A Public Option for Broadband
A friend joked yesterday after a frustrating experience dealing with Comcast that “I think we need a public option for cable/wireless companies.”
But there’s a real issue here. The United States gets very mediocre results in terms of broadband price and speed compared to other industrialized countries. It’s true that some of this has to do with the difficulty of wiring a relatively sparsely-populated country. But lots of places in the United States are as dense as Stockholm, and in Sweden the average is 18.2 mbps, which you won’t find anywhere in this country. As Mark Loyd has written:
The United States will not meet President Bush’s goal of universal broadband by the end of 2007—not by a long shot. The number of subscribers to Internet services is growing faster than the adoption of “dial-up,” yet for the most part these subscribers are not connected to the broadband technology Congress described in 1996 as a two-way communications service capable of high-speed delivery of data, voice, and video.
This failure to connect over half the country to advanced telecommunications service is not a technological failure. It is a 21st century public policy failure. In the 1990s, policies established by the Clinton administration to encourage public/private telecommunications partnerships, to connect schools and libraries to the World Wide Web, and to allow competitive service providers onto the networks of the local telephone monopolies all sped up the deployment of broadband around most of the nation. These policies were either deliberately abandoned or hampered by the Bush administration.
The increasing noise from Washington about the lack of a U.S. broadband policy obscures the fact that a policy choice was made by the Bush administration to rely entirely on “market forces” to determine how and where advanced telecommunications services would be deployed. That policy has failed.
It’s no coincidence that the cable company is always a go-to liberal example of private sector dysfunction. I would ditch Comcast in favor of a rival cable company except . . . there isn’t a rival cable company that served by neighborhood. Nor does my window face the right direction for DirectTV. So it’s Comcast or nobody, and thus the quality of Comcast’s offerings and customer service tends to be extremely bad. Appropriate regulation and public investment have a big role to play in this field.
67 Responses to “A Public Option for Broadband”
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October 27th, 2009 at 9:26 am
No DSL? That is pathetic. Who runs the local telephone service in DC?
October 27th, 2009 at 9:33 am
Comcast is pathetic, and it sucks having to go through them. Here in Philadelphia, they are part-owners of the Flyers and the Sixers, and leveraged that into an exclusive contract with the Phillies; so that almost all the regular season games for those teams are only shown on their own local sports cable station. Which they won’t allow DirectTV or other satellite networks, and of course isn’t available by antenna, so all sports fans in the city are forced to subscribe to Comcast.
As for the internet, it’s either them or Verizon, who suck almost as badly.
October 27th, 2009 at 9:38 am
We have faced situations where telecommunications companies have sought to make it illegal for local governments to promote municipal/public broadband solutions.
In any event, the USA’s weakness in comparison to the most advanced nations is not about broadband penetration; there we’re doing pretty well. It’s about the broadband speed we can take advantage of. I am hard-pressed to figure out how this lack of national access to speed is a problem. The thing is that we do not really know what to do with all of that bandwidth. We are only going to be able to figure it out once we see other regions of the US with faster access develop applications that can take advantage of it, spurring demand for development in the rest of the country.
What we also have is an early-adoption problem: since we created policies to make cable television and analog phone service universally available to remote and rural areas all over the USA, there’s little demand for broadband there. If those areas had less telecommunications infrastructure in place, then we would make more of an effort to build out broadband services as a means of providing modern digital TV and phone service.
October 27th, 2009 at 9:38 am
Um, what would individuals do with 18mbps rather than 2mbps, besides more movie downloading and gaming? This doesn’t seem like a big-time competitiveness issue, just a curiosity.
October 27th, 2009 at 9:44 am
So, because the government has set up legal monopolies for their crony capitalist friends, we have zero competition in most places. And as a solution to that problem you propose more crony capitalism (because you know damn well the government is just going to contract this out) instead of fixing the actual problem.
October 27th, 2009 at 9:50 am
More to the point, Sweden has about the same avg density as the US, a bit lower I think.
October 27th, 2009 at 9:51 am
I’m no expert on the subject, but I would imagine that if most people had access to such speeds, web application companies like Google would be more inclined to make good use of it, and we might be able to make huge strides toward things like cloud computing. It seems like an “if you build it, they will come” scenario.
