Stuck paying for your apartment's crummy internet? FCC boss Rosenworcel wants to help One of the oddities of American apartment living is "bulk billing" – a practice that sees landlords determine which ISP serves the entire complex and requires residents to use that provider even if they would prefer a rival. If that ISP is a dud, tough luck: you literally have to live with it – but maybe not for much longer. …
This is all great but now it means each provider is going to have to run new wiring to each apartment?
I see it as improved choice yes, but possibly not lower cost, since each apartment has to make its own contract at retail? Maybe someone with insight can contribute to their current bulk situation.
If the apartment cabling was set up right, having multiple provider choices would not be that difficult. That's assuming that each apartment has its ow Ethernet (or fiber optic) cable to the appropriate utility closet. where it would a matter of moving one end of a patch cord. Chances are that for most apartments, arranging for choice in providers will be a royal PITA. I wouldn't be surprised to see the rule having opt-outs where it would be too expensive to upgrade the wiring.
I do know someone who works for a company that specializes in utility billing for apartments and condos, would be interesting to see what their take is on the matter.
That's a big "IF".
Yes, IF the building were cabled with (say) Cat6 cabling back to a services room, it would be practical to put a 2nd connection in and move people by moving the patch lead. Even better if it's fibre with it's higher data rates.
But I suspect there will be things like proprietary and/or shared cable services in many places - and with that, it's going to be a right royal p.i.t.a. to change things. Either the owner would need to recable the building to provide individual cables to each apartment, or the incumbent supplier would need to reengineer their network to allow it to pass traffic from/to a competitor's router co-located in the services room - like that's going to work without "accidentally" having performance or reliability problems.
The third option is potentially the worst - but it's what tend to happen in many places. Each provider puts their own cables in using whatever risers/ducting routes are available - and often leaving a rats nest of cabling along every corridor. Of course, every time someone changes provider, new cabling goes in and the old never gets removed.
The way it works down south in Americaland, for most residents, is that city X / rural district Y gives a certain utilities a service monopoly; in exchange, those utilities are allegedly-government-regulated. Electricity service, water service, natural gas service, sewer service, garbage-removal service, telephone service, and television cable service are all examples of these. Sometimes the "utility company" is not a for-profit company, but instead is owned/run by the government. In a major metropolitan American city I visited, the city owned/ran the water utility and the sewage utility, but none of the others. In a smaller American city I visited, the citizens had formed a "utility district" which owned and operated infrastructure (electricity generation/distribution and water treatment/distribution) for the benefit of all those citizens, and the government granted that "utility district" monoplies on the services they provided. Interestingly, citizens of that utility district enjoy the lowest electricity prices in their state (geographical political division) -- but that's not a panacea. You can have a collectively-owned infrastructure whose services will cost far more than those of a comparable for-profit company, if the collective puts idiots in charge and/or hires incompetent employees
Let's take the simple(r) example of a single-family dwelling owned by the family living there. Their possible choices (or non-choices) of Internet provider depend upon the infrastructure mode they choose.
(1) Dial-up internet service over plain old telephone service. A wide variety of providers existed. You needed an external or internal modem for your computer. Unless you had a second P.O.T.S. telephone line, you could not simultaneously "Internet"* and "talk on the (land-line) phone." There's very little dial-up now, due to (a) much-faster options, and (b) telephone companies (intentionally?) killing off modem use by their adoption of multiplexed digital connections, which do not support the audio fidelity required by modems.
(2) Internet service via local-monopoly telephone company (A)DSL line(s). The local-monopoly telephone company is your one-and-only potential service provider. You can "Internet" and "talk on the (land-line) phone" simultaneously.
(3) Internet service via local-monopoly TV cable company ADSL-over-broadband cable. You need a DOCSIS-compliant cable-modem (cable modem + router + WAP + etc. in one box). The local-monopoly cable company is your one-and-only potential service provider. You can "Internet" and "talk on the (land-line) phone" simultaneously.
