wtansill
Ncc1701
join:2000-10-10
Falls Church, VA
| Re: Yea But......... This may at times be the case, but that's not what we're seeing here. When "Ma Bell" was heavily regulated, the United States was widely acknowledged to have the best phone system in the world.
Fast forward a few years:
1) Universal Service is dying (despite the fact that we all pay the fee on our phone bill).
2) Many times the service we pay for is sub-par.
Case in point -- I spent yesterday afternoon at a friend's house helping her untangle some computer-related issues. She has Verizon DSL, advertised at 768k. I ran a speed test here on DSL Reports. She is actually getting 122K down and 133K up -- or just over 15% of her advertised speed (yes, yes -- I know that VZ advertises "up to" 768k). And that's after running some of the tweak tests here and using Dr. TCP to adjust settings. She mentioned that whenever someone has to work on the outside pole, they say it's amazing that her phone works at all, indicating to me that the external infrastructure is falling apart. This BTW is in Northern Virginia, in a close-in suburb of Washington DC.
Please -- remind me again how good deregulation is for us?
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That which does not kill me merely prolongs the agony. |
