 deadzonedPremium
join:2005-04-13
Baton Rouge, LA | Depressing. It's pretty depressing of a report overall. We could be doing so much better if we were not so at the mercy of big business.
Note - I am not saying that it's totally to blame, but I think a large portion of blame falls at their feet, followed by the government for failing to regulate the market better.
I'm happy with what I have, but I sure wouldn't mind more!  | |
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 | | | Re: Depressing. I suppose you are right. It does fall primarily at the feet of big business. Then again the other option would be to have the government run the telecom industry like they do in Japan. And seeing as how the government can't even run itself I don't think things would be as good as they are now if they did run it. | |
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| | | You can't legislate things to become cheaper than the cost to produce. Well you can...but you end up with producers producing less. Have people learned nothing from price controls?
New equipment for broadband is expensive. Most of these other country's never had a lot of legacy equipment to replace or to even maintain so them leapfrogging the US is a given. Not to mention the relative density. | |
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| | | | Re: Depressing. Hogwash. Most europeans markets have been deregulated by the government, thereby fostering more competition. This has nothing to do with some kind of government run telecom business and has everything to do with the regulator doing its job, which is to foster competition.
People have a hard time seeing past their preconceived ideas apparently... | |
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| | | | | Re: Depressing. 'People have a hard time seeing past their preconceived ideas apparently'
Yes, indeed. You have the preconceived notion that regulation makes the market better.
Goverment mandated competition doesn't help the market. We had a whole decade of regulatory created competition to prove that canard wrong. | |
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| | | | Ahrenl
join:2004-10-26
North Andover, MA | Re: Depressing. So your contention is that government provided wire-line monopolies make the market better?
This market already has regulation, it just needs to be done properly. The question of more/less is hyperbole. We need more good regulation, and less bad regulation. | |
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| | | | | | | Re: Depressing. Wheres the gov't monopoly? They all ended in 1984. | |
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| | | | | | | | Re: Depressing. So, instead of one big monopoly, you have several smaller monopolies that won't intrude on each other's territories? ... | |
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| | | | | | | | | Re: Depressing. So you're saying that if you live in at&t territory you can only get service from at&t? You know that's false. | |
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| | | | | | | | | | Re: Depressing. For pots service? Yes.
For broadband? Me, personally, yes. | |
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| | | | | | | | | | | Re: Depressing. POTS has competition from cellular and VOIP. You may not think that they do...the FCC may not think they do but in the marketplace they certainly do. | |
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| | | | | | | | | Chair
join:2002-04-08
San Francisco, CA | Re: Depressing. And how does Cellular and VOIP relate to DSL? | |
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| | | | | | | | | | | Re: Depressing. They relate the POTS. That's why I said specifically when the prior post said POTS, I referenced POTS in my rebuttal. It's Engligh 101. If the prior post referenced DSL I would have made a reply referencing it. | |
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| | | | | | | | | | | Funny, I didn't know there was competitive cell service back in 1984! | |
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| | | | | | Ahrenl
join:2004-10-26
North Andover, MA | The government monopoly (or oligopoly more correctly) is that it is not possible to build competing wireline services because of physical limits to Public ROW space. That is the government wire-line monopoly (oligopoly). There is no widely available competition in wireline broadband. Satelite and wireless are still not comparable.
Since the government MUST provide wireline monopolies (oligopolies) because no one wants 1,000 different networks wired over their neighborhoods, they also must provide effective and fair regulation for those networks. ANY business that uses the public domain as a profit center can and should be subject to some additional regulation. If you're a private company, using private funding, operating on private land/assets then you're free to operate under the normal regulatory environment. | |
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| | | $3.18 is decent!
FOLKS, Lets start looking at these three!!!
Labor
Upgrades
Density | |
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| Reviews:
 ·Comcast
 ·CenturyLink
| In 1995 I had SprintION - 10MB SDSL (S=Synchronous, same speed in both directions) and 4 Digital (VoIP) Phonelines for $150 a month and NO service problems for the two years that I had them. At the time Qwest was being a butt and just after the Feds dealt with line sharing. Qwest said no access and Sprint said it would be easier to go away other than fight. So bye, bye. That was about the time that ADSL came out and marketing and pricing took a serious turn and not in the consumers favor. ADSL (A=Asynchronous, different speeds in each direction) was the new and expensive toy on the market and if you want SDSL you have to pay out the . . . . Not to mention speed, that really went to pot. Needless to the term "high Speed" is so generic that you really need to do your homework. It can mean anything from faster than dial-up to really fast. But one casualty has been the T1. It used to be the nomdeplume for "the" premium Internet connection. Today, my ADSL is faster and cheaper. This all has developed only since the providers realized there was a product there that they could really screw us with. | |
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4 edits | Did they include Bellsouth/AT&T? I pay $37.95 for 1.5 Mbit/s...or about $25.30 per Mbit/s...that puts me out of the US "range" on this graphic.