October 27th, 2009 at 9:53 am
I would ditch Comcast in favor of a rival cable company except . . . there isn’t a rival cable company that served by neighborhood. Nor does my window face the right direction for DirectTV. So it’s Comcast or nobody, and thus the quality of Comcast’s offerings and customer service tends to be extremely bad.
Yes, but you live in a remote rural area. It might be different if you lived in, say, the capital city of the world’s only superpower….
October 27th, 2009 at 9:56 am
For D.C. residents wondering when they, too, will be able to get high-speed Fios fiber optics service, Verizon Communications Inc. has a two-part answer: It’s now negotiating with the city to secure a franchise to offer the service. But along the way, Verizon wants the D.C. Council to give up regulatory authority that could govern Fios’ Internet-based phone service.
http://washington.bizjournals.com/washington/stories/2008/03/17/story2.html#
October 27th, 2009 at 9:58 am
I want to believe… unfortunately, the track record of efforts to organize municipal ISPs is pretty bad. Perhaps it’s a question of scale; maybe it’s just that they aren’t allowed to go head-to-head with the cable company, and are instead stuck trying to offer a “free wifi for all!” dream that never pans out. Whatever the case, the model does need to change. Packets should be delivered to my house the same way that water and electricity are.
October 27th, 2009 at 9:58 am
So, based on the article above it seems the process is hampered by a lack of a national policy and national regulatory structure.
October 27th, 2009 at 10:06 am
Not only are Comcast’s offerings and service crap, but, much like cell phone companies that don’t improve the quality of their coverage because they have clients locked into lengthy contracts, Comcast’s internet quality is absolute shit. My cable internet goes down routinely, and it always takes them forever to figure out how to reset it over the phone — and the entire time they try to blame my router, and threaten to charge me. They are just utter crap, and I would kill for another cable company to work with.
October 27th, 2009 at 10:08 am
Nothing is stopping google from marketing such things to their Korean and Swedish customers, which might create more of a demand for access to those services in the USA.
I want to hear Matthew’s specific complaints about Comcast. The service itself was not bad in my experience. The problem I had with them when I lived in DC was that the wiring from the tower to my apartment was quite poor and prone to failure until you sent in enough complaints about it. Once again, this was a legacy-technology problem: Comcast had a bunch of aging wiring from the old cable company. And Verizon is just holding off on rolling out FIOS until they get the city council to cry “uncle” to whatever their demands are.
October 27th, 2009 at 10:14 am
For those dubious on the need for more bandwidth, this reminds me of the early days of dialup when we would say to ourselves, “you don’t need anything faster than 2400 baud because you can’t possibly read text any faster than that.”
October 27th, 2009 at 10:21 am
Um, what would individuals do with 18mbps rather than 2mbps, besides more movie downloading and gaming?
Ditto, JustMe. Or there’s “640K of memory should be enough for anybody.”
Apocryphal or no, most adults with more than a passing knowledge of the history of technology know enough to steer clear of idiotic arguments like the above..
October 27th, 2009 at 10:26 am
And Verizon is just holding off on rolling out FIOS until they get the city council to cry “uncle” to whatever their demands are.
Do Swedish cities even have any say in these sorts of decisions – or does an edict from the Näringsdepartementet (Ministry of Enterprise, Energy and Communications) trump any local decision making?
October 27th, 2009 at 10:27 am
Utilities like this are “natural monopolies,” and any econ 101 student can tell you about the dead-weight loss caused by monopolistic pricing. Even a Chicago economist should support government price ceilings on this sort of thing.
October 27th, 2009 at 10:28 am
These policies were either deliberately abandoned or hampered by the Bush administration.
The problem is not that Bush abandoned Clinton’s policies. It is that Clinton’s policies never worked. AT&T took the money we gave them to build up their infrastructure and pocketed it. And when people complained about how the taxpayers did not get any value for their money, they whined that liberals hate business.
Nobody hates capitalism more than corporations.
