Each time I see a NN post I'm generally too late and it's been run rampant with defenders of "light touch" regulation... no, just no. If the companies had competition, then, maybe. Sadly they're entrenched monopolies (and more are merging each day, further limiting choice). NN is the way to go.
Let's not forget, the monopoly exists because the FCC auctioned off the available frequency bands to these companies.
Let's not forget the US Govt blocked an attempted Sprint + T-Mobile merger to produce a viable third competitor in the space, ironically, in the name of competition.
We could have had a spread spectrum solution with open airwaves. We have with unlicensed WiFi frequency bands, and there's plenty of competition in that space. Well, at least until the FCC tries to meddle in that too.
"Light touch"? Yes. How about "no touch" or just "get out". Everything the FCC touches turns to a pile of ash and ruin. Where's my fiber optics? It's almost 2018. I live in a metro area with more than 1M people. Where's my fiber optics? This is ridiculous.
> Let's not forget the US Govt blocked an attempted Sprint + T-Mobile merger to produce a viable third competitor in the space, ironically, in the name of competition.
Not sure what you mean here. T-Mobile's efforts in the last few years (the "uncarrier" marketing push, among other things), has cemented their position as the "third competitor" already (in part due to the failed AT&T buyout), and AT&T and Verizon have been forced to offer better plans to compete with T-Mo's offerings. I don't see how a Sprint merger is necessary or useful to the competitive landscape at this time.
What I mean is T-Mobile + Sprint is still third by customer count. And not really a close third.
If competition is a problem, then ideally, the government would either allow a real third competitor, or in absence of that, break up the bigger two. They blocked the former and did not pursue the latter.
>I don't see how a Sprint merger is necessary or useful to the competitive landscape at this time.
Spectrum. Combined, they would be a force to be reckoned with.
> What I mean is T-Mobile + Sprint is still third by customer count. And not really a close third.
I don't know where you live, but in LA County I have as good (if not better) reception than Verizon.
I switched to T-Mobile (I think in 2013 or 2012) from Verizon and never looked back, in additional to good coverage the bill is always the same amount (it doesn't suspiciously grow month over month), they don't seem to make "mistakes" with my bill that cost me more, don't charge me if I go over quota (just slow down the access) and comes with free perks such as free texting and data even when traveling internationally.
The T-Mobile is actually considered a shitty (as treating consumers badly) service in Europe so I'm very glad that at least for now we do have competition and if T-Mobile will become too big, at least there might be a chance for Sprint to grow as well.
In my opinion Sprint right now is where T-Mobile was 5 years ago.
T-Mobile hasn't hurt Sprint. Sprint is basically in the same spot it was 5 years ago. AT&T and Verizon are also largely unchanged. The only action is in T-Mo eating up subscribers from the small carriers like cricket and metropcs.
T-Mo has eliminated all the smaller competition. The US gov did not create/preserve competition by blocking a Sprint+T-Mobile merger. Neither Sprint nor T-Mo alone are mounting a serious challenge to the big two.
> Combined, they would be a force to be reckoned with.
I'm just not seeing how T-Mobile isn't already a force to be reckoned with, even without Sprint in the picture. They're certainly smaller by subscriber count than AT&T and Verizon, and have less spectrum to work with, but it doesn't seem like they're actually hurting for spectrum or that their lack of more spectrum is hurting their growth.
I would certainly like my phone (on T-Mo here) to work in some random out of the way places where my AT&T- and Verizon-using friends have service and I don't (though the instances of that drop in number constantly), but T-Mo's subscribers are still way more loyal than any other carrier's, and they keep on growing.
The only reason they're a competitor is because the FCC blocked at&t acquiring them which triggered a clause where at&t had to give them spectrum. The FCC desperately needs to implement a use it or lose it policy on spectrum.
There's more competition in the mobile space so I think it's less of a concern, though it can still be a problem. Broadband is where we need net neutrality the most.
