Your ISP Is Screwing You: As Your Service Costs Go Up, Their Backbone Costs Go Down
techcrunch.com/2011/07/29/your-isp-is-screwin...
techcrunch.comPosted Jul 29, 2011, 4:14 PM UTC
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techcrunch.comI've noticed a lot of posts in r/tech about this very issue. Can I ask for a way to combat this problem? Currently I live in an area in which Comcast is the only option, aside from Clear wireless USB receivers. How do we stop this problem if they're pretty much the only option?
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Organize, make it a political issue (local monopolies are), and vote locally based on it.
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So there's really nothing we can do right now. I should suck it up and subscribe to comcast? it sounds terrible but I can't just not have an internet connection.
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Get your town to start a Municipal ISP
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And then hope that the the resulting lawsuit turns out in your favor.
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Yeah... that's not allowed in my state.
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Are there any blueprints available for this?
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Get your town to start a Municipal ISP
Better yet, start a co-op yourself.
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Sadly, it involves an attention span longer than the life of a reddit post. Upvotes don't solve real problems. I am in the same situation with Time Warner, and although I have a small grass roots organization, it simply doesn't have enough support.
The problem is for most of the population these connections are good enough to check their e-mail and download some songs off iTunes.
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Sadly that is the business. Supply and demand and basically value, you and I say its worth X amount but we are willing to Pay Y amount and Comcast knows this and will charge us Y because there is not another cheaper option for the same level of service. Without competition they will charge the maximum they can that makes sense before we cancel or do without. I am right with you (comcast or clearwire) and broadband is the only good option. I want more competition!
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Yeah, I read somewhere that Comcast isn't "technically" a monopoly because there are "technically" other options (Clear, Cricket, etc).
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But local business cannot compete without reliance on Comcast. Telecoms are really tricky because of the infrastructure needed, especially in the modern climate. Frankly I think broadband needs to be government paid like our highways(taxes and tolls). Equate tolls to various cap levels and a lot of problems are solved. State level would work very well I think.
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They either need to become dumb pipes or utilities. There is very little government regulation aside from the "no competitors" part. The problem is our local government doesn't see it that way because they receive contributions from Time Warner and there is "competition" in the form of dial up.
I don't blame it on local politicians being corrupt, they don't really need to money to win re-election, they need local support, and the most people care about internet connectivity around here is checking e-mail or going to CNN.com. The area's demographic is predominantly baby boomer aged, white heterosexual couples and families who work in manufacturing and service industries. Editing this in: They don't know much about technology, nor do they care to, my group's research points to that overwhelmingly. Tangentially: They are really friendly and active politically though and aren't afraid to talk over a survey on Saturday morning and afternoon. That was a surprise.
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LOL
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How do we stop this problem if they're pretty much the only option?
Hire a better lobbyist than the ISPs did. No, seriously. ISPs were going to be held to the same standards (regulations) that telephone companies were in regards to service coverage, but they got together in the early 2000s, during the business friendly Bush-era FCC, lobbied, and got exactly what they wanted. A de-regulated market with no mandates on minimum coverage for underserviced or unserviced markets, letting them cherry pick the most profitable markets. You only have one ISP quite simply because the ISPs won't make enough profit on you to satiate them. They argued that regulations would hinder innovation, expansion, and drive prices up...the exact same BS they are spewing on net neutrality right now.
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This is true for everything, not just Internet access. The lobby system and the current campaign financing is pretty much legalized corruption.
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Imagine a day where corporate funding of lobbyists is banned. Imagine if lobbyists were simply neutral experts who educated our congressmen on certain issues. Imagine if not a dollar exchanged hands between businesses and politicians (PRIOR to any government contracts, that is). You can't though, we're living in a self replicating machine of money and power that we can't influence, can't control by ourselves. We are pawns, yes, but always remember that every 100 years, the world is full of entirely different people. I know people bad-talk my generation, but they are only highlighting the negative examples. There are many ambitious, morally upstanding, socially & environmentally conscious, kind kids in college right now, and we will be the change that needs to come in this transparent century. The century of information, not misinformation, the century of the microchip, the century of governments losing their ability to blindly control their people. We are a generation that questions, we are a generation that cares, and we are a generation with the sum of human achievement and information at the touch of our fingers. Give it time, man, I'd say 70, maybe 80 years until the age of fully transparent, fully empirical/rational-based legislation and government. For the next thirty, forty years, we will simply have to accept the economic oppression because the grass is yellower in the rest of the world through our eyes. phew [7]
tl;dr patience, young padawan
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The optimist in me gives you an upvote. I really do hope our generation (college/20-somethings) can turn around our political/corporate system.