October 27th, 2009 at 10:40 am
So it’s Comcast or nobody, and thus the quality of Comcast’s offerings and customer service tends to be extremely bad.
Don’t get me started.
I actually did something recently I thought I (a rather voracious consumer of TV) would never do: gave up cable altogether. Just couldn’t justify the couple of grand or so a year it was costing me. Now I’m getting by satisfactorily on the four DVD at a time plan with Netflix, plus free TV and internet. It’s pretty much all good except for having to wait for the Don Draper and Larry David, and not having a DVR. Okay, it is difficult being an NBA fan without cable, too. Sigh.
I’ve read that the price of broadband cable/internet in this country has been consistently rising faster than inflation. Seems like this should almost never be the case with technology-centric consumer products. America: the home of the free, and the land or the regulatory captured.
October 27th, 2009 at 10:44 am
I think we are at a point in this country where we all realize that we want a public option for everything. In addition to health care and the Internet, I’d like to see public options for cable TV, rent and groceries. Then I’d have more incentive to just stay home everyday rather than go to work and line the pockets of fat cat CEOs.
October 27th, 2009 at 10:45 am
And Verizon is just holding off on rolling out FIOS until they get the city council to cry “uncle” to whatever their demands are.
Actually, this process is complete.
October 27th, 2009 at 10:48 am
It’s no coincidence that the cable company is always a go-to liberal example of private sector dysfunction.
True. Cable is a great example of private sector ineptitude. But there are many others.
October 27th, 2009 at 10:58 am
10 years ago, Tacoma WA got sick of how it was being treatedby the cable companies and formed it’s own company, run by Tacoma Public Utility. Called Click! Network, they offer cable and Internet. It’s made Comcast much better and Click keeps getting better too to compete. Win win!
In terms of competition, they’ve handled it really well. Click offers the TV service and then any private company can sell you the cable Internet. Three so far offer cable Internet packages at a variety of levels (topping out around 30 Mbps I think). It’s a really brilliant way to handle dealing with cable monopolies like Comcast.
When Click started in 1998, I heard it was the first city-owned cable company in the US. More gov’ts should follow the model. It works!
October 27th, 2009 at 11:02 am
I think we are at a point in this country where we all realize that we want a public option for everything
Not everything, no. But Americans shouldn’t have to put up with predatory pricing on the part of those with monopoly powers.
October 27th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Here in my sprawling suburban Kansas burg, we have the choice of two, and in some areas, three cable/broadband suppliers (not counting satellite).
Why? Well, my city doesn’t live to screw me, unlike Matt’s. My understanding is that DC held up deregulating phone service while spending 9 months negotiating a franchise agreement with Verizon, both of which delayed Verizon’s entrance to DC.
The Lloyd article is really, really bad. I knew we’d be getting some mediocre appointees from Obama, but stupid is another thing.
But at least we find a case where Matt endorses subsidies for rural areas and sprawl.
October 27th, 2009 at 11:13 am
Um, what would individuals do with 18mbps rather than 2mbps, besides more movie downloading and gaming? This doesn’t seem like a big-time competitiveness issue, just a curiosity.
I don’t think it’s just about the maximum speed. Slow-downs or disruptions in service are common, and my personal anecdotal experience is that they are once-a-week experiences with my Verizon here in Boston (which, at least by DC standards, has good competition, with Verizon, Comcast, AT&T (DSL), and RCN all having pretty strong penetration into most buildings), which is far better than how I had it with AT&T. Upgrading the broadband infrastructure would improve what are to me far more annoying problems that having a lower maximum speed than Stockholm.
October 27th, 2009 at 11:16 am
It is interesting that Matthew specifically called out rural subsidies for guaranteed USPS delivery as being something he considered not to be worthwhile but endorses broadband subsidies for those same populations, isn’t it?
October 27th, 2009 at 11:16 am
My parents recently moved back to the house where I grew up on the outskirts of a very small town, several miles from the nearest paved road, let alone the local cable TV lines. I haven’t looked into it, but I gather that their options for Internet service are the following: dialup modem through their phone line, or some kind of satellite Internet service. Same as when I moved out of there nine years ago.
