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.
We need to clean out these bullshit laws.
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.
Not exactly. It's true that a coax cable can, over distances of hundreds of metres, carry up to a frequency of 850 MHz at a fairly low attenuation and, at greater attenuation and/or ideal circumstances, up to 1.2 GHz in a useful capacity. This may translate, as per Shannon-Hartley and QAM into a raw bandwidth of multiple Gbps.
However, the topology of most FTTLA deployments doesn't imply that any individual customer is guaranteed this speed. In many deployments the LA - last amplifier - will be shared among hundreds of customers. In some cases, it may be only dozens. In some, it may be in the low thousands.
While the TV multiplexes are always going to take up a huge amount of space, depending on the deployment easily more than the majority, it's also becoming more common, for example, to dynamically switch multiplexes onto the spectrum on demand only.
If you have a healthy contention ratio, quality coax, few people on your LA, it's a good time of the day and you have a sensible provider then yes, it's possible to get a Gbps over coax. But the stars need to align to get that magical moment when with GPON or especially 10GPON it's basically a guaranteed thing.
Comcast isn't rolling out Gbps speeds because they have a monopoly power and want to artificially constrain total bandwidth (well, they kind of are but in a different way), but because it would imply rebuilding their FTTLA deployments deep into the field to basically take them halfway to FTTP/FTTH.
They're not offering Gbps because they're a monopoly and hate selling bandwidth first, they're not offering it because they're a monopoly and hate investing money in infrastructure. After that, it's definitely the hating bandwidth thing.
If it was the former, they'd be able do a far better job competing against municipal broadband deployments and Google Fiber than they are in everyone's mindshare.
Any internet provider in Moscow. It's actually even cheaper.. US internet and phone service prices are ridiculously high.
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.
By what measure? Certainly not Akamai's (http://www.akamai.com/dl/akamai/akamai-soti-q114.pdf?WT.mc_i...). 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. 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. 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?
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.
The point is, there is not a legitimate "population density" excuse for NYC or LA or Dallas or Seattle or SF or any other major metropolitan area to have much slower internet speeds than cities like Seoul or Tokyo, or nations like Israel or Singapore.
Worse is that with the internet you have to be hooked up to the central grid or else it's useless. A farmer in a rural part of Kansas who's tired of not getting enough electricity from the electricity company (not a fast enough connection) and paying power overages (bandwidth caps) has alternatives like solar, or buying a generator or whatever.
But when your internet isn't fast enough you can't just install 10gig copper in your house and solve the problem. Install your 10gig until you've got terabits of bandwidth all over your farm; you still can't use it in what most people would call a meaningful way to interact with the rest of the world.
The idea that some states have good broadband and others have terrible broadband and that this is acceptable is an oft-argued point especially once you take population density into account. And it's not a bad argument. The economics are completely real.
But once you try and make an analogy to power or water or telephone it gets a little easier to see why some folks might be up in arms.
Comparing nations to states is ridiculous. However, if you read the report it's damming with faint praise. "the average connection speeds seen in the United States and Mexico remained more than twice as fast as the next fastest country"
Sure, if you discount everyone that's better than you then you can call yourself #1 at anything.
PS: Note this is of course average bandwidth which radically distorts the picture. One person nominally at 1GBPS and 10 people at 1MBPS is not the same as 11 people at 90+MBPS. For a more realistic vew you would average the square roots of bandwidth, but that makes US look bad.
But stifling the economy is not only a matter of speed. It's also a matter of how much you pay for that speed. Let me explain. I am a Comcast customer. When I look at a Netflix movie, Comcast gets money from three sources for that movie: my monthly subscription, the 200% overage fee that I pay, because - basically - I watch Neflix instead of one of the crappy channels that come with my subscription, and from Neflix.
The fact that Comcast gets paid three times makes internet pretty expensive for me. Because Netflix will have no choice but increasing their subscription costs.
So? That's like saying the US is 31st on average car speed. Very few people need a car that goes more than 70mph, just like very few people need an internet connection that goes faster than "can stream HD video".
Example, every time I log into VPN I barf a little knowing that for various reason I need to use US servers, but that practically every random smaller nation is blowing us away...
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.
I don't see the relevance of arguing that the FCC should prevent municipal broadband projects on the grounds that they are a financial boondoggle for the municipalities involved. Plenty of companies in regulated industries fail to generate enough cash flow to stay open yet a company's balance sheet remains unregulated. To suggest that the FCC has any responsibility for a municipality's balance sheet would be quite an expansion of regulatory jurisdiction, to say the least.
I certainly hope that someone at the FCC reads the fiscal arguments in the same way, or else we're really screwed.
Wouldn't more people be able to afford internet access under this municipal connection's pricing than under Comcast/Verizon/Time Warner/etc? I have trouble understanding how that would be a disproportionate benefit.
citation needed... I know government has a reputation for being wasteful and corrupt, but weird for you to defend NYC.
I defend NYC because as corrupt as it may be, over the last 20-30 years it has a pretty good record of getting municipal projects done. It has functioning subway, regional rail, etc. It has invested in protecting its water sources, etc.
Most American cities have not done as well as NYC in that regard. E.g. Atlanta's ancient sewer system dumps untreated waste into the city's main river after every heavy rain, and the city's water supply is entirely at the mercy of the water levels in Lake Lanier. After a drought a few years ago, the city came this close to running out of water.
This is not voodoo economics. In the absence of profit motive, you need social consensus and a forward-looking bureaucracy to ensure that public infrastructure receives adequate funding. Most American cities do not have either.
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.
1. Why aren't cities everywhere doing this?
2. Who do I have to bother in my city to get this to happen?
"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.
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?
However, they refuse to provide broadband access to the entire county. It is quite frustrating.
Now the cable giants, one pure local geographic monopoly, lobby to control municipal remediation of the crappy service. The hypocrisy is, unfortunately, unsurprising.
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
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.
why is this a bad thing?
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)
I pay $42 for 100 Mbit (symmetric, fiber), from a large Swedish ISP (without any government/taxpayer funding).
I think the issue in the US is that there is too much monopoly (and oligopoly), with ISPs lobbying [i.e. corruption] instead of competition.
I think that you mean:
> all other interests were second to it
If 'it' was second to something else, that would mean that said something else was first.
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)?
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.
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.
What's that about? What regulatory burdens are these public providers avoiding, and are those burdens in the public interest or not?
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.
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.
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). 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.
