FCC Adopts New Historic Internet Rules

How does anyone really know what the new regs are? They weren't made public.

Shouldn't that give us some clue as to their nature?

Oh you and your fear mongering. Shouldn't you be in your hole hiding from Ebola still?

On a serious note: they will be closely watched, and it can be easily fixed by having congress write some law that isn't full of ***, but hey.

Putting your faith in Congress yea doesn't sound like a good idea.

^

I'm sure things will get better just wait till Hillary is in charge.

if you rely on a corrupt entity to save you from another corrupt entity you're gonna have a bad time

You don't have to have faith in them, you just have to have enough people behind the right ideas to scare them in to doing what you want. Before all this started the FCC was dancing to the ISP's tune and after an avalanche of complaints from millions, they noticed that voters care about this issue a lot and it made them spin a 180. As long as we continue to care about this issue and push it in the right direction with our kind letters informing them we'll not vote for them we'll be much better off than having just let the ISP's have their way and be unregulated.

I'll completely agree that more targeted rules would be nice but this is the quick first fix to ensure ***doesn't hit the fan before we can get decent regulations in place that pertain to how the internet works. Such regulations wouldn't even be needed if ISP's had enough real competition to keep them wanting to please customers. You either need real competition or strict regulation, otherwise the customer gets the short stick every time.

I don't see real competition people keep citing Google. They aren't going to stop being a search engine to become a ISP.

They're already both Fone, you drunkard.

Yea a few select cities doesn't count. If you think they will take over Comcast I'm afraid I got some bad news for ya !

They'll have more when they have access to utility infrastructure.

They are already an ISP, just so far a small one. And if they grow to be world wide, that does not mean they have to stop being a search engine to do so. That doesn't even make any sense.

The problem is that even for an entity with as much money as google has, it is very expensive to build infrastructure. This isn't like a lemonade stand outside. Any old kid can't walk up and start selling it for 5 cents cheaper than you. You have to spend billions to build out a system and THEN you have to get clients to want to pay for it. It's hard to do these things so even Google requires some strict city help to get cities approved for them to come in. This is why there are so few ISPs and most of them are just resellers of the same damn lines. They have two separate faces but it's the same shitty old copper. There's also been so many damn rules and laws made to entice providers like AT&T, Comcast and TWC to come in to their towns that getting anything else started is illegal. It's tough and that means very little competition. And this is why we need regulation to protect consumers.

Yea I don't see any of that happening anytime soon.

Verizon Fios is literally 30 miles from me and I probably will never get it.

I'm not going to hold my breath for Google to come save the day.

I'll pray to Google every night as they are all powerful though.

I'm 1 mile. ONE single *** mile from Fios. And I'll never get it either because Verizon and TWC both wanna make more money so they won't expand in to "enemy" territory.

I'm literally going to have to decide where to move based on what internet is available to get anything decent.

But regardless, it's already happening. FCC struck down the ISP endorsed bans on municipal networks and is giving access to utility poles to others. This means that a lot of doors are going to open for cities, counties and states to make it easier for themselves to put up their own networks or to let providers like Google in. But yeah, it's gunna be a slow process anyway, especially with how the ISP's are reacting with lawsuits.

Well that's the thing. This new agreement changes nothing; which is a good thing, considering the alternative was essentially letting ISPs have free reign on regulating bandwidth allocation between the services within the internet and end users by essentially making a "*** you or pay up" scenario. Instead, it doesn't matter how many GBs you spend on streaming movies, downloading games, or reading articles, as all data is delivered and treated equally regardless of data necessary to use those services.

Commercial fiber runs virtually under my house and I'll never have access to it even though it was laid by the city, since none of the ISP's are willing to make the relatively small investment to license usage of it for residential. Why would they? There's no other game in town, why shell out money to provide a better service to your customers when nobody else is going to either?

Maybe everyone move to Chattanooga for faster cheaper internet? :D

Heard its only $70/month for gigabit internet and $58 for 100 megabits :D

I hope this makes faster and cheaper net available for where I live.

Currently paying around $80/month for 1.5mbit DSL. I forget what my upload is, but I don't think it's even half of my downstream.

This is the fastest you can get here and there is no such thing as cable tv/internet where I live. If you want anything other than the oldschool antenna broadcast, you have to get satellite tv.

I personally just use the internet for all my TV (Netflix, torrents, streams, etc.), but for the majority it's satellite as the only option.