(4) Internet service via satellite. Expensive, and laggy. There are multiple possible providers (StarLink, Hughes, Telenor, DiSH, etc.), and no (yet, AFAIK) provider exclusivity/monopoly arrangements. You need a microwave satellite dish antenna, a "magic box" (transceiver/converter + router + WAP + etc. in one box), and a clear line-of-sight to your provider's satellite(s).
(5) Internet service via microwave link. Multiple possible providers, and no (yet, AFAIK) provider exclusivity/monopoly arrangements. You need a microwave-link dish antenna, a "magic box" (transceiver/converter + router + WAP + etc. in one box), and a clear line-of-sight to your provider's transceiver antenna(s), which is(are) mounted on top of some local hill or tall building.
Some American service areas have experimented with government-owned or service-area-owned cable- and Internet- providers of various types. These seem to have been successful, and also severely hammered-upon by privately-owned companies and consortia. Metric assloads of dollars have been spent by the opposition in lobbying and campaign-support (and outright bribery?) programs to suppress these experiments.
So ... with all that said, victims of bulk-billing, exclusive-Internet-provider arrangements can choose some alterrnate Internet providers, depending on what's on offer in their geographic area, which physical media are used by the monopoly Internet provider, and what makes sense. It does not make sense to "quit" using a bulk-billed, exclusive-Internet-provider which uses TV cable as their distribution media in favor of an alternate provider which also uses TV cable as their distribution medium, because the victim would be unable to arrange for a second, physical TV cable connection from the alternate provider, and that is because of the monopoly granted by the government to the provider the victim had just quit.
*I did not "verbify"# the noun "Internet," but that's how I've heard non-technical people talk about it.
#Nor did I "verbify" the noun, "verb" ...
Where I live in England:
Rubbish collection is carried out by the local council using council-employed staff and vehicles.
Water and sewage are "provided" by a government-sanctioned organised crime gang
For electricity, there is a monopoly cable provider, but I can theoretically choose which billing company I want to use.
Same would apply for gas if I had it.
For telephone, there are two companies that operate cables along my street - BT Openreach and City Fibre. Both of them allow me to select which ISP I want to access over those cables, and there is an actual genuine difference in the service the different ISPs provide. Other streets nearby additionally have the option of using Virgin Media cables.
There are 4 mobile providers + a load of MVSPs who use those providers networks
There is a fixed wireless provider
+ there is satellite, but probably not worth considering given the alternatives that are available.
The NC town I used to live in was also the power company - and charged 30% more per kWh than the actual utility. Apparently they started doing this back when there were no power lines going to the town (75+ years ago?) and that was how they convinced the utility to hook them up. These days they say "and the extra money means we have our own electrician so we get power back on quicker". Yeah, sure, that money ALL goes to one electrician AND it actually increases the speed. Uh-huh.
For apartment ISPs, often the apartment has set up wifi-based internet access you MUST pay for, whether you use it or not. For some reason (*cough* MONOPOLY *cough*) it's usually both more expensive and worse quality than other options. For a typical apartment, other viable options include:
* Phone line-based DSL. In some areas, this can be 30 Mbps down. There's usually at least 2 companies to choose from.
* Cable TV line-based. They claim higher speeds, but Spectrum/Time Warner isn't exactly honest or reliable, and is typically twice the price of everybody else. (There are no other cable providers.)
* 5G-based home unit. T-Mobile and Verizon both offer these here.
Note that none of these require running a new line; they all use existing lines or none at all.
I'd love to see the local municipality offer town-based broadband as an option. But it has to be an OPTION, not a requirement to use (or pay for) it.
I'd also love to see actual 100Mbps+ broadband, but none of the above actually provide it. ("Up to x speeds" can also include near zero.)
In my little section of the US, current options are: a so-so DSL connection from AT&T (formerly SBC, formerly PacBell); Cable Modem with at least 240Mbps down not sure if upload speed is greater than 10Mbps; fiber from Ting 930M down, 940M up; possibly mm-wave service from Verizon with about 300M down. Electric power and gas are from an "Investor owned utility" though the city offers to "sell power" A.K.A. the generation portion of the bill. Garbage is a commercial entity operating under a franchise, water and sewage are government districts that date back before the city was incorporated in 1986.