Rich in PA Says:
October 27th, 2009 at 9:38 am
Um, what would individuals do with 18mbps rather than 2mbps, besides more movie downloading and gaming? This doesn’t seem like a big-time competitiveness issue, just a curiosity.
a. iTunes or other ways to download music and audiobooks, and how big are the files for books on a Kindle? plus, lots of Web sites are sufficiently demanding that even normal Web browsing via modem is slow enough to be problematic.
b. Why exclude movies and gaming? That’s like the post Matt linked to a few days ago where someone talked about the most progressive cities in America being white – except for the three biggest. Movie downloading and gaming are big business and big parts of some peoples’ lives. They aren’t indispensable, obviously (although I’m sure for some people in exceptional circumstances somewhere or other, they have been), but if “indispensable” is the standard, that excludes lots of stuff, including the telephone.
c. Ditto JustMe and ibc. Even if there wasn’t demand for 18 mbps right now – and I think I’ve shown that there is – there might very well be demand soon.
October 27th, 2009 at 11:45 am
#13 JustMe Says: Once again, this was a legacy-technology problem: Comcast had a bunch of aging wiring from the old cable company.
In my suburban neighborhood of Lakewood, Colorado, the Comcast backbone for distributing TV and internet access to individual homes is buried 3 to 6 inches below the ground. The phone lines, even from the distribution boxes to the houses, are buried 3 feet. This gave me considerable pause before I finally selected DSL for the ISP.
October 27th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Given the prevailence of cable infrastructure in the states, I am amazed that access regulation has not been put in place for these cable networks to promote consumer choice.
Some sort of bit stream access and unbundling of the upstream and downstream channels to allow alternate operators. The incentive to invest is ofc limited when you have a captured market with no likelihood of contestation.
I understand that the US does not have ex-ante regulation like in europe, but the degree of monopoly that is accepted is amazing.
October 27th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
What we have now is a “public option”. Local governments across the US have allowed local monopolies for cable service in exchange for the ability to regulate. The result should be a liberal paradise: universal access for all.
What, it’s not? Maybe that whole public option idea should be rethought then. Maybe if local governments just got the heck out of the business completely, you might get somewhere.
Fat chance of that happening though. Meanwhile, I enjoy 20 mbps up and 20 mbps down, out in one of the unsustainable suburban hellholes Matt thinks are impractical…
October 27th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
To give you an idea of how pathetic US broadband is — I get 1.5 Mbps Verizon DSL in Manhattan (and FIOS is absolutely nowhere in site — in America’s biggest city…). In Italy you get 7.2Mbps (and you really do get it) on your iPhone or 3G dongle for your computer. Simply awful.
I have no idea why Verizon is dragging its heals with FIOS in NYC — other than lack of any meaningful competition. TWC’s roadrunner service is an unreliable joke.
As to “Rich in PA” who says: “Um, what would individuals do with 18mbps rather than 2mbps, besides more movie downloading and gaming? This doesn’t seem like a big-time competitiveness issue, just a curiosity.”
You, sir are either a Luddite or Microsoft employee. How about on-line/off site backups of your precious data? How about hosting your own home business website?
October 27th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
The Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency (UTOPIA) is trying to provide a public option here, but Comcast and Qwest have fought it hard with every means at their disposal. UTOPIA has few customers, no advertising, but a great model that promotes competition among private service providers over a public fiber optic network.
October 27th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
In an effort to break up Verizon’s monopoly in the North East, they were forced to sell their lines and service to this shitty company called Fair Point Communications, who are currently going before all three northern New England states to answer for their service. So for TV, I have Comcast or Direct TV, since Fair Point ONLY offers Direct TV packages and not Verizon’s TV service. So sure, I could get Fair Point internet which (supposedly) is still get Verizon High Speed, but I would have to use Direct TV. Instead, I have Comcast’s shitty overpriced bullshit.
So now I have WORSE service due to monopoly busting. Ugh.
October 27th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
A little give-and-take would help, I think. Part of the telecomms’ difficulty in setting up broadband is negotiating right-of-way through municipalities. In the Boston area, for example, you have to traverse several small towns to get from downtown to Route 128. Anyone setting up a network has to negotiate routes with all of them.
