That is not going to happen. The onus is not on the consumer, it's on the service provider. The service provider may transfer the costs onto the consumer but Comcast won't directly charge the consumers a premium. That would be a bad move and Comcast would lose out its customers to competitors.
My guess is that in a true free market, a big chunk of those households would have no cable service at all. That is to say without the franchise agreements that gave them quasi monopolies in those areas, providing service wouldn't have been attractive in the first place.
Remember when there used to be five different cable companies listed in the weekly TV listings? Maybe you never saw that in your area, but when I was growing up in a semi-rural suburb, there were many cable TV competitors. Surely they didn't all require franchise agreements to want to enter the market.
Further, assuming franchise agreements exist and were necessary, consumers and municipalities should expect better from their franchisees than abuse of monopoly.
You're totally ignoring the difference between cable systems now and cable systems back then. Building modern HFC networks capable of supporting broadband requires tremendously more investment than cable TV systems of yore.
"Netflix is network heavy and competes with Comcast offerings using Comcast's own network"
Funny, back when I was a Comcast customer, I do not remember paying for "Comcast Network Access." I remember paying for "Internet Access;" sure, I went over Comcast's network, but I (maybe naively) thought that such distinctions were irrelevant on the Internet (that was kind of the point, if memory serves).
Its silly to pretend that the abstraction is the reality. There is no Internet, just a bunch of private networks connected together. No amount of wishful thinking will change that underlying reality. Now that real money is in play, the fiction of the internet is crumbling and the physical nature is becoming exposed.
"Its silly to pretend that the abstraction is the reality"
No more silly than pretending the the abstraction of "files" and "directories" is reality. No more silly than pretending that your computer is running a Python program, when in reality there are sequences of machine language instructions being run. Computers are useful because of abstractions.
"There is no Internet, just a bunch of private networks connected together"
You might have missed the definition of "an internet:"
There is, in fact, an Internet that we use every day. The overwhelming success of the Internet is due to the abstraction it presents, which is best-effort routing of packets from one host to another -- without regard for what networks the hosts are connected to, what arrangements govern their connections to those networks, and perhaps most important of all, what applications those hosts are running. On the scale of positive improvements to human communication, the Internet is up there with the printing press and written language.
"Now that real money is in play, the fiction of the internet is crumbling and the physical nature is becoming exposed."
No, what we are seeing is the impact of years of systematic attacks on the Internet by companies that are desperate to protect obsolete business models. Comcast is worried about the imminent demise of cable TV and all the power and profit that came with it. AT&T is worried about the demise of long distance fees, roaming charges, SMS charges, and all the power and profit that came with controlling the phone system. The recording industry and movie industry worked hard to leave the Internet divided into "consumers" and "services," even though the system itself was designed to be far more general.
In short, had we told these companies to adapt or die rather than tolerating their efforts to roll back the clock, we would not be in the situation we are in today. This has nothing to do with leaky abstractions, physical limitations, or the design of the Internet. It is just a power grab, a systematic effort to destroy a good thing that threatened the entrenched players.
> No more silly than pretending that your computer is running a Python program
Its a useful abstraction, but as physics causes CPUs to hit a performance wall on single threaded code, then you start banging up against the GIL and the failure of the abstraction to deal with parallelism. And when that happens you can't bury your head in the abstraction of a Python program. I'm not saying that abstractions aren't useful, but at the end of the day you have to concede that they are merely abstractions. When the abstraction becomes disconnected from the reality, reality wins.
> In short, had we told these companies to adapt or die rather than tolerating their efforts to roll back the clock, we would not be in the situation we are in today.
Adapt to what? Abstractions must adapt to reality. Reality does not have to adapt to abstractions. You can of course invoke the government, to regulate the reality into conforming to the abstraction, to the benefit of certain companies and the detriment of others. But history has not been kind to regulatory regimes of that nature. The deep irony of your position is that its the same thinking that led to the current mess with cable. In the 1980s, cable was the future. People invoked the potential to distribute educational material and public access material to the masses, and decided that such an important technology should be regulated. So they created the cable monopolies, under the conditions that they have cheap basic access rates ($13/month in Phila), carry public access or educational programming, and build out even to poor and rural communities. And it was an utter disaster in retrospect.
