Big Cable falls into wormhole to alternate universe, sends back blog post about USA's amazing broadband In a striking example of corporate gaslighting, the US cable industry's trade association, the NCTA, claims that the defining characteristic of the US broadband market is competition. "Competition isn't just the rule in television, it defines broadband markets as well," a new post by the organization argues. "In spite of …
And don't expect any help from the FCC/FTC. They'll buy the ISP line and ignore what the provider is actually doing. I tried fighting with Frontier because they claimed in their advertising our speed was "up to 6MBPS" with the option for two faster speeds, all via ADSL. Yea, right. Our normal speed is slower than we were getting in Tanzania via a USB dongle that used the local cell phone network. And that was back in 2010.
I first read "88 percent of American consumers can choose from at least two wired internet service providers" as "88 American consumers can choose from at least two wired internet service providers" and I thought, yeah, that's actually about right.
But of course of those two providers, one is a cable provider that charges twice as much if you don't bundle TV and phone and an alarm system with your Internet, charges you $10 monthly for renting a cable box you can pick up for $100 on eBay, limits your throughput if you exceed a few gigs/month, then adds below-the-line fees to jack up your bill well beyond the advertised price. The other is DSL artificially limited to 6M down/768K up at a price point disproportionately high per unit bandwidth compared to the cable provider, though the monthly fees are lower (even after adding their own below-the-line fees), though they'll be happy to sell you 12M down for about what it costs for cable. So only one of them even qualifies as broadband. If you call either company's customer service you end up in menu hell, then on hold for 15 minutes or more; you talk to somebody with an incomprehensible accent who tries harder to upsell you than to resolve your problem. Then they schedule a visit where you're required to stay home all day, even though the problem turns out to be in a switching station 5 miles away and nobody actually has to show up to your house.
And if the problem is that you lose connection every time it rains, the first thing they want to try is a replacement modem which for which they charge you $60 for overnight shipping without warning.
It turns out that the DSL is unreliable because the phone company buried the cables and an unsealed junction box 30 years ago and haven't touched it since. It takes 3 weeks and two tries for them to dig it up and replace it with another junction box, seal this one with black electrician's tape, before burying it again.
The only mitigating factor is they can't charge you for the work, but the field tech tries to lecture you on how much better service you'd get if you were dealing with them directly instead of through a third party. You know, one with real customer service and no artificial throttling.
NOT THAT I AM BITTER.
Exactly... oh and then there's the "name change game" that comes with an increase in prices but not service. Yeah.. I have two... crappy cable company or even worse DSL from the phone company that is no where near the advertised speeds. There's some fine print about "distance from the "office" and it's less than 1 mile. Where I am, it's approximately 3 miles and I live in-town not in the country.
With a well designed game latency shouldn't be an issue. I used to play over a satellite connection. Then you just hide and shoot from where they least expect you to be. I also found some nice little bugs in certain games that made it possible to be invisible in just the right places. Bug hunting is a lot of fun. As long as you don't squish the bug you can squish the enemies.
I don't game anymore though. Too much real work to do. I have been considering it right now since the University is on semester break. No clue what games are the best for strategic thinking.
One of my favourite games was Dungeon Master on the Amiga.
And mine. For strategy I've fallen in love with Europa Universalis and the other games from Strategy First. Play China if you're feeling masochistic. Hard, but fun. They all seem labors of love that rely on our community support (i. e. no copy protection). I don't game nearly as much as I used too. That's down to physical problems. EU is easy to break from if needed.
NB: I can here the chains clanking as the portcullis door slowly lifts up. Even now.
I don't know what you're talking about, I'm paying $100 a month for TV, phone and unlimited usage Internet. Both bell and Rogers offered me similar deals, except Rogers offers 150Mbps vs 100. Though they are giving me 1Gbps for the first 6 months. I used to pay for 300Mbps but that's overkill, I'd rather just pay less.
I live in a little town not far outside San Francisco where TFA rightly says there is gigabit fibre to be had, but out where I live you're lucky to get either dialup or Comcast.
I've got Comcast, *THREE* MiBps, and pay $50+/month *without* the modem rental fee. I purchased my own over a year ago so I could shave that $10/month rental fee off my bill, but Comcast seems to enjoy "charges, fees, surcharges, & taxes" the bill up until I'm paying far more than the advertised price.
When you try to complain about the craptastic speeds, Comcast claims the ads specify "speeds UP TO" & that "network conditions will effect speeds". Yes, true, but when the fastest I've ever had was barely 4MiBps & they keep trying to get me to upgrade to their 50MiBps service, I counter punch with "If you can't even deliver a reliable 3MiBps to my home, what makes you think I buy your BS about being able to provide 50? Prove it. Deliver 50 for a month, reliably, consistantly, *MINIMUM* speeds, and THEN I'll consider upgrading. Until you prove you can actually do that, there's no way in hell I'm giving you even more money."
Bitter? Me? Fuck yes.
Competition? I've heard of it too, but it doesn't exist in my neck of the woods... and I live so close to central downtown that I can walk to the telco office to pay my bills in under ten minutes (stupid traffic lights & drivers that think pedestrians are targets... grrrrr)
*Sigh*
Meanwhile here in the UK... we generally get a choice of, erm, two providers. Most of the time, although if you're in a city and can afford it then you can get business lines that are neither of these and genuinely separate. However as a consumer and not a business if you do get a choice then generally you may choose from Virgin Media or BT. If you think you're getting a line from somebody else it's usually just reselling over the BT infrastructure. The same BT that dragged its heels on ADSL technology to extract more money from its cash cow leased line business and where investment in "the last mile" is usually zero.
I live in Connecticut and my internet has always been terrible. After 20 years I finally bought a dual WAN router. WAN1 uses wireless to a cell tower and WAN2 uses ADSL. Now if one provider goes down I can continue working on the second WAN connection.
I experienced the same BS Jeffery Nonken experienced. I had a DSL outage for 3 Days with Frontier DSL. Customer service was awful. Everyone goes through their service script and nobody really knows how to troubleshoot anything.
Now my internet is up all the time because I have two providers. I'll pay more for internet to save my sanity.
I live in a semi-rural village of about 1000 people in the USA. When walking in the middle of town at night you can hear the cows lowing at the edge of town...
Our telephone provider (TDS) provided levels up to 5 Mbps service until something broke, and the service level for the village degraded. Instead of fixing it, they went to offering only 1 Mbps service for $50/month before other fees. In the village 5 miles down the road, they offered up to 50 Mbps service. The difference between the two villages? Our television cable company only offered analog service. Their cable company offered digital service. I would get advertising for 5 Mbps service from TDS for $15/month, call in and be told that my location did not qualify since 5 Mbps service was not offered. I responded with, OK, how about 1 Mbps service at $15/month. They replied with, sorry, you need to have 5 Mbps available in your area to qualify for the offer. Gotta love monopolies.
This went on for years. Finally our cable company decided to try and scoop up some of that business, but because of all the FCC red tape they had to file for permits, etc. TDS, of course, keeps an eye on these things and 2 months before the cable company was allowed to offer digital service, TDS amazingly fixed the broken equipment and started offering 50 Mbps service.
So even SOME competition helps...
"So why does the NCTA imagine it can get away with such blatant falsehoods, selling people on the idea that everything is great, that consumers' own experience is wrong, and the broadband market is "defined by competition"?"
Because here in 'Murica up is down, black is white, and the emperor has no clothes.
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