I actually experienced an interesting incident that made me switch from Charter with no intention of ever giving them my business again. They had upgraded their default speed in my area from 200 Mbps to 300 Mbps but you wouldn't get it unless you called in for them to increased it. Then a short time later they announced it as a increase to service at no additional cost and it would automatically take affect. Then a couple of months later they reduced again and said it was never an option. I was just so annoyed I switched to 1 Gbps service for an extra $30. I really hope that one day cellular or satellite gut them. Charter/Spectrum is one crooked company that should be sued out of existence.
I had a similar experience with Spectrum. They offered a faster service at a cheaper price, but said they couldn't upgrade me because I was an old account from the Time Warner merger. It took a while, but I was able to get them to switch me to the faster, cheaper service. Then after a year my price went way up again, and since I have no other options at my home in Brooklyn I'm stuck paying $80/month for 200 Mbps.
All these mergers have been awful for consumers in the telecom space. My relatives in Europe are always shocked at how expensive service is for such mediocre setups.
Got new internet service at the office a few years back, and got a bundled 'phone number'. One of the guys at the office (coworking space) needed heavy fax so... we got him the line and a fax machine. 18 months later, he left, and... owed me money. I tried to cancel the phone line part, but was told it was "bundled", and the 'internet only' service was now $10 more than the old bundle service.
I called every 4-6 months to ask for the service to be removed and to get lower pricing. Nope. Nope. Nope.
A few months ago I called and explained the situation to the woman. I then said "fine - give me the higher price. I just don't care any more. Joe still owes me $500, and every time I see that stupid phone line on the bill, I think of Joe and I can't deal with that any more. Charge me more money so I don't have to think about Joe any more."
She laughed. A bit. Well... chuckled any way. "hang on, let me look up some stuff..." Silence. "Are you there?" I asked. "Yes, just give me a moment". More silence. I waited. And... started to play guitar. Just strummed a few chords.
She laughed again. "What's that?"
"I'm playing my own hold music, since you don't have any on your end".
I got a strong chuckle out of that.
"Any requests? Any favorite chords?"
"B".
So I played a B chord.
Then waited a bit longer.
"OK, I can get you back on the previous bundled price, but without the phone line any longer. Will there be anything else?"
SUCCESS! It just took 15 months of calling and a B chord.
I’ve always suspected this. Same with TV. Internet+phone+TV = $X. Remove any single component or just choose one and the price is > $X. Makes no sense. I was told at some point if I remove TV and phone my price would go from $90 month to $500 month for just Internet. Their answer is always “it’s a bundle discount!”
With Cox it was cheaper to get Cable TV & Internet than internet alone, so I ended up with a useless cable box stuffed in a corner to keep track of and return 2 years later. Very annoyingly stupid policy
ISPs are a rigged economy. Google Fiber showed competitors are blocked from entering competition. Or so much friction is injected that they effectively block competition.
Contract log-in to block price shopping/switching. Gouge existing customers & lower price for people switching. Low prices on website, but existing customers can't ever get those costs.
Very rigged economy. City level government often sells out to block competitors.
I wonder how much the situation is exacerbated by IP address exhaustion. It's practically impossible to start an ISP of you don't already have IPv4 addresses, and whatever small allocations you might still be able to get won't allow you to grow very large, at least if you want to provide good service.
> All these mergers have been awful for consumers in the telecom space.
It has nothing to do with mergers. If there is 1 pipe/wire going into your house, and if the owner of that pipe/wire wants to extract as much out of you as they can, then you’re in the same position regardless of how big the owner of that pipe/wire is. Unless, of course, the government regulates it such as utilities.
>* If there is 1 pipe/wire going into your house, and if the owner of that pipe/wire wants to extract as much out of you as they can, then you’re in the same position regardless of how big the owner of that pipe/wire is.*
...because the mergers eliminated their competition and loss-leader attacks on the market are still legal.
Does loss leader attack means not making a profit to force out competition with cash from somewhere else?
I think that's pretty scummy in ISPs case but wouldn't banning that also make it impossible for venture backed business to compete in established markets?
Thousands. Once upon a time, the telecommunications companies who ran/run the internet had more open peering policies and it was possible to have a Mom & Pop ISP that connected to the major exchanges. They could offer web hosting and colocation (your machine, their racks) as additional services and people could have a nice little business.
Then the big boys started excluding smaller providers, starving them like a gazelle with a broken leg until the hyenas of Larger Business swept them up. To be sure, there was also plain, MBA-style consolidation, but restricting peering prevented new independent providers from replacing them (yet another instance of Boomers pulling up the ladder after themselves).
If there was only 1 pipe or wire going into your house, there never was any competition to begin with. And no one is going to pay to lay a new one regardless of merger.
There's no "Unless" there. If the government regulates it as a utility, the government has become the de-facto owner of that pipe who can screw you in whichever way they see fit. The fact that government typically noticeably screws you in different ways than businesses (Spying on your flows, playing morality police) than businesses (mostly extracting cash and providing low quality of service) is almost artifact (because both government and business do all of those things and more).
