Goodbye to the internet in the US except for the phone co. and cable

A little over a month ago the US Supreme Court determined that cable companies do not have to share their facilities with competitors. They hadn't shared them previously and got to keep it that way.

Now the FCC has ruled that phone companies don't have to share their facilities either. This surely means goodbye to all isps other than the phone company and cable. There might be a couple of lame options such as satellite. The latency would be horrible in Second Life. Here is a link to one of the stories.

There is a one year transition period for the rules to take effect and for me to keep my wonderful ISP Aracnet/Spirit One.

Well on one hand how can the government force a company to let other companies use it's assets? That would put the using companies at a supreme advantage and Comcast or whatever cable company at a disadvantage.

I do agree, however, we need more companies selling high spped internet. Tired of paying 49 bucks a month... going to 59 after I updrade to 6MBPS

The problem is one of infrastructure.

The big companies own all the infrastructure. A start-up could never afford to start laying a new grid on top of the existing one -- no way to compete.

No competition means that your bill is only going to get bigger, your support is going to get worse, and there will be fewer choices to make it better.

And ironically, this is where modern capitalism ends. The inevitable rise to the top and competition to squash out and buy as much market share as possible only leads to monopolies.

Why are we blaming the supreme court?

Btw-- when you switch to something other than your current ISP, how much more will you be paying? (And for the same exact service?)

Where did we get "blame" from? I just said what they had decided.

As for the other part of the quote above I am happy to pay $10 or $20 more for a good isp, but it isn't for the same exact service since the phone company or the cable company are not going to offer me a unix shell account, wonderful customer service or probably even a static ip.

Breaking down the sharing rules is actually a really great thing... it opens the door for companies to move in and lay down new wiring, where before big TELCOs would have legal monopolies. This ultimately means more competition to cable companies, lower rates for consumers, and more innovation to services. (Can we say, "optical to your doorstep"?)

This is the final, long overdue step to breaking up the old Ma Bell, and allowing true competition.

Well, the short answer is the FCC can and does do whatever it wants. If you're in telecommunications, you do what they say, period. You don't pass go, you don't collect $200. They reign supreme, and they answer to no one. Their regulations tend to have a lot more to do with what companies they want to see succeed (often for highly personal reasons) than anything else.

The more "fair" answer is the government that has "forced a company to let other companies use its assets" is the same government that had allowed monopolies to exist for decades. Because of that, the only companies that have the assets in question are the ones that are the direct descendants of the breakup of those monopolies. What goes around comes around. Those companies only exist because they were previously granted the right to be the only ones. It's only fair that they be forced to share their infrastructure since no one else was ever allowed to build one.



I couldn't disagree with you more, Hiro. Telling Company-A that that it can no longer use Company-B's wiring in no way means that Company-A now magically has the resources to all of a sudden lay down its own wiring. All it does is allow Company B to charge more for the use of its resources, or worse, to refuse to share at all. This ruling does one thing, and one thing only. It puts more money in the pockets of the Bell children since they're no longer forced to supply their services to their competitors at regulated rates. That's it.

How are you arriving at your conclusion that this willl somehow boost competition? Your assertion seems based on the assumption that new companies will be willing and able to lay down wiring whenever and wherever they want. That's simply not the case. Building an infrastructure like that is a monumental undertaking. There are precious few companies on Earth who can do it, and even fewer who would, especially when you consider the odds against state and local governments being willing to approve adding more telephone poles, digging new conduits, etc., so that all these new and completely seprate systems can be installed from coast to coast. No one's going to do that. What they are going to do is be forced to pay the phone companies whatever the phone companies want, which is going to make every non-phone company ISP cost a hell of a lot more. That in turn means a good many ISP's are going to fade away since not many people are going to want to pay those prices. Ultimately it could well end up that the only broadband carriers in America are the phone companies and the cable companies, who will have no competition, and then prices will skyrocket.

What's happening here is a step back TOWARDS the old monopoly system, not a step away from it.

Imagine that - a company needs to buy its own equipment.


I work in telecom. Everytime I deal with a mom & pop TELCO I shudder. Overall their service sucks ass and they hold mini-monopolies in their areas. Customers deserve better.


The cable companies did that, and at a loss for years. Now they're hugely profitable.

I believe there are investment companies out there with the capitol and the long-term vision to want to do this.

Most likely, companies will step in with Optical cabling:
(a) Towns will approve the addition because it is much more reliable than copper or coax and provides much higher bandwidth.
(b) Demand for bandwidth will continue to grow, and so optical will be need to be laid everywhere anyway to meet demand.
(c) Companies will want to invest in it because it's a superior bandwidth, and there's a considerable profit base to steal from the cable companies.
(d) Land line telephone companies are dying anyway. DSL ain't going to save them. People are going to wireless phones and Voice-over-IP. Phone companies in 5 years will be all basically ISPs and data-movers.


And hence, people will flock to alternatives, the push for optical will be greater, and innovation will occur. That's precisely the whole point of a capitalistic economy.


I doubt it. The demand for Internet is there, ISPs have brand-name loyalty and personnel. It's more likely that some will combine, others will make deals with TELCOs.


Even if this is correct, you will have cable companies moving on other cable companies' turfs, and you'll have inter-competition between them.

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The bottom line is that our system of telecom was always based on a socialist system - a legal monopoly. The process of changing this has taken over 20 years, and we finally can get to a point where the demand and technology will determine prices, rather than localized monopolies. What we currently have is smaller companies being subsidized by larger ones, and that's not good business.

Hiro, i couldn't agree more. Especially about the "mom & pop mini-monopolies", I use to live with one of those ISPs and they raise the price as much as they want, because they know you can't get it anywhere else unless you move. I personally think this is a step in the right direction.

"land of the free and home of the brave, FCC crawl in your grave...gouge their eyes out, etc" Mojo Nixon (Daz hides his lifetime FCC radio broadcaster licence)

Lots of countries have gone through this - in the UK we have a system where the former state monopoly (BT) owns the infrastructure (which was paid for by the tax payer) but has to allow other fair access so that there is competition.

For example I can get my ADSL from BT, or I can get a better (and less nannied) service elsewhere. Regardless of who provides my ADSL BT still own the copper cable.

We also have local loop unbundling but only a fraction of exchanges have any competition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_loop_unbundling

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSL_around_the_world

You make some god points, Hiro, but I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one. I really hope you're right and I'm wrong on this, but I just don't think that's the case. I guess time will tell.

For true.

I'm optimistic because of Moore's Law as it relates to bandwidth - bandwidth continues to get cheaper and cheaper per kb/s (mb/s now!).

I don't know, that's the impression I got. It seemed like it was criticism of someone or something. I don't really know if it's good or bad in the long run.

Don't forget that there are a few other options like the wireless Clearwire service, (www.clearwire.com) which is available in a growing number of markets. Wireless is going to be an increasingly large sector of the market.

Wireless broadband...wouldn't touch it with a 100 mile pole. Screw taking that security risk...