It took fierce competition to even get broadband companies to advertise what they are offering. I had to deal with a very small local monopoly in Western Maryland that just advertised "faster than dial up," had typical pings of over 200. It was thick on the local board, had a deal with local government as the sole authorized supplier in the county.
Now I'm in a different part of the country, can get FiOS, but while Verizon's service always delivers over 50 Mbps on speedtest sites, it often chokes on Youtube or Netflix. When that happens, there's no simple way to determine if it's the provider or some random provisioner in the middle. This is the future of getting screwed by telecoms: worthless metrics and plausible deniability for service degradation.
I happened to get a deal by calling all the providers in the area, then playing their offers off of each other. I recommend everyone does this every few months. But the fact that was so easy doesn't really make me feel very comfortable. If they can haggle, it just signals how much rent they're charging from all the unwary customers.
> Now I'm in a different part of the country, can get FiOS, but while Verizon's service always delivers over 50 Mbps on speedtest sites, it often chokes on Youtube or Netflix. When that happens, there's no simple way to determine if it's the provider or some random provisioner in the middle.
If you have shell access to a Linux machine in a College of Engineering attached to some university somewhere [0], try this:
1) Use youtube-dl to get the actual URL of the video that Youtube is sending to your machine that's slow as balls. [1]
2a) Wget that url on your home machine.
2b) Wget that url on the machine attached to that university.
3) Notice the discrepancy between download speeds of those two machines. In particular, notice if your home download starts at full speed, but is throttled to super slow speeds after a couple minutes of video have been downloaded.
4) Run a traceroute (I love using mtr for this) to ensure that the route to Youtube from your home machine goes directly from your ISP's network to Google's network. If this is the case, then there's noone to blame for poor performance other than your ISP and Youtube.
Comcast used to severely throttle Youtube videos downloaded on my connection here in SF. Using the method outlined above, I discovered that:
* I had a direct path from Comcast to Youtube at both my house and at the university.
* At my house, the first minute or two of the video file was fetched at full link speed (~6MB/s), the remainder of the video (even when downloading a 1080p MP4) was fetched at ~100KB/s.
* The very same file when downloaded at a university across the country was fetched at full link speed (14MB/s) and never slowed down.
[0] To lessen the chance that the campus network admins will be artificially throttling your connection, natch.
[1] You will notice that this URL is super-long and appears to encode all sorts of fun stuff in the domain name. This (along with a traceroute) leads me to believe that accessing this URL at another physical location won't give you a file from another CDN that's closer to that other physical location.
lol at calling all the providers. the free market fails if left alone, under shady regulations it is almost a joke.
i found a aDSL number for ATT that was not advertised (and you reached a person on the first minute!) that was the result of some obscure regulation that they had to provide dsl without charging for a phone line if so i wanted. it was a very good service. as i was next door to their trunk.
i moved, less than 20miles, but another city. called att to transfer service, the rep read something and the burst out a sad "ah, sorry, this is verizon territory".
and that is exactly what i get here. verizon. nothing else. the 2nd or 3rd biggest city in los angeles, and i can choose, verizon.
I live literally across the street from the Univ of Illinois, in a fairly big college town (150k), and Comcast is my only option. No competition at all. ATT used to provide DSL here, but they weren't interested in upgrading so they just let it become obsolete.
I pay $15/month for 3Mbps download but I have to switch company every year to keep this rate (ATT->Comcast->ATT->Comcast->etc...). This special price if often fairly difficult to find on their website. Also, I can play Youtube 720p.
I'm so glad the concept of "dial tone", video or otherwise, never crossed the demand for and rollout of content-neutral, flat-rate-billed, backbone-peering-supported Internet Service.
Having worked in voice telecom billing for 11 years, it is my observation that phone companies adore detail billing. Imagine an ISP bill which details all the websites you visit, and bills each visit according to some value the phone company might opaquely ascribe. It might have gone that way with a thankfully unimplemented evolution of the amorphous notion of "video dial tone".
Had this $200 billion boondoggle actually given us megabit access, then it would be... access to what, exactly? I can't imagine phone companies providing access to the flat-rate, always on, servers-allowed, content-neutral Internet we have now, no matter the bit rate.
The thought of all phone companies collectively coming up with a service like Netflix is, to me, as unimaginable as the thought of those same phone companies coming up with the iPhone.
