Verizon, Comcast, and a Republican FCC commissioner presage the political fights ahead by stressing a hands-off approach and arguing that Americans have pretty decent broadband choices after all.
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been substantial advancements recently, but these guys are making
money hand-over-fist. Their marketing tactics are incredibly sly.
And how many times have we seen the costs go down? How about
zero.
month. And each household paid around $2000 already to get it.
The telcoms haven't delivered... they kept the money. What are they
spending money on instead? Expensive equipment to control and
limit data... and marketing to tell us how great what we already
have is. Shame on them!
See: www.newnetworks.com/ShortSCANDALSummary.htm
- Broadbent
- by FellowConspirator August 21, 2007 5:32 AM PDT
- First, "broadband" and "high-speed Internet" are not the same
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(4 Comments)thing. The providers are interested in the former (a bunch of
services bundled together on the same connection), whereas the
consumers are interested in the latter (namely bidirectionally
fast always-on uncapped and unfettered Internet).
The industry understands that distinction and that's why we
have what we have now. Connections are costly, generally
require that you get a bunch of services from a single provider
(e.g., cable and Internet together or you pay extra), and the rates
and grade of service fluctuate wildly -- like cell-phones, you
often cannot get a concrete price before your service starts (they
add quite a few ambiguous fees and charges, change rates
based on zip codes, etc). Also, you often can't tell what sort of
Internet service you're going to get -- the providers block ports
in some places, don't in others; you oftne can't run a "server",
but it's so ambiguously defined that they could shut you down
for using Windows XP because it has file and print sharing
capabilities.
Lastly, there's a huge disparity in the uploads versus download
speeds, which, while a lot of it is due to poor decisions on
implementation, is also something providers intentionally limit.
If one assumed that everyone was going to download
exclusively, maybe that isn't a problem. But the fact is that many
people are legitimately uploading content -- updating their
personal web-sites, sharing personal videos, video conferencing
and voice-chatting, etc.
The big problem is, of course, that it's basically impossible to
enter the market as a competitor these days. A company that
wanted to provide just high-speed Internet without wasting
money on generating/purchasing content you're not interested
in doesn't have a chance. The average person has 1, maybe 2
providers to choose from. And, as the article indirectly points
out, they providers believe that you should be happy that they
provide you service at all, at any price -- so settle down and
take it like a man/woman.