Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast • Hacker News Board

Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast

#501

Post by throwaway2048 » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 3:32 PM UTC

NotSammyHagar wrote: post #490

a_e_k wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! I live in Seattle and whenever I try their checker it tells me "Great! You qualify for up to 12Mbps" for $45/mo. I'm not a fan of Comcast, but that Century Link offer is a poor joke in comparison. And this is despite living less than three blocks from a Century Link building crammed full of machines (I can hear the hum from the sidewalk when I go by). I don't get it.

It's the cost of the last mile, and the difficulty and expense of running those wires.

Or just apathy by incumbent providers, why do better when doing worse still gets you paid.

Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast

#502

Post by auiya » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 4:14 PM UTC

These anecdotes may be a moot point when 5G wireless rolls out. The wireless carriers are going to eat the landline providers for lunch as long as their plans are structured correctly. I'd be happy to own a WiFi router with only a SIM card.

Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast

#503

Post by Bartweiss » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 4:23 PM UTC

kls wrote: post #418

Bartweiss wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My point is, I don't see how allowing these "exclusive" coverage monopolies does anything but harm the consumer. I imagine a community based provider like the one in the article would be met with a host of legal challenges here. I'm not sure I understand what you mean here. I think the confusion is over exactly what exclusivity AT&T holds? (I don't intend this as a lecture since you may well know all of this, I jus…

my understanding is they have exclusivity to the polls, only AT&T can string the polls on my island only Comcast can string the polls on the next island over. I could be mistaken but that was the way it was represented to me by AT&T and Comcast when I talked to both of them, AT&T was willing to string the poll, Comcast said they could not because they where AT&T polls. They may have been wrong or mistaken, but that w…

Oh interesting, thank you! In that case, I think there are two possible cases - and you're totally right, they're both strictly bad for consumers.

One is that AT&T has absolutely exclusive rights to string those poles. That would be unusual - the Telecommunications Act of 1994 generally requires pole owners to give other users access. But you're in an unusual spot physically, and they might have swung some local rule (e.g. access to the sites instead of the actual poles?), or just cut a deal with Comcast to not touch each other's customers.

The other is that they own the poles, and only have a de facto monopoly on stringing them. The requirement to permit access (the "make ready" rule) isn't very strong, and they can easily delay for months or even years before actually letting anyone else put up a single wire. So legal rights aside, Comcast might just list those poles as "cannot string" because in practice they can't honor any requests to do so.

Either way, it's an absolute mess that's purely bad for consumers. And one that creates some strange incentives... I wonder if anyone without a handy storm has gone and trashed the lines themselves to force a replacement?

Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast

#504

Post by swasheck » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 4:31 PM UTC

olyjohn wrote: post #344

nostromo wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true for Century Link. Lots of people in Seattle, and a growing number of other cities, have Century Link gigabit fiber to their residence. I pay less than $70 a month for this. Comcast is losing marketshare fast in Seattle because of this. https://www.centurylink.com/fiber/img/Gigabit-Launch-Map-res...

Yeah, well look just a couple of miles outside of the core city, and you'll find loads of people who still can't get anything faster than 1.5Mbps DSL. Hell, I live in the city, and CenturyLink only offers 12Mbps DSL to me. I know people who live in denser, core residential areas than me (Ballard, Queen Anne, etc) and can't even get over 25Mbps from CenturyLink.

There's a comment above that suggests that Comcast owns the physical layer and, as such, is allowed to limit CenturyLink's access on its infrastructure (though there is a contrasting reply to it). I've always wondered why CenturyLink's advertised speeds were so much slower.

Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast

#505

Post by Bartweiss » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 4:40 PM UTC

qes wrote: post #347

Bartweiss wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did you have an upstream filter installed on your line by any chance? I too had a similar issue but a tech visit to disconnect a noise filter fixed it. Could you explain more about this? I've never heard of a noise filter on a cable line, and I can't really imagine why you'd have one - unless it's something ISPs do to cripple upload speeds on otherwise symmetric connections?

Comcast shut us off and informed us we were apparently spewing RF back out the line. They sent a tech to install an upstream noise filter. I believe it's a low-pass filter. I unplugged everything except a short run to the cable modem and they retested our line and removed the filter. I didn't notice any drop in speeds while the filter was installed, but it was some years ago and my upload was only something like 1 or…

Interesting, thanks for the follow up!

I guess that makes a certain amount of sense, long unshielded cables often pick up RF and I guess in a data cable it might read as a stream of bad requests. I'd be interested to know the theoretical impact, in terms of how many legitimate requests are expected to be below-threshold. If they're only installed on 'noisey' lines, maybe the answer is "none in practice", since any packet that would be filtered would also be wiped out by RF interference?

I'm stunned to hear that you've consistently gotten over advertised rates. I've had Comcast in two places, and considered myself lucky when I got close to advertised. One apartment ranged from 80%-105% of advertised, then plummeted to 20% in the last few months I was there. (No troubleshooting available, because I didn't rent my modem from them.) The other just sat at 20% non-stop, except that supposedly Comcast's speed test server was getting my full allocated speed. Honestly, I was halfway convinced by the theory that ISPs throttle connections just so they can report annual "improvements" to consumers and the FTC. But they legally defend those advertised speeds as averages, so I guess someone has to be over the rating to offset the people who aren't.

