I am on several watch email lists and have sent electronic correspondence to our reps, as well as used an online automated dialing system to call several of our reps and voice opposition.
Unfortunately, I fear that since the corporations live forever and people come and go, they will end up carving up the Internet like they have our local neighborhoods to where your choices boil down to where you live or how much money you can afford to spend to get the level of service THEY want to provide to you. The days of $10 Netflix streaming are numbered…
I agree that “Net Neutrality” is a bad idea. Bandwidth is not free, and keeping it capitalistic promotes innovation. If anything, I’d propose that the last mile is the regulated part. Provide a pipe with minimum bandwidth (X) to each house, and then the consumer would pick, from a pool of unregulated companies, who “lights their pipe”. Those providers could then negotiate their own paths to Netflix, Amazon, pr0n, etc.
Sounds a lot like how electricity works now with “Free To Choose” in TX, doesn’t it?
The issue is that you are pretty much stuck with one last-mile ISP because there are huge barriers to entry. Often this is due to the local government. We should make it easier for new ISPs to run fiber in the existing right-of-ways, that way we can have actual competition.
With the recent announcement of Verizon selling FiOS to Frontier, I think I’ll be pressuring my city council members to do just that.
You can already choose alternate providers for telco access. The problem is that whoever owns the lines has a list of rules they have to play by and a timeline they have to respond on installation, problem resolutions, etc… and they take EVERY bit of time they are allowed to respond to drag things out.
The internet should stay neutral. If not, who is to say what is or isn’t allowed? As a small web business owner this scares me that they could cut off access to my website on a whim or because of some perceived competitive threat.
I haven’t been paying full attention to the debate and I’m not sure what each side is advocating. I read a mishmash of things, and all of them have pros and cons.
I don’t want my streaming movies to double in price simply because my ISP can do that. In fact, the state of Internet service in the US already is overpriced and under-serviced. We are being ripped off by the telcos, witness the fact that our Internet connectivity is some of the slowest and some of the most expensive in the developed world.
Working for what will soon become the FL/TX/CA branches of Frontier, I have a mixed view of Net Neutrality.
The vast majority of what net neutrality proponents seem to be all excited about has simply never happened outside of a few incidents. There are precious few examples of ISP’s blocking access to websites, shaping traffic they saw as undesirable, or setting up “fast lanes” outside of deals with NetFlix etc where the performance benefits are appreciable. The first two inflict appreciable costs on the ISP without producing revenue; the latter obviously produces revenue, but this is ostensibly to offset the costs of setting up the additional interconnects.
Bigger problem for ISP’s are…
The value gap Everyone demands internet service, yet will piss and moan endlessly about the price for something they use pretty much every day. Curiously, the average family probably spends more eating out on the weekends without complaint than they do on their home internet service. So long as the market is hyper price sensitive, there is little incentive to truly invest in the business. If $X9.99 a month is too much for you and you’ll switch providers for a $10 monthly reduction yet you also demand bleeding edge performance, expect cautious discounting and slow network upgrades.
Low rates of return Relative to wireless with its standard two year contracts pretty much guaranteed to generate profit in the last 6-10 months, wired internet has really long payback times. Looking at my own employer’s financial statements ~5 years ago, wireless and wireline made about the same gross revenue - only wireless made 4 times as much profit; fast forward to last year and the profit mismatch is the same with wireless also making 50% more revenue. Small wonder the capital dollars flow mostly into wireless. This is an issue regardless of who owns and runs the network, be it the much-hated telecoms, similarly-hated cablecos, or some municipal broadband operator … capital demands a return, and the market is increasingly uninterested in utility and municipal rates of return.
Changing nature of residential internet usage Until recently, residential internet usage was characterized by its “bursty” nature - subscribers request a website, send and e-mail, or sporadically move IRC packets in and out. This resulted in predictable patterns of utilization at even the neighborhood scale, which home broadband networks were engineered around. The reason you can get up to X Mb/s for $X9.99 a month is largely because the networks are oversubscribed - by factors of 200x or more (some of the first-generation DSL concentrators were >500x). This bandwidth contention is repeated a few more times until traffic reaches the network core. As video streaming becomes the number 1 use of bandwidth, home broadband networks will face performance challenges as they run up against bandwidth contention. It will be relatively inexpensive for ISP’s to address this issue at the network core and central office level, but at the distribution level or the “last mile” it will blossom into a fantastic expense in terms of equipment upgrades and engineering efforts to rebuild home broadband networks into something that looks more like business internet with much lower levels of over-subscription.
Regulation There is concern in the industry that net neutrality rules under Title II will move the yardsticks in such a fashion that existing investments are no longer profitable, no longer allowed to operate, or be forced to deploy in areas where they will never see anything approaching return on investment.
Despite the fact that my bread is buttered on the ISP side of the debate, I am not opposed to municipal broadband. It’s becoming apparent that the big ISP’s lack the interest in deploying big upgrades any more, so under-served communities will need to invest in themselves. I would like to stress the last bit since I would not like to see federal or state tax grants being used to deploy to these areas. If they can’t carry a large percentage of the load themselves then perhaps we would be better off investing resources elsewhere.
Lastly, most of the concerns brought up by net neutrality proponents are issues for the Federal Trade Commission since they revolve around the potential for anti-competitive behavior by incumbent providers. Rather than shoehorning the FCC’s Title II (based on laws written 80 years ago) into the situation and creating additional specialized bureaucracy, perhaps the FTC should beef up as needed to monitor and address potential abuses by the carriers.