If the government regulates it as a utility, they effectively set a price cap and minimum service requirements, and nothing else. It doesn't magically become the property of the government.
I just got 250Mbps service from Spectrum with a two year deal for $35 per month then the regular price will be $65. The neighborhood is on the roadmap for a new fiber provider so hopefully I can get a better deal when the special rate expires.
They can make money with cheaper service. I just had a fixed $35 200Mbps plan with Optimum in an area with overpriced competition from Fios. Verizon would send their minimum wage sales drones out to personally plead with me to sign up for $80. The new $50 subsidy is going to ruin cheap internet by setting an inflated price floor. I would gladly take 20 Mbps service for $20 per month but that is never going to happen.
Wow, that sounds pretty good. I'm a TWC legacy customer paying ~30/mo for 20Mbps, called Spectrum last month to ask about upgrade options (need upload speed to be .5Mbps faster for WFH) and they told me their cheapest option was 100Mbps which would be $80/mo after the first year.
AT&T was only slightly less after the apparently mandatory monthly equipment fee, despite the fact that I own my cable modem. Right now I'm looking into EarthLink at "only" $68/mo for 35Mbps. As far as I can tell, cheap internet has already been ruined.
Where in Brooklyn? I've had gigabit for around 70 dollars in two apartments here in Downtown Brooklyn, and in general NYC generally does have pretty good fiber availability at reasonable prices
Also it's not like Verizon is your friend either; they just don't (yet) have any incentive to screw you.
These companies are apparently all run by greedy scum. I would much prefer if it were run by lazy greedy bureaucrats instead; at least then theoretically I can write a letter to my local legislators about it and complain at city hall.
I'm in Williamsburg. It's definitely block to block, because other blocks in my neighborhood definitely have fiber. I've actually never lived in a building that has fiber -- the last one I moved out of literally got fiber the month I moved out!
Downtown Brooklyn has a lot more new luxury highrise buildings with fiber wired in from day 1, as compared to pre-war brownstones in other neighborhoods where even _if_ Verizon has fiber on your block your elderly out-of-state landlady and absentee super won't let them in to wire up the unit.
That doesn't sound like a problem with Verizon, that sounds like a problem with legislation.
Your absentee super or out-of-state landlady wouldn't be allowed to stand in the way of you getting hot water, why should they be able to get in the way of other utilities?
Same here. I was paying $45 for 40mbps through TWC, which was an introductory promotion, after which it would be $55, I think? Then they merged with Spectrum and the cheapest option became $65 for 100mbps (they also charged me $65 for the 40mbps service before I had to call to upgrade it). Then it went to $70. I was very close to just cancelling it and tethering to my (also exorbitantly expensive) cellphone plan when the pandemic hit and I realized that wasn't feasible.
They don't have a cap yet because it was part of their merger requirements. That requirement expires in 2023 and they've been pressuring the government to expire it sooner[0]. I let them know this was the reason I cancelled and switched to the local municipal fiber as soon as it was available.
For some providers, if you cancel and sign up again after 31 days, it counts as new service and qualifies for 1 year of promotional discounts as a "new customer".
It's terrible internet really, too. Freqently drops and has slowness during the working day. On zoom calls, it tends to cut out audio for 5 seconds at a time, so I'm asking everyone to constantly repeat themselves.
I can't even run from this. It's literally this or back to the stone age with AT&T DSL. These are my choices.
i hate rentiers, especially greedy telecoms, and as such, share internet with neighbors, each using our own routers to create isolated networks behind the modem.
most people typically use 5-10 Mbps, so 200 Mbps can easily support 20 people and multiple households (who won’t all be online at the same time).
Frontier is getting sued by the FTC and a bunch of states for lying about the internet speeds they provide, so hopefully the other ISPs will be similarly held responsible too.. It might take years, though.
Yeah, I love Charter's service (they took over Time Warner in this area) but hate their billing practices. However, with little choice in this area (the other one is 'AT&T' - automatic nein), one has to 'grin and bear it.'
Funny coincidence: The same week that the city started running conduit in our neighborhood for municipal fiber, a Xfinity "account manager" came to our door and left a handwritten note saying great customer service was their goal and to call him if there was ever a service problem!
Funny how legit competition makes them sit up and take notice...
At some point after that, Xfinity dropped their gigabit service level from $190 to $70/mo (IIRC).
In theory we have competition, but the alternatives are: Century Link 40Mbps DSL, or Rise Broadband terrestrial wireless (which hasn't proven a very good alternative for my coworkers).
I think antitrust jurisprudence in the US is far too heavily focused on consumer prices to the detriment of all of the “intangible” benefits of increased competition. (Thanks, Chicago Schoool!) Things like quality, customer service, responsiveness, and even transparency and data privacy are important aspects of competition and very real benefits to consumers but are completely overlooked in the antitrust analysis.
I don’t care if I’m paying the “market rate” if I’m having to constantly argue on the phone about charges or to adjust my schedule to accommodate an 8 hour service window. Those negative consumer externalities wouldn’t exist (or would at least be far less frequent) if the market were more competitive.
