Claim? Claim? You think that people are lying to you? To what end? We have only one choice for broadband, Comcast. I could go with AT&T and get 0.768Mbps, but choose not to penalize myself by doing that.Wulfman... wrote:My question for those who claim they only have ONE choice of ISP in their area........
If you've had "net neutrality" for the last two years.......Why don't you have MORE choices by now?
Den
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Anyways, that's like asking, cars are too expensive, why aren't there more car companies? Or that classic chestnut, "Don't like the price of cars? Start your own car company". There's a matter of scale here for new competitors. We have a local ISP that's currently putting in Gb. fiber, but it is expensive to put in, and they've been at it for about 3 years so far. Probably that many more years until they get to my neighborhood. But the primary reason that they're able to do it all is because of the monopolistic way that Comcast has treated us for the last 6 years or so. We're all cheering for them, I don't know anyone that isn't ready to wave goodbye to Comcast. Especially since the ISP's pricing model is much more fair, they're not as interested in excess profits as providing service (as opposed to Comcast) and making a fair profit. Which I'm fully behind.
I want businesses to make a fair profit, since I need their services. But when they are thrust into a monopolistic position, apparently the temptation to treat customers like crap and overcharge is just too great. Comcast has also avoided infrastructure investment in our area, because they could, virtually no competition. We were at 25Mbps for their "blast" tier when Comcast in a nearby, more urban area where there's actually competition, was supplying 100Mbps+ for less cost ("performance" tier). The threat of the local ISP putting in fiber, that I mentioned above, caused Comcast to raise our speed to 150Mbps for the same tier. It was clearly done to make the fiber effort be less attractive, and has worked to some extent. When your download speed is held low for years, and then suddenly jumped by a factor of 6, you know that something unusual is going on. However, the cost is still exorbitant. I was on the "blast" tier, and recently backed down to the "performance" tier to pay less. I still get acceptable performance and am still paying through the nose for internet. More than the local ISP will charge for 1Gb. when their fiber lines are in.
Anyways, in our case it's Comcast's monopolistic behavior that's keeping the cost up. That's part of "net neutrality" as was recently formulated, that ISP's are regulated as common carriers rather than allowed to get excess profits from their monopolistic positions. Interesting that you would ask about why this monopolistic behavior doesn't cause competition to arise. It can, but the uptake of competition is slow, since they have a lot of work to do to put in their network, and generally finance it by the increased income from their growing network. That way they're not incurring debt, which would force them to charge higher prices to cover payments on that debt.