The current price is lower ($32.95, yet still about $22 per Mbit/s) but I have an old discount I'm locked into that makes the overall phone bill cheaper.
And the "lite" tier is almost $27 per Mbit/s!
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OASAASLLS | |
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| | Dont Expect Change There two things you can count on in the coming years in the U.S.
1. Slower broadband deployment due to cost & political corruption & the fact that unless VZ, TW, or ATT can nickel & dime every last cent out of you forget a fiber pipe. It's all about $$$ & unless thousands of people in that area can afford it forget it.
2. Alternative fuels, Americans myself included have no interest in this topic. We will just keep buying gas until it hits $6.00 a gallon & then maybe....just maybe we as a nation will wake up to alternative fuels. | |
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|  BF69Premium
join:2004-07-28
Camden, TN | Re: Dont Expect Change said by Techie714:2. Alternative fuels, Americans myself included have no interest in this topic. We will just keep buying gas until it hits $6.00 a gallon & then maybe....just maybe we as a nation will wake up to alternative fuels. Like what BS, like ethenol which is already making the cost of food go up because corn is being used for FUEL and not FOOD. And farmers that were growing other crops are growing corn spefically for ethenol? What good is saving a fricken quarter a gallon on fuel if you're food bill is 25% higher? | |
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| |  TechieZeroTools Are Using MePremium
join:2002-01-25
Gibsonton, FL | Re: Dont Expect Change LOL -- but but but...it's good for the ENVIRONMENT.  | |
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| | | | | Re: Dont Expect Change And LOLOL guess what -- it's actually not because it takes more fossil fuels to produce a gallon of ethanol biofuel than it does to just put a gallon of regular in your tank. But don't let the Exxon Mobil -- Oops, I mean the gov't -- know you're onto them. | |
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| | | said by Techie714:There two things you can count on in the coming years in the U.S. 2. Alternative fuels, Americans myself included have no interest in this topic. We will just keep buying gas until it hits $6.00 a gallon & then maybe....just maybe we as a nation will wake up to alternative fuels. Corn based Ethanol is driving food prices up. Besides, I seen a report last night about how it requires almost as much fossil fuel to make the same amount of Ethanol. Ethanol is not gona replace fossil fuel use. | |
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| | Ahrenl
join:2004-10-26
North Andover, MA
1 edit | Re: Dont Expect Change Well, that's actually some industry FUD. Brazil creates surplus ethanol, and uses the output to power the refineries that create more. We just haven't reached an economies of infrastructure yet. Also they use sugar cane, as opposed to corn.
The real danger to corn based ethanol production is the type of corn that is best suited to production, doesn't produce a feed stock waste (which can be used to feed livestock) and depletes the top soil so that it can not be reused indefinitely. Hopefully the pipeline technologies (the one that can make ethanol out of plain grass for instance) will become useable. | |
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| | | Reviews:
·Comcast
| Re: Dont Expect Change Brazilian ethanol production is almost entirely government-underwritten; also, most of it is from sugar beets (and thus helps prop up sugar prices; Brazil is also a major source of such beets). While the US is also a sugar producer (from both sugar beets and cane), we grow *far* more corn and other grains (hence the use of grain in the US for ethanol production). Without the diversion of corn for ethanol, at-the-silo corn prices (especially for human consumption) have been at historic lows; farmers had actually been paid *not* to grow corn!
Actually, the United States is the specific reason why Brazil even *has* an ethanol industry; we pretty much killed the export market for Brazilian sugar stock (from both cane and beets) via our own trade policies (heavily weighted to favor both domestic production and Caribbean sources; NAFTA/CAFTA certainly didn't help matters any). With the largest export market for sugar stock closed off, what was Brazil to do? | |
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approval from:
Linklist 
thumbs down from:
Necronomikro
| As a stockholder...... i expect them to charge as much as possible while meeting demand in the marketplace environment they are in. in japan or korea, perhaps pennies per mb is all they can get away with, but here in the US, if demand is being met, why lower the price? | |
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| deadzonedPremium
join:2005-04-13
Baton Rouge, LA | Re: As a stockholder...... Meeting Demand?! Yours, as a stockholder, or what the "Marketplace Environment" actually wants as opposed to what you THINK it needs? | |
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| axus
join:2001-06-18
Washington, DC | Yeah and as a regulator, the FCC and FTC are supposed to foster competition so that *opolies can't get away with so many of our pennies.