Also, our only option for DSL is through a company called CenturyLink. They don't throttle and their connection is fairly good quality (low ping in games (40-90), rarely ever get less than max on download). But god damn the costs and slow speed are annoying.

Nothing like taking a couple days just to download 1 game.


As for the XI stuff. Played this game on 360kbit for a few years with no issue on lag. Patches took forever but that is a different story. Once we got the 1.5mbit, not much changed as far as how the game played went. Never had "lag" in dynamis or any other major event. Downstream isn't everything when it comes to games. If you have a high downstream but the quality is ***, your ping is gonna be bad and you're gonna have a bad time. Inversely you can have a slower speed and really good quality, thus giving you a decent ping and no issues.

You would have a point if TWC and Comcast were the only 2 ISPs in the nation. Sadly (for you apparently), they aren't.

Competition is a good thing, but I guess people like to *** about only having one option when they only see the one option. Never mind that other options are out there, they refuse to look for them because they rather ***.

K. Granted, fiber optics isn't the standard here in San Antonio yet, and when it does, we will all have higher speed here in San Antonio, and I can't wait for that to happen.

But what does that have to do with competition? I have already proved that there are more than 20 different providers of internet in San Antonio. I guess you skimmed over that post because if you actually read it, you wouldn't have an argument...


Let me ask you, what is an "obscene" amount of money, in your mind?

Is it 1.3%?

Or is it 3.0%?

I'm guessing your answer is: If anyone is making $.01, it's an obscene amount of money.

I guess the concept of regional monopolies escape you?

Your link proved that there 10 potential services based off availability in that list of 20.

That little green bar means more than the volume of names of businesses. Of those 10, 2 are actual providers while the remaining 8 fall under wireless which is cellular/LTE.

What your link proved was that you only have 2 available ISPs in the San Antonio area.

You actually ever try to switch providers? Have you looked at your "20" options and actually seen how many of them are a viable replacement for what you use right now?

You have TWC right? I bet you do because that is the ONLY viable option for decent speeds in your area at a usable price. Just look at the site you linked.

http://broadbandnow.com/Texas/San-Antonio

You see that availability column? Other than TWC and AT&T's shitty DSL do you see any other options that aren't mobile? No, their aren't any. You don't even have half the options you think you do, you just see something that fits your agenda so you parade it around without even understanding how it works. Plus... most of those are just resellers using the same damn lines.

And no, mobile data is NOT a viable replacement for home internet for modern day. Data caps, throttling and price are preventing problems. The US needs a fast, consistent quality internet for everyone so we can innovate and make amazing services and be more connected but we don't have that.

And I just don't understand, if you actually had competition then why does Google Fiber coming to town make any difference? If you had real competition then the other providers in the area would have to fight for your business. They would have to provide great speeds at a fair price. They clearly already have the ability to give gigabit, but they aren't because they haven't had to because there is nothing to take their business away yet. But Google coming in DOES affect their bottom line. If they don't fight for their customers they will lose nearly all of them. Hell, they probably still will lose many of them even if they do put up a fight.

If I get more time I'll go over the money they make.

That availability bar is misleading. It shows how many people have the service, not where it is available.

Don't believe me?

The service is available to everyone, but only 11% of the population actually uses it. So, the availability is much higher than you think....

No, because I'm happy with the service I have now.

No, I have Clear, which at the time wasn't part of Sprint. Notice that Sprint is on that listing that people seem to ignore? Oh wait, they choose to ignore it because it's an option other than the major ISPs....

You dismiss all other options because it's not landline? Have you even attempted to try wireless?

By the responses here by several people, nobody has. That would explain why people automatically assume that there's only one/two providers.....

I have wireless internet, not through a phone carrier, and I don't have caps on my internet. Maybe because I actually did the research and found something worthwhile. I suggest that you do the same if you are so displeased with your ISP....

Because Google actually provided the fiber optics in the area. Prior to Google coming to Austin, there were almost no fiber optics options available. Now that there is, guess what happened to speeds?

Go for it. I gave you their annual statements. I'm sure you will go the "gross income" route in your argument...

***. Mine says I have Verizon Fios available but I don't. I've tried. I call every few months with hope that they may have expanded but it NEVER happens. If what you claim was true, I would have access. Also, How the hell does 96% of the area have TWC AND 91% have ATT UVERSE? Are they buying 2 connections?