Yeah, my building here in NYC, I can get Time Warner or DSL (Verizon or from a reseller). That's it. Lots of us are stuck with 1 or 2 crappy options. I have overpriced Time Warner and a Verizon hotspot as a backup because the TW cable connection goes down about once a month. The other option is DSL which is too slow to do work and was down a week of my 30 day trial when I checked it out years back.
Keep in mind that this is New York City. You'll have lesser options in many other places in the US.
Yeah, funny world - once one decent internet provider pops up in an area (Grande, presumably, and now the thread of Google Fiber too), all the other classic providers seem to provide the best service they offer throughout the country. AT&T doesn't offer that in 95% of their territory in the US (so like 99% of the US can't get it), and the same goes for Time Warner. If any area has decent internet options, it's not because of a classic / well known broadband ISP, it's only because of some small independent ISP that forced a local market to be competitive.
broadbandnow.com isn't fine-grained enough to be trusted.
For my zip code they list AT&T UVerse, AT&T DSL, Cox and Time Warner. The reality of my actual address is that my only options are Time Warner and AT&T DSL (old school fully copper DSL, not UVerse). I'm positive these are my only wired options because I have researched this extensively (including actually calling the companies, not just relying on bad Internet data) due to being unhappy with my two options, and I continue to look into it about once every 6 months but nothing ever changes. Both AT&T UVerse and Verizon FiOS seem to have gone into deep slumber mode when it comes to service expansion.
The really sad part is that I've been using AT&T DSL for the past two years because while it is significantly slower than Time Warner cable in the bandwidth department, it has been far more reliable. Cost-wise both are a complete rip-off already, and if the government doesn't step in on the ISPs soon, I expect that the cost issue is going to get a lot worse, not better.
Yes, this site says I have Cox and Comcast in my zip code. I can assure you that Comcast is not doing cable internet business in my zip code or anywhere near my zip code. I don't believe they have a presence anywhere in the county.
Also the information blurb at the bottom says I have a fiber provider, but none are listed.
Finally, it's missing some local providers which I am positive exist; our local power/water provider also provides Ethernet to local business and some residential areas, but it's not listed.
I did this and keep doing it periodically. I only have 2 (but and I feel lucky). I keep bouncing between them to get "new customer" promotions for 2 years or so. Then I quit and switch to the other one. Sometimes talking to the "retention" department results in some minor bill reduction. But no, there are no 10 companies to choose from and picking the best one.
The reason Comcast would rather have Netflix pay than pass those costs to consumers is because they don't want to make net neutrality any more salient for consumers. If Netflix pays Comcast then it goes mostly unnoticed by the average person. If people have to start paying then the people screaming for net neutrality will start to scream louder, and Comcast really does not want that. It's not about competition with other ISPs, because as other posters have pointed out, Comcast is usually the only ISP in many markets.
Comcast worries about the FCC and Congress, not its competitors.
Comcast worries about the FCC and Congress, not its competitors.
It would seem that worry extends only so far. In this case, if what you're saying is accurate, Comcast intends to take (i.e., extract rent), and it just doesn't want to get noticed while it takes. Fear of the FCC and potential consumer backlash do not extend so far as to help it to reconsider its basic strategy of expanding rents, even as its merger with Time Warner is under review. There's a certain boldness to Comcast's move in working out this deal with Netflix.
Pass on the costs? Isn't this supposed to lower costs for Comcast even without getting paid by Netflix? If so you mean pass on the more profit they want.
You're right. There are no actual costs, and shame on me for adopting Comcast's language.
ISPs have the option of making content providers(Netflix), or content consumers(you and me) pay more. They're choosing content providers because they don't want to make net neutrality more salient for their customers.
Netflix isn't just going to absorb those payments, they'll have to pass them along to customers. Customers will want some explanation for why their bill is going up . And if Netflix's per-user costs become substantially different at different ISPs, they'll have to start thinking about ISP-specific surcharges...
The problem is that in many Comcast markets there are no viable competitors.
With Comcast I get ~3MB/s internet. DSL and Wireless broadband aren't even close to those speeds (in my area). So if I'm forced to pay a premium or switch, I have to "give up" significant performance.
Do a lot of people in the US only have access to one or two ISP's?? If so why? I'm in a not particularly urban part of Ireland and I can choose between at least 5 ISP's, decent speeds, and a good variety of prices.