Needless to say, I'm using the Ting option - it boggles my mind that the data throughput is higher than the ECS transfer rate on a CDC 6000 series machine (10M 60 bit words per second). I have talked to people who have 10G or higher fiber optic connections in the area around UCSD.
How dare faceless bureaushits interfere with the glorious Free Market (Hallelujah!) by forcing choice on consumers when apartment complex owners are trying to do their residents a favor by removing the burden of needless decision-making. Thankfully, when God-Emperor Trump regains his office by the grace of God, he will smite heathens like Rosenworcel and banish them to the darkest reaches of Hell where they belong!
MAGA! YOLO!
What about cable TV monopolies in US cities? Often they’re the only real broadband ISPs in some cities, the phone companies are only offering crap Internet speeds. Unlike “socialist” France, where you might be able to choose between 6 or so providers offering 2 GB fiber for one-fifth of what I pay for 100MB cable.
Once your building is wired up by the likes of HyperOptic you are probably locked into that particular provider.
At least with OpenReach as a wholesaler you get a certain amount of choice on the ultimate service provider. Sure, the access infrastructure is the same, so a fault in the last mile stuffs you up regardless of who you are with. Thats inevitable, it wouldn't make any sense to have multiple lines run into each end premises any more than it would make sense to have multiple electricity supplies or water pipes. Service levels are intended to address that (although had more than my fair share of dumb/obstinate/competent OR technicians).
The kit in the building should be vendor neutral. If I want my HO "line" plugged into A&A's network then that should be possible.
The building in which I get Hyperoptic only has them for ultra-fast. There is still the option for xDSL but its quite far from the exchange and OR haven't seen fit to upgrade that part of East London to VDSL The best you get over the phone line is about 9Mbps on ADSL2 and obviously a paltry sub 1 megabit upload. So an effective monopoly in that entire area.
This is why I pay for two services, Zen for a routed block of IP4 and HO for the ultra-fast. HO used to assign relatively static public IP's but they switched to CGNAT some years back.
Hmm, what I probably want is L2TP service from AAISP, then I can get rid of the Zen connection.
My SSI Disability income is $943.00 a month. Legally, no one can help me by more than $20.00 a month.
No one but me is allowed to pay for my rent, utilities, or food. If my landlord made me pay for Cox cable & internet as part of the rent on a 600 square foot apt, I couldn't t afford it.
Instead, he charges me $700.00, not $900.00. I pay AT&T nothing for ACP internet; I have SafeLink Gov Benefit phone that my sister paid for, with free minutes; & I endure free antenna dumb TV.
Utilities basically are water, gas, electric. I get food stamps. I'm trying to get on wait list for income -based housing. I have Cancer.
Stepstone :-)
Imagine living in an apartment where you have rock solid fiber connectivity, only to be told that come next lease renewal you have no choice but to start paying for internet provided via decades-old coax from the incumbent cable company - for more than you're paying now. Don't want it? Tough - it's on your monthly bill regardless. Refuse to accept the additional terms in the lease renewal? Tough - move out. That's exactly what's happening to my daughter. She's moving out. These ever-expanding "gun to your head" sales tactics are becoming common across all market segments. The enshittification spreads like the parasite it is.
Down in my neck of the wood (Australia), we have the NBN which owns the physical lines. Myself, I am lucky in that I managed to score Fiber-to-the-kerb*. I then get to pick my ISP to supply me with the data through that phsyical cable and I pay the ISP for my access. The ISP pays the NBN based on the amount of traffic they want to push through the various cables around the country. I don't need to know what it is, because that cost baked in my ISP's fee and not added as a fee or tax or whatever on top.
Of course I could also go 5G or Satellite, but my location stinks for 5G reception and too many storms to make satellite worthwhile.
YMMV.
* For my American audience, this is not a mispelling. Kerb: a stone edging to a pavement or raised path. Curb: a check or restraint on something. So far as know, the USA uses curb for kerb - but then again, folks over there use check for cheque. <shrug>
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