Despite Claims Title II Will Kill Investment, Comcast Launches Major New 2 Gigabit Deployment
from the watch-what-we-do,-not-what-we-say dept
While broadband ISPs have repeatedly claimed that being reclassified as common carriers under Title II will crush sector innovation, investment, and destroy the Internet as we know it -- they simultaneously continue to do a bang up job highlighting how these claims are complete and utter nonsense. For example, while Verizon was busy proclaiming that Title II would ruin, well, everything, it's been using Title II to reap massive tax benefits. Similarly, despite the fact wireless voice has been classified under Title II for years, that didn't stop the industry from investing massive amounts during that period or spending record amounts at the FCC's latest spectrum auction.Comcast has similarly proclaimed that if the FCC moved toward Title II it would have a devastating impact on network investment. In fact Comcast's top lobbyist David Cohen had this to say the day the FCC voted to approve Title II rules:
"To attempt to impose a full-blown Title II regime now, when the classification of cable broadband has always been as an information service, would reverse nearly a decade of precedent, including findings by the Supreme Court that this classification was proper. This would be a radical reversal that would harm investment and innovation, as today's immediate stock market reaction demonstrates."Of course on the day in question telecom stocks actually rallied, suggesting Wall Street wasn't all that worried about the FCC's new rules. Meanwhile, this sudden freeze in investment is nowhere to be found on the news this week that Comcast is going to deploy symmetrical 2 gigabit per second service to an estimated 18 million homes. From the Comcast blog post:
"We’ll first offer this service in Atlanta and roll it out in additional cities soon with the goal to have it available across the country and available to about 18 million homes by the end of the year. Gigabit Pro is a professional-grade residential fiber-to-the-home solution that leverages our fiber network to deliver 2 Gbps upload and download speeds...Before people get too excited, remember that Comcast is trying to get its acquisition of Time Warner Cable approved, and as such is probably willing to make any number of promises it may or may not keep. ISPs also often like to conflate homes "passed" with fiber with homes served, so we'll have to see if Comcast actually gets anywhere near that 18 million mark. It's also worth noting that the company's current top-shelf tier of 505 Mbps runs users $400 a month, has a $1000 early termination fee, a $250 installation fee, and a $250 administrative fee. As such, if pricing for the new tier is similar Comcast knows most users won't take the option, with the possible exception of markets where Google Fiber creates downward pricing pressure.
Gigabit Pro isn’t the only way we plan to bring gigabit speeds to customers’ homes. We are currently testing DOCSIS 3.1, a scalable, national, next generation 1 Gbps technology solution. We hope to begin rolling out DOCSIS 3.1 in early 2016, and when fully deployed, it will mean almost every customer in our footprint will be able to receive gigabit speeds over our existing network (a combination of both fiber and coax)."
Still, which is it? Does classifying ISPs as common carriers under Title II create telecommunications Armageddon, or do things generally just proceed as normal, the only exception being an FCC equipped to police the most egregious examples anti-competitive behavior? Because increasingly, all signs are pointing to the latter.
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Filed Under: 2 gigabit, competition, docsis 3.1, fcc, fiber, gigabit, net neutrality, title ii
Companies: comcast
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Telecom stocks are down since Feb. 25
No, the market didn't rally after Title II was imposed. In fact, the day of the announcement all the telecom stocks were down.
VZ was the least affected by the Title II freakout since it is already under some common carrier regs in 700 Mhz.
And no, the mobile networks didn't bid $41B for AWS-3 in order to roll out some tricky new voice service, they bought spectrum for this thing called an Internet.
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Re: Telecom stocks are down since Feb. 25
Or it could be what I've been thinking for a vary long time while watching the stock market: Stock prices are bullshit and should not be used as evidence for anything.
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Re: Telecom stocks are down since Feb. 25
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Re: Re: Telecom stocks are down since Feb. 25
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Re: Re: Re: Telecom stocks are down since Feb. 25
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Re: Telecom stocks are down since Feb. 25
Also, you're intentionally ignoring the entire central point of the article.
