Net Neutrality and Sling TV

[Mick]

I live outside the city and capitalism brought fiber right down my street aeveral years ago. It replaced the DSL that was there for years. I also have the options of the coax cable or multiple wireless providers. Innovation isn't dependent upon government rule.

Do you have a fiber NID? Do you have fiber run to your house.

 

[Dobbs 4 Heisman]

What is the ISP's motivation to exclude VN? To piss off some customers?

Volnation is simply an example. But the argument the ISPs use is like this. We can make the internet better for consumers if you let us redirect connection speeds to sites based on internet traffic. Now this sounds good in theory but it hurts start ups. Without net neutrality maybe sites like Twitter and Instagram don't blow up. By allowing different sites to have different speeds, it would favor established sites that are popular now over sites that could emerge in the future.

Also the general consumer should know better than to trust private companies to make choices for them. I would rather have the entire internet available to me at the same speeds everywhere rather than having the telecom companies determine for me which sites I might be interested in and deserve faster speeds.

 

[Septic]

You and septic need to work on your reading comprehension. You know what they say about assumptions.

Dude you cited a wikipedia definition to refute federal law.

Don't get mad at me because you're awful at defending your argument.

 

[FLVOL_79]

Most ISP's are using inferior technology and speed can only reach the maximum of that technology. Your local copper loop is complete crap that is incapable of utilizing the full capacity of fiber communications. You cant champion capitalism as being on cutting edge of innovation and competition.

In case I haven't said it today ID10T

Um...copper and fiber are two different connections. One is copper..one is glass..

My old copper got me 150Mbps, and I can could stream 4K no problem and have multiple users on my wireless. My fiber gets me about 980Mbps..no real different in streaming..porn loads faster though.

You have to run brand new fiber lines to replace your copper ones..thats not cheap. AT&T has been doing it for about a year now here in Orlando.

 

[FLVOL_79]

Volnation is simply an example. But the argument the ISPs use is like this. We can make the internet better for consumers if you let us redirect connection speeds to sites based on internet traffic. Now this sounds good in theory but it hurts start ups. Without net neutrality maybe sites like Twitter and Instagram don't blow up. By allowing different sites to have different speeds, it would favor established sites that are popular now over sites that could emerge in the future.

Also the general consumer should know better than to trust private companies to make choices for them. I would rather have the entire internet available to me at the same speeds everywhere rather than having the telecom companies determine for me which sites I might be interested in and deserve faster speeds.

Remember how bad the internet was before 2015?.....

 

[midnight orange]

Dude you cited a wikipedia definition to refute federal law.

Don't get mad at me because you're awful at defending your argument.

Then you should be able to quote where I said the fcc didn't define the internet as a utility.

 

[Mick]

Um...copper and fiber are two different connections. One is copper..one is glass..

My old copper got me 150Mbps, and I can could stream 4K no problem and have multiple users on my wireless. My fiber gets me about 980Mbps..no real different in streaming..porn loads faster though.

You have to run brand new fiber lines to replace your copper ones..thats not cheap. AT&T has been doing it for about a year now here in Orlando.

Its cheap as hell right now compared to late 90's. For Orlando it should have already been done because of the corrosive nature of salt water and air. What has been taking them so long?

 

[FLVOL_79]

Its cheap as hell right now compared to late 90's. For Orlando it should have already been done because of the corrosive nature of salt water and air. What has been taking them so long?

The need isn't there. Its like me asking why you have copper water pipes in your house and not PEX. Why haven't you switched? Creating a new infrastructure is expensive and there needs to be a demand for it. I mean..people still use DSL (old people) in my neighborhood..

 

[VolStrom]

Why does ESPN network not work on my TV right now, but I can stream it? I have no signal on ESPN with Tennessee playing North Carolina in Basketball and a signal on 200 other stations that I never watch.

 

[Mick]

The need isn't there. Its like me asking why you have copper water pipes in your house and not PEX. Why haven't you switched? Creating a new infrastructure is expensive and there needs to be a demand for it. I mean..people still use DSL (old people) in my neighborhood..

The need was there a long time ago. Hello, its Orlando. Lot of people hoping the DSL wouldn't go out when it rained. If you have lived there for 15 years you know what I'm talking about.

 

[tumscalcium]

.

 

[midnight orange]

Entered in error

 

[AM64]

In the 1980s, engineers assumed that optical cables would replace more expensive copper cables for telephone service, saving money in the process. When the use of the Internet exploded in the 1990s, suddenly there was a great demand for cables that could carry heavy loads of digital data. Optical fiber fit the bill perfectly, and many thousands of miles of new cable have been laid all around the world.

