Commerce Department Study Reveals There's Almost No Competition If You Want Real Broadband
from the what-broadband-problem? dept
Just recently, the U.S. Commerce Department's Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA) released yet another study for defenders of the broadband industry status quo to ignore. The study specifically took a look at the competitive options available at higher speeds, and found that -- surprise surprise -- they simply don't exist for most users. FCC boss Tom Wheeler has recently been making the rounds trying to sell the idea that our minimum broadband definition needs to be higher than 4 Mbps, in the process pointing out that three quarters of the country doesn't have the choice of more than 1 ISP when it comes to speeds of 25 Mbps or higher.The ESA study confirms this and then some. When it comes to speeds of just 3 Mbps, the study notes that 98% of the public has the choice of two providers. Of course 3 Mbps is barely enough for decent HD streaming, much less a household of hungry bandwidth users, and the choice of just two providers means both are going to be expensive. It's fairly similar at speeds of 10 Mbps, where most people at least have the choice of two ISPs -- an apathetic cable operator, engaging in "wink wink nod nod" competition with a phone company. Move past 10 Mbps, and competitive options get worse -- quickly:
"For example, only 37 percent of the population had a choice of two or more providers at speeds of 25 Mbps or greater; only 9 percent had three or more choices. Moreover, four out of ten Americans did not live where very-high-speed broadband service – 100 Mbps or greater – is available. Of those with access to broadband at this speed level, only 8 percent had access to two or more providers; 1 percent had access to three or more. Only 3 percent of the population had 1 Gbps or greater available; none had two or more ISPs at that speed."So for all the hype surrounding 1 Gbps speeds this year, it's important to remember that only 3% of the population can get it. That's a lot of fiber to the press release. The ESA offers a handy graphical breakdown of the dearth of options in most markets:
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Filed Under: broadband, competition, fcc, net neutrality, tom wheeler
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Call ISP in region X, ask prices. Call in region Y, ask prices. Rinse, repeat. Very, very weak excuse for something that is publicly available with very little effort.
The 1Gbps offering must have its caveats too. I can get 1Gbp here for $1.300 installation fee and $500 monthly for home use. Hardly accessible, no? It would be interesting to see this accessibility with per capita wages considered.
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Getting prices
Hah, hah. Very funny. Firstly, you won't get the real pricing, you will only get the promotional pricing. Secondly, they won't tell you all the fees that will be tacked on to actual bills.
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Re: Getting prices
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Re: Re: Getting prices
Sadly, it is only a crime when we do it. If you have enough money to pay for lobbyists and lawyers, you needn't worry yourself about petty issues.
I suspect if I tried to tell them I was going to pay them up-to $80/mo and remove a bunch of money off in hidden refunds, I'd be looking at some jail time (though likely they'd just drop me as a customer and deal with collections for the owed amount.)
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Re: Getting prices
I've spent hours getting an accurate picture of package, prices, speeds, channels and equipment in JUST MY AREA. And none of that can factor in the hidden fees because HIDDEN FEES.
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Re: Getting prices
I think the OPs point though is that their argument that they can't release pricing data is bunk, which is correct, because big ISPs can hire data miners to actually get a much closer approximation of rates.
Consumers are the odd man out when it comes to that data.
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Our upper-level corruption is a bit more esoteric, but is roughly analogous to a large number of our MPs being members of the Kennedy family... kinda.
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what a crock: uber-kapitalists who extol the virtues of competition, blah blah blah, then do EVERYTHING in their power to make sure their competition is stifled if not eliminated by laws they lobby for...
its not turtles all the way down, its scumbags all the way down...
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In other words, you work for Comcast.
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price(s)?
I didn't find "price" by itself at all in the embedded document, and only one instance of "zero-price", but four instances of "prices" (not including a citation.)
All four instances of "prices" relate directly to consumer prices, and three of those pretty much directly state that less competition means higher prices, so your statement is a bit misleading. However, when I was doing the search for these words, I was getting weird and inconsistent results; at one point it was telling me I was viewing result 4 of 3, and it often did not show all the results if I did more than one search in a row. So I can understand getting this wrong if you just did some searches and trusted what it told you.
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Re: price(s)?
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HAHAHAHA LOL
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Availabliity
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Willing to move but...
I also rather dislike how, very often, multi-dwelling-units have 'agreements' that prevent competition.
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question
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Fiber
Once more markets get Google fober trust me the market will be blown wide open
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