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The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

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Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#91

Post by gonzo »

fragsworth wrote: post #51
andyl wrote: post #16

My broadband service is terrible. Far to expensive, it is slow and drops packets. And the competitive environment sucks. Comcast and Regulators: go to hell. I'll vote for any politician who is interested in improving the situation.

> My broadband service is terrible My business gets 10mbps down, 2mbps up, for $90/month in Los Angeles. It also goes down frequently (5-6 times a year). I think the next best upload rate (5mbps) was $400/month or so with some bullshit "enterprise" plan. It takes way too long to do simple file transfers from my office to a remote machine. I fucking hate it and our culture of monopolies can go to hell.

My business has a redundant 10Gbps connection to our cabinet at zColo. We lease the dark fiber (but it doesn't run very far, so it's not very expensive.) The cabinet has a 1Gbps uplink for Internet.

Home is 50Mbps FTTH right now. Google should start to deploy in ATX during 2014, and when they come to my neighborhood, I plan to switch to Google Fiber.

I also have a Time Warner fiber service on premise, mainly for one of my employees who lives just outside Elgin, TX. (but also because we get a redundant 100Mbps connection.

While I spent an order of magnitude more than you, I also have much better service. :-)

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#92

Post by gcb0 »

ojbyrne wrote: post #68

The first comment on the page sums it up: "America is the only country in the world where BRIBERY is legalized and stupidly called lobbying."

and rather uninformed. lobbying may not be as efficient elsewhere as it is here, but it exists everywhere.

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#93

Post by mindslight »

gcb0 wrote: post #83
brownbat wrote: post #76

It took fierce competition to even get broadband companies to advertise what they are offering. I had to deal with a very small local monopoly in Western Maryland that just advertised "faster than dial up," had typical pings of over 200. It was thick on the local board, had a deal with local government as the sole authorized supplier in the county. Now I'm in a different part of the country, can get FiOS, but while V…

lol at calling all the providers. the free market fails if left alone, under shady regulations it is almost a joke. i found a aDSL number for ATT that was not advertised (and you reached a person on the first minute!) that was the result of some obscure regulation that they had to provide dsl without charging for a phone line if so i wanted. it was a very good service. as i was next door to their trunk. i moved, less…

Sonic.net provides their "Fusion DSL" service in LA through resellers. It's worth to check if you are in the service area at http://www.dslextreme.com/ . I ended up signing up through another company, Omsoft, because they were very down to earth.

Yeah, the advertised throughput is a bit slower being ADSL2+, especially on the upload (although you can bond two channels for a simple twice the cost. and if you really need upload, inquire to see if they've got "Annex M" support yet). But it's fast enough, very predictable, and you won't be giving your money to assholes.

Also FWIW, Speakeasy is also still around, they've just renamed to Megapath and raised their rates a bit.

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#94

Post by jjoonathan »

ojbyrne wrote: post #68

The first comment on the page sums it up: "America is the only country in the world where BRIBERY is legalized and stupidly called lobbying."

To be precise, bribery isn't just legal, it's mandatory under the current campaign finance setup.

Campaign finance reform is a prerequisite for addressing any of the anti-consumer legislation we are stuck with today. Best of all, it hasn't been turned into a partisan wedge yet, so there's hope, assuming we can find a way to make people care.

Unfortunately, last time I saw a campaign finance reform proposal cross the HN frontpage, it fell off within 5 minutes :(

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#96

Post by bane »

vacri wrote: post #88
bane wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd strike Portland and Baltimore off of that list and replace them maybe with Seattle and D.C.? The greater Portland area ain't bad, but downtown Portland kind of blows. The food scene is okay, but it's hard to get just normal good greasy spoon food without having to find out more than you want to know about the meal. Seattle is nicer is almost every way and has more to do and a far better tech scene. Baltimore is a…