I use (10mbps by now, I think) DSL exactly so I won't have to give the dickheads a penny. I do fine, websites themselves are much slower than my connection.
So that invites an obvious question: Why isn't the competitor available on that next street too?
Some streets are more expensive to dig on than others. Perhaps prices are higher and competition is lower there for that reason.
Don't get me wrong; I don't trust the broadband providers to do anything but try to extract maximum revenue from their customers. But I also don't immediately trust too-simple explanations that confirm my biases. The story here is more complicated than just moustache-twirling greedy corporations.
I live in a Charter area and can confirm similar pricing shenanigans have recently happened here. A fiber internet service is rolling out in our city, neighborhood-by-neighborhood. However, it is only rolling out in the CITY. There are pockets of land inside of the city that have been never annexed by the city and that still remain in the jurisdiction of the local unincorporated TOWN. You could never tell you were in the town, not the city, by looking at these houses and streets--they look just like the neighboring ones. (Our city has a no-forcible-annexation policy). The fiber company (a regional player named TDS) is not deploying fiber in those town-not-city areas yet. I suspect TDS will eventually roll out to these non-annexed areas, but for right now probably has deployment targets to hit in the city since they have a deal with the city (for easy right of access and such) and are too busy to take care of those extra houses.
Anyway, all of that is preamble to point out that if you order service from Charter within one of those pockets of non-city-so-no-TDS-service-yet, you will pay a higher price than your neighbors on all sides of you that are in the city (and hence in the TDS service area). That points to, yes, it is monopoly-power-moustache-twirling greed on Charter's part here. Or alternately you could just say the lower prices at the neighbors is competition doing it's magic.
For everyone living in an area with no competition other than a singular incumbent telecom or cable company... or perhaps no broadband option at all.... I expect 5G fixed wireless to come into play in a big way over the next 5 years. T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T are going to be eating the cable companies lunch. Likely coaxial networks will become an antique of an older era. the same way POTS (plain old telephone service) did.
Home internet is a new business. T-Mobile already covers 30M households for home internet (around 20-25% of US households, https://www.t-mobile.com/isp). Verizon has a more limited LTE home internet program.
T-Mobile is currently targeting areas where they have excess capacity, but their capacity will be growing a lot over the next year or two as they launch a lot of new mid-band spectrum. Verizon is also looking to launch new mid-band capacity, however that will probably be a couple years behind given that the spectrum isn't currently free and the fact that Verizon's new spectrum will require more towers for coverage. Still, wireless companies are looking at a lot of new capacity and looking to expand into home internet.
Sometimes it's about the technology coming together at the right time to offer a new product. Think about the original iPod. Before then, MP3 players were either sad 32MB players that could only handle 10 songs or large and heavy boxes that weighed a pound and couldn't fit in a pocket. Then the 1" hard-drive came around and Apple shipped the iPod. Without the 1" hard drive, Apple couldn't offer a light-weight, pocketable music player with a 1,000 song capacity.
Likewise, without new mid-band spectrum and new 5G technologies, it's very hard for wireless carriers to offer home internet without data caps. However, those new technologies come around and all of a sudden it opens new opportunities. T-Mobile has already started to use some of that new capacity. Their base plans include 100GB of premium data (deprioritized when the network is busy after that) and their new MAX plans have unlimited premium data (never deprioritized).
The industry will be working toward home internet over the next 5 years, but it is a reality today for a lot of customers and that will start growing quickly.
Most carriers don't have hard 10-20Gb data caps anymore, and the fixed 5G services that are rolling out from T-Mobile and Verizon don't either. That data cap thing was very 2015, and I haven't seen one other than a tethering cap for a while...
Thank you so much for pointing this out. I'd given up on something like this ever happening.
I have a colleague living in the northern California wilderness who maintains a point-to-point wifi antenna at the top of a 300' redwood tree because he needs to use a WISP rather than an LTE provider to get uncapped data. I just looked at these plans and they look like a dream come true for him.
And it's less of a tethering cap and more of a soft cap to stop egregious users. I tether pretty frequently on Verizon and have never noticed any slowdowns.
The T-Mobile ISP plan doesn't have any caps afaik. Keep in mind that getting it requires a hard pull credit check. They do have other issues though (e.g. their modem selecting a sub-optimal band leading to poor service.)
> Likely coaxial networks will become an antique of an older era. the same way POTS (plain old telephone service) did.
DSL will become the antique thing since you can't go much more than 50 MBit/s outside of urban areas with short distances due to piss poor old cables, while DOCSIS can already deliver 10 GBit/s over way longer distances because the shielded cable allows way more effective transmission.
Upgrades (aka splitting the trunk to provide more bandwidth to the customers on one branch) are relatively easy to do, whereas upgrading 5G capacity is a legal hellhole - you need permits, pay rent to whomever's house you're setting up the cell, and the base station and antenna hardware is expensive.