Some towns can be pretty obstinate. For example, when I came here in 1997, Burlington already had broadband, while Lexington did not. That’s because all the doctors and lawyers who live there didn’t want their precious streets dug up to install the necessary equipment. Burlington, on the other hand, went with the flow. It wasn’t until years later that Lexington got cable broadband.
I wouldn’t mind if the federal government took responsibility for the infrastructure (fibers, cable, right-of-way management), but leased it to providers. That would eliminate the barrier to entry for new competitors.
October 27th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
I’ll preface my comments by saying that I don’t have tons of exposure to Comcast yet. But I find this post funny because I just moved to D.C. from Columbus, Ohio a couple weeks ago and I sent my buddy an email yesterday telling him that one of the best parts so far is getting Comcast instead of Time-Warner, which is truly terrible. I think it was implicit that I don’t consider Comcast “good,” just the lesser of two evils.
In terms of progress, my hope is that someday soon we’ll have a choice between the lesser of five or six evils.
October 27th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
james Robertson Says:
What we have now is a “public option”. Local governments across the US have allowed local monopolies for cable service in exchange for the ability to regulate. The result should be a liberal paradise: universal access for all.
What, it’s not? Maybe that whole public option idea should be rethought then.
This is a lie. A public option – at least in the current, commonly used meaning – is government-owned and operated, as a supplement to an existing free market offering similar products differentiated by quality or specialization or whatever. A regulated monopoly, on the other hand, is almost precisely the opposite.
James Robertson, why would you lie about something so obvious? If this isn’t the real James Robertson, the usual person who comments here under that name, please let us know. If it is the real James, I think you should apologize for lying and try to cut back on it. (You’re a conservative, so asking you to refrain from lying entirely is unfeasible, but try to keep them plausible, OK?)
October 27th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
… But lots of places in the United States are as dense as Stockholm, and in Sweden the average is 18.2 mbps, which you won’t find anywhere in this country …
Verizon claims 50 mps download and 20 mps upload for its FIOS service.
October 27th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
Folks,
My wife and I just tried a new WiMax provider, Clear, here in Portland. We found that at our house it doesn’t yet perform very well; the techs told us that we were just at the fringe of acceptable service and there is a house directly between my office room and the closest tower.
However, we took the radio with us to a relative’s house in Seattle where we got “four bars” and it screamed. I had downloaded a 100MB file from java.sun.com using Comcast as a test and then downloaded in at home using the radio modem.
The download manager in Firefox showed a consistent 770 KB (big “B”) per second with Comcast which is about the advertised Comcast standard of 6 megabits per second, but only 70 KB per second with Clear.
But when I tried Clear in Seattle it also got the 770 KB per second.
So the technology is quite comparable to Comcast’s $45 per month standard and would be $30/month, except that at this time the service is not good enough where we happen to live.
Since it’s massively cheaper to populate more cell towers with WiMax antennas than to add another “pipe” to our undergrounded neighborhood, I’m hoping that the service improves for us and we can get away from the Roberts brothers.
October 27th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Cyrus,
We have a regulated, “public option” style system for telephone and cable access in the US. In general, any given area has one, maybe 2 providers (having more is pretty unusual). That’s a result of local and state governments deciding that the best option for such service was a locally regulated monopoly provider. We are now living with the consequences of that decision.
Is it “public” in the sense of being run by the govt? No. However, it’s public in the sense that localities decide what they will allow, and who they will allow, and what the service minimums are, and what charge structure is allowable. We could have competition, but government has previously decided that this would be bad.
It’s truly rich to see Matt object to such a system. In any public option for (insert your favorite industry here), the government will set up a quasi-public or private entity to be the monopoly provider. We’ll then enjoy service in (insert industry here) that works as well as local cable does.
When that happens, Matt, and most of the people here, will be perplexed.
October 27th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
When Click started in 1998, I heard it was the first city-owned cable company in the US. More gov’ts should follow the model. It works!
I believe Braintree, MA had a public cable company (to go along with municipal electric) well before 1998. I don’t know whether they also provide broadband now.