Yes, $200 billion is a shameful waste of ratepayer funds and a regulatory failure. But thankfully, it neither collared nor crossed with the Internet.
In my opinion, separation of ownership of content (and applications, and platforms, and end users) from the common carriers who own some of the "plumbing" which connects routers to routers to routers becomes fundamental to a free Internet.
> Then there were regulatory problems as the FCC tried to control deployment centrally while states and cities tended to view video dial tone as just another cable company to be taxed and regulated.
That seems like the most egregious thing in the article: treating Internet-based video delivery as a cable company. The concept of local cable franchise monopolies is ridiculous enough to begin with, and the only possible justification hinges on not wanting to have multiple sets of cables wired everywhere. Content delivered over the Internet completely eliminates that justification, leaving no possible rationale for making such services subject to franchise regulations.
They should be subject to regulation; they should not be granted monopolies. These are two entirely different concepts. The current system grants them monopolies, and fails to regulate them appropriately. This is exactly the wrong way round. But this is the problem with politicians: monopoly provides concentration of cash, and this can be tapped into far more efficiently from the perspective of political exploitation. Its much easier to garner a donation from a rich individual with concentrated cash, than many individuals. Likewise, its much easier tax a few firms or not with tax {X} in return for special favours. Its much harder to garner the support of the diffuse and middle classes (not to mention, even get/keep their attention). So, this is sort of a classic case of political economy in the instrumental sense...on both sides.
To be precise, bribery isn't just legal, it's mandatory under the current campaign finance setup.
Campaign finance reform is a prerequisite for addressing any of the anti-consumer legislation we are stuck with today. Best of all, it hasn't been turned into a partisan wedge yet, so there's hope, assuming we can find a way to make people care.
Unfortunately, last time I saw a campaign finance reform proposal cross the HN frontpage, it fell off within 5 minutes :(
I'm Australian, am I to understand that our internet quality and distribution is only just approaching what the American's had in 2007? WTF!?
I wish poor internet connection was something I could really get upset about, but I guess the rest of my life is a lot better than most around the world.
I'm just in the process of upgrading our office in the heart of Melbourne from ADSL2 to a 10/10Mb synchronous DSL. That costs us just shy of $600 per month. There is enough fat in that pricing that the vendor dropped around 10% off the list price with us just asking, no real haggling.
Our office in the heart of SF has 100/100Mb (admittedly, 'selected buildings only') for $50/month.
And this is just after us receiving an new government which scuttled the NBN that might have given us comparable service in 1-2 decades time. We're going to have expensive, slow internet for a long time.
As an Australian that lived in America for a long time, trust me when I say life in Australia with crappy internet is significantly better than life in America with fast internet.
Australia only has a few submarine connections to the rest of the world, it will always suffer because of this. On top of that it is incredibly low density, even in the big cities. The same reason we don't have an subway/underground or good public transport is the same reason the internet suffers. On top of that Australia has only produced a small amount of content compared to the rest of the world.
Anyone who comes up with a reasonable way of bypassing the natural local monopolies of cable companies is going to make a fortune.
I would think dense wireless networks in urban areas could work. I'm not an expert, and would be interested in hearing from one, but I imagine that wireless networks could benefit from algorithmic advances in a way that might be more difficult in traditional copper/fiber networks.
If you gave me (someone with very little wireless experience but used to be a cable guy) carte blanche, here's what I would investigate:
Several routers in an urban area which require minimal installation and can be mass-produced and immediately interchanged - think roof access, and could be turned on and off remotely, maybe battery operated, flowing to relatively few fiber hubs.
Infrastructure advantages: Network algorithms have come a long way, and the ability to dynamically add or scale nodes as needed could have great performance/cost balances that aren't possible with fixed nodes. And upgrades do not require new lines, just more and better routers. If a router dies, replace, and send the old one to a shop somewhere inexpensive. No midnight service restoration pay.
Customer advantages: I connect to wifi the same way I do right now. Zero home installation (google Comcast horror stories if you need imagery).
If I were to start, I would do it in an urban area with a landowner that had a monopoly. Hyde Park, Chicago is like that. There are basically two landowners: University of Chicago and Mac Apartments. You have to make one community love you to pieces before branching out, and that would require a lot of cooperation. Of course a danger here is if Mac suddenly decides that they hate you and removes access privileges. But if that worked, and you got more funding to expand, imagine the word of mouth: "Here's how installation works: it's a wifi network and you connect to it".