Regarding the overpriced-ness of Australia, for a long time our dollar was worth around 2/3rds of the US dollar (at one point in the past 20 years it was down to 50c), and pricing made more sense in comparison, with imported things being generally more expensive due to remoteness. Then we had a mining boom and our dollar increased in value to a peak of around US$1.12. Of course, your local prices don't fluctuate to m…

re: overpricedness

I think it has something to do with the better labor laws (for low-end workers) which push up prices on commodity items. I don't remember any country outside of maybe bits of Northern Europe and Switzerland where I paid more for local food. I've even been on some pretty remote islands and not paid that much, exchange rate adjusted or not. I remember the first time I paid $22 for breakfast and $5 for a smallish, very lackluster, meat pie I knew I was in for a huge hit on my wallet. I know someplace have isolated foreign or exotic foods that are expensive (the famous $11 Japanese hotdogs for example), but even in Tokyo you can find plentiful meals for under $10.

I hit a decent steak house in Canberra (Australia has great beef BTW), and was very happy it was paid for by a local. I think the tab was well over $50 a head for a steak and a couple sides.

It may have been a particularly weird time to go or something (2007), but it left an indelible impression on me.

Don't get me wrong, I'd still readily return, Australia is a lovely country for the most part.

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#97

Post by [deleted] »

gametheoretic wrote: post #66
marincounty wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how Comcast charges differnt rates for internet speeds, but at around 5:30 p.m., when people settling in after a hard day of work--the rate is reduced? My hope is Comcast is eventually split up by the government.

Do you think the government would rather deal with more ISPs or fewer, insofar as surveillance is concerned?

[deleted]

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#98

Post by digisign »

pionar wrote: post #55
michaelochurch wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an American. There are some ways in which I like living here. Would I come here if I were a Swede? Hell no, except for a $300k+ job in banking or the Valley, and only then knowing that I could get on a plane and leave if I got sick. (You can get 100-200k in the EU; at the 300k level, the jobs start getting rarer in the EU relative to the US, which is why Wall Street gets a surprising amount of French, German, and…

I don't get all the apologies in this thread. The US is a great country! Has its warts, but I've lived in Europe, and I've been to Australia, and I wouldn't live anywhere else. It's the maverick, can-do entrepreneurial spirit that's more prevalent among Americans and the rich cultural diversity that comes with being a melting pot that I love about this country. Outside of a few bad spots in a few cities, it's one of…

It's because of the cancer I like to call the US government, not to mention corporate media which make a profit obfuscating the process of national theft. Everyone is angry but few know why.

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#99

Post by triangleman »

zw123456 wrote: post #63
warfangle wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if an automatic peering arrangement could be built on top of a mesh infrastructure, to give incentive for running more robust nodes (not just for in-network traffic, but for uplink to the internet at large).

Interesting. I was thinking about some of the open source implementations of LTE that have been posted here but maybe the wifi mesh approach needs tweaking. Also, from a business perspective, I think it would be cool if there was a way to make it sort of like a "co-op" so people who host hot spots or base stations would get some profit sharing or something?

FON (https://corp.fon.com/en) tried to make this work, I'm sure there were other attempts.

Re: The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)

#100

Post by nl »

mikeash wrote: post #35
robzyb wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that a significant majority of the United States' healthcare system is lacklustre. I understand that a significant majority of the United States' only offer limited annual leave (compared to Australia's 4 weeks). I understand that a significant majority of the United States' suffers from an extremely high murder rate for a 1st world country. This is a sample of why I don't want to live in the US, even th…

The health care system is fine if you can afford it. The main problem with American health care is financial, and if you have good insurance (which should come with any good job) it's fine. Not great, but on par with the rest of the first world. Limited annual leave depends on the job. If you're in software engineering or similar, you're unlikely to have a problem. If you get offered a job that doesn't offer the annu…

I doubt your statement that a majority of the US has an extremely high murder rate. Some parts of the country certainly do, but much of the country is perfectly safe. The overall average rate is higher than other first-world countries, but that does not imply that most of the country has a higher rate. Crime is not spread out evenly.

That sounds reasonable, but I thought I'd take a look.

It turns out that the Australian states with the worst murder rate (NSW & WA, 1.6/1000) would have been the fifth best in the US (after New Hampshire, Minnesota, Iowa and Hawaii)[1].

So yeah, most of the US does have a higher murder rate.

[1] 2011 figures, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...

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