October 27th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Um, what would individuals do with 18mbps rather than 2mbps, besides more movie downloading and gaming?
The real bottleneck is in the upstream, given that residential broadband is capped.
We have a regulated, “public option” style system for telephone and cable access in the US.
Bullshit.
Is it “public” in the sense of being run by the govt? No. However
Which is why it’s bullshit. Or, to be more precise, it’s bullshit because local monopolies are run on the basis of benefitting the providers, not the users.
You really are remarkably dumb, J-Rob.
October 27th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
[...] Do you hate your cable company? You’re sure not alone if you do—and Matt Yglesias suggests this is another area where we need a public option. [...]
October 27th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
#42 – I assert that any public option thing set up by the govt will end up being run for the benefit of the providers, not the users.
That’s the history of how it’s always ended up here; believing that it will ever run differently is believing in the impossible.
October 27th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Rick Karr
Rick Karr
Tell me you all haven’t seen Rick Karr’s incredible hour long Bill Moyers special on this topic?
October 27th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Um, what would individuals do with 18mbps rather than 2mbps, besides more movie downloading and gaming?
Go read The Accord by Keith Brooke. Thats why.
October 27th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Video delivery has always been a heavily and haphazardly regulated field. Indeed, if anything it is a great example of public sector dysfunction (municipalities viewing the cable system as a tax collector, blocking entry, and so forth). For those interested, Tom Hazlett has a useful paper.
October 27th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Just a note – the Australian government is spending $43 billion on a national broadband network. It isn’t exactly ‘public’ since corporations will be doing the work and getting the benefits, but the private sector just hasn’t been able to do the job on its own:
http://www.watoday.com.au/technology/technology-news/australia-embarks-on-great-broadband-adventure-20090928-g86d.html
October 27th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
Shearer, you realize you would pay $145 per month for that, right?
October 27th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
How many of these superior foreign services are publicly or privately owned monopolies? I don’t know, but I do know that my employer (rhymes with horizon) has done market analyses for the rollout of Fios (something I work with closely) and claims that ‘maximized’ service speeds aren’t cost effective where the market is shared with competitors. We can’t (won’t) run a dedicated fiber the complete route to each residence; too expensive. The system relies on splitter technology relatively like cable’s coax is a signal sharing system. Therefore slower speeds. I also believe we are still covered by the modified agreement which requires us to use a diversity of vendors; even if one provides a superior product, I think we are prevented from purchasing from them solely.
October 27th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
@18 Walker: “Nobody hates capitalism more than corporations.”
Good one.
Wait till we try to build a National Smart Grid. If there was no interference from monopolies, it would take a couple of years to have all the rudimentary elements in place. Wind power could provide 50% of our energy needs in 10 years and 80% in 20.
But, there are 500 different owners of the United States’ electric grid. What? 500! How can this be, America? You volunteered to hand over a vital segment of your National Security to private and foreign corporations? Corporations whose interests lie in preventing you from developing efficient delivery systems of any kind? No, there is no government, which means coal will block wind power because it can, which means there will be no National Smart Grid in my lifetime.
Anybody who thinks Capitalism and Free Markets are an efficient way to govern a nation-state is out of their fucking minds.
October 27th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Re: The United States gets very mediocre results in terms of broadband price and speed compared to other industrialized countries.
I’m not sure the speed matters, any more than it matters that we don’t produce cars that can do 140 mph the way the Germans do. Slow internet speed is often the fault of the individual’s own PC than the connection itself. However American broadband pricing does absolutely suck.
October 27th, 2009 at 10:21 pm
I wouldn’t switch to Comcast if they were the ones paying me. I’ve got as much broadband as I can pay for via DSL from Qwest and have zero problems. I’m not even worried about being throttled or cut off because the RIAA thinks I’m using the internet innappropriately.
If Qwest can tell the NSA to go screw themselves when it comes to phone records, what do you think they’re going to say to the RIAA?
Of course, unlike Comcast…Qwest isn’t in bed with content providers either.