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I wonder how much it would cost in lobbying money to get free and competitive internet access.
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Buy space in a datacenter. Work a deal with a nearby building to rent roof space. Run fiber from datacenter to building. Use high power wireless radios to beam internet around. Point to Point radios can go several miles.
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See, now I'm assuming you're talking a lot more money than Comcast.
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That's why there are monopolies in some areas. If you don't have enough people that are willing to pay, nobody is going to invest in the infrastructure.
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But, companies should be forced to rent the "pipes" to other ISP's. That is how the rules were when everything was on dialup. There was a ton of competition and the rates went down over time. For the broadband age the company that laid the cable provides the service. Hence, no competition and shitty.
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true, but the worst part is that it's not even their money invested in the infrastructure - it's taxpayer money.
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That's why there are monopolies in some areas.
The monopolies exist because the local governments limit the number of providers through franchisee agreement. Basically, the local govt creates a monopoly company providing the utility, but does not regulate the price.
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The only solution I thought of is just a massive switch to a company to systematically starve the others out. I know there are varying providers, but it should work in cities or towns with 2+ competitors (like mine), I doubt that will even work unless you get EVERY ONE OF YOUR NEIGHBORS TO SWITCH. You can't just have random people over the country switch, it doesn't make that much of an impression.
Because let's face it, whining isn't going to get anything done and we don't want to go back to dial-up.
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See, in my area (Northern Philadelphia), the options are Comcast or Clear Wireless via USB. I feel as my only realistic option for a decent connection is COmcast.
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That is PRECISELY why they are doing this...because they know they have local monopolies everywhere.
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Change the law, and introduce powerful regulators. That's what we did in Europe, and by and large it has worked.
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Get the FCC closed down, it prevents more then a single operator from laying cable or using a wireless frequency which means no competition.
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Easy, just start your own grass-roots political campaign or pay exorbitant amounts of money to hire a lobbyist! If you don't spend a large part of your life trying to combat unfair legislation then you clearly deserve to be taken advantage of. </sarcasm>
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Start your own company and go around spending billions relaying your own network across the country. This requires digging massively long tunnels and expensive wiring directly to homes. Free market son!
For all the downvoters, that's sarcasm. I'm pointing out how I do enjoy the freemarket and think govt regulation is often harmful, but there are often industries that are impenetrable and would require govt intervention to introduce a little fair free market.
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Government intervention is necessary for the success of a free market, even as outlined in its most idealistic form. It seems so few free marketeers have never even read the material surrounding the free market idea and just spout: no government, the market will fix itself.
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Smith argued heavily on the fact some government intervention is needed. It is absolutely required to have a healthy society.
I think today's argument from the right is selfishness, they argue that it's THEIR money and why should the government have it to give to others? Again, Smith and Jefferson argued that it's the only way to maintain a healthy society and democracy. The wealthy are required to pay more to support the lower classes. If you don't you have a bunch of uneducated, unhealthy, dissatisfied, selfish, and ignorant people. Not only does this make social mobility difficult, but these people not only vote, but are the key contributors to both the culture, political representatives, and economy.
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Not so.. One regulatory change would solve the problem over time. If the cable companies were forced to rent their connections to outside ISP's at reasonable rates we would see a more ISP's and over time we would see faster rates for cheaper prices...
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Exactly. I was being sarcastic. The internet is a vital service we all need. And they know this, and know they can make us pay whatever it takes. Currently, they go to congress and tell them a vast majority of internet users don't exceed 3gb or w/e it is they pull out. Which is a half truth. Most households have their household PC/notebooks but so do work places. Almost every work place also has a PC for their employees. This is where their inflated argument comes from. Yes, most connections don't exceed a certain amount, but most HOUSEHOLDS do.