As for Sprint and Tmobile, they are both "viable" competitors, whatever that means.
I think Sprint has like $30B in debt and struggles to make a profit while being a distant 4th. Not sure how viable they can be or for how long. SoftBank made a huge mistake buying up a majority of Sprint.
> We could have had a spread spectrum solution with open airwaves. We have with unlicensed WiFi frequency bands, and there's plenty of competition in that space. Well, at least until the FCC tries to meddle in that too.
Wat?
Do you even know how spectrum works? It's so trivial to dump RF hash out on 70cm/23cm that I don't think you have an appreciation of how horrible of an idea that is.
So I used to work in the spectrum sharing space. When the FCC started spectrum auctions, the technology wasn’t there yet. Even today, see the challenges involved in sharing space between LTE and WiFi.
As for fiber—blame your municipality. I’m in a metro area of 200,000 and have two fiber providers.
What’s the alternative? Give more power to local governments, the same entities that have screwed up education, transit, housing, policing, and all the other issues we entrust to local governance?
> Let's not forget the US Govt blocked an attempted Sprint + T-Mobile merger to produce a viable third competitor in the space, ironically, in the name of competition.
I don't agree with you on this. A merger is never good for a consumer. I'm actually very glad it turned out this way. The purchase of T-Mobile by AT&T was also blocked and as an result of this T-mobile received $3B which they promptly invested to improve their infrastructure.
Now T-Mobile is a viable competitor to AT&T and Verizon and we still have extra choice which is Sprint.
>>> We could have had a spread spectrum solution with open airwaves. We have with unlicensed WiFi frequency bands, and there's plenty of competition in that space. Well, at least until the FCC tries to meddle in that too.
Airwaves are the scarcest resources in the planet. There are only so few of them and they are fairly limited by the law of physics. The mobile network is already running at physics capacity.
But that's the bigger issue isnt it? That is we keep using bandaids when the root problem is lack of competition.
Has anyone heard if Google is considering restarting Fiber? I was always under the impression that they hope the implied competition was enough. It had seemed to be working. But then it was squashed.
I don't claim to know what Google's motivation is/was with Fiber. But isn't it funny that the company with the most money, one of the best brands, some of the best engineering talent, and access to the deepest bench of lawyers... failed.
You can't align the stars in a straighter line than Google. And yet, they gave up. Why?
At this point, I'm rooting for SpaceX's Starlink. At least they have a chance, and a history of fantastic achievements. I trust them to follow through more than Google.
Google wanted a stick to bash Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and Centurylink with, to get them to offer better connectivity to more potential users of Google's services.
Google Fiber ultimately wasn't executed well (with fiber being installed and sitting dormant for ~1 year post installation in many areas). Had Google looked at how other ISPs operate, their ROI would've been much improved and they'd have significantly more customers today.
If you look at the GF Austin facebook page, there are hundreds of angry comments from people about paying deposits and getting trenches dug and then not hearing anything for a year. Also a lot of complaints about trenches being sloppy and making a mess of the neighborhood, although this could just be the nosy neighbor crowd.
OneWeb's satellite constellation is ahead of Starlink by a couple of years. Even though I live in an urban area, which will have limited OneWeb/Starlink service due to the density of people, I hope they'll blow the lid off my current cable/phone monopsony problem.
I'm not so sure failed is accurate. Ultimately, Google wanted more having ibternet access and faster speeds. That has happened, at least where I live (in NJ near Princeton).
That said, NN is more a political issue at this point and that's Google's kryptonite.
I may be conflating the coincidental timing of two events: I mistakenly thought Google Fiber -- in addition to wanting more internet access and faster speeds from incumbents -- was a response to Google's NN concerns, as well.
You have to go city-by-city to get approval. It's painful even for a company with infinite money like Google. And Comcast will (also with infinite money) will fight you city-by-city.
Not only is city-by-city approval painful, it is also slow. Think how long it takes a city council to approve an apartment building. Now thing how long it will take them to approve a city-wide project like installing fiber lines.