A la "it's a folder, and it syncs" dropbox. Presumably something like this has been tried before, but that's true of many things that end up working (like search engines or social networks).
> Anyone who comes up with a reasonable way of bypassing the natural local monopolies of cable companies is going to make a fortune.
That reasonable way is for municipalities to gather some courage and run their own open-access fiber. Until municipalities realize that the monopolies that they've granted their "local" cable companies are now working fiercely against the interests of their citizenry, real change in this space won't happen.
To anyone who's thinking of trotting out the old "The US is too spread out to make that feasible!" canard: NYC, SFO, and SJC have slower, poorer, more expensive per bps residential broadband options than Chattanooga, TN does. Make sure to carefully examine the population densities and regions surrounding each of those metro areas before making your argument. :)
> Anyone who comes up with a reasonable way of bypassing the natural local monopolies of cable companies...
I'm nowhere near a socialist, but government intervention is a perfectly reasonable way to deal with natural monopolies. How do you think Northern European and Asian countries pulled so far ahead of the US on this?
> I would think dense wireless networks in urban areas could work
You've basically described mesh networks. There are a number in cities across America, but are normally run by enthusiasts.
The trouble is, in dense urban environments, there's a lot of noise to overcome, and if you don't work around that, your network will fall apart. Especially a problem with the coming 802.11ac routers which will crowd up the 5 GHz band that is current the target for backbone links in the wireless networks.
Start small in a part of the city populated by mostly young people - like university students. Buy ad time on the Discovery Channel. Run your cables through the air between buildings and over trees - it will fail with every storm, but it's cheap to replace. Hopefully you'll get big enough fast enough to put some proper cabling before regulation catches up with you.
A few unlicensed wireless systems exist, namely, Ubiquti's AirMax (http://www.ubnt.com/) and Cambium's ePMP (http://http://www.cambiumnetworks.com/). The problem is that these systems are often set up by people with no knowledge of how radio or the Internet works. Imagine a residential DSL connection being resold to fifty people while being made even worse by radio interference and propagation issues. It is possible to build an ISP while bypassing a local monopoly, but few have the requisite knowledge.
I have tried posting this idea a couple of times before and have been roundly scolded, but oh well, here goes again. I think... that readers of this forum are ideally equipped to find a way around this problem. What I mean to say is that it is universally felt by everyone that they hate their broadband provider, phone company etc. Why can't we, the tech community come up with a competing technology? I know many have tried to do "open source" types of mesh wifi networks, but I think something more robust than that is needed. Everyone agrees current companies are leaving their customers unsatisfied, hence there must be an opportunity there for someone clever enough to come up with a good alternative.
It's not a technological problem. The technological barriers have been taken care of. Google Fiber exists and is awesome and affordable. The reasons we don't all have Google Fiber level of service are political: regulatory capture, monopolies and oligopolies, conflicts of interest, etc.
I guess the problem is that all of these (broadband provider, phone company) are regulated by the government. Once you have the government involved, forget about competition, the market won't fix. You have to fix politics.
I wonder if an automatic peering arrangement could be built on top of a mesh infrastructure, to give incentive for running more robust nodes (not just for in-network traffic, but for uplink to the internet at large).
There's very little difference between corporations and government these days. So it doesn't really matter what we call the people stealing from the citizenry. Corporations shower politicians with gifts, jobs and campaign contributions, which in most other countries would just be called bribery. The purpose of this from the corporation's viewpoint is to align the interest of the politician to that of the corporation. And once their interests are aligned they operate in concert. So as this process accelerates the border between government and corporation becomes less and less clear.
I have absolutely no problem with paying money to the government so damn near everybody can get decent internet service if they want it. Corporations have shown over and over that they are unwilling and actively hostile towards that idea.
The only corporation that I have seen upend that view is Google. Whether competition from private enterprise, or government these companies scream that it is unfair. No, it isn't.
Yes. Less government, more free market. The government should be fighting anti-competitive behavior not granting monopolies. There is no reason for a government sanctioned monopoly in ANY market...it's just a breeding ground for corruption.
Absolutely. Corporations do nothing but good. They bear no responsibility for their purposeful misuse of the funds.
And government does nothing but bad.
Swear on your stack of Ayn Rand books that the world would be better if we had more corporations, because they are perfectly ethical and never screw anybody over.
Yes, that's right. Never blame the con artists^W^Wcorporations who didn't do what they promised. Instead blame the government for trusting them.