The internet wasn't considered an essential infrastructure when it was categorized. Phone lines were, so they were forced to give up some of their space for the free market. The net doesn't have that privilage. So schmucks like me in LV pay 55 a month for 8mbs because I have no choice due to their monopoly... They price it at whatever they want.
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Please Sir, can I haz some of that 10 billion dollar free market tax money?
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Psh. Get a job you lazy bum!
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I agree, US and Australia seem to get poor service at ridiculous prices.
I pay $9/month and I get better service, my ISP is amazing.
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Don't forget about Canada! I would elaborate more but its using all my bandwi
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MY GOD THEY CAPPED YOUR APOSTROPHES
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BREAKING: Canadian telecoms now employing Candlejack to limit users' ba
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I'm in Bulgaria, a second-world country, in a tiny rural village as a Peace Corps volunteer. I pay ~$22 USD/month, which is more than what people in the larger Bulgarian towns pay. I still get 6/12 Mbps up/down.
Back in the states, in a moderately dense Chicago suburb, I paid $25 USD/month for 0.75/6 Mbps up/down through AT&T. That's also their fastest plan for the area.
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I really hope this doesn't surprise anyone. I work in the industry and helped roll out ADSL back in 1997 when it was true unlimited all-you-can-eat. They were making a killing back then! Since then the price per megabit backhaul has gone down year after year while prices for the consumer have gone up (with data caps).
PS- don't let anyone fool you about caps. They are there for one reason: to fend off internet video & protect traditional TV service. This is what my company calls a 'desirable regulatory environment' and nothing will change until we get rid of corporate lobbyists and the ability for corporations to basically write their own legislature.
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*Legislation
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Another major problem is the difference between advertised speeds vs actual speeds. Not to mention that to the layman there is absolutely no difference between XXMb/s and XX MB/s.
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In case any laymen or laywomen see this and are curious, the difference is bits vs. bytes. Small b means bits, big B means bytes. One byte is 8 bits.
So, for example, 40 Mb = 40/8 MB = 5 MB.
ISPs tend to advertise bits per second, but download/upload speeds are usually presented in bytes per second by user applications. This can be misleading to consumers.
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Pretty much all telecomm stuff is measured in bits/sec because whether bits are grouped into octets depends on application. It is not just ISPs -- Fast Ethernet is 100 MBit/sec, gigabit ethernet is, well, gigabit/sec and so on.
Data rates required for transmission of multimedia are also usually quoted in bits, not bytes. For example, 128 Kb/s is a typical data rate for MP3. That's why they are called _bit_rates. Or, say, MPEG-2 on DVD is up to 10 Mbit/s.
So if it is misleading it is a problem of programs and customers, not ISPs. ISPs just follow traditions/standards.
Quoting upload/download speeds in bytes per second instead of bits provides no advantages as it is rather hard to convert them into time estimations anyway. It makes much more sense to provide this time left estimate explicitly and quote speed in bits/second for a consumer to compare to bandwidth advertised by ISP.
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Well I guess what I was getting at is that say to someone like my Dad, who is not all that well versed in these types of matters, doesn't work with anything in terms of bits. His flash drive, memory card for his camera, and his iPod are all measured in bytes so when he sees an advertised speed he always equates it to bytes/s.
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I've been with ATT and Time Warner in the Texas area, and I am always able to cap my advertised speeds. I even had a few times on ATT where my cap 'fell off' and I ended up doing double the speed they sell anywhere in residential markets.... It turns out these routers can actually go pretty damned fast if they want to.
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I hate comcast as much as the next guy, but I consistently get speeds over the 24 Mbps they advertise/I pay for.
50 bucks a month isn't terrible either.
It's the cable tv that really sucks.
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Sky blue, water wet, ISP screws customers.
Shocked.
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Suits!
Lawsuits!
Lots of lawsuits!
That's what we need. Pile lawsuits as high as the Moon on those greedy corporates until they die.
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Please - techcrunch basically ripped the article off from Cringley, and didn't even bother to get the name right. Check out the original article. EDIT:Link.
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Sorry, scanned up and down but didn't see your link.