Fiber optics rendered all previous telephone network transmission media obsolete. By 2000, copper wire for the most part persisted only in local loops that ran between telephone exchanges and individual subscribers. 90% of americans are on these type of local loops.

Anyone in Chattanooga complaining?

The south-eastern Tennessee town of Chattanooga has some of the fastest internet connection speeds in the world, thanks to a fibre-optic network installed by the government-owned electric company, EPB.

The town, with a 2012 population of just more than 171,000, has used its internet speeds of over 1 gigabit per second to attract new businesses, including five venture capital funds with 2014 investment capital of more than $50m (£30m), according to the Guardian.

Chattanooga's success is a testament to the power of government infrastructure investment, writes Daily Kos blogger Steven D.

It's also, he says, a threat to the private telecommunications monopolies, which are content to offer lower levels of service, "slowly draining the lifeblood out of our nation even as they steal whatever is left in our pocketbook".

Why a Tennessee town has the fastest internet - BBC News

Other providers fought to stop EPB, and fortunately for us they didn't win, and I don't miss Comcast at all.

One point almost nobody ever addresses is infrastructure and right of way and how it affects competition. In short, utility companies put up those poles or put cables or water or gas lines in the ground and dealt with easements and rights of way long before internet and ISPs showed up. Municipalities granted franchises to manage chaos - imagine 15 power companies or water systems running cable or lines to the same neighborhoods. EPB being the power company that owned the poles and underground spaces could go directly where Comcast and others couldn't - a game changer. The part of the EPB fiber implementation I'm not so sure I like is that we are now on the Smart grid; there are good things about that, but as an old engineer, I've seen enough to be a skeptic about plenty of new ideas - like in the age of hacking who actually controls your power.

Cable and internet providers can compete easily, but it all gets back to running copper or fiber cables. Somebody else owns the poles and has the easements covered. You can't just ride into town and start stringing up cable on power company poles. Regardless of how we think about competition solving all the technical issues; there's that bigger logistical issue to answer first. Radio and TV were beamed through public airspace with only regulation needed to assign channels and control who used space on the broadcast spectrum. That's a far simpler problem than how you run physical connections from place to place.

 

[midnight orange]

“What goes unmentioned is the cost. Chattanooga didn't build the network cheaply, nor did they even pay for it themselves. No, it took $111 million in federal tax dollars to get the network off the ground. This was doled out to Chattanooga as a part of President Obama's stimulus program. The success that Chattanooga has had in putting federal tax money to work was actually the impetus for the FCC's unilateral, unprecedented overturn of state-level municipal broadband laws; the Chattanooga EPB wants to bring its service beyond the lines of its current authority.

We can see the folly in using Chattanooga as a model for how other municipal broadband projects could work. “

City-Run Broadband Internet Is a Disaster in the Making - Reason.com

 

[AM64]

“What goes unmentioned is the cost. Chattanooga didn't build the network cheaply, nor did they even pay for it themselves. No, it took $111 million in federal tax dollars to get the network off the ground. This was doled out to Chattanooga as a part of President Obama's stimulus program. The success that Chattanooga has had in putting federal tax money to work was actually the impetus for the FCC's unilateral, unprecedented overturn of state-level municipal broadband laws; the Chattanooga EPB wants to bring its service beyond the lines of its current authority.

We can see the folly in using Chattanooga as a model for how other municipal broadband projects could work. “

City-Run Broadband Internet Is a Disaster in the Making - Reason.com

The Electric Power Board (EPB) is Chattanooga's electric company, and everybody has one. I don't know how the bidding and selection process went, but Chattanooga was one of the few cities chosen to test the concept of a new fiber network. It had to do with a size large enough to be meaningful but not one that was overwhelming in scope - like Atlanta or other large cities.

The choice of an existing utility as the support system makes complete sense - not sure how the other target cities handled that. Since we actually live outside the city limits, it was a few years before EPB expanded to our neighborhood. EPB doesn't do teaser rates and then continually jack them up; you simply pay the rate for the service or package or speed from the beginning.

The old meter comes out and a new meter and box go up. The fiber terminates outside and copper lines come into the house - ethernet to the router, RG-9 to the cable box, RG-9 (72 channels standard definition for any TVs not on a cable box). The fiber connection allows EPB to monitor electric usage and apparently locate outages and remotely clear faults as possible. The internet connection continues to work during storm related power outages - at least when I've tried it.