The fact that the price is higher here means something is wrong with our competitive structure. | |
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| | | | Re: As a stockholder...... 'The fact that the price is higher here means something is wrong with our competitive structure.'
Water is expensive in the Sahara Desert. What regulatory mistakes are being made there? | |
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| | | | | Re: As a stockholder...... So, available bandwidth in the US is a natural resource as scarce as water in the Sahara desert? | |
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| | | | | | Re: As a stockholder...... It's a resource. It's scarcity depends on a multitude of factors but it's a resource the same. | |
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| | | As a consumer, I would prefer to get quality service for less money, and stop pandering to the stockholders by not upgrading and instead maintaining 20-50 year old lines... | |
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Reviews:
·Comcast
| Apples and Oranges I tired to download the report but it is too large. Still I see a slight of hand in this report. One cannot compare the effects of government regulation to that of free market investment in broadband.
The issue is the hidden cost of Government broadband since there report does not account taxes paid or cost of issuing bond that must be repaid. In addition there is the problem of lack of spending discipline in government where government tend to pay more for infrastructure than it needs to and for a system that has more capacity than people really need.
I also wonder if the report is rigged by ignoring the market for cheep lower speed broadband. I know many who feel 14.99 for 756K is enough. | |
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 ColorBASIC8-bit FunPremium
join:2006-12-29
Corona, CA
1 edit | Boy I really missed those daily "Why America sucks" articles Welcome back Karl Bode ! | |
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bohn
join:2006-05-30
Scarborough, ON | Canada Raised Rates Sharply Socialism Is Very Wrong! I'll tell you i've had a gut full of this country called Canada and its' commusist policies. It's so bad Rogers cable is useless for al but browsing the internet. Of course many sites are blocked because of Jewish issues in Canada (like i could care less)so you really can't even browse the internet. All p2p is blocked even encrypted traffic. No newsgroups not even text ones paid for by yourself newsgroups don't work and email may work on a good day. Ted Rogers had the nerve to raise rates 25 yes twenty five percent while the rest of the world saw a 17 percent decrease in the monthly internet rates. | |
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| | | Re: Canada Raised Rates Sharply Socialism Is Very Wrong! Bohn, I know plenty of people in Canada and p2p / Bt aren't blocked. Your case is isolated. While many isps DO HAVE caps, they do not black the traffic....You sure have one melodramatic post.... | |
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| | bohn
join:2006-05-30
Scarborough, ON | Re: Canada Raised Rates Sharply Socialism Is Very Wrong! Did you even read what i stated? | |
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| bohn
join:2006-05-30
Scarborough, ON | Might i add Ted did this while the Canadian dollar appreciated almost 20 percent against the US dollar. Meaning his costs dropped substantially. | |
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| | | | Re: Canada Raised Rates Sharply Socialism Is Very Wrong! I am not defending his price hike. I am defending the fact you make a broad and generalized statement that is very untrue. First, p2p, BT and file sharing is NOT blocked by many ISPS in Canada. Second, I do contend that many however, issue user caps. This seems to be common place between the U.S. and Canada. Yet, not all do this once again. The fact that you are blocked leads me to think it might just be your city since I know people in several parts of Canada who have not had such a problem. My 2 cents. | |
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| | Leader of Innovation.... What's that saying.. We're the leader of innovation, but last for implementation.... Ah yes, that about sums it up in a nutshell. | |
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1 edit | Re: Leader of Innovation.... I ask the same question over and over on differnet forums but here goes.
I have 342 Houses in my area. If half of that many people got even the SLOWEST DSL service from ATT ATT would make 30k dollars a year. Isnt that enough demand for some supply. Once again distance is about 5 ish miles. I think they built out to one of our schools. Five or four. Wouldnt that many people subscribing quickly pay for itself. Also like ive said before, they went down to even lower population areas.
Edit: The lower pop area they went to has a population of 160 Vs our 600 and 93 houses versus our 342 stated above. | |
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| | confusion between mbps and MBps Can you clear up between Mbps and MBps?
4.8Mbps is megabits. The graph has megabytes.. a big difference. | |
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