Have an upgoat from me
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From the article comments:
"Unfortunately, I just can't trust Cringely when it comes to telecoms. His misrepresentation of the mid-90s shows his bias against the entire sector. (Google search $200B rip-off and see if you can see the bias.)
Regarding his latest specifically consider this: I used to pay about $40/month for 768Kbps DSL in 1999. In 2009, I switched to fiber and pay about $40-50/month for 25 Mbps. That's a 32x increase for roughly the same price (less when you consider inflation). A telecom invested $20B in their network to provide this service. Obviously, I'm bearing the cost of that $20B network rollout in my monthly charge. It doesn't cost that telecom anywhere near $40/month to provide 25Mbps of service but someone had to write a huge check to get the network built.
Another way to look at it: my service increased in speed 42% PER YEAR and stayed about the same price. Due to the nature of technology, the speed moved in jumps rather than a smooth curve. I went from 768K DSL to 3 Mbps DSL to 5 Mbps Cable to 25 Mbps fiber, but the end result is the same: in 10 years, my service level went up 32-fold."
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All data and bandwidth practices are so shady. Once the infrastructure is in place why do we have to pay more for it? I never got that, it always cash grabs and passing the cost onto the customer.
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A combination of maintenance costs and inflation. Comcast are cunts but the costs of bandwidth have been vastly simplified, doubling available bandwidth requires doubling fibre channels which is not cheap. Costs could be pegged at inflation but would have never moved beyond 512k anywhere.
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All data and bandwidth practices are so shady. Once the infrastructure is in place why do we have to pay more for it?
Since when do sellers charge according to what it costs them to provide the product or service?
No, they charge the market clearing price.
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That's a simplistic article for several reasons :
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In Japan, because of earthquakes, they tend to build infrastructure overground which is why you see a lot of cables in the street of japanese cities. The side effect was that it's been significantly cheaper to deploy fiber optic. They also have a very high population density which makes it more interesting. In other countries and in particular in the US, deploying the same level of completely new infrastructure costs more.
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It is true that the price of wholesale bandwidth has been quickly going down for at least a decade. At first it was because after the Dotcom Bubble, a lot of companies found themselves with overprovisionned network capacity in a very competitive market. It's not so much overprovisionned but the market is still very competitive. Which is why you start to see a lot of concentration (Level 3 buying Global Crossing for instance or ISP merging with hosting companies and developping related services like CDN, and even in the consumer market ISPs are getting cosier with content providers).
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Now we're at a turning point. Demand for high bandwidth in the last mile is rising which means deploying a completely new infrastructure (fiber) which costs a lot of money and is kind of a pain in the ass to deploy. At the same time, higher demand in the last mile means you need higher capacity at the agregation and core level. The problem is that technology has stalled lately at these level. 40 Gbps was the maximum before maybe a year ago. We're just now starting to see widespread deployment of 100 Gbps links but it also costs a lot and still has a weak port density by equipement. That's a lot of investment for ISPs in the wholesale market while at the same time their margins have been falling for the past ten years.
For these reasons, rather than being purely evil and trying to milk every cents of their customers, I think ISPs are mostly trying to tame the growth to buy more time to deploy new infrastructures without getting too much in debt.
Keep in mind that these points I just made are also simplification. Also, the state of Internet connectivity varies widely from a continent and people tend to use the same words (like net neutrality) to describe very different situations.
EDIT: Sooooo I'm not complaining but am I being downvoted for having a researched but unpopular opinion ?
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several ISPs turned down stimulus money. my favorite two reasons given were: they had enough cash to expand/upgrade the networks and they were worried it might lead to inquiry about business practices.
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ISPs: We'll take stimulus money if you meet us in the back.. alone. That means no fucking cops and no fucking investigation, Capisce?
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Nice try.
But since they are all reporting RECORD profits in the BILLIONS of dollars (AT&T netted $20 Billion, for example), it is clear the ISPs are NOT starved for cash or worried about going into debt by spending umpteen million on infrastructure.
It's a pure greed grab to show every increasing quarterly profits to Wall Street. Pure and simple.
If they had any REAL competition (i.e. one they are not in collusion with) they'd have no problem upgrading their infrastructure and it would only cost them pennies on the dollar.