Don't get me wrong, 5G will be extremely useful for rural areas as it's way cheaper to build out than wiring up houses with DSL/cable... but where there is cable (and the cable is somewhat-ish affordable), people will choose cable over 5G.
>but where there is cable (and the cable is somewhat-ish affordable), people will choose cable over 5G.
I think you may be surprised. In my old area, people are leaving Comcast in droves for T-Mobile's 5G service, not because it's all that much better or all that much cheaper, but because they've been taking it from Comcast for two decades now and they finally have an opportunity to show their displeasure.
And if it doesn't work out after a few months they can go back to Comcast and qualify for new customer promos. There's no contract requirement on the T-Mobile service.
That sounds like "where the cable is affordable and they don't have a long-standing, heavily justified grudge against the company running it", which is a fair caveat, but doesn't seem to invalidate the parent's underlying claim.
Yes! T-Mobile is aiming to have 7-8M home broadband customers in 2025. Their home broadband business is relatively small right now, but it should be expanding fast. To put that in perspective, Verizon Fios only serves around 5M customers. Getting 7-8M customers would probably make T-Mobile the 4th largest home broadband provider behind Comcast, Charter, and AT&T.
Verizon has also announced that it's looking to cover 50M households with home broadband in 2024. While not as ambitious as T-Mobile, that's still around 40% of households getting new home broadband competition.
I'm less confident that coax will go the way of POTS. DOCSIS 3.0, 3.1, and 4.0 can offer pretty decent speeds and the networks are already built. I think the coming competition will push DOCSIS-based systems to actually offer better service. Comcast can and does offer gigabit service today, but they tend to charge a lot for it as a premium service.
While I'm very bullish about wireless home internet (especially as carriers deploy mid-band spectrum with T-Mobile leading the way in 2021 and Verizon and AT&T following in the 2022-2024 time-frame), I think we're still going to see certain limitations with wireless. I don't think that will matter to most people. Most people just want to be able to stream video, Zoom, etc. They don't need gigabit speeds. Heck, 5 HD video streams can fit into 25Mbps. Even if wireless home internet won't be a great option for some power-users, the fact that it will be an option for so many people will make it a lot harder for cable companies to be mean to their customers.
Most people don't actually have a phone company for "broadband". Right now, "broadband" is defined as at least 25Mbps down and DSL often tops out at 3-7Mbps. While 25Mbps will fit a few HD streams and might (5 by Netflix's specs), 3Mbps DSL simply doesn't offer the ability to watch HD video and likely makes things like Zoom a very rough experience.
I think it's also likely that a lot of people will end up seeing 2-3 wireless broadband options given that there are three wireless carriers.
Maybe you live in a Fios area so you feel like there is competition. I wish I lived in a Fios area. For so many people, wireless home internet means getting another competitor (or another 2 or 3 new competitors). I have access to Verizon DSL at 3Mbps. I can't leave my cable company for that. I could leave my cable company for wireless home internet in the 25-300Mbps range.
I live in a concrete house. Our phones don't receive wireless signals inside the house and we can't get wife on any floor except the main one where the router is. At least for houses like mine, cat-6 will be around for the foreseeable future.
I have no credentials, so correct me. Do the high 5G frequencies (Frequency Range 2) lend themselves to tiny cells with no contention? I'm talking a radio for every ~50/100 subscribers or so, placed on light posts and telephone poles.
OP could've admittedly done a better job with this, but let me give it a try.
The problem comes down to spectrum, how much power you can push across that spectrum, and how you share that spectrum with other devices. The more bandwidth you have available, the more power you can send across it, and the fewer devices you have sharing it, the higher your information rate between a sender and receiver.
5G, in theory, brings a lot of spectrum to the table, so they can talk about, say 1 Gb/s or 10 Gb/s connections. The problem is, you've got to find a way to share that among users. Sharing spectrum is never a 1/n process because of inefficiencies, so you end up with a bit under 1/n speed for n users.
Meanwhile, cables might have less spectrum, but you can push comparatively more power through them, but more crucially, everyone gets their own connection and there's much less noise. So, more aggregate bandwidth across cables than over the air.
This is all very handwavy, so if someone would like to put some numbers to this and/or fix any mistakes I made, please have at it.
Technically, everyone on the same cable node shares the same spectrum (typically targeting 200-500 subscribers.) Which is effectively 1GHz at the moment, a decent chunk of which is dedicated to TV.
But certainly there's less noise, neighboring nodes effectively don't interfere with each other, and nodes can be made arbitrarily dense.
And this, folks, is why local loop unbundling initiatives are important.
Also:
> Dampier found that Charter offers 200Mbps service for $50 a month "[i]n neighborhoods where Spectrum enjoys a broadband monopoly." Charter charges $70 for 400Mbps service in those same competition-free neighborhoods.
Honestly, even the lower-end prices are not great. In France you can easily get 2Gbps for $60 / month.
Broadband infrastructure is expensive to install and upgrade, so it's expected to last a very long time to break even for the installer. Often, broadband speeds are more indicative of how recently the local infrastructure was upgraded than anything else.
