has changed since the first year of Obama’s first (edit: second, duh) term.
Wheeler was also a former small ISP CEO, so everyone assumed he'd be in big telco's pockets. That he turned into the main driver of full net neutrality was shocking.
>Why has the Biden administration not managed to install a new FCC commissioner
Because Trump gutted the government so badly that it's taking years to do the congressional dance to approve replacements for many departments. Congress isn't helping either being basically a failed political body.
Good thing that the Constitution allows for the Executive branch to immediately appoint and replace any vacancy while Congress is out of session for the summer.
> Article II, Section 2, Clause 3:
> The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.
Too bad the Democrats are intentionally hamstringing Biden by pretending to be in session all summer long despite not actually working.
Were the Democrats to move to adjourn without a pro-forma session, every Republican + Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema would vote against it, since it would end-run their hostage-taking on nominees. (The GOP led House would also object, and their consent is usually required for a recess sufficient to trigger recess appointments, but that disagreement itself would allow the President to use the extraordinary, and never yet exercised, power of his office to declare an adjournment in the case of a disagreement between the houses of Congress on the matter, so while it would be a major escalation to bypass it, the House objection wouldn’t be insurmountable — the failure of a majority in the Senate, though, would.)
(Still think they should do it, even though it would be a break from long-established [0] practice, but it wouldn’t have any practical effect other than setting up another debate for the next election.)
[0] long enough to be a bipartisan norm, actually not that long in historical terms.
Friendly reminder that the Obama Administration invested billions in broadband companies, in an effort to encourage them to build out their fiber plants and improve access speeds.
Do you know what they did with that money? Blew it on useless upgrading projects like digitizing their old drafts.
May as well have flushed it down the toilet. I'm perfectly fine with government imminent domain-ing that shit and selling it back to people at fair prices. Business didn't build those networks, government hand-outs taken from citizens' tax revenue built the network in this country.
There will be a point where people strike back against ISPs by attacking the infrastructure itself. If they won't upgrade it, damage it and make them upgrade it.
The government gave large incumbent ISPs money to do exactly what they did (anything but actually providing internet access). If, as you claim, the money was intended to somehow benefit their customers, it would have been taken back.
You're missing the point. ISPs did not build out their plants to support more bandwidth with Obama money. Serving a handful of remote areas to have the appearance of it isn't enough. Why isn't the US covered in fiber? We spent the money to make it happen, and it didn't happen.
I think I disagree on this premise - government subsidies for telecommunications over the last 20 years have largely served to connect new and under served markets. If you have broadband (by the pitiful FCC definition) you have not been a target of investment.
Literally drafts of the cable plant, as it occurs on the street. I worked for a firm who contracted through various ISPs to digitize their equipment plant drafts via AutoCAD and SPATIALnet back in 2010. Our contract ended up falling through. I'm not fully sure why, but I was part of a hiring frenzy in the firm's area, that ended up laying off a bunch of people after the Comcast contract fell through. There was a class action and everything, they paid for training or unemployment for two years.
It wasn't that bad of a job. I worked four 10s and could grab coffee, blast some music, and knock out the cable plant. Accuracy and speed are all that really mattered. The worst part was how picky drafting standards were and how poor the Python scripts they cobbled into AutoCAD were at actually meeting their standards. Lots of manual offsetting. I wish I had known enough Python at the time, because I might've been able to get a foot into their infra staff or something by improving the drafting workflow.
they did that because they had the petro dollar system
this is the same system that allowed most americans to not pay taxes and also downsized the IRS
they thought they were going to be able to keep this system around indefinitely, but nope. I'm basing it all on guesswork, but I think that system ended this summer. the USA fed and gov is going to be at war by the next summer (debt ceiling expiry), or they're gonna get their cred destroyed even further.
Sonic.net moved into my area last year and offered 10Gbps service for $40/mo (now $50).