Eh many states passed state-wide franchise laws that eliminated city-by-city rules. It didn't help much.
Installing fiber is damn expensive. It is a hugely capital-intensive business. A sword is constantly hanging over your head as the entrenched monopolies can cut prices to $10/month at any moment in any market where you are laying fiber (trivial when they are bringing in $100/mo per customer where they are the only choice).
The only reasonable solution for natural monopolies is a regulated utility or government-owned infrastructure. Electrical choice is often done via the former, roads and water are examples of the latter.
In either case one entity should lay fiber to every home, then charge $cost + $expected_future_capital_contribution (and +7% profit if a regulated utility). Any ISP that wants to compete puts in the order and the fiber owner routes a drop to their equipment at the local CO.
Some great new technology enables 10Gbps? Not a problem - your ISP owns the ONT and can swap it out. The utility only maintains the fiber, which unlike copper doesn't have water-infiltration or degradation problems.
Even though I have sonic fiber in SF it is actually a waste: on the poles in front of my house there are three completely duplicated pieces of communications infrastructure: copper phone lines, copper cable lines, and sonic fiber. If ATT ever bothers to install fiber then I'll have duplicate fiber lines. That is a deadweight loss for basically no benefit and only enables 2-3 competitors rather than potentially 20 or 30.
No system is perfect and free markets are simply terrible at handling natural monopolies.
> Installing fiber is damn expensive. It is a hugely capital-intensive business. A sword is constantly hanging over your head as the entrenched monopolies can cut prices to $10/month at any moment in any market where you are laying fiber (trivial when they are bringing in $100/mo per customer where they are the only choice).
That's not correct. Installing fiber is extremely cheap. DWDM prisms are cheap. Long range 10G optics is dirt cheap.
> Even though I have sonic fiber in SF it is actually a waste: on the poles in front of my house there are three completely duplicated pieces of communications infrastructure: copper phone lines, copper cable lines, and sonic fiber. If ATT ever bothers to install fiber then I'll have duplicate fiber lines. That is a deadweight loss for basically no benefit and only enables 2-3 competitors rather than potentially 20 or 30.
And this "we want perfection", ladies and gentlemen, is why you are not getting telecom competition.
BT OpenReach is a regulated utility, but not a very heavily regulated utility. Ofcom did what the FCC managed to completely screw up: create an unbundling regime that still made investing in infrastructure worthwhile. The FCC set wholesale rates so low that it killed DSL as a viable competitor. Ofcom, meanwhile, conducted tons of economic analysis before privatizing BT, and set rates high enough where BT OpenReach is actually about as profitable as Comcast or TWC. (Of course, the new government is in the process of trying to completely screw up BT with new universal service obligations).
Google also didn't know how to operate as a communications infrastructure provider. Many of the fiberhuts they built sit with few customers connected today due to poor marketing and long delays to get each customer connected.
Comparatively, Centurylink will have salespeople knocking on peoples doors two weeks after running fiber, with installs occurring a few days later.
ROW/easement for telecom approvals should be taken away from municipalities all together. You would be amazed how quickly you would get competitors to VZ/Comcast.
> It is time it is treated as a utility and price regulated like one.
Having lived in an area that had Pacific Gas & Electric, who has infrastructure so old and decrepit that it literally exploded and destroyed part of a town, i'm not so sure that I want my internet access being treated like a utility.
> And 15 percent of households earning more than $100,000 are mobile-only, versus 6 percent in 2013.
These are households who can easily afford wired broadband. But a growing number of people simply find wireless to be fast enough and place a high value on mobility.
5G wireless is going to make wired broadband obsolete, and also solve the competition problem. Unlike laying fiber, it's easy to have several different competing 5G networks in the same place. Once you get above about 100 mbps (and LTE-A is already there in some places), the mobility advantage is going to totally dominate any incremental improvement in speed for 80% of people.