> Honestly, even the lower-end prices are not great. In France you can easily get 2Gbps for $60 / month.
Broadband is extremely dependent on geography and the city.
In many places in the US (my city included) it's easy to get gigabit broadband for similar prices.
I have friends in remote areas who would be happy to have even reliable 10Mbit at this point, but their properties are so isolated that it's prohibitively expensive for anyone to run infrastructure out to service their sparse neighborhoods.
People need to commute less if we generalize remote work for office workers, car-pooling, etc. Transportation costs are less dependent on gas prices if we build better exchange points between truck freight and train freight.
Infrastructure is dependent on gas because we let gas be cheap. If we seriously want to curtail climate change, we need to rip the band-aid off.
The train mention is important. My understanding (and my experience, from the few trips I've made to Europe) is that your transportation infrastructure is generally much better than ours in the US, and thus driving isn't nearly as much of a requirement. (Plus there's not as much of a sharp divide between walkable cities and car-dependent suburbs like we have in the US.)
I'm sure there are significant regional differences within Europe, of course.
Indeed, especially in cities that are still riddled with cars but you can manage without if your job is not in a remonte location or doesn't require a car. In the countryside cars are still mandatory. Trains once were reachable from many small villages but many stations have sadly been removed.
I hope the train network will improve, or at least not degrade.
I like being able to go to work by train every day, and I also like being able to finish my day job in the south east of France and be able to reach north west by 11 PM, doing my stuff or sleeping during the trip, and planning to do this only a few days before.
> I live in France and I'm at loss on what a gallon is. ... probably a hidden fine for the sin of using strange units
Strange units, as opposed to strange languages.
Since language is far more important than measurement, the French should obviously abandon their entirely unnecessary national language and adopt either English, Spanish or Mandarin as a logical standardization improvement. As French will continue to perpetually decline in importance and use globally, I propose that French is a failed language and it would be wise of France to get out in front of that unstoppable trend and drop their national language sooner than later.
Overall English is clearly the best choice as a standard, as it will be adopted by more people this century than any other language as the global population swells toward 10 billion. Mandarin would be a solid second choice, however China's population will rapidly contract and the globe isn't in a hurry to adopt Mandarin given it's particularly difficult to learn.
The vast inefficiency of Europe having and intentionally maintaining three dozen major languages is of course silly. Approximately half of the people in Europe can't communicate with eachother effectively because they share no common language. It's a very backwards approach.
One might suggest that people can speak multiple languages and that that resolves the matter (it doesn't, the vast inefficiency of time, money & effort dedicated to maintaining failed non-English languages remains). However in that vein, it turns out you can utilize multiple measurement systems as well, as the US very commonly also uses the metric system where it matters to do so.
The sole reasonable counter argument, the language-is-culture argument, applies exactly the same for non scientifically critical measurement references in the US. For example using yards, or feet which are tightly bound to US culture (from media to sports to history to routine conversation).
OK, French is a bit weird. I'll take your English. A bit quirky, but manageable. No genders. Usually. That's neat. Quite concise. I can do this if you meet me halfway through. There's this color/colour centre/center thing where it does not know how it should be spelt (spelled? Screw your irregular verbs especially if they don't know whether they are irregular), but whatever. I will not comment on your phrasal verbs.
But we can do nothing about its pronounciation. Sorry. A catastrophe. Nothing that can be fixed.
Spanish is very regular in its pronounciation, so let's use that instead of English's. Or German, actually it might make more sense to use it for pronouncing English, a germanic language.
As for the vocabulary, I'm fine if we keep English's. It's ours anyway.
Well that would just show how disconnected from rest of USA you are. Whereas such expensive gas may ruin millions in US but you will be fine with your Gigabit broadband.
Focusing on cars is a very American thing to do, they are still important in Europe but I for example have no problem getting about in the UK and our public transport is pretty crap
I don't play this game personally, but where I live in Canada, it seems that the main internet providers (Bell and Rogers) each offer heavy discounts if you bug them enough and threaten to switch. A year later your temporary discount expires, and you play the game again.
We still have alternate ISPs that the above two have to share their last mile infrastructure with, and mine has no-BS pricing and policies so I stick with them. But a friend who does play the game routinely gets his internet access cheaper.
Rogers is really offering heavy discounts in streets where Bell has just installed their fiber-to-the-home stuff.
So, I have the amazing luck of having three wired broadband providers on my street in the US (Comcast, RCN, and Verizon FiOS). Competition is fierce and prices are low, yet, having attempted the above trick twice now (RCN -> Comcast, Comcast -> RCN), both times the reps I called were sufficiently clueless to not try to offer me a discount incentive to stay despite my plain wording that I was switching to get a better price. And both times, I was contacted by a rep after I switched, basically asking, "why did you leave? we could have given you discount X!"
Like... someone in their offices is clueless that the competition is very real in my area and that they need to empower/train their customer service reps to actually offer discounts to stay.
Regardless we've been able to keep low prices just by actually switching. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they never get the idea to collude with each other.