This is not really an American problem. In nearly all developed countries the delivered broadband "moore's law" has been abysmal compared to what technology allows.
In an apartment building the cost of per apartment gigabit ethernet with a couple of trunked 10 gig ports for last mile would be very very low.
(And we'd have much faster tech for same money, but development stalled due to lack of deployment - 10 gig ethernet is what 12 years old now?)
In the bay area, if you can get our bandwidth needs at the level you need from them, I highly recommend Sonic.Net. They seem to be trying to do the right thing/build infrastructure/and bring better broadband speeds to people in the bay area.
I recently left them to go from DSL to go to Wireless w/ a local reseller of some of Sonic's service. I gave up a few static IPs to get 20Mbps symmetric. I'm one of those where upload is just as important as down. Price is reasonable given I could get rid of my land line and some other costs.
My Charter High Speed internet went from $60 to $40 a month on the spot just by threatening to leave them and go with AT&T U-Verse. And I did it all through their chat with a sales rep online without calling anyone. They even gave me a free cable modem.
Moral of the Story: Shop around and make threats, you are the customer they need you and your money. They'd rather lose $20 a month than lose $40 so you can almost always talk the prices down.
That's because you have two options to choose between. Many have none, so it's either pay the price or have no home internet. Where the only choices are Comcast and Verizon, which offer near-identical packages and pricing in most markets, Comcast's retention department no longer negotiates. If you threaten to switch, they'll tell you to go ahead, and send a door-to-door sales rep to your home every 6 months.
PacBell had built one of these next gen networks, it was even in limited deployments, as soon as SBC bought them, they killed it. It was an HFC network (hybrid fiber/coax)and was a commercial ready product. I'm not in a position to find citations right now, but if you google Pacific Bell and Hybrid Fiber Coax, you'll find the cites.
Cringely's claim is that various subsidies and tax breaks, totaling 200 billion dollars, were given to telco operators with the understanding that a 45 mbps symmetrical connection would be developed and offered to end users. The companies received those subsidies and tax breaks, but didn't develop the system they claimed they would develop and instead built a system that is nearly 27 times slower (I use the term built loosely there since the ADSL network sits on top of the same old copper wire infrastructure that has existed for decades and decades).
funny how this article came back today, I'm visiting my grandma, she has an ipad as her computer (first successful adoption of a computer for her btw, she previously had bought 2 computers and didn't take to either one) and I'm looking at her internet speeds and I can't deal with it. She is paying $28 for 3 mbps (max) speeds. It's dsl from at&t. I ran a speed test and she only gets about .5 mbps. I get about 300mbps(when plugged into ethernet) when I'm at school...
[+] [-] brownbat|12 years ago|reply
Now I'm in a different part of the country, can get FiOS, but while Verizon's service always delivers over 50 Mbps on speedtest sites, it often chokes on Youtube or Netflix. When that happens, there's no simple way to determine if it's the provider or some random provisioner in the middle. This is the future of getting screwed by telecoms: worthless metrics and plausible deniability for service degradation.
I happened to get a deal by calling all the providers in the area, then playing their offers off of each other. I recommend everyone does this every few months. But the fact that was so easy doesn't really make me feel very comfortable. If they can haggle, it just signals how much rent they're charging from all the unwary customers.
[+] [-] simoncion|12 years ago|reply
If you have shell access to a Linux machine in a College of Engineering attached to some university somewhere [0], try this:
1) Use youtube-dl to get the actual URL of the video that Youtube is sending to your machine that's slow as balls. [1]
2a) Wget that url on your home machine.
2b) Wget that url on the machine attached to that university.
3) Notice the discrepancy between download speeds of those two machines. In particular, notice if your home download starts at full speed, but is throttled to super slow speeds after a couple minutes of video have been downloaded.
4) Run a traceroute (I love using mtr for this) to ensure that the route to Youtube from your home machine goes directly from your ISP's network to Google's network. If this is the case, then there's noone to blame for poor performance other than your ISP and Youtube.
Comcast used to severely throttle Youtube videos downloaded on my connection here in SF. Using the method outlined above, I discovered that:
* I had a direct path from Comcast to Youtube at both my house and at the university.
* At my house, the first minute or two of the video file was fetched at full link speed (~6MB/s), the remainder of the video (even when downloading a 1080p MP4) was fetched at ~100KB/s.
