If you are, like I once was, hesitant to leave Comcast for a competitor because of their IPv6 support: just do it, and get a (free) IPv6 tunnel via Hurricane Electric: https://www.tunnelbroker.net/
It must be nice to have reasonable competitors. When I first moved into this house 2 years ago, I needed to wait for Comcast to dig me a new cable line, and in the meantime I had to use Frontier "fiber" DSL (it's not fiber). What a joke that was. The idea that my internet, phone, AND TV all came over a single telephone line was fascinating, but the internet was total crap.
Only since recently do I live somewhere with actual competition (RCN, Comcast, and FiOS; only Comcast providing IPv6). I do count myself lucky.
It's amazing what a difference competition makes; I pay the same price today ($40/mo) for 50 Mbps from RCN as I did a month ago for 3 Mbps from Comcast. Regulation cannot come soon enough; we as a tech community must do all we can to oust that corporate capitalist tool Ajit Pai from the FCC.
Uh, what you seem to have is actual competition going on in your area. More regulation will not necessarily help bring about more of that. I do agree that Ajit Pai seems to be a giant toolbox.
The FCC, pre-Trump, was starting to take down state legislation prohibiting community based/owned deployments. Both the physical layer and ISP service; and as regards the service, at least some community deployments allowed private ISP's to purchase capacity/access and resell their service as a competitor to the public service.
Federal regulation trumping (or not, as it were) state xxxxxxxxxx [edit out "regulation"; I meant to type "legislation"] that had been purchased and manipulated by large, private ISP's (the Bell babies, Comcast et al.) to eliminate competition.
Note further that those big ISP's often secured substantial (i.e. enormous) tax breaks and other incentives, in return for agreeing to "universal broadband deployment" in the relevant state/community's service area. They have almost universally reneged on their side of these agreements, sometimes e.g. lobbying the state legislature to let them out of their side of the agreement almost before the ink is dry on their signature to it.
Going back in time, early trunk capacity was to a significant extent government built and government owned. There wouldn't have been an "Internet" without the Feds. And, once opened up, they kept access on a rather equal footing. This might not have all been "codified" regulation -- though I guess that and/or a set of "operating rules" grew somewhat organically. But it certainly controlled and set precedent.
So, both presently and in the past, "regulation" has actually fostered competition.
And yeah, the corporate lawyer is a giant tool. Quelle surprise!
I am hesitant to leave because I have literally no other broadband options in one of the home cities of the first networked machine, Berkeley.
Sonic can't give me more than 15mbps, ditto AT&T. LMI is dialup, Pax is dialup. I own my own home, so I can't get Webpass.
Comcast can get away with shit like this because people realistically have no other options. I am damnned in to paying such an evil company thousands of dollars a year because of their monopoly and the supposed "free market" party passes laws and pushes policy to further entrench the status quo. It is maddening.
Using HE tunnels isn't all roses; Netflix treats them as a VPN and blocks streaming access (on the plus side Roku boxes don't do IPv6, so you don't have to figure out how to block Netflix IPv6 if you watch on a Roku), and some of the ATT CPE equipment blocks IPv6 tunnels (probably unintentionally, some of their CPE equipment is pretty stupidly implemented)
I'm quite ignorant on how the industry has gotten to this state. I don't understand why the cable companies are private in the first place. Wasn't the infrastructure they leverage heavily subsidized by the public? There are no consumers I can think of who are against net neutrality if given the option, yet it's still a battle. What can we do about this? I'm not asking rhetorically.
The original cable companies were community antenna television (CATV) providers. They would find high ground with good signal reception, or make it with antenna masts, and send an amplified signal to their subscribers. The service was relatively cheap and very desirable in areas where putting up your own antenna wasn't useful. Towns easily granted licenses to their local companies to put up wire on the telephone poles.
The first added services were satellite channel reception and local channel insertion. These cost little to add.
Then pay channels were invented - HBO among the first. In order to differentiate non-subscribers from subscribers, the cable companies came up with a clever idea: they would add a transmission to each pay channel that would interfere with the signal. Subscribers would get a notch filter that would cut out the interference.
It was easy when you only had one channel to block or allow, but handling several meant multiple filters. It was much cheaper to maintain a few sets of multiple-filter enabling devices than to customize them for every subscriber, and that's where tiers of channels originally came from.
All of these things were handled by more or less local companies, and towns and cities didn't have a problem handing them pole access. But the companies consolidated into larger franchises, 800 becoming 20 or so companies covering populations of a million or more subscribers each and 82 much smaller businesses. The top five have about 235 million people in their coverage zones. The next five cover 43 million. And the next ten have about 15.
Now, once you have wired infrastructure covering that number of people, coupled with a tradition of granting local monopoly access to the wires, you get to hire lawyers and lobbyists who convince legislatures to make your traditional de factor monopoly a de jure monopoly.
So that's how we got here.
What can we do? Mostly what we have to do is to make net neutrality and infrastructure reform a priority for our state legislators and congressional reps and senators. Talk to them about your concerns. With Republicans, concentrate on arguments about enabling small business innovation and improving the economy. With Democrats, use arguments about freedom and consumer rights. Talk to your neighbors. Nobody wants a high cable bill, and the only way to lower it is to break the monopoly.
Excellent historical summary. I wonder, in your opinion, how do you envision new VHF/UHF technology impacting wired monopolies? Do you see it shaking up the local wired monopolies or do you expect airwave frequencies to be snatched up by the big guys in order to maintain status quo (ie limited choices)?
There's a major difference between wireless and wired communications: one of them requires a wire.
You have to pay a lot to get those wires to the places where you want them to go, but they don't interfere with each other. You can double capacity along a link by doubling the number of wires. (Or fibers, or continuous waveguide metamaterials, or whatever.)