This is a yearly ritual for my family on Comcast/Xfinity. The promotional offer ends, you call and say you want to cancel, get sent to customer retention, and re-up on the promo. I'm pretty sure they know the game since it's so common.
Careful with that! I once called up to do that retention routine and got a surprise. “Hi, I want to cancel because the regular rate is too expensive.” “Ok, sir hang on, I will put you in touch with someone.” So then I’m thinking yesss, retention team is going to get me the discount... Then I hear: “Ok, sir, we have canceled your service as of today, your final bill will come in a few days.” Me: “uhhhh wait...”
This has been my experience too (as mentioned in a cousin comment), albeit in an area with competition, so (thankfully) no loss to me other than time. Must be a new national strategy.
No reason not to play the game, honestly. Even if it takes waiting an hour on hold (highly unlikely), a mere $20 discount on service is like earning $240/hour.
Fibe is an umbrella marketing term. In my neighborhood, they offer FFTN then copper , a few blocks away it's FTTH (speedtest at 900M down 800M up). In both case they call the service Fibe and charge a similar price .
Bell markets FTTN (i.e. VDSL) as "Fibe" and FTTH as "Fibre". Not the most ingenious branding IMHO. I'm on 15/10 FTTN and have no reason to go faster (it tops out at 50 down). Bell's new FTTH offering (conduits being buried on my street as I write this) starts at Can$85 for the lowest practical tier (150M and unlimited). Their nominal cheapest tier ($55) only gets you 100G/month which is a joke. Rogers offered my friend $39/month for 500M unlimited on his street, where Bell's FTTH service is already live.
These three points were a requirement of their merger and expires in May 2023. We need to stop allowing these mergers to happen, they are not good for the consumer in the long term.
Experienced the same in Florida. We had to relocate while our home was being cleared of hazardous material. I had Spectrum at that location being worked on at one price. The temporary digs were about 3 miles away and the price was 1/3 more for the same service (this was not with a promotion at either location). The only difference is that the new digs had no other option, while our home being worked on also had a FiOS option. I pointed this out to the sales rep on the phone and they couldn't give me a reason why.
Not to excuse this or anything but aren't Verizon, Comcast/Xfinity, etc. also guilty of this? It's an issue with the industry as a whole not just Charter right?
Yes. The major ISPs in the US are territorial cartels[1] tacitly colluding[2] in restraint of trade with juuust enough plausible deniability and a heavy helping of political campaign contributions to keep the gravy train running.
Likely yes. Where I used to live we had AT&T and Comcast as providers. We'd always get decent subscription rates. I moved, and now only have AT&T fiber...no discounts, very expensive. Wife and I own a small business with a brick and mortar location. It has AT&T DSL and Spectrum. Well...AT&T DSL is slow as hell and for "ok" speeds is expensive. Spectrum knows this. Hence, no discounts...still very expensive for "ok" speeds.
At home at least the speeds is OK and the monthly fee is manageable (not the best). But having to pay AT&T to rent their device annoys the heck out of me.
I currently live in an area where Spectrum is the only "broadband" provider. I pay $75 for 200/10. My town finally said enough is enough and is now in the process of rolling out municipal owned internet.
It's unfortunate that many states have passed legislation to block municipal internet. Corporations such as Spectrum, Comcast, etc. should not have that sort of lobbying power, but yet, here we are.
I think we regulate them like telcos. Verizon is supposed to provide everyone fios in my neighborhood but our dead end street is underground working. I don’t get fios but the cable company thinks we do and keep offering great rates. I don’t dare tell them that we don’t get fios.
My apartment building forced us into Charter/Spectrum "community wifi" and it's obnoxious. The speed is actually decent but they screw around with the traffic.
* Everyone is NATed. There's no option to upgrade to a dedicated IP address if this is a problem. STUN works, but some things don't. Nintendo Switch online play doesn't work and I haven't dug in to figure out why. They know it doesn't work and have said that they won't fix it.
* They intercept all (UDP/53) DNS queries. You can change your DNS servers and it won't make a difference because they will spoof 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1 or whatever in response. They'll even spoof root servers, so you can get strange things like a "root server" serving you an A record for pages.github.com.
* Of course there is no IPv6 support.
* Everyone is on the same ESSID with the same PSK. I suspect someone could sniff their neighbors' traffic if they were motivated enough.
It will be interesting to see how the mobile based options drive competition. I think T-Mobile and Verizon are available in the $50-60 range at my house. At some point AT&T will have gigabit so I'll have 5 options with Starlink in beta.
> It will be interesting to see how the mobile based options drive competition.
I've been watching market prices for ages, spent years as a broadband reseller. I've yet to see (or read about) an instance where wireline operators considered mobile data to be meaningful competition.
I've personally taken two properties off of DSL and onto cellular with pretty-respectable service quality. In both cases latency and throughput and cost improved. The competition from wireless is real and getting better all the time.
That said, I think that's often used as an excuse to not invest in wired infrastructure which should be dramatically superior, but often simply isn't.
It's true, but at one of those properties I wouldn't even consider Starlink because the cellular service is cheaper and perfectly good. 70/70 most of the time for $35/mo at 30-40 ms latency to most of the region.
