The cable lobby loves to bring up rural areas but when we gave them millions to build out they just took the money, said fuck it and did jack shit. I’m beginning to think that they prefer to under serve those areas and then use that as a bargaining chip to get everything they want.
Comcast for decades have said on their website they support my parent’s address but they obviously do not since there are no cables on the poles for Internet. We’ve tried calling and asking to fix it and we’ve tried calling to just get someone out so we can prove they don’t service it but each time we scheduled an appointment nobody showed up and when calling back they would say they never set one up. So I’m pretty sure you’re correct.
“By the end of 2014, America will have been charged about $400 billion by the local phone incumbents, Verizon, AT&T and CenturyLink, for a fiber optic future that never showed up.”
TL;DR: they took billions from the government to build fiber infrastructure then said, “sorry that wasn’t enough. Give us more and we swear we’ll build it this time.” They just pocketed the money.
I almost feel bad for rural people until I realize they’re the ones voting for the people who make sure rural people don’t get services. Redneck America wants to close the USPS for fuck sakes.
My parents live in butt fuck nowhere and are in a fiber co-op paying like $70/month for unlimited 1gbps up/down.
Meanwhile I live in the (extremely left) Capitol City of my state and pay Comcast $165/month for like 175mbps capped at 1TB, with some absurd overage fee like $10/5GB over until I hit $100 over and then it’s “unlimited” but seems throttled.
I am in New England. Looking to buy a home. The amount of area that is not covered at 100/10 is fucking criminal. Like, they upped my price this year. For what? Transferring packets didn’t get more expensive. Did you go e your employees raises? No? Are you expanding your infrastructure? No?
Numerous places I’ve lived had contracts with Comcast so there was no option but them, and the speed is shit, maybe they needed to raise prices to pay for their forced monopolies.
The dumbasses that gave them the money should have made it so the companies did the work FIRST, then get reimbursed when they could prove they finished it. Whole thing was stupid.
In Australia we watched American ISPs do exactly that and then we did the exact same thing with the exact same result because our politicians are corrupt pieces of shit with no backbone, integrity or ethics.
Taxpayers have already paid them billions for broken promises. It’s been long demonstrated the oligopolistic communications industry cannot be trusted to provide what the public needs at fair pricing.
These people forget that they have to exist physically alongside us “citizens”. Your layers of obfuscation won’t save your reputation forever. Eventually people will be so tired of everything be stacked against us we’ll just riot and take from these corpos.
We’ll drop the bans if you immediately drop litigation against any and all public projects aimed at establishing municipal, regional, state, or federal broadband service that would compete directly with you.
Yeah, didn’t think you’d like that one, Comcast et al.
The NCTA has repeatedly stated over the years that net neutrality rules aren’t needed because ISPs already follow net neutrality principles. “Internet service providers have always delivered open, unrestricted Internet service. Consumers enjoy the web content and applications of their choosing without any blocking, throttling, or interference,” the group said.
Wow. Talk about professional gaslighting. Not enough people are aware that the Obama-era FTC enacted the policy because AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon were all caught throttling Netflix and prioritizing their own competing services.
And tethering. Verizon was basically forced to stop blocking tethering apps by the FCC. My complaint was one of the ones which started the enforcement.
Maybe if they didn’t sell people more bandwidth than they could provide they wouldn’t have to throttle people below the service they paid for to work for everyone.
I would, in theory, be all for allowing companies to prioritize latency to services and protocols that benefit from it. Except they oversell the absolute shit out of their service, and can’t be trusted to give you what you pay for if they don’t like your traffic.
Failing to provide the full bandwidth they advertised for even one percent of a given month should result in fines that massively exceed what they charged for that month. Selling shit you don’t have is not acceptable.
When companies protest against regulation while claiming that they already adhere to the same rules, then something is clearly off, and one better gets regulation through, because they plan to ditch that adherence as soon as the governmental regulations are off the table.
Let me plug Counter Points, a favorite political show of mine.
They recently talked about FTC Chair Lina Khan and Apple’s monopoly, the government’s anti-trust lawsuit against Apple, and monopolies in general. www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMyChnACLKQ
It’s tangential, but it came to mind.
If the cable companies want lawsuits, let’s give them what they want in the form of anti-trust lawsuits and break them up.
hah, no, it really, really isn’t like that at all. shooting straight north or south, for example, is really hard. going in the opposite direction of the earth’s orbit is hard too.
earth is spinning around the sun. going in the direction the earth is trying to escape the sun from is easy.
I have a pretty reasonable grasp of delta V. While my comment is flippant, you can launch Eastward from the equator any day and end up in space: deep space if you have sufficient velocity (though usually you’d do that with one or more gravity assists). The sun is the only other place you can go any day, but there’s huge angular velocity to overcome to make a direct shot.
It really really is the case mathematically that if you just want to go to deep space it’s not as difficult as trying to figure out how to go to a particular place, as anyone who has ever done trajectory planning with STK will tell you. More difficult from a cost and engineering perspective, sure, but mathematically easier to just shoot in a direction at escape velocity for the sun whatever day you want.
Nah, just allow communities to build their local infrastructure. Trust me. You don’t need to threaten the status quo, just allow the market to compete.
Every town where local fiber is available, Comcast and Spectrum suddenly have cheaper and more reliable service. It’s magical.
I mean yeah that’s what monopolies do. They eliminate competition by either buying it out or lowering their prices/improving service to drive them out of business so they can then raise prices again. Just cause a small company can come in and make things better while they’re able to be around doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go after these monopolies and cut them down so they can’t have this power.
Probably companies like Comcast making sure there isn’t anything to disrupt their monopolies. Another reason to break them up so they can’t have that much power.
I lived in Charlotte, NC when Google announced GFiber was coming. Instantly AT&T started running as much fiber as possible and Charter(spectrum) was trying to get people locked into cheaper 3 year contracts. Ultimately AT&T got fiber first so we went with them, and it was vastly better. Charter was getting 60% packet loss every night from oversold infrastructure they didn’t care to fix, as before the announcement the only competition was AT&T uverse in some parts of the city.
Just openly admitting the system is fucked and they’re exploiting it.
I would like more assholes in power to recognize that law is the polite version of common people getting what they need out of rich stupid bastards. When law does not work - alternatives tend to happen.
Jessica Rosenworcel is a champ. She has been fighting this fight for years. The week Ajit Pai (Ashit Pie) ended net neutrality using falsified public comments, a group gathered in front of the FCC to protest the change. I went down there for a few hours and Jessica came to the window and waved to us.
Every piece of shit greedy corporation can’t hide from their lies when they say things are too expensive to implement correctly or pay people appropriately when they are simultaneously posting profits measured in billions…
Those last couple paragraphs with the quotes from ISPs…make no fucking sense. They’re saying it will “restrict access for rural customers.” How? They say it’ll slow internet down across the nation. How? How can ARST.com just run those quotes and not even explain how they’re bullshit or even just call into question their reasoning? Shoddy journalism if you ask me.
Are there any past examples of companies getting out of fines that way? Even Facebook had to pay 20Bn, you would think they could have gotten a judge for only 15 if it were so easy.
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