I'd guess that most of those households are still getting a cable or satellite TV package. My OTT-exclusive household routinely breaks 100GB/month, and we aren't even very heavy TV watchers by American standards. To get that at equivalent speeds is an order of magnitude more expensive from every wireless provider I've checked, after eliminating the ones that don't even offer an equivalent combination (e.g. ~$700/month from Verizon, ~$1000/month from a local WISP). I'm not a metro-scale wireless guru, but I have a hard time believing that any realistic 5G deployment is going to have enough capacity to handle a large-scale exodus from wired connections.
But it's not a solution to a problem. It's a solution to a symptom. We do this all the time and then wonder why we waste so much time revisiting things.
Or. You can "accept" NN in the short term knowing it's going to cause a negative reaction in the market. That tension will build, the market will become more aware, and then demand the problem be addressed and solved.
The point is, the current solution being proposed by so many actual keep the powerful status quo intact. They win either way. Is that a win for the rest of us? I think not.
We can't focus on fixing a root problem so intently we fail to fix an immediate problem.
Lack of NN is an immediate problem. We must fix that. If we don't, we lose, and we might not be able to win the bigger fight, against monopolization, for a very long time.
Or is competition a bandaid for a lack of neutral service? Which is the means and which is the end?
My impression is that Fiber's implied competition only worked in cities where Google got pretty far along. Prices in other cities don't seem to be affected.
I think that they're independent goals. I don't think that competition would guarantee NN. Competition promotes better customer service and faster internet at lower prices, which is also good.
Could be. But the threat also moved slow and never really became a real enough threat. Also, I believe Googe was ultimately pushing for speed and availability; price and NN less so.
Google already has a history of favoring their own products and services, and I don't trust them to be neutral if they're acting as an ISP.
Without a law mandating neutrality, no ISP is going to ignore the possibility of making extra money selling preferred bandwidth. Maybe they wait until the uproar dies down, but no doubt they'll look into it eventually.
Citing market power as a reason for special regulations in cellular, where in almost every major city there are 3-4 completely fungible carriers, makes no sense. Verizon and AT&T have about 1/3 of the market, T-Mobile and Sprint have a little under 1/3, and in any given market there are smaller players like Boost Mobile.
That's an entirely normal level of competition for the economy at large. In smart phones, in contrast, Android has 82% of the market, Apple has 18% of the market, and Windows is well under 0.5%. In search engines, Google has about 2/3 of the market, Microsoft has about 1/4, and Yahoo has a bit over 10% (but they use Microsoft's back-end). In soft drinks, Coca Cola has 42%, Pepsi has 27%, and Dr. Pepper Snapple has 17%. In parcel service, UPS has about half the market, FedEx about 30%, and the Postal Service about 15%.
1. AT&T claimed it has NEVER blocked third party apps when that concern was raised in relation to Net Neutrality.
2. AT&T DID block Facetime, and wanted to allow access only on special plans.
3. The magic of the free market and competition did not step them
4. Special regulations about not blocking third party apps could have stopped them.
This issue is always framed as some lofty philosophical debate about "free market vs. regulation!!!" by companies.
In reality its perfectly clear that neither extreme works or even exists currently, just a precarious balance we as consumers have to protect that companies are always trying to erode.
It's fine if you think the government should intervene aggressively for consumer protection. But it's inaccurate to suggest that cellular is somehow unusual in the level of market concentration as the reason for such regulations.
Market power/concentration can be both common/usual relative to some context (eg the US) and yet too high to maximize consumer welfare, or too high relative to another context.
The U.S. economy is characterized by oligopolies, and I think there is a rational position that they should all be subject to regulation. I happen to disagree, but it's internally consistent. What's not internally consistent is to say that cellular is so concentrated that it requires regulation, then to say that there is plenty of competition in smart phones or search.