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Re: Re: Telecom stocks are down since Feb. 25
I don't think any particular day's stock prices reflect Wall St reaction to a change in policy; it was anticipated, so some decline was already priced in, and the details weren't given for some weeks after Feb. 26th.
In any case, the stock performance of telecom firms has always been weak compared to the OTT firms like Google and Netflix, because broadband carrier profit margins - ROIC - are a fraction of OTT margins.
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Re: Re: Re: Telecom stocks are down since Feb. 25
Two, you're still not actually addressing the fact that investment isn't utterly imploding like the industry (and I'm sure you yourself) claimed.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Telecom stocks are down since Feb. 25
It's actually too early to measure the impact of the White House's regulatory overreach just yet, frankly. That's what journalists are saying.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Telecom stocks are down since Feb. 25
Actually you misquoted me, ignored 90% of the story, and then tried to pretend that very minor drops by two companies undergoing extensive merger reviews were linked to Title II's impact.
Ah, I see. We'll revisit this in a year's time then.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Telecom stocks are down since Feb. 25
I read that a member of Congress is complaining about the recent $1 hike in the price of gas. Price gouging, right?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Telecom stocks are down since Feb. 25
What regs are those? The Title II regs didn't come from the White House, so you must be talking about something else.
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Do you generally take everything the Democratic Party says at face value? I sure don't.
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So you believe that A) the FCC is part of the Democratic Party and B) the Democratic Party can be trusted to report on its affairs honestly and accurately? I don't believe either of those things.
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It's a shock, isn't it?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Telecom stocks are down since Feb. 25
In Europe, as in Asia, carriers are encouraged to build cable and fiber networks by deregulation. DSL is heavily regulated in those areas, but the faster networks are not. The fiber networks in Japan and Korea are effectively deregulated because unbundling requires the leasing of multiple strands of fiber at a time.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Telecom stocks are down since Feb. 25
Isn't unbundling a result of regulation? What references are you using for these conclusions?
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That doesn't sound like deregulation...
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"Since then, the primary focus of Japanese ICT strategies (e-Japan II in 2003, IT New Reform Strategy in 2006, i-Japan Strategy 2015 in 2009, New Strategy in Information and Communications Technology in 2010, and Declaration to be the World's Most Advanced IT Nation in 2013) shifted from expanding broadband coverage to promoting its usage. Expanding broadband coverage to the nationwide market was mostly done by
private initiatives, firstly of ADSL operators and then of FTTH providers. The MIC helped their businesses through interconnection rules, reducing access fees to existing network infrastructure, settling disputes among operators, and issuing direct orders if needed. It is important to note that, since the terms of local loop unbundling of fibers could not fully satisfy the need of competing providers, competition in the FTTH deployment is far less than ADSL’s. The main concern for unbundled fiber is that competitors cannot lease a single strand; instead, they have to use a bundle of eight strands even if they need only one strand. This makes it difficult for competitors to make profits in the fiber retail market. On the other hand, competitors can lease a single metal line from NTT-E/W; thus, they can offer competitive ADSL services in the retail market."
Like I said, if your regulator wants to move the nation from copper to fiber he regulates the hell out of copper and deregulates fiber.
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Re: Telecom stocks are down since Feb. 25
Yup, those are some drastic changes there, I'm sure nothing at all could shift stock prices in such a significant amount other than Title II. Clearly the cable companies were right and the very internet itself will soon be destroyed.
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Re: Re: Telecom stocks are down since Feb. 25
You can't believe everything you hear on the Daily Show.
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Re: Telecom stocks are down since Feb. 25
Oh. Right. Wall Street cares, in that self-serving narcissistic navel-gazing manner that it cares about everything it does.