At the time, I was on Comcast. 65/15 Mbps for $130/mo. I had this service for 10+ years and I was unable to upgrade to faster speeds without paying more.
I was one of the first people in my area to switch. Once I did, I got a call from Comcast saying they'd lower my bill to $50/mo. I saw their (and AT&T) trucks in my area and got ads in my mailbox for $40/mo 1Gbps connections.
The problem is, most places in the US do not have competition and Comcast and AT&T will not lift a finger to provide better service.
There was a similar situation when Google Fiber was rolled out in Provo Utah. Comcast essentially had a monopoly (they're the only ones allowed to put their cables on the power lines), they charge huge amounts for their internet, Google Fiber buries their fiber lines and suddenly Comcast drops prices begging people to stay.
I had to use Comcast for years, they lied to me many times and I finally escaped to a place with a different provider. Suddenly, this year Comcast comes and buries fiber lines in my area.
I will deliberately avoid Comcast, competition is absolutely required to keep prices down.
I am beginning to accumulate instances of recording when Comcast lied to me personally. They patently lied straight to my face (over phone, over chat) on numerous distinct points. The most recent was outright fraudulent not canceling my phone plan despite 3 separate requests. They lied about my home having its previous tenant using their services. It did not, the last customer was apparently the original home owner who had RG59 cable installed. The tech who installed the system pretty much point blank said this house could not have had Comcast cable in the last decade or more because we switched to RG6 years ago.
I don't get how such a company can tolerate bald face liars working for them in so many segments of their staff, it's mind boggling and makes me think there are scumbags at the top who encourage this stuff or knowingly look the other way.
> We don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company."
Hah! Haven't thought of that one in years. (You're dating yourself, BTW.)
For young whippersnappers, this is from https://vimeo.com/355556831 — a Lily Tomlin bit on SNL in the 70s, reprising one of her famous recurring characters from Laugh-In in the late 60s.
I laugh so hard at this every time it comes up. I live 5 blocks from AT&T world headquarters and they don't even offer service of any kind at my address, let alone fiber. Spectrum is the only option.
ISPs collude and have deals on which of them are zoned where. It's not a conspiracy, it's just reality. Go to any area in the US and whoever the major isp is, only has dysfunctional att or a crappy satalite provider as their "competition." if Cox, Comcast, and spectrum (pick three big names) had to compete in every area the consumers would have a lot more options. Yes, you can't force business to sercice areas, but I think the collusion of these companies is what should be regulated. We all know it's happening and when they do, if the regulators treated them as a single entity, we'd have the antitrust violations and breakups consumers are so desperate for.
When Fiber disruptors like frontier, Google, or local metropolitans enter the picture: suddenly the ISPs have a lucrative deals because they finally have to freaking compete. Suddenly the data caps are non issue and consumers can get blazing fast speeds with no infrastructure changes because they are holding out.
Regulators need to prevent this in the USA, but have been captured by the isp lobbies. Cable crooks is what I call them, because that's all ISPs are now, crooks. They'll have techs steal or break your equipment. They'll hide evidence when damage was caused by their techs. They'll lie when outages occur due to their own infrastructure failures despite sending out contractors to repair. They'll say whatever they need to, no matter how fraudulent, to tack fees and monthly charges to your account. They've weaseled their way out of being classified as utilities despite that being exactly what they are.
I loathe the ISPs in USA. Of course they will push bills like this. I see no end to the hell of having them the as tollmen of the internet.
American ISPs without competition charge double what Norwegian ones do for substantially worse service. That money isn't used for physical plant; if it isn't going to profits, where is it being spent?
Starlink is only a monopoly in locations without traditional broadband. It's not even a very good alternative in dense locations, where you compete with neighbors for bandwidth. Though perhaps they can serve enough users to influence prices a bit.
This is a federal bill, but aren't federal powers limited to regulating inter-state commerce? Yet the powers it strips from state legislatures are clearly aimed at intra-state commerce.