* The very same file when downloaded at a university across the country was fetched at full link speed (14MB/s) and never slowed down.
[0] To lessen the chance that the campus network admins will be artificially throttling your connection, natch.
[1] You will notice that this URL is super-long and appears to encode all sorts of fun stuff in the domain name. This (along with a traceroute) leads me to believe that accessing this URL at another physical location won't give you a file from another CDN that's closer to that other physical location.
[+] [-] gcb0|12 years ago|reply
i found a aDSL number for ATT that was not advertised (and you reached a person on the first minute!) that was the result of some obscure regulation that they had to provide dsl without charging for a phone line if so i wanted. it was a very good service. as i was next door to their trunk.
i moved, less than 20miles, but another city. called att to transfer service, the rep read something and the burst out a sad "ah, sorry, this is verizon territory".
and that is exactly what i get here. verizon. nothing else. the 2nd or 3rd biggest city in los angeles, and i can choose, verizon.
[+] [-] mixwhit|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Istof|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adventured|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EEGuy|12 years ago|reply
Having worked in voice telecom billing for 11 years, it is my observation that phone companies adore detail billing. Imagine an ISP bill which details all the websites you visit, and bills each visit according to some value the phone company might opaquely ascribe. It might have gone that way with a thankfully unimplemented evolution of the amorphous notion of "video dial tone".
Had this $200 billion boondoggle actually given us megabit access, then it would be... access to what, exactly? I can't imagine phone companies providing access to the flat-rate, always on, servers-allowed, content-neutral Internet we have now, no matter the bit rate.
The thought of all phone companies collectively coming up with a service like Netflix is, to me, as unimaginable as the thought of those same phone companies coming up with the iPhone.
Yes, $200 billion is a shameful waste of ratepayer funds and a regulatory failure. But thankfully, it neither collared nor crossed with the Internet.
In my opinion, separation of ownership of content (and applications, and platforms, and end users) from the common carriers who own some of the "plumbing" which connects routers to routers to routers becomes fundamental to a free Internet.
(Edits for grammar, clarity, tone)
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|12 years ago|reply
That seems like the most egregious thing in the article: treating Internet-based video delivery as a cable company. The concept of local cable franchise monopolies is ridiculous enough to begin with, and the only possible justification hinges on not wanting to have multiple sets of cables wired everywhere. Content delivered over the Internet completely eliminates that justification, leaving no possible rationale for making such services subject to franchise regulations.
[+] [-] 001sky|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ojbyrne|12 years ago|reply
"America is the only country in the world where BRIBERY is legalized and stupidly called lobbying."
[+] [-] jjoonathan|12 years ago|reply
Campaign finance reform is a prerequisite for addressing any of the anti-consumer legislation we are stuck with today. Best of all, it hasn't been turned into a partisan wedge yet, so there's hope, assuming we can find a way to make people care.
Unfortunately, last time I saw a campaign finance reform proposal cross the HN frontpage, it fell off within 5 minutes :(
[+] [-] betenoire|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gcb0|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] catmanjan|12 years ago|reply
I wish poor internet connection was something I could really get upset about, but I guess the rest of my life is a lot better than most around the world.
[+] [-] vacri|12 years ago|reply
Our office in the heart of SF has 100/100Mb (admittedly, 'selected buildings only') for $50/month.
And this is just after us receiving an new government which scuttled the NBN that might have given us comparable service in 1-2 decades time. We're going to have expensive, slow internet for a long time.
[+] [-] grecy|12 years ago|reply
You don't want to live there, trust me.
[+] [-] caprad|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinalexbrown|12 years ago|reply
I would think dense wireless networks in urban areas could work. I'm not an expert, and would be interested in hearing from one, but I imagine that wireless networks could benefit from algorithmic advances in a way that might be more difficult in traditional copper/fiber networks.
If you gave me (someone with very little wireless experience but used to be a cable guy) carte blanche, here's what I would investigate:
Several routers in an urban area which require minimal installation and can be mass-produced and immediately interchanged - think roof access, and could be turned on and off remotely, maybe battery operated, flowing to relatively few fiber hubs.
Infrastructure advantages: Network algorithms have come a long way, and the ability to dynamically add or scale nodes as needed could have great performance/cost balances that aren't possible with fixed nodes. And upgrades do not require new lines, just more and better routers. If a router dies, replace, and send the old one to a shop somewhere inexpensive. No midnight service restoration pay.