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I did say there are antitrust issues didn't I ? And I also added that the situation might be very different from one country to another which is why I brought up the antitrust issue : this is a problem the US have but other countries don't. Yet, you see the same actions taken by ISPs all over the world. Explain that. It must means there's a more global trend underlying these decisions.
You must also take into consideration that ISPs like Comcast or AT&T do not derive most of their profits from purely providing Internet access. This is actually one sad truth and the real risk against net neutrality : they are no more pure players in the ISP world, even at the wholesale level where, as I said, they're merging with or developping new businesses like hosting or CDN. And as weird as it is for all of us, business rules dictate that you do not simply transfer profits from one business unit to a failing one, you try make all of them profitable. This is probably the main reason you see bandwidth caps, throttling or traffic prioritization : they're trying to make the Internet access business unit somewhat profitable on its own. This means both postponing capital-heavy though overdue investment in a brand new infrastructure and making the existing infrastructure last longer in the face of increasing demand.
I'm not defending ISPs, I'm trying to understand how they think.
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YEAH MAN, THE CORPORATIONS ARE RAPING THE WORLD FOR MONEY!
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While ISPs may be acting in good faith (which I doubt), there are absolutely no excuses for oversubscribing and then failing to deliver even 1/4 the speed I pay for during peak times.
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Not all ISPs do that. I have FiOS and have 25/5 Mb dedicated.
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Dedicated to where? My guess is the node in your neighborhood, where there is a backhaul to the local POP, which in likelihood is going to be smaller than the sum of all the lines sold in your neighborhood. If you're lucky, the backhaul is never over-saturated and you can enjoy full speeds whenever you request them.
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Perhaps "dedicated" wasn't the right choice of words. It's guaranteed, not dedicated. They guarantee at any time, all the time, I will get 25Mb down. Somehow I manage quite a bit higher most of the time even.
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Then it is likely that the "speed you pay for" is "up to" xMbit, on a shared service, with no guarantees on speed or quality of service. That's why a T1 costs what it does, and services with speed guarantees and SLAs cost more than $60 a month or whatever.
Overselling has been the order of the day since almost day one of residential internet provision. Do you think AOL (in their heyday) had enough modems in their modem pools to allow every customer to connect at once? Unlikely.
The same is true now. Some network technologies (GPON - which is what FiOS uses) have enough capacity to satisfy current demand, however.
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"They also have a very high population density...blah, blah"
Bullshit argument. I live in rural japan and have better internet connectivity than my mother who lives in Los Angeles. Not the suburbs, friggin' Culver City. If American ISPs can't properly fiber up the second largest city in the country, they are hopeless.
And while the above ground wiring may make it cheaper, the real reason for Japan's success is that one company (NTT), partially owned by the government, lays all the fiber and private ISPs license local service rights from them. So the government does the infrastructure and a competitive marketplace provides the customer service.
So much better than what passes for broadband policy in America.
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By having been involved (albeit remotely) in a study to install fiber in a neighborhood, I can assure you there's a very large difference between overground, deep underground and barely underground (the last one being how several countries in Europe are deploying fiber even though there's a higher risk of cuts during construction works). The fact that some areas are very dense makes it also easier to have a fast return on investment which makes deploying fiber in rural area less of a burden. Of course, the ideal solution is a mutualized infrastructure either through direct public sector involvment (Australia and its NBN is a recent example) or through incentives to the private sector to cooperate (the preferred way in France to deploy fiber).
Once again, I'm not defending ISPs. I'm just trying to explain that situations vary widly and it's not all black or white.
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In other countries and in particular in the US, deploying the same level of completely new infrastructure costs more.
Shiny new US metropolitan suburbs also get shitty service/prices -- I don't think you have a point here.
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Thanks for the well reasoned post. I forsee this getting downvoted into oblivion.
These "technology" journalists crack me up whenever they try to report on networking. They need to stick with writing articles about the latest cute web start that doesn't have vowels in it's name. There's a huge difference between wholesale bandwidth at the edge of your network and backhaul. Bringing that bandwidth from the edge to your house is where all the costs are tied up.