October 28th, 2009 at 1:40 am
The cost of HD Comcast cable is the same as buying every single TV series and movie I watch on DVD and blu-ray – and I would get to keep them.
At $100 a month to watch the channels I want ($60 base for all the stuff I don’t use, then $7 for the HD tuner, plus $27 for the digital channels I actually watch, plus another $3 for the rest of the stations I watch…)
And as said previously, their service sucks. They always blame any glitches upon my home wiring – my home wiring does not change when it rains, and the service goes out. It’s high and dry in the rafters.
October 28th, 2009 at 3:29 am
The only reason to build a PON-network like horizon (I assume that is what spitter system means) is to insure than you infrastructure cannot be meaningfully unbundled. You imitate cable network infrastructure rather than telephony lines.
Since digging is such a big cost component, P2P is almost as cheap, but much better for speeds and competition.
October 28th, 2009 at 3:30 am
Forgot ” ” on horizon…. Morningretardness.
October 28th, 2009 at 8:56 am
I do not think that P2P will be the solution. The solution is going to be wireless broadband using cell towers/base stations to deliver xG or WiMAX broadband services to the home.
October 28th, 2009 at 10:47 am
It is all about competition. The minute Verizon came to Fairfax County the major cable operator COX started rolling out better lineups, cheaper service, and faster internet. I still chose FIOS which has actually gotten cheaper and faster. I get 20 mbps for the price I paid for 3 mbps a short 16 months when there was no Verizon in my neighborhood. Of course I moved and had Comcast for the worst month ever and went running an screaming as fast as possible to Fios. Everything will get better when there are more options.
October 28th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
[...] In the course of suggesting that perhaps we ought to have a "public option" for broadband, Matt Yglesias writes: [...]
October 28th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
No coincidence? That’s pretty harsh; since that’s a ridiculous example, it sounds like you’re call liberals idiots.
The cable company in most places is government-granted exclusive monopoly franchise. Yeah, DC has had a much slower rollout of Verizon’s FIOS (and FIOS TV) than other places nearby. Some of that is Verizon wanting to light the wealthier neighborhoods first. But a lot of it is DC holding up granting a competitive franchise too.
The cable company is as much an example of private sector dysfunction as Washington Flyer is.
October 28th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
You wrote: “in Sweden the average is 18.2 mbps, which you won’t find anywhere in this country.” Sorry, but my internet speed is faster than that, up to 28 mbps but over 20 for sure. And last I checked Phoenix was still in the United States (unfortunately). Lots of places in the country have speeds faster than 18.2 mbps so perhaps you wrote badly, or perhaps you want to change your claim. Or is this just political hyperbole and not meant to be accurate?
October 28th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
This is another example of left-wing policy failure. Cable is a highly regulated industry, where regulation serves as a barrier to entry and thwarts competition. I live in DC too and Comcast is the only game in town. Verizon has been trying to bring Fios to DC and the regulatory process has taken over a year.
Here is a copy of the 11 part application Verizon had to fill out:
http://www.oct.dc.gov/information/regulatory/Verizon_application.pdf
At least as a huge corporation Verizon had the lobbying power to get this through, think what it would take if they were a small company.
The left puts all these barriers in place to the free market working, then wonders why things fail and demands more government action. Rinse and repeat.
October 28th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
I wish I could find where my phone company has accepted a gov’t grant to enhance internet support. Where I live it’s like in the dark ages, we have been left totally in the past. No cable here in the country, no wireless, even let my cellphone go due to bad reception, not even DSL service. The same phone company ( A T & T ) provides DSL service inside the city limits, but over that line, they won’t even provide dial-up, because they know that their lines are too unkept to handle it. When the ground is severely dry here, my best speed is 26k,, yes that’s a k, not an M. When the ground is moist it does better, usually up into the 40k range. After a soaking rain it goes plum to hell, with sometimes unable to connect above 12-16k, and seeing many 4k during the many dial-up attempts I set through, hoping for a half way decent speed. I’ve spent at times 30 minutes just dial and disconnect, over and over repeatedly, in struggles to obtain a usuable connection. My only option would be satellite, which I couldn’t possibly afford. And I’m not in the backwoods of Alaska, but centrally located near the eastern TX-OK border.