Stocks rise and fall on Wall Street all the time -- often in a matter of hours -- based on rumors, hunches, guesses, broken trading algorithms, mistakes, and everything else. Trying to use stock prices as a barometer of anything -- except as a measure of Wall Street's insanity -- is pointless.
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Re: Telecom stocks are down since Feb. 25
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Re: Re: Telecom stocks are down since Feb. 25
Korea Telecom offers 2 Gig service even though Google isn't a player; there's more than one cause.
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Given that DOCSIS 3.1 was just recently displayed at CES 2015 and I still can't find any modems for sale, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the actual deployment. My guess would be push it out until it's deemed absolutely necessary by competition.
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Corporations care zero about an individual,
So the more faith you, as an individual, place in the words of a corporation the more you're a part of their machinations to game the system.
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Don't worry
Given Comcast's history with prevarication and deception, I can't get excited by anything they promise or predict.
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Law
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Re: Law
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"Under title ..."
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who cares if its capped
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Comcast Launches....
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Comcast outrage
This means that customers could enjoy Comcast's new speed of 2gbps (which equal 250 MB of traffic per second) for a little over one second before Comcast's extortionate "data hog" charges kicked in.
Assuming only a 1% usage of Comcast's 2gbps offering, which would be 20mbps, or 2.5 megabytes per second, in 2 minutes a user would have consumed an entire month's bandwidth allotment. And that's using only 1% of what Comcast claims they will deliver!
Charges for usage beyond 300MB/month are $10/50MB, or $30/minute. Again, using only 1% of the capacity Comcast claims it will be offering.
That works out to $1800/hour, $43,200 a day, which is more than the average American worker earns in a year -- including multimillionaire CEO's in the average!
Monopolists (and duopolists, in practice there is no difference) should be strictly regulated as common carriers, including --especially-- for their rates.
They rely on easements (the right to use) public property to run their cables and fibers, as well as publicly-mandated easements from the owners of private property. This for the greater good of the community as a whole, not so they can engage in extortionate price-gouging.
These sorts of public announcements by public utilities should be binding on them. And when they are shown to be scams, as in this case, the corporations involved should be subject to exemplary punishment, up to and including the corporate death penalty -- forfeiture of their assets without compensation.
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Re: Comcast outrage
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Re: Re: Comcast outrage
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Comcast outrage
This means that customers could enjoy Comcast's new speed of 2gbps (which equal 250 MB of traffic per second) for a little over one second before Comcast's extortionate "data hog" charges kicked in.
Assuming only a 1% usage of Comcast's 2gbps offering, which would be 20mbps, or 2.5 megabytes per second, in 2 minutes a user would have consumed an entire month's bandwidth allotment. And that's using only 1% of what Comcast claims they will deliver!
Charges for usage beyond 300MB/month are $10/50MB, or $30/minute. Again, using only 1% of the capacity Comcast claims it will be offering.
That works out to $1800/hour, $43,200 a day, which is more than the average American worker earns in a year -- including multimillionaire CEO's in the average!
Monopolists (and duopolists, in practice there is no difference) should be strictly regulated as common carriers, including --especially-- for their rates.
They rely on easements (the right to use) public property to run their cables and fibers, as well as publicly-mandated easements from the owners of private property. This for the greater good of the community as a whole, not so they can engage in extortionate price-gouging.
These sorts of public announcements by public utilities should be binding on them. And when they are shown to be scams, as in this case, the corporations involved should be subject to exemplary punishment, up to and including the corporate death penalty -- forfeiture of their assets without compensation.
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Re: Comcast outrage
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An 'announced' 2 Gbps speed is worse than useless if, as the commentor notes, the data caps they impose on their customers means that using it to even a fraction of it's potential will lead to massive overage charges.
'Congrats on your new, much more expensive blazing fast internet connection! Oh, you actually used it? Well, let's just add a few more zeros at the end of your bill shall we?'
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Also worth pointing out he works for a think tank that shockingly does some lobbying in a not so shocking manner for the telco companies who have a dog in this fight.
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Yes
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