Now, I'm in no way defending the big ISPs, as they still charge far too high of margins on their service. But you have to have a clear picture of what you're really talking about. The ISPs have spent billions building out the last mile infrastructure. Now they're trying to monetize those investments.
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that might one of the best posts i have seen in a long time . kudos sir, and well done on the replies too. It makes for interesting reading.
You are being downvoted for unpopular opinion.
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Hopefully Google will step in and shake the shit out of these bastards.
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I have a local ISP. It's the best service I could ever ask for.
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Please - techcrunch basically ripped the article off from Cringley
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Starting Monday, my ISP is a local city-subsidized fiber ring. For the same price as Comcast 6/2 internet, I'm getting 20/20. Hell. Yes.
I could go cheaper, but when there's 20/20 available, and work subsidizes it, why?
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Aren't the companies run by CEOs whose jobs depend on the company's ability to turn a high quarterly profit?
I think any CEO would have to be silly not to rip off people for short-term gains and get bonuses before being dismissed in a few years.
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Maybe for you USA folks, buy my ISP took my 10MB/s line and upgraded it to a 25/25MB/s at no extra charge, with the same monthly cost.
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Download Caps? Cost?
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Is really even anything we can do about this? We can't exactly boycott all ISPs. And even if we tried to start a boycott, we couldn't ever really get enough people to matter to them.
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Cable guy here: this headline is absolutely true.
When cable internet came out in the 90's they said the price would drop as they added customers and the service became more popular. It never did. The greed of the corporations overwhelms everything.
The internet bill you pay in turn pays for the losses the CableCo encounters via the TV end of the business. Internet services alone pay for themselves easily; TV services barely break even.
It's also the reason we are all PAYING for advertising supported television.
The original cable channels, like HBO, were subscribed and commercial free.
Now we are paying for blocks of 500 channel filler garbage when all we really want is to watch 3 or 4 channels commercial free.
commercial free with quality content
Commercial free and quality content?
Who do you think you are? The queen of england?
The Doctor is most definitely in.
In Canada (at least Ontario) the prices have stayed the same, but our speeds have increased. Of course, the amount of bandwidth we're allowed to use in a month is rapidly decreasing so we just hit the cap sooner. Telecom companies are devious motherfuckers.
It goes deeper than you might think, I was bell tech support. Even though bell is not a cable isp it does the same things to it's customers.
Hell they even fuck over the companies they outsource to.
The bells are even worse. While cable is putting out faster and faster speeds, the bells have clung to low speed DSL and put off upgrading their networks to profit even more. Verizon is the only bell that is attempting to upgrade.
I live in Romania, and for some incomprehensible reason we get great speeds and prices. We are #4 in the world. Why? Nothing else works in our country, except the internet. 6.6 mbps is the average speed.
We are a poor country with GDP per capita 11k$ compared to 46k$ in US and 38k$ in Canada. Many Romanians immigrate to work in EU (10% of our population).
Imagine the degree to which the corporations fuck the people in US and Canada, if such a poor country as Romania has so great services.
Isn't Romania also home to some of the biggest cybercriminals?
Edit: Added link
I'm pretty sure there's some legitimate Internet businesses in Romania. It's just pretty hard to get investors to take a Romania-based company seriously. Without investors, growth is slow.
The same problem, even more so, is in Nigeria. Lagos, an university city and the seventh biggest metropolitan area in the world, really doesn't have local jobs for newly graduated (or studying) tech experts. The Nigerian scam industry didn't spring up in a vacuum.
It's not like the companies only have the backbone cost to pay for. Maybe their backbone cost has never been a large cost. The interesting thing to look for is if their profit margin has increased.
It sounds boring, I know, but the headline is just sensationalist.
Last mile is static and the backbone keeps going down.
How can you say that justifies prices increases and data caps?
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Price per ports or price per mbps go down. Capital expenditure go up because the technology needed to absorb the new demand both in terms of users and of sheer capacity is more expansive and develops slower.
Besides, "last mile is static" ? What about fiber optic at least to the building or to the block ?
That is part of last mile. Last mile is essentially from your house to the ISP.