This is not "whataboutism." People who think that search or smart phones shouldn't be regulated, I think, generally have a notion of how awful government regulation can be. So they say that we should only do it when the concentration, and thus the potential for abuse, exceeds a certain, high, threshold. Their view is that the threshold is not exceeded in smart phones, or search, or parcels. This is, I think, a really common view. Under that view, it's relevant that the market concentration in cellular is comparable to those other industries.
Im all for regulation in any industry when companies do bad things and people don't have recourse.
If Google started manipulating search in a way that really hurt and people did not have recourse, great regulate the f* out of them. Same goes for smart phones.
Its not inconsistent because my guiding principle is not "enough competition/too much concentration in this industry or not?", it is "are their behaviors significantly hurting consumers or not".
I don't understand this "free market always wins" argument. What if all companies agree on throttling a particular service like bittorent? What if all competitors are too expensive for me to choose them and my competitor is throttling a majority of the internet? What if I'm already in a 2 years plan and cannot leave my service without paying some extra? Do these reasons give my service right to intervene in my internet experience?
Except in this case (cellular service), there is at least some competition. And FaceTime isn't particularly a good example, as AT&T reversed their policy without Net Neutrality rules in place. Competition, at least in this one example, worked.
AT&T reversed their policy without Net Neutrality rules in place
After official complaints lodged with the FCC. Also, this was during the time period of the 2010 open internet order[0] and the 2014 court case[1], where ISPs and the FCC thought that the FCC had the authority to enforce "no blocking" violations.
So, saying "without Net Neutrality rules in place" is incorrect.
Sure. And the "no blocking" rule was eventually struck down. My point is there were no existing laws that would have forced AT&T to reverse their decision.
Not necessarily. They faced regulatory issues with some states.
The carriers deployed proxy infrastructure to inspect and control traffic and were definately experimenting with limiting apps deemed disruptive in the 2013-2014 timeframe. If you had an app that generated lots of small packets in a short period of time, you’d run into it on some networks.
The "people who disagree with me are payed to" viewpoint is one of the most intellectually lazy viewpoints, second only to the idea that those who disagree with you are evil.
I'd forgotten this! The dark ages of iPhone on AT&T. Seems... quant, now, doesn't it?
We never will, but it’s very important that we be able
to. But we won’t. So let us do it. Because we won’t do
it. Which is why we’re spending so much money to make
sure we can. But we won’t. But let us.
3 years ago, timewarner was doing the same thing[1]. They throttled YouTube and then makes the page that explains it disappears from THEIR internet. It doesn't matter what they say about their position, they are in the business of making more money and Net Neutrality means not more money.
I sure as hell did...the same people who would bemoan Google failing to stop carriers from handicapping their Android phones in various ways were suspiciously mum about Apple _explicitly_ doing so in a way that IMO was among the worst offenders. The hypocrisy certainly didn't escape me.
Interesting, you swapped one telecom who violates net neutrality for yet another telecom who violates net neutrality. [1] [2] I wouldn't be tooting that horn too loudly.
We need legal protections, not good feelings from these carriers in their positions of power.
I used to have a Kyocera 7135[1] on Verizon with Minutes of Use(!) for data long before any unlimited data plan existed.
This was a device that didn't support cellular data in the traditional sense so they couldn't bill extra for for it.
Once the Treo 650+ started rolling out they started coming out with the $50 data plans. Mysteriously everyone with a Kyocera 7135(including myself) started having "issues" where those devices wouldn't authenticate on Verizon's CDMA network. They offered a Treo 650 as a replacement with a promise no plan change.
Of course, plan change and $500+ bill the next month as it moved me over to a per-KB data plan.
Fought them a long time on it and eventually had to give up and pick up the $50/mo extra. They weren't allowing Kyocera 7135s or Minutes of Use plans any more.
Found out a while later that everyone else on HowardForums hit the exact same thing and yet other CDMA providers outside the US had no issues the the 7135.