...now that I think about it, could those "average download speeds" be from a mix of fiber-to-home and fiber-to-hub residences? If they're the mean of something bimodal, it'd explain a lot of what I hear.

Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast

#506

Post by mperham » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 4:47 PM UTC

linsomniac wrote: post #450

peterlk wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Colorado has laws that give monopolies on the infrastructure to whoever owns it. But in order to get around anti-trust laws (or for some other cynical reason), so in your case, there is really only one provider, but they share their infrastructure with their competition and throttle them to nothing. So your options are "whatever comcast offers" and "whatever comcast decides CenturyLink can offer"

I don't understand. Comcast has their own infrastructure: a bunch of coax in the ground. Century Link (previously known as: QWest, USWest, and Ma Bell) has their own: Cat-3 coppter in the ground.

DSL/Telephone copper line has physical limits to the bandwidth it can provide. It can't do anything close to gigabit and plummets very quickly with distance from the telco box.

Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast

#507

Post by la_barba » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 5:56 PM UTC

smileysteve wrote: post #421

la_barba wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you're talking about WiMax. I was briefly on WiMax in Bellevue, WA, but the service sucked, not sure if it was the tech itself or their infrastructure...

WiMax was the (pre)4G implementation using the old Nextel spectrum (a major reason why Sprint was an investor). I had the EVO 4G on WiMax, had amazing speed, especially near the highways before anybody else did. Also made for a great hand warmer. The point is that 5g may provide the product that most people want when they want fiber; have less additional infrastructure cost, and the wireless penetration doesn't matte…

Yeah this was a while ago.. maybe 2007.

Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast

#508

Post by nnq » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 7:05 PM UTC

Bedon292 wrote: post #232

nnq wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

with 3gb of data - maybe I'm a weird consumer, but I don't get it what's with this insanely low data caps... while in France I had a 100gb / month 4G data plan for ~20EUR, and couple times I even exceeded those 100 gb! how/what are most people using internet for that they tolerate such small caps?!

My phone is always on WiFi unless I am in my car driving from place to place. I use under 2GB a month, closer to 1GB most months. I can't even comprehend how you would use 100GB of data on a mobile device in a month. My primary internet consumption is sitting at a computer all day long, or a laptop on the couch. The mobile data is just for traffic, slack, email, and news. All my podcasts are downloaded on WiFi, all m…

uhm, yeah, the sim card was in a mobile "pocket router" and shared to phone(s) + tablet + laptop, and I'm sometimes watching multiple streaming videos at the same time as a way of mixing music (Bach + heavy metal instrumental rocks :P) without bothering to turn video off or to low qual even if I'm not watching it

Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast

#509

Post by ehsankia » Fri, Sep 20, 2019, 12:42 AM UTC

malnourish wrote: post #368

ehsankia wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But are there competing gigabit internet in Seattle? Obviously they will stay competitive, that's beside the point. It's like how Comcast happened to bring cheap gigabit internet to every city Google Fiber entered... The fact that it takes a local competitor to get these big companies to bring cheap gigabit is exactly the problem. Your anecdotal evidence about a city full of competition doesn't really prove anything.

That's fine though, as long as they're not actively campaigning and lobbying to keep entities from entering the field in the first place.

Do we know that they aren't lobbying? I'm not familiar with CenturyLink for Comcast absolutely is all over the US.

Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast

#510

Post by jessaustin » Fri, Sep 20, 2019, 6:06 PM UTC

cptskippy wrote: post #38

jessaustin wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So true! There is a giant federal agency, FCC, the primary purpose of which is to preserve telco monopoly. Few people realize this is FCC's purpose. As usual, it's informative to pay more attention to results than to marketing. Even supposed "reforms" (why would an agency functioning in accordance with its stated goals need reform?) like the 1996 law have primarily led to increased revenue for monopoly telcos.

Faliciously Purporting that Federal Regulatory Agencies are intended to be something because that's how they currently function doesn't lend you any credibility. Instead it makes untrustworthy and manipulative. It's completely possible to corrupt an agency and for the FCC to behave the way you described through political interference but that is not their intended purpose.

That's a nice portmanteau of "fallaciously" and "maliciously"; thanks for that. You seem to have concerns about "credibility". My suggestion would be not to worry too much about that. Paying attention to what is said, what is believed, and what is intended is asking to be fooled. Instead, pay attention to what is done. The USA polity has functioned in substantially the same fashion (even if at inexorably increasing scale) for about 150 years. One might imagine that voters can't always predict the consequences of their actions, but legislators certainly can. In 1934 a majority of legislators had concluded that telecommunications should be provided by a single monopolist, despite the fact that there had been a thriving market in previous decades. So, they wrote a law that enshrined that preference. In later years typically Panglossian economists would be inspired by FCC policy to misread Mill's discussion of "natural" monopolies. We're still dealing with this.

Leaving politicians aside, perhaps this is too harsh a judgment of FCC personnel? To an extent, yes, because some of them are janitors or IT helpdesk folks. However, most people at FCC have at least an inkling of how things really work. At the minimum, they know where the third rails are. They know that asking "why can't more of the spectrum be unlicensed like the wifi band?" is a career-limiting speculation. They know that every Chairman Wheeler will be soon followed by a Chairman Pai.