Valid point, 0 upvotes. Besides, while the cost per gig continues to plummet, total usage keeps climbing so it offsets the savings. Total cost is rate (per gig x total gig), the article sensationalizes the title based only on the first number going down even through they make the point later about the second number climbing but few people bother to look past the headline.
It actually isn't cheap to buy hardware to keep up because the rapid climb in usage means frequently replacing gear with stuff fast enough to handle it.
Reddit like everyone else likes to have their opinions parroted back to them, if you were a website that made money on ads who wanted traffic you would keep this in mind.
So are you saying that because more people are subscribing to broadband Internet, that's why prices are going up?
Are you saying that demand is out-stripping supply?
It is more than just more subscribers, it is also more data per subscriber. I think you overlooked or ignored that.
A fairly major telecommunications company in the western US was using 6 wire type B mechanical crossbar switches up until 3 years ago. They even ran DSL lines through it...
Are you saying that companies aren't capable of increasing their supply of bandwidth? Cause if you are, you sure are right. This company has been hemorrhaging customers for years, mostly because they are dropping services this company offers in favor of newer technologies that it does not offer, or that other companies can offer at a cheaper rate and ar a more reliable service. To be fair, Qwest cannot put more subscribers on that same shitty ass hardware that was supposed to be retired 20 years ago. If only they spent more time in, say 2000[PDF], when they had revenues of almost 20 billion a year upgrading equipment....
But it's too bad they cant, because they let their wallets take all that money and they failed to look further than 2 years in to the future, and now they're being bought out to a company that really does want to expand them, but realizes that it'll cost too much. Poor TelCos. Anyone want to start a fund to save it?
edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ant_and_the_Grasshopper
There are tons of bankrupt companies out of the last 10 or so years in that space. Some of their assets are sold of for peanuts to other barely surviving companies like Level 3 and Global Crossing.
They are dropping like flies. Most oil companies and government contractors don't seem to be having the same problem.
But they're NOT improving their infrastructure to keep up.
My internet bill was $85/mo for 1.5mbps in the 90s.
Now it's $52 for 15mbps.
In the 90s, I had a 300 mhz singlecore CPU. Now I have a quadcore running at 4.7 ghz with somewhere between 5-10x the power per mhz.
Apples to oranges.
We barely went from 10 Mbps to 100 Gbps at the same time. And actually if you just consider the consumer access level, we barely went from Fast Ethernet to Gigabit Ethernet. Technology does not evolve at the same speed everywhere.
And now think of how many times you replaced your PC in between to stay current. Now think of if you had to go rent a backhoe and a work team to dig up an entire neighborhood each time you wanted to upgrade your PC.
There would be some significant expense there.
Nothing I've read even remotely suggests the backbone is limiting speeds; all that is required is to replace a computer here or some network gear there at the wire center.
You had a fast connection in the 90s, and a more average connection now, not quite as comparable as it would be if they were both average speeds, or both high speeds.
And you've not mentioned capping, I know when I first got the net it had no caps at all, then fair usage came into play, and now they want to put a real cap in place.
Actually, I had a fast connection in the 90s and almost the slowest connection Comcast offers now.
And I didn't mention capping because I don't have a cap. I have Comcast business internet. No cap. I could also have sonic.net for about the same price with slightly lower bandwidth and no cap. I don't know what you're trying to imply with fair usage.
But none of this goes against the point. The poster says that rollout and technology should improve the product and/or lower the price. It has. I'm getting more for less than ever. In the future I don't expect my bill to drop further (I expect it to go up with inflation actually) but I know my bandwidth will rise just as it has since I first got DSL in 1997 (or something like that).
One of my friends could only get ISDN in 1997 even though we were both in Pac Bell area. He paid slightly more than me to get 112kbps!
You got Comcast business for $52/month? I'm doing something very wrong
Bullshit
No, not bullshit.
Same here. ISPs are ripping you off but be glad you are not in Canada where bandwidth caps are very small.
I wish people like you would start boycotting or doing something to bring more attention to it only because opinions of people in the business would be seen as having more credibility than those of consumers. I'm hoping that the net will work its way around all of the artificial limits being imposed on it, but as of the moment I'm kind of scared for its future.