I'm under no illusion that we'd have a fiber network if Chattanooga hadn't been selected as a test city. From what I've seen EPB service has probably changed some attitudes at Comcast - certainly not anything that would ever tempt me to go back.

When the cable was pulled (underground in my neighborhood), I talked to the tech - there are a lot of unused strands in the fiber bundle. Perhaps a better model would be for multiple providers to install a single cable bundle and then split it into small individuals bundles leaving some free for later entries to the market. That might or might not make the concept financially manageable.

 

[Thunder Good-Oil]

Its cheap as hell right now compared to late 90's. For Orlando it should have already been done because of the corrosive nature of salt water and air. What has been taking them so long?

You may not realize it, but capital budgets aren't unlimited. Every telecom spends significantly on upgrades. They can't do it too fast and build up massive debt else they could go out of business in an economic pull back. There aren't enough infrastructure jobs to fill every need immediately. Then there are hurricanes that require resources being deployed into areas like Houston and Puerto Rico.

 

[Weezy]

EPB is fantastic. We should forget this net neutrality crap and just use federal subsidies for municipal broadband everywhere. Net neutrality solved since there would be no desire or need for fast lanes. Super fast internet at reasonable prices. No more being held hostage by companies with the lowest customer satisfaction of any industry.

 

[Mick]

You may not realize it, but capital budgets aren't unlimited. Every telecom spends significantly on upgrades. They can't do it too fast and build up massive debt else they could go out of business in an economic pull back. There aren't enough infrastructure jobs to fill every need immediately. Then there are hurricanes that require resources being deployed into areas like Houston and Puerto Rico.

Read your bill and you will see that they have fees and surcharges associated with maintenance and upgrades that they have been collecting for years. Knowing the nature of the internet don't you even wonder what you are actually paying them for, since they do not provide content just a network link. Let the ISP's provide the link and the consumer can decide on the content. I will side with the consumer's right to choose every time especially with the monopolistic nature of many local ISP's. Don't let them supply what "they" want and let demand be damned.

 

[Dobbs 4 Heisman]

Remember how bad the internet was before 2015?.....

Smh. Obama did it so it must be bad.

Stop just rooting for a side and use your brain.

The FCC rule the Obama administration pushed in 2015 was to keep the internet the way it's always been.

It was a prophylactic measure. It changed nothing. It only said ISPs can't change the internet from what it already was.

But keep pretending the 2015 rule changed something so you can be against something Obama was for.

 

[TDawg]

Smh. Obama did it so it must be bad.

Stop just rooting for a side and use your brain.

The FCC rule the Obama administration pushed in 2015 was to keep the internet the way it's always been.

It was a prophylactic measure. It changed nothing. It only said ISPs can't change the internet from what it already was.

But keep pretending the 2015 rule changed something so you can be against something Obama was for.

Keep shaking your head .. I have been in the information tech industry for going on 20 years now with the last nearly 10 being in Security and I have studied politics for nearly as long. You are so over your head with this and the worst part is you missed the guy's point altogether. Fact is, the 2015 FCC regulation implementation was an encroachment on business as a whole which is an overreach of the government's authority since it didn't go through congress. This is an Obama/Sanders move stealing freedom from the free markets. Government needs to stay out of it.

 

[Mick]

Keep shaking your head .. I have been in the information tech industry for going on 20 years now with the last nearly 10 being in Security and I have studied politics for nearly as long. You are so over your head with this and the worst part is you missed the guy's point altogether. Fact is, the 2015 FCC regulation implementation was an encroachment on business as a whole which is an overreach of the government's authority since it didn't go through congress. This is an Obama/Sanders move stealing freedom from the free markets. Government needs to stay out of it.

Hell you gave your credentials like you have some insight but you didn't have anything but a political opinion. You must have stayed at a Holiday Inn last night.

You need to study more: the FCC is an independent agency of the United States government created by statute (47 U.S.C. § 151 and 47 U.S.C. § 154) ) to regulate interstate communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable. The FCC works towards six goals in the areas of broadband,[4][5] competition, the spectrum, the media, public safety and homeland security, and modernizing itself.[6]

The fcc was doing their job in 2015 and they are doing their job now. I don't agree with them but i'm not going to call foul on the FCC.

 

[tumscalcium]

Smh. Obama did it so it must be bad.

Stop just rooting for a side and use your brain.

The FCC rule the Obama administration pushed in 2015 was to keep the internet the way it's always been.

It was a prophylactic measure. It changed nothing. It only said ISPs can't change the internet from what it already was.

But keep pretending the 2015 rule changed something so you can be against something Obama was for.

You’re the only person bring up Obama.