Well, only now is long-range wireless becoming a viable competitor. Kodak didn't see digital photography as meaningful competition, until customers switch en masse within months. Smith-Corona didn't see personal computers as meaningful competition, until customers switched en masse within months. Ditto MySpace, AOL, CompuServe, etc.
Wired monopoly-based ~50Mbps service had no meaningful competition - until wireless modest-activation ~500Mbps is individually available at comparable cost.
You haven't seen it because it wasn't here. As of a few months hence, it's here. Only reason I haven't dropped local wired service for Starlink is I get a substantial discount on the former; I'm looking for any excuse to switch.
Back in the late 2000s we had Comcast for about a year prior to moving to a different city. During that point I had to almost monthly call someone in the executive office (I found contact info online) to get my bill corrected to show the rate we had been quoted rather than the much higher rate we were billed at.
When we moved, I went with 8Mbps DSL instead of dealing with Comcast again. This was theoretically much slower than the 25Mbps Comcast we'd had but since this was during the network neutrality wars it was actually faster for Netflix since they weren't throttling it.
We later bought a house in a neighborhood with Comcast, RCN, and FIOS (the rollout halted just south of us). Unsurprisingly, all 3 deliver great service to our neighbors — and Comcast and Verizon customers a few blocks away have reported that they are given worse service and higher prices because it's _very_ clearly known that their options are take it or leave it.
TWC Internet was pretty good here, at least they were technically competent. The field service people were pretty good too. But our bill was slightly different every month. Never got any explanation for that. Eventually, Internet-only was over $100 for 300/20. The only competition was AT&T, but their data cap would have doubled our bill.
Then Google came to town. Real competition. 1G/1G for $70. With their new config I didn't have to mess with their VLANs, and finally got IPv6. Of course we swapped out the Fiber Box for our own router immediately (an ER-4), and a year on haven't had a single outage -- although sometimes have to work on battery backup because Duke Energy...
Even on streets with competition, such as mine, they charge more than the competition so I’m not sure why you’d use them if you have a choice. I have the following three lines run to my house, so are active options:
I have Spectrum gigabit service. They decided to deploy gigabit in the wonkiest way possible so a normal DOCSIS compatible modem was unable to provide service, so for the first time in over a decade I’m renting the modem instead of having my own. I also pay an outrageous sum for the service.
But none of that is what bothers me. What bothers me is that they don’t even deliver on their promise. Most of the time I am silently downgraded to the “standard” high speed service which is 300mbps.
I’m usually not a fan of government intervention, but in the case of ISPs in the US, there’s a desperate need for more oversight.
I found out that my ISP, which was bought out several times, is folding service in my area. Goodbye, some co-lo. And so now I have to make the choice between Charter and AT&T. This seems like a no brainer but I need an 8-block of static IPs (yes, I know about dynamic DNS and VPNs) and apparently you cannot get static IPs on a home fiber account with AT&T.
I suppose I will have to pay, because my base feeling is anything but Charter.
Basic utilities (electric, water, internet) should be run by government, not private enterprise, for the same reason we we do this for roads. Applying market forces to infrastructure has no benefit and many downsides. The value of infrastructure is multiplied by the number of people with access to it, meaning it should connect all of us. That's not compatible with a market system.
This seems like a logical thing to happen when the environment in the US right now is so pro-monopoly. Companies are stacking up vertically and companies are merging. The government has little interest in doing the basic work of preventing it. It seems like there is no way to actually stop this from happening every 20 years
Comcast does the same thing. I moved less than one mile but from a block that was wired with FiOS to one where Comcast was the only option and the same plan with 30% more expensive.
Yeah? Wouldn't you? The greater the premium the faster competition should be encouraged to swoop in and slightly undercut, racing them down to the price of the other streets?
Or maybe it is extremely wasteful and expensive to run 5 different water pipes, 5 different sewer pipes, 5 different electrical lines, 5 different natural gas pipes, and 5 different fiber lines to each house.
Obviously the solution is to give more tax breaks to these businesses. All that extra money will surely flow down in the form of lower prices to consumers, and not in the form of bonuses and 4th-homes for the company execs.
That's how a company is "supposed" to act in a free market, right? They have all the only supply, and can thus "should" charge whatever the market on that street can bear.
<s> I mean, it even creates a perfect opportunity for someone to come in and undercut Charter, amirite? </s>
I downvoted this because the guidelines [1] specifically state "Don't be snarky." There are plenty of outlets for snark. I like HN for thoughtful replies, even when I disagree with them.
I wouldn't classify the comment I replied to as egregious. I can't find in the guidelines where it mentions not discussing downvotes. Perhaps you could cite that, specifically.
You have a point. We have been trained to think that "fair market price" is whatever the market will bear and that this is the just price. All you need is to sprinkle some "consent" on it. But a moment's thought shows that no sane person actually believes this. Consider:
(1) A storm hits your area and destroys homes. Hardware stores ramp up prices way up, not because the cost of labor to produce them has increased, but to increase profits because everyone is in a bind and needs building supplies so they have a place to live. Libertarian Man will say "the demand will constrain prices", but it's not a question of constraint per se, but rather that prices are exorbitant (let's say it means the local populace will need to go into a lifetime of debt as a result).