Customer advantages: I connect to wifi the same way I do right now. Zero home installation (google Comcast horror stories if you need imagery).
If I were to start, I would do it in an urban area with a landowner that had a monopoly. Hyde Park, Chicago is like that. There are basically two landowners: University of Chicago and Mac Apartments. You have to make one community love you to pieces before branching out, and that would require a lot of cooperation. Of course a danger here is if Mac suddenly decides that they hate you and removes access privileges. But if that worked, and you got more funding to expand, imagine the word of mouth: "Here's how installation works: it's a wifi network and you connect to it".
A la "it's a folder, and it syncs" dropbox. Presumably something like this has been tried before, but that's true of many things that end up working (like search engines or social networks).
[+] [-] simoncion|12 years ago|reply
That reasonable way is for municipalities to gather some courage and run their own open-access fiber. Until municipalities realize that the monopolies that they've granted their "local" cable companies are now working fiercely against the interests of their citizenry, real change in this space won't happen.
To anyone who's thinking of trotting out the old "The US is too spread out to make that feasible!" canard: NYC, SFO, and SJC have slower, poorer, more expensive per bps residential broadband options than Chattanooga, TN does. Make sure to carefully examine the population densities and regions surrounding each of those metro areas before making your argument. :)
[+] [-] speleding|12 years ago|reply
I'm nowhere near a socialist, but government intervention is a perfectly reasonable way to deal with natural monopolies. How do you think Northern European and Asian countries pulled so far ahead of the US on this?
[+] [-] thundara|12 years ago|reply
You've basically described mesh networks. There are a number in cities across America, but are normally run by enthusiasts.
The trouble is, in dense urban environments, there's a lot of noise to overcome, and if you don't work around that, your network will fall apart. Especially a problem with the coming 802.11ac routers which will crowd up the 5 GHz band that is current the target for backbone links in the wireless networks.
[+] [-] anon4|12 years ago|reply
Start small in a part of the city populated by mostly young people - like university students. Buy ad time on the Discovery Channel. Run your cables through the air between buildings and over trees - it will fail with every storm, but it's cheap to replace. Hopefully you'll get big enough fast enough to put some proper cabling before regulation catches up with you.
[+] [-] afuchs|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] expertentipp|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zw123456|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wtallis|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hcarvalhoalves|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] warfangle|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baddox|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smutticus|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mzr|12 years ago|reply
The only corporation that I have seen upend that view is Google. Whether competition from private enterprise, or government these companies scream that it is unfair. No, it isn't.
[+] [-] superuser|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hbags|12 years ago|reply
And government does nothing but bad.
Swear on your stack of Ayn Rand books that the world would be better if we had more corporations, because they are perfectly ethical and never screw anybody over.
Yes, that's right. Never blame the con artists^W^Wcorporations who didn't do what they promised. Instead blame the government for trusting them.
[+] [-] knodi|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ams6110|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zurn|12 years ago|reply
In an apartment building the cost of per apartment gigabit ethernet with a couple of trunked 10 gig ports for last mile would be very very low.
(And we'd have much faster tech for same money, but development stalled due to lack of deployment - 10 gig ethernet is what 12 years old now?)
[+] [-] dubcanada|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msandford|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmspring|12 years ago|reply
I recently left them to go from DSL to go to Wireless w/ a local reseller of some of Sonic's service. I gave up a few static IPs to get 20Mbps symmetric. I'm one of those where upload is just as important as down. Price is reasonable given I could get rid of my land line and some other costs.
[+] [-] ChrisNorstrom|12 years ago|reply
Moral of the Story: Shop around and make threats, you are the customer they need you and your money. They'd rather lose $20 a month than lose $40 so you can almost always talk the prices down.
[+] [-] dangrossman|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aloha|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MBCook|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huhalu|12 years ago|reply
Internet cost as part of income is more accurate
[+] [-] 9999|12 years ago|reply
Cringely's claim is that various subsidies and tax breaks, totaling 200 billion dollars, were given to telco operators with the understanding that a 45 mbps symmetrical connection would be developed and offered to end users. The companies received those subsidies and tax breaks, but didn't develop the system they claimed they would develop and instead built a system that is nearly 27 times slower (I use the term built loosely there since the ADSL network sits on top of the same old copper wire infrastructure that has existed for decades and decades).
[+] [-] maaku|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amjaeger|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukateake|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paul_f|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dijit|12 years ago|reply