October 29th, 2009 at 7:34 am
Actually when will this broadband services going to be solve
October 30th, 2009 at 11:10 am
[...] Matthew Yglesias » A Public Option for Broadband By admin | category: cable internet | tags: always-takes, cable internet, entire, [...]
November 1st, 2009 at 11:43 pm
[...] A public option for broadband, by Matthew Yglesias [...]
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:01 am
When our family needed to find a small apartment in or near Cambridge, Mass, I narrowed our search by looking at cabling on poles. We ended up choosing an apartment on a street where cabling from three different companies were draped on the poles: Comcast, RCN and Verizon. The latter two had fiber optic cabling. Comcast had HFC: hybrid fiber/co-ax.
I kicked the tires of all three, and chose Verizon because it had the top speeds both upstream and down. I’m now paying about $60/month for 20Mbs service in both directions. Two years ago RCN had 20/2 service, while Comcast had something similarly restricted on the upstream side. That’s still the case.
Here’s another report on that front.
Most places in the country, however, still offer a choice of monopoly or duopoly, and the speeds are embarassingly slow.
In fortunate cases like mine, the competition could still be far better. Boston is the world’s largest college town. There are lots of academics and professionals who would be willing to pay a good buck for faster speeds. Any of these providers could go after that market. But they only offer the same cookie-cutter choices they offer with the same provisioning elsewhere in the country.
One problem is that the carriers still see the Internet as the third act in a “triple play” of offerings that include cable TV and landline telephone. In fact both of those are just data services now, and far more restrictive and crippled than the Internet’s pure data pipe.
Another problem is that nearly everybody involved in policy, from the federal governent on down to the state Public Utility Commissions (PUCs) and the municipalities, see the Internet as a grace of phone or cable company carriage, rather than the pure utility is in more developed parts of the world, such as Sweden, Denmark, Korea and Japan. That’s because regulatory capture is a very real thing, at every level. The phone companies especially own the game.
The actual data speed Verizon distributes in my neighborhood is 2.5GBs down and 1.2Gbs up. Most of that capacity is reserved for television, available only on Verizon’s own set top box, which remains unimproved by competing offerings, because none are allowed. Want to look up a show to record? Forget plugging a keyboard into the USB port on the thing. That’s disabled. No, you have to type by picking through the alphabet, letter by letter, using directional arrows and the select button on your remote control. This and much other crap is annoying and lame beyond the endurance of most users. Verizon’s TV picture is outstanding, as TV goes, but the bundled price is too high for us. If the programs were a la carte, we’d gladly pay. But they’re not, so we don’t use it.
The long term cure here is to recognize that connectivity and pure data carriage are what really matter; and that the Internet is a simple utility, like water, gas and electric service. Until the only players in that market get their clues from elsewhere in the world, or from enlightened municipalities that roll their own Internet, a public option remains a good idea.
How to provide clearance for that is the big question. I don’t think noise about net neutrality from the FCC is helping. Better to provide enlightened guidelines toward opening opportunities for more public and private offerings of pure data utilities at the local level.
Today’s cable and phone companies are the modern versions of the old “power and light” companies. We don’t buy light any more from those companies. We buy current that we use as we please. The same should be the case with data companies.
Sadly, the cable and phone companies in the U.S. don’t see themselves as data companies. Worse, they’re afraid of being commodified as “dumb pipes.” But dumb pipes are the lemons from which they need to make lemonade. Fortunately, they can. They have the standing relationships with customers. They have real estate at local low-latency locations. (And latency matters.) They can offer “cloud” and other services, by themselves or with the help of Amazon, Google and others already in that business.
I see hope for Verizon on this front. They seem a bit more clueful than the others. I don’t for Comcast. Their moves toward buying big “content” companies (e.g. NBC), and locking up of content offerings (e.g. local sports) inside their own piping systems, compromise the public utility nature of their Internet service.
In the long run, still, that’s what we’ll have. Public data utilities. The winners will recognize that. The losers won’t. Meanwhile, most of us, along with our Internet providers, are losing.