When you need to double capacity along a wireless link, you need to either come up with a 2x better coding regime -- and those don't happen all that conveniently -- or you need to have access to twice the frequency range that you had before. Since the FCC hasn't given up on that part of their regulation, it's going to cost you quite a bit to have that license.
Now, the next time you need to double, you have the same choice...
Absent a major regulatory change not likely before 2020, I expect a fire-sale or give-away of licensed frequencies, all going to major incumbent players.
That's generally how telecom works. You can always try to compete against the big guys, at least for a while, but in the long run they will own you one way or another. It's not an accident that the two biggest wireless companies are also the two biggest wireline telecom companies (and both former parts of Ma Bell).
Why? To build a telecom, you need billions in capital. To raise that much capital, you need shareholders with deep pockets. If you do very well with those investments and threaten the big telecoms, they'll just buy you out. Those investors with deep pockets will be happy to sell for a profit.
Eventually, the scale advantages when it comes to things like network upgrades will plow you under.
Let's compare Comcast (30 million subscribers) with a local cable operator (and let's say it's a co-op with 50,000 subscribers):
If Comcast wants to upgrade from DOCSIS3 to DOCSIS3.1, they have to come up with an upgrade / migration plan for probably 3 or 4 different configurations of their CMTS platform. Let's say this costs $10 million per platform, so $40 million overall. Spread across 30 million customers, that works out to about $1.25 per customer.
If the local co-op wants to upgrade from DOCSIS3 to DOCSIS3.1, they have to come up with one migration plan for their single CMTS platform (this includes things like lab equipment, etc because you absolutely have to test and tweak this stuff). But the local co-op probably doesn't have a bunch of on-staff CMTS integration experts, so they have to hire an integrator at probably 1.5x the cost Comcast would pay. $15 million across 50,000 subscribers is $300 per subscriber.
Tell a co-op board that they have a choice: a one-time $300 fee across all the customers to cover the upgrade, raise prices by $10/mo, or accept a buyout offer from Comcast who will perform the upgrade for free. And this is just for one component of the system. Costs are simply higher across the board, and that has to get passed along to customers.
Scale matters in telecom. A lot. A lot of the investment is in non-variable costs, or at least costs that scale logarithmically to number of customers rather than linearly. Comcast/AT&T/Verizon can afford to undercut any smaller competitors because their scale enables a cost structure with much lower overhead maintenance costs.
>Wasn't the infrastructure they leverage heavily subsidized by the public?
Not directly so, no. If anything they get taxed very heavily because they are an easy target (because they can't pick up and leave.
Some argue that some local governments signed exclusivity deals, which can be considered an indirect subsidy. But that was usually only one side of the quid pro quo. In exchange, the cable company had to wire up poor neighborhoods, submit themselves to price regulation, etc. But exclusive deals were banned before cable internet was even invented.
There already are satellite internet services. They're expensive (beyond a little bit of included data usage) and high-latency. How's SpaceX going to change that?
> They're expensive (beyond a little bit of included data usage) and high-latency. How's SpaceX going to change that?
Very many lower cost lower orbit satellites.
The plan is to double the amount of active satellites in orbit (4425 new satellites) in the next few years, resulting in half of all satellites being SpaceX internet satellites that cost an order of magnitude less than current satellites.
IIUC, existing services use geostationary orbits, which accounts for a lot of the cost and latency.
The new plan is to use a large number of satellites in LEO, with receivers able to switch to whichever are currently in view. Lower orbits are cheaper, and latency should have a better lower bound.
I had 4Mb DSL once. It was okay, then water got into the line somewhere and I was moved to a different pair that could only manage 2Mb. Naturally the phone company couldn't GAF and I had no way to remedy the problem other than cable. The existing utilities should be forced to maintain a suitable quality of service.
Yeah, the way they neglect their infrastructure is an incredible load of shit. If you have phone service (real phone service; a voip service like the one AT&T tries to push with Uverse is basically unregulated) on the same line and it's experiencing problems however, you can get the FCC involved if they refuse to fix it.
Comcast is currently working on LoRa networks and lobbying for control. The economics of a low power wide area network don't really favor a monopoly, but they might get one if nobody is paying attention.
Literally, they have opposed an open internet for as long as they have been involved with it.
They have been one of the larger IPv6 deployments, which is good for the network. That being said, they have always wanted to use "Qos" to bias some traffic against others.
I really think that the answer here is non-profit carriers providing fiber to everything. As long as carriers can compete in the content space they are going to have a monetary incentive to screw people.
They don't just want to use QoS, they actively do. All non-Comcast TV traffic entering a Comcast customer's network is tagged with DSCP 8, which basically means "bottom feeder" in terms of network priority (below even untagged traffic).
For many this is not a problem. But if you have a router with WMM (WiFi QoS) enabled, the above setting destroys your connection quality, since inbound data takes a back seat to basically anything on the airwaves. I had to start stripping DSCP off of incoming packets to regain any semblance of a functioning internet connection.
And of course Comcast doesn't care about this, it combined with their bufferbloat problems just serve as a means to convince subscribers that the really need to upgrade to some $100/mo package to be able to browse Facebook…
I did not know that. I haven't been a Comcast customer for years because the last time I used them the bill was never what they said it would be. I had the worst time getting it turned off too. It was really weird.
They could even be for-profit companies if they were willing to accept regulation (like utility companies ) and a low but guaranteed profit (like utility companies.)
The weird thing is that the constitution actually tasks the Postal Service with interstate messaging. They even have local offices where they could issue smartcards/hardware tokens for authentication. It's more likely that I will grow wings and fly away, but they would be in a great position to build a national content agnostic network.
I don't know if I should flag this or not. Most every post gets the obligatory reply like this one, stating 'this is not news', 'what do you expect', maybe there's even a term for it.
