ISPs: Reclassify Us as Utilities and The Sky Will Fall

[Wreckem]

Metered service is the inevitable future no matter what the FCC does or doesn't do.

 

[realibrad]

Right, a little deregulation was bad, more deregulation would have been good.

I don't know if this was a joke or serious?
If serious, here is my response.

Rules should be even, even when not optimal. If I understand your argument, its like this.

You take a pill A to help an issue. You then take pill B to help with the side effects of pill A. You then take pill C to help with the side effects caused by pill B. You then stop taking pill B, and wonder why pills A and C had a horrible side effect.

Deregulation needed to be far broader than it was. As such, the deregulation was pushed for by a specific group so they could jack up wholesale rates. That is not deregulation so much as removing a few parts of regulation.

 

[werepossum]

Right, a little deregulation was bad, more deregulation would have been good.

In that case he's absolutely right. Deregulating the wholesale cost while maintaining the retail cost is insane and unsustainable.

Chattanooga did something brilliant. Our local power company is the Electric Power Board, a typical non-profit semi-autonomous City-owned utility. A couple decades ago they identified two needs, a SCADA system for monitoring and controlling the grid and (for a variety of reasons) elimination of meter readers. They began by installing a high speed fiber optic backbone for the SCADA. Once a substantial portion of that network was operation, they began offering telecom services and soon after, Internet services to downtown businesses. Once the system was complete, the entire area served by EPB was offered telecom and high speed Internet. If your home is served by EPB, no matter how far out, you can purchase high speed Internet on a fiber optic backbone. Farther in, EPB competes with AT&T and Comcast so that every home within the normal cable service area has at least one option to a conventional big corporation service. Many homes have the option of EPB, AT&T and Comcast. The decrease in meter reading and semi-automated billing expenses and the decrease in outages and response paid for the backbone.

This has all the advantages of a monopoly while actually breaking the existing virtual monopolies.

 

[werepossum]

Metered service is the inevitable future no matter what the FCC does or doesn't do.

I suspect you are correct, and I'm fine with that. People should pay their own way, and no one has any inherent right to have others support their torrent downloads.

 

[Wonderful Pork]

Metered service is the inevitable future no matter what the FCC does or doesn't do.

I agree with you, with the stipulation that the second it goes to metered service then ISPs lose control of "the last mile" so that OTHER ISPs can compete with them.

Sort of how like people are switching cellular companies more often now because they can port their phone number, so when T-Mobile does all kinds of ridiculous things to incentivize customers the other carriers have to follow or else they lose subscribers. I pay less now for more service & better coverage than I did 12 months ago...on the same carrier with the same phone in the same house.

However, since Comcast is the only broadband choice I have, that'll never happen for me on the wired side no matter what anybody else does, unless Google comes in and lays the smack down. Or FiOS (which actually might happen in my lifetime!). Or if the FCC enacts & enforces strict net neutrality rules (which aren't overturned by the Courts or overruled by ridiculous laws from Congress).

 

[NoStateofMind]

Right, if the gov just got out of the way these monopolies wouldn't exist.

Exactly.