/idealistic_rant
What are their profit margins like these days? How do they compare to other companies? How do they compare to investing the money passively instead of with great risk?
I couldn't comment on the financial end of things, but I can tell you that waste and having to do work twice is a MAJOR cause of cableco expenditures from what I've seen in the past 10 years. They do very little quality-checking on contractor work beyond whether something is working or not - and it bites them all in the ass later.
They, in turn pass those costs on to the consumer by only offering overpriced cable packages with numerous worthless channels and a stifling array of advertising. And then they cap your internet usage because they sold cable internet to everyone on the block @ $29.99 for 6 months and can't provide the advertised speeds, so they post a disclaimer in tiny print at the bottom of all their paperwork just to cover their slimy loopholing asses while your internet slows to a crawl - and you have no recourse. Remember, they count both upstream and downstream data for that cap, not JUST the downstream side!
I'm surprised that it actually became the opposite. My first place was about $45 a month and it was unlimited. Now it's nearing $60 and I get about 60 gigs of bandwidth.
Internet service speeds back then started at less than 1 Mb (megabit) and the highest tier offered was somewhere around 1.5 IIRC. I'm not surprised you get more speed for the same (or nearly the same) cost, it seems on par with the development of the internet and its popularity.
Back then only a few people had high speed connections. Computers were running at 1 Ghz with 512 MB of RAM, a 40 GB HD and still had 3.5" floppy drives.
Today there are many times the original number of users, using much faster machines with much higher storage and transfer capability - and there are ten million more things you can do with the internet now.
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But the content costs are controlled by production. Increasing production costs while you have the same viewership is pretty damn stupid.
Adding 200 channels no one wants is not a valid reason for increasing costs. Maybe if we could buy the channels we want and skip the nonsense that inflates our bills there wouldn't be so much resentment.
If all I want is internet, I shouldn't have to concern myself with the price of content. I don't want their content.
Also, you speak as if any real competition exists. Both Comcast and AT&T, the only remaining options available in my area, are government assisted monopolies. Both have spent government funds to buy up competition rather than invest in infrastructure.
I've lived in Japan and Korea. While US data speeds have improved, they are still far behind. I dread my Comcast connection.
I can't believe someone is defending these guys.
It's simpleminded to think that a company is full of people who are actively out to fuck you just because you don't understand their business model or the way the industry works. Just because a bunch of people on the internet say comcast is run by a bunch of jerks doesn't make it so.
Remember the crap about sandvine? There was just as much debate in the company about those things as there was on the internet, and they got yanked pretty fast. We still use them, but for an entirely different sort of thing now - they monitor traffic types but perform absolutely no rate shaping whatsoever. Just let us know what sorts of things are going down on our network.
You can call me simpleminded and defend that company all you want, but it doesn't change my past experiences with them or that they're a profiteering entity seeking legal or loopholed monopoly. I'm not going to sit here and flesh out any details because there are thousands or articles and blogs online preaching the good word of how Comcast has fucked them in one way or another.
What's really simpleminded is thinking someone who has no pull within his company stands for what the company really is. Comcast isn't there to do anyone a free service, it's not a charity. It's a business, and it's set up to make money. The reason why they charge people $500 for misplacing a $45 cable modem or $15 isn't just to scare people into not losing their shit, it's to profit from people's misfortune. Doesn't sound so righteous to me. (Of course, not all companies are like this, but Comcast fits the bill.)
Hell, I'm an awesome employee for a bank, but just because I'm a fucking saint doesn't mean the bank will change itself around to make people happy at the price of possibly losing significant revenue. I do understand that it's not the entire company, but it's the part of the company that actually matters and makes decisions who are actively out to fuck people.
I mean, I get better service out of Verizon wireless reps than from Comcast reps! That's a fucking insult!
I also work for Comcast and it's depressing to see the misinformation and misunderstandings in these sorts of threads. I'm learning not to try to correct anyone because even correct information gets voted down to oblivion.
Regarding the complexity, I wholeheartedly agree. The portion of the network I deal with is far more complex than I ever would have guessed before I worked here, and I'm still blown away by all that is involved to provide these services to customers. And I agree that every single person I work with wants to provide the best possible suite of services to customers. It's not nearly as easy as people think.