(2) A loan shark is approached by someone who can't get a loan from a bank, but desperately needs one. The loan shark charges compound interest that keeps this person in debt for a lifetime. Some might say "we have usury laws for that", but it's not a question of law per se, but rather that desperation is being exploited to fleece the loaning party.
Now, in practice, the market may often be a relatively good mechanism for determining an approximate just price, but not always and maybe we just have to play this by ear and live with this kind of nonsense (the perfect is the enemy of the good). But let's not pretend the market is some magical force that guarantees the good. I say this as someone who prefers the free market (not unregulated, though) and recognizes both the benefits and how natural it is as opposed to something as dreadful, stifling, and inhuman as a centrally planned economy.
Almost. It’s how capitalism is expected to work when you have to get permission from the city before you can support customers on a new street. The existing companies could roll out fiber to everyone in just a few years if they didn’t have to go through the whole process of getting approvals, waiting through public comment periods, rebutting stupid public comments, etc, etc for every single street. Or worse, getting approval from your direct competitors because you’re required to use their telephone poles.
1) My evaluation of free markets is that they are poorly equipped to solve certain problems; IMO protecting/preserving the environment being the best example of this. Otherwise I believe them to be an incredibly powerful tool.
2) I think the whole system breaks down when companies lobby for and receive special governmental protections, which incumbent ISPs have done in the US since before they even were ISPs (phone and cable TV providers).
Yes, I think at absolute bare minimum you need regulations to keep industry from capturing/controlling government, or else the most powerful capitalists effectively become the government. I don’t know a lot of people who like that scenario.
Clearly IMO you need regulations to deal with issues markets are not addressing. Again, the environment being the prime example.
My preference is for the government to intervene in other areas, e.g. capping prices on life-saving drug. In those instances I favor the simplest laws that achieve the desired result. My understanding is as laws become more complicated and harder to understand the more convoluted (and even bizarre) companies behave.
The wired ISP market in the US is the exact opposite of "free market". It's government enforced monopolies, or in the better cases, duopolies. The point to it as a failing of the free market is to misunderstand how regulation and free markets work.
Complete deregulation would not solve this problem.
The problem is that it is really, really expensive to lay brand new fiber in most places.
If we had complete deregulation, the companies that already have the fiber laid would dominate. A competitor might look at a market, and see the price that the incumbent is charging and think they could provide the service for cheaper and still recover the cost of laying fiber. However, if they decided to actually start laying fiber, the incumbent would just lower prices and the new company would be unable to compete (since they have to recover the cost of laying fiber while the incumbent doesn't).
The only way for true competition in this market is to do what a lot of countries do... have regulations that say whoever lays fiber has to agree to rent it to competitors at reasonable prices. That way, you don't have to keep laying redundant fiber just to compete.
Do regulations force ISPs to make people pays more when there are no competitors around? Do regulations set the the price? Aren't duopolies a possible consequence of a free market?
Free market includes when competition can reasonably enter a market that's not structured through legislation to be overly favorable towards incumbents.
Note that there are natural monopolies/oligopolies, which are the result of the nature of the market (eg need for scale) rather than legal lobbying.
The regulations literally stopped any competitors from even being allowed in the same area. If you’re genuinely curious about how that screws up industries (not just short term pricing) I’d recommend Luigi Zingales‘s A Capitalism for the People, it has a very thorough analysis of crony capitalism.
This is not correct. You can deregulate the market completely and end in a worse place for consumers.
The idea of "free market" giving the best outcome for buyers requires:
1) virtually infinite suppliers
2) virtually infinite customers
3) fully fungible product/service
4) fully rational and informed customers
In markets like ISP, real estate, water/electricity supply, wastewater/garbage/mail/roads the product or service is in no way fungible because is based on your location.
E.g. you cannot pay for an ISP in Germany and use it from San Francisco.
On top of that it's practically impossible to have a large numbers of suppliers in such markets.
Finally, providing mail/electricity/water/Internet to small and remote town is rarely profitable. You can have so-called "market failures" where market equilibrium does not serve customers at all, or at unaffordable prices.
This is why such services are provided by local governments in most countries or heavily regulated companies.
> For me, this is a textbook consequence of a "free market" based system.
Free markets plus regulatory capture (and/or collusion). Unless you're arguing that those additional constraints are inherent to free markets then I think there exist other viewpoints which allow one to be self-consistent.
> But are collusions a cause for an ISP raising there prices when there are no competitors?
I think the argument is that collusions are one of a small number of reasons there aren't competitors. I.e., the act of raising prices in the absence of competition is all fine and dandy from a quasi-free market perspective, but there should be more competition.
This would sharply contrast with me being fine with a service being provided without competition as long as it is good (and then yes, you probably need it to be public or heavily regulated)