The answer is, it's complex. It really depends heavily on where you are - and streets matter. But many people only have one or maybe two choices for wired, broadband Internet: DSL or Cable.
I live in a suburb of a medium sized city. At my house, I have 3 choices for wired Internet access: Knology/WOW, AT&T DSL, AT&T Uverse. DSL is right out because it's too slow, so really it's a choice between Cable (Knology) and AT&T's Uverse (which is FTTN or FTTP depending on various factors).
We moved here a couple years ago, two miles away from our old house. Same city, same suburb, just 2 miles difference. At our old house, we didn't have Uverse as an option - it was just slow DSL through the phone company or a single cable provider. If I had lived three streets over (less than 100 yards), I would have had a choice between Comcast or Knology cable, and DSL.
In other areas of the suburb that are further out, you start to see Mediacom (another cable provider). There are probably some areas that Comcast and Mediacom overlap in.
I have a coworker that lives in a rural area, and all he has is Windstream DSL. Cable doesn't reach out that far.
Unfortunately, the min/max slider forces hard-coded values during page load, so I can't link to specific graphs. I suggest checking out "served areas"/min:1/max:1 and "unserved areas"/min:2/max:whatever.
Those maps suggest the "1 ISP" set (or any set, really) is fairly uniformly distributed across the nation. In my opinion, it's not quite as biased towards the urban/rural divide I expected.
So it's a minority, but a substantial one. I would also guess that at least "some" of the 2-ISP group have various barriers that make it de facto 1-ISP.
Regardless, 8.9% of the nation is still a LOT of people, and "2 or 3 providers across the nation" isn't really a thriving economy full of healthy competition.
The interesting data points, I think, are the high end. A 4-ISPs isn't THAT different from 1-ISP (8.9% vs 14.3%), and those numbers drop off fast in the 5+ range.
Oh, and yes, I'm excluding radio, in any form ("G[0-9]", various satellite/asymmetric services, etc). Those are a different product entirely, and any similarity in feature set is only superficial. You can't play games or any other low-latency task over most wireless, and VoIP doesn't like the "several second" latencies of satellite, for example.
Most places are wired with one phone line, and one cable line. That phone line is generally owned by one specific phone company, and that cable line is generally owned by one specific cable provider.
So those are the choices of ISP: you can choose cable service or dsl.
For a few years the last mile over phone had to be shared with other IP providers, so you could choose between a) one cable company, or b) a few IP over DSL ISPs, but that ended sometime back.
There is also satellite providers, but they usually, I believe make a deal with your phone company, wireless, which is expensive, and fiber, which to my understanding is still just an upgrade from the over cable company.
How is the last mile provided in Ireland? And what are your choices of ISPs?
It is common in Europe that owners of the phone lines must give other ISPs access to it (for a - regulated - price). This in turn stems from the fact that the owners of the phone lines are (or used to be) owned by the state.
>> "Most places are wired with one phone line, and one cable line. That phone line is generally owned by one specific phone company, and that cable line is generally owned by one specific cable provider."
That seems to be where things differ. My phone line is owned by BT but I can still order internet through a different company. I pay that company an extra £10-15 per month for line rental (so I guess BT, even though they own the line chooses/or has to rent it to others).
I can't recall the last time I even heard of somebody in the US having the choice of more than two high-speed ISPs. At best, your choice is cable from one company and DSL or fiber from another. I'm sure there must be some places where there's three or more, but they must be extremely rare.
There are more if you count wireless, but those don't really work as a substitute for real home broadband, even with companies (e.g. Clear) that pretend they do.
Ireland and Britain enjoy better competition since they're a smaller area. Australia and the US OTOH are terrible since the population is so spread out (Australia's slightly better as the population is mainly coastal).
That's a cop-out. Services in the UK are either over the Virgin cable (HFC) network, or BT-owned copper/FTTC. The reason there's competition is a solid system of regulation which ensures fair and reasonable access to the infrastructure.
That's quite a different posture though. BT was a government owned corp, and when it was privatized, investors bought it subject to the restrictions in its license. In comparison, the cable companies built their infrastructure against the backdrop of deregulation, in which it was illegal for them to be granted exclusive franchises.