I think there is a bit of a false sense of the world here in the metroplex. Most people do not have the ability to choose between 3-5 different potential high speed providers. DSL is not a fast option in many cases because of distance from the CO, leaving only one option: cable.
Where I’m from, if Comcast wants to charge $1000 for “high speed” internet service, that’s what they’ll charge until someone puts down a billion dollars to put in fiber.
This is the problem is that there is no market competition. It’s not capitalism. And if Comcast wants to block what I can do with my high-speed internet service, right now that is 100% UP TO THEM. You’re right, it is a free speech issue, but I’m not too interested in Comcast’s right to limit it, twiddle with DNS, or whatever.
BTW, if ISPs weren’t ultra-greedy with the lowest customer service ratings of any industry anywhere, you might think that they would actually WANT to host Netflix co-lo servers to improve the performance of a widely used product – one of the big reasons why a person would WANT high-speed service!
Frontier is an interesting and exciting newcomer. I began looking into them during my job hunt a few years ago. I believe they are the fastest-growing ISP in the nation; they are growing pretty fast, anyway. This looks like an exciting time to get into the company. I think that one of their selling points is that conventional ISPs having been doing a good job servicing customers; Frontier intends to compete in terms of service and maybe value.
As a starving consumer, yes, I absolutely will scream bloody murder over every penny that I have to spend for anything. At the same time, I absolutely will try to get the best value I can. Be that as it may, my networking needs are modest. I stream a movie or two from Netflix or YouTube or Hulu every day or two, or send plain-text emails, or post to forums, or upload photos to Flickr. None of these are straining my 1 mbps connection (caveat: it appears that I’m sometimes getting 3 mbps service at no extra charge). It would be nice to have 10 mbps, but I don’t really need it most of the time (unless I’m uploading videos).
What I needed, as someone who was under-employed for the last five years, is cheap Internet access. Single-digit megabit Internet speeds should not cost multi-digit dollars per month. I loved Verizon FiOS when I could afford it, switched to TWC cable when they had a special discount, then switched to Roadrunner when the TWC discount expired. I’m paying about $25 a month for 1 mbps connectivity. That’s expensive for what I’m getting, but it’s the cheapest I could find. I pay only about $20 a month for my cell phone service (and, I use an old, $5 flip-phone).
It is my understanding that the State of Texas passed some legal procedure (probably a constitutional amendment) banning any metropolitan-provided Internet access. Texas will not have public Internet over power lines, or metro-WiFi or anything else that could compete with Comcast, TWC or Verizon or, now, Frontier.
Frontier nearly went bankrupt the last time they bought a chunk of Verizon and hasn’t seen good performance lately, so this latest phase promises to be fortune cookie exciting™.
Texas is one of a few states that have hard, absolute barriers to municipal broadband. I think it’s dumb - it’s fantastically expensive to roll physical media, be it twisted-pair, coax, fiber, or unobtanium with stem-cell insulation - so there’s little need to “protect” incumbents; especially when bond issues aren’t so easy to float. And from the ISP side, it makes for an even more attractive proposition to hook up to a POP and collect some revenue for layer 3 services while the muni operator handles all the costs of last-mile infrastructure.
But this is business-friendly Texas, so we’re not going to tolerate something that sounds like people’s anything…
So you are saying you want ISPs to be able to sell restricted internet access based on which sites pay the ISPs? The world where you pay $50 / month for premium access to a list of ‘top sites’ and have to pay extra to get the rest of the internet at reduced speed would be a good thing?
I’m am 100% ok with that, so long as I have a choice on which ISP I can use. I’d of course sign-up with a different ISP than one who restricts what I can access. The problem is that right now, as consumers we have no choices, so the ISPs have no real competition (other than who can bribe local govt more effectively).
Where I am at, I am in a Uverse area, which is a dismal 25 down and 2.5 up, or Time Warner which is 100 down and 5 up. Uverse hasn’t done any upgrades since I moved in 7 years ago…Time Warner has recently gone from 50 to 100, and they are promising 300 this year…I need UPLOAD speed. Why should Uverse upgrade when Verizon can’t come into their area?
So I’m on the list of cities being upgraded to gigabit network some day. I
had 100 down with TWC and switched to Uverse because a neighbor manages the
installs and promised better service then they used to have and was
downgraded to 20 with promise of gigabit soon. I now see it may not have
been a good idea. Would love see Verizon in my neighborhood. As for price
and quality the US in my opinion is at the bottom compared to overseas
providers.
In spite of the big marketing push by Verizon touting the benefits of synchronous speeds, it’s not something any big slice of the market much cares about.
Telcos and cablecos compete because they have overlapping footprints … it’s vanishingly rare for telcos or cablecos to overlap with their own kind due to the territorial exclusivity they used to have.
Verizon did some small-scale out of franchise deployments a few years back that were less successful than anticipated (perhaps related to their tiny scope) before the total stop on deployments. As far as FIOS upgrades go, we’ll have to see what direction Frontier takes once the purchase completes in 2016 - they bit off a big chunk, but arguably bought it at a great discount, so maybe they’ll be more willing to invest.
I’m immediately amused by the way the title calls it “OBAMA’S PLAN TO REGULATE THE INTERNET” when the very first line accurately calls it Tom Wheeler’s plan to, I guess, do his job.