Verizon, ATT, T-Mobile. Take your pick they're all going to probably try to screw you one way or another. Although I'll give that T-Mobile tends to better about what devices they let you bring and what they open their network to.
I don't think he said at any point that T-Mobile was perfect, just that they didn't screw him over as hard as AT&T, your response seems presumptuous and holier-than-thou.
The OP said they had not forgotten AT&T violated net neutrality, and then used that as one of the points for moving to T-Mobile which also violated net neutrality.
Either OP didn't know (which is fine) or didn't care but wanted to try and make a comment out of it (which isn't good).
The title of the article is that AT&T wants you to forget that it blocked FaceTime. OP responded saying he did not forget the blocking of FaceTime and that along with other reasons prompted him to move to T-Mobile. Nowhere did OP say he had not forgotten that AT&T violated net neutrality, that is an assumption you made.
If you want to use the mobile Internet, you're going to hand money to a NN violator. Aside from abstaining, the only rational option is to pick the least worst. Blocking a service is much worse than throttling classes of high-bandwidth connections.
I’m happy with my choice, and I shall toot it as loudly as I damned well please. Because if you think the two choices are equivalent, then we have little to discuss. Beside, that of which you complain about T-Mobile happened after I’d already switched.
Tell ya what, though, were my mind not already made up on NN, your sanctimonious, self-righteous post would drive me right to the arms of those you oppose. You will feel that you have righted that egregious wrong on the Internet, but you will have changed no minds.
> Interesting, you presume to know what network they are using now
Crazy thought, but perhaps I based it on their comment that simply said:
> It's one of the multitude of reasons I left for T-Mobile.
Which, in most educated circles, means they are still with T-Mobile. If they weren't I would have expected another note that they moved on to another carrier. But guess what, all the other carriers play the same game so I'm still on the right side here.
> Good try at a gotcha though, really raising the discourse.
Drop the snark, you know exactly what both comments were going after.
As a bystander who really doesn't give a crap about NN either way, I'd like to say that your comments are the rudest I've read on HN all day. Heed the feedback of those who are replying to you. It's not what you're saying, it's how you're saying it.
Likewise, you knew what he meant. They did something unpleasant and he left and your response was "they're all that bad" as if technically minded people aren't aware of that? What were you contributing exactly?
- I would have expected someone who knows that the major carriers all have something to gain from this Decembers vote not to list that as a reason. Listing that as a reason makes T-Mobile look "better" in the realm of NN, when that isn't true.
- Raises awareness to other HN readers like yourself that T-Mobile has also taken advantage of their position of power.
- Sure, there can be plenty of other factors of moving carriers as a consumer, but this shouldn't be counted among them.
> and your response was "they're all that bad" as if technically minded people aren't aware of that?
Bingo. Yet, here we are where I'm having to explain that this is the case. The comment added plenty to the discussion, you just wanted to attempt to slip some snark in.
This is where I'll go ahead and stop engaging with you in comments, because this is an explained point and you have no interest in having a meaningful conversation around it.
Whenever discussion of this form comes up, I wonder how they can even block "applications" when their traffic is encrypted (never used FaceTime, but I'd hope that one is). They can block destinations, but I suspect this whole net neutrality thing is just going to spur more development in VPNs/tunneling/proxies/steganography/P2P.
A lot of ISPs block low ports like 80, 25, and 21, which is arguably in violation of net neutrality, but everyone didn't seem to care... they just used a different port.
I think that should be grounds to terminate a contract with the carrier. No doubt if they instantly started bleeding customers because of a stupid decision like this their minds would quickly change.
That was the excuse. Their network, absent any major upgrades, was carrying real time video from all sorts of sources within a year. This was a naked money grab to force users into a metered data plan.
Each time I see a NN post I'm generally too late and it's been run rampant with defenders of "light touch" regulation... no, just no. If the companies had competition, then, maybe. Sadly they're entrenched monopolies (and more are merging each day, further limiting choice). NN is the way to go.