If you're okay with a high latency connection that's fine by me. But I like to play games where latency matters a lot. So no, wireless isn't an viable option for me. I'm glad some people are complacent with the shitty state of our internet but I'm not. We've used Clear in several of our offices for work as a temp measure while other services were being installed. The latency is too high and the connection is far more unstable than wired.

The only way I'll get fiber optic internet is if I start my own ISP !


Kickstarter ISP here I come !

A huge segment of why competition was so stagnant aside from organized oligopoly between heads of every major provider, was the fact that starting up a new ISP service was extremely difficult and expensive. As it required relying on existing infrastructure which depending on what city or region you're hoping to provide to is in pitiful shape, or at best, non-optimal. Not to mention you had to make sure you weren't piggybacking on existing services' lines or else you'd face hell of a penalty. Also it requires approval from heads of municipal sources within the city/town which more often than not are already bought and paid for by the big boys.

So with all the existing expenses including infrastructural and political woes, any humble up and comer simply can't provide consistency or anything at all without carrying that overhead over to the end user's prices.

You wait till I make my own ISP it will be great.

Make it fiber and have it come my way.

Sorry folks this is one of those issues I fall squarely on the left with. Net neutrality is required in order for free open internet to continue. But first let me explain a few things about the situation that most probably wouldn't understand.

Previously, ISP's and other internet providers were not considered utilities and could operate how ever they pleased. This is ideal in a free market situation and I would typically support this. The problem here though is one of physics. See the physical wires that the current data providers use are themselves utilities and protected from competition. You can't have two cable providers in the same area because the rights to run physical cable along your roads are only given to one utility. You can't two local telephone providers because the rights to run those copper lines are only given to one utility. So both the cable and telephone companies enjoy a state sponsored monopoly on the rights to distribute public TV and telephone service. This is exactly how power, electric, gas and waste disposal work. You can't have two power companies running two separate sets of physical power wires down your roads and to your houses. So while free market is in effect, its in name only as both the cable and phone company enjoy monopolistic powers. The consumer (demand) doesn't have any choices, they can't choose to go with another provider that offers more competitive service (supply). So we have a free market that is no longer free, it's broken. For years we've grappled with this problem, going back and forth as the rest of the world passed us by. Telecom providers have followed their natural capitalistic instincts and gone with profit over service because there is no incentive to provide better service. People are going to pay you whatever you want for your internet regardless of the service because your the only game in town. This isn't an attack on free market capitalism, it's just what happens when you don't have competition.

So now that data carriers are regulated as utilities, like power, water cable TV, phone, gas, and waste disposal, the local government has the ability to negotiate with them for a better service or open up access of the physical infrastructure to competitors. Data ISP's can no longer gouge consumers for the same reason water providers and power providers can't, the voters of that local government now have a say in the matter.

Now this isn't an ideal situation, ideally the physical wiring would be owned / controlled by the local government and open to contractual bidding where ISP's pay a license fee for access to that physical infrastructure and the consumers get to chose which data ISP provides their gateway to the internet. This is similiar to how South Korea and Japan work. In Korea the government provided loans to KT (Korea Telecom), a private company, to build the nations high speed fiber backbone under the condition that KT would then lease those lines to anyone ISP at the same rate it costs them to use it. So now I have 100Mbps internet service in my apartment and can choose between three different data providers (LG, KT and SKT). Because those three are constantly competing against each other for customers, there is a plethora of options, deals and services offered at a competitive price. They are now in the process of upgrading everything to gigabit internet because the demand for IPTV (yes they now use that same infrastructure for regular TV) and media services is soaring. And for this amazing speed, this gigantic pipe to the internet I pay all of 33,600 KRW a month (about $32 USD).

That is how much the data ISP's in the USA have abused their state sponsored monopoly. That is how much latitude the FCC and USG have given them, how long the consumers have tolerated anti-competitive practices. I'm a free market guy, I love capitalism and the immense wealth it brings, and I also value pragmatism over ideology.

#Note#
Google is bypassing the state sponsored monopoly by installing a third infrastructure dedicated to data. This has become a regulatory nightmare as they need a sh!t ton of permits, leases and paperwork in order to install that infrastructure on public roads and sometimes they can't do it because the local telephone company owns the poles and refuses to apply them to purchase space on them. The places that Google installs it's services are usually chosen because their local laws enable Google to obtain all this paperwork with less hassle or potential for a full block.

And we can all now thank Verizon for having the gall to sue the FCC over their demand for keeping their already shitty/greedy practices.
Quite the domino to tip over eh?