No Britain enjoys better competition because BT's final mile is heavily regulated so that competitors can offer services and are charged regulated prices for access to the unbundled local loop.
The BT Group was also forcibly split into separate operating companies, particularly OpenReach which owns the local loops and sells services to all ISPs including BT Retail.
Most US municipalities have a franchise agreement for a particular service. The franchisee has exclusive rights to provide a service in the franchised area. So there is often one cable tv provider and one wired telephone provider in an area. This naturally leads to one cable internet and one DSL provider. Some areas do also have a fiber provider (Verizon FiOS, Google Fiber).
These same areas are often also serviced by wireless providers, either cellular, satellite or some other kind of fixed wireless.
Note that while DSL tends to be available in every market, it may not actually be available at your home due to distance from the CO. Or it may be available but you're so far away that the performance would not be worth what it cost.
So the problem is that there's a clear hierarchy of what's good in any area. Where I live it's cable > DSL >> wireless/satellite. Compound this with the pricing structure: where I live it's wireless/satellite >> cable == dsl, with cable having some speed tiers that DSL can't match. At the end of the day, for any consumer trying to make a decision on value and performance, there's often really only one option.
I'm going to assert that this is how it looks for the majority of the geographical US. I'm not sure about the larger metro areas.
Are those all some form of DSL? Is there a big choice of phone companies? I know in the UK, its BT and a couple of resellers. Do you still have to pay for a phone line rental to someone else?
In the US, you generally have a choice between one (two if you're lucky) cable companies and DSL.
You have to remember that, compared to the US, Ireland is tiny. The majority of the US population does not live in large urban areas, who while New York for example might have lots of choices, Spokane probably doesn't.
While this is true, it doesn't really explain the situation in the US, IMO, since the very populous urban centers here suffer as badly, if not more so, than the more rural areas.
If you live in a sparsely populated area the excuse is "well, it is expensive to wire you up because of distances". If you live in a densely populated area the excuse is "well, it costs a lot of money to put new infrastructure into a densely populated area".
In both cases, lots of other countries are managing to do both of those at far lower cost to the consumer than occurs here in the US. Ultimately the ISPs here in the US are just greedy, duopolistic fucks.
New York does NOT have choice. I live in Manhattan (Upper East Side) and have the choice between $60 1/15Mbps Time Warner Cable and $40 1Mbps Verizon DSL. Theoretically some people in the city have access to Verizon FiOS but I haven't met these people and complaining about ISPs is pretty common for the locals.
The only factor that determines the quality of your ISP options is having a competitive player in the market.
Many people in the US have quite a bit of choices: Cable, DSL, Cell+Internet, Wireless. Usually those that live in large urban areas. But the service and quality of these ISP's varies greatly, which Comcast--in my area, being top.
Those Americans that live in rural areas, may not even have access to high speed internet, or always on internet--see the Xbox 1 fiasco for more details.
"Many people in the US have quite a bit of choices: Cable, DSL, Cell+Internet, Wireless. Usually those that live in large urban areas. But the service and quality of these ISP's varies greatly, which Comcast--in my area, being top."
This needs to be emphasized more. We rarely get to choose between equally cost-effective ISP options. The typical choice is one cable company, one phone company, and some kind of wireless service (possibly satellite). That is not competition, any more than heavy truck sales compete with mo-ped sales.
Same here. I'm in Bangalore, India, and I am spoilt for choice! There are about half a dozen ISPs that are recognized nationwide and then there are about a dozen that are specific to Bangalore with comparable QoS. And I also hear that ISP costs in US is really high in comparison. I really wonder why do they not come under anti-trust laws.
There are normally only one or two low cost options. There are often some higher cost options. For example, in the Bay Area there is high speed microwave internet available, but it comes out to more like 150/mo.
HBO charges Comcast a flat rate to carry their content, because HBO has great content.
Comcast then bundles HBO in various packages designed to bring a profit, knowing that people just want HBO, and are willing to pay extra for a bundle in order to include it.
In this case, Netflix is paying Comcast for the rights to use their End of Mile network.
In most parts of the country is Comcast had viable competitors , Netflix wouldn't have to pay it. The problems is cable and broadband industry is US is controlled by very few players. In quite a few areas, there is simply no choice (Satellite is just too expensive for many people),
