"Businesses will lie to customers and regulators as much as they're allowed to get away with because it's good for profits."
Either the customer or regulator needs to hold companies to account. In an industry that is a natural monopoly like last-mile internet delivery, then regulators need to step in and work hard to structure the market such that it actually functions properly, with as much competition as possible.
In Australia this had the government own the wires, which rented the capacity to companies, that sold internet service to consumers. An actual functioning market with competition, instead of one company owning all the wires for a town/city/state, refusing to rent them to anyone else, and charging sky high rates.
Theres a natural Pit and Pipe monopoly, but ISPs are hardly bound to it. The Pit and Pipe asset is a gift from the federal government to Telstra, who sold it to NBN for a steal. There are multiple fibre companies in a lot of our pits. PIPE, Vocus, Optus. They are prevented by legislation from diverting any of that asset towards residential users. The only exception where theres any kind of competition at all, was TPG taking NBN to court over apartment buildings, otherwise its illegal to overbuild NBN. The penalty is quite hefty too.
In fact NBN is being directed to overbuild other fibre providers. NBN says, we arent coming to this community. Community organises their own fibre. NBN says hey we actually do want to be in this market now. Now its a legal grey area as to whether the existing provider can continue their rollout.
Thats before we get into fixed wireless. I spent 99% of the NBN "debate" with a 300M residential fixed wireless service. Shady operators give it a bad name, but a well engineered wireless link is a godsend.
We had a functional market in this country. It was ULL. Legislation forced Telstra (through gritted teeth) to sell ULL copper instead of reselling their services. It lead to the largest sharpest increase in internet speeds in this country. The ULL model allows providers to provide their own hardware and upgrade it as demand requires. It removes a middle man from their logical networks. Why we trashed this model for an NBN cost recovery makes no sense. Singapore rents glass, it was a big undertaking and it has been extremely successful. Companies competing to be the first to roll out 5/10/100 gig services.
Any discussion in this area needs to acknowledge it is illegal for me to rent pit and run a fibre cable into a residential dwelling thats already serviced by the NBN. There's nothing natural about it.
The other thing the government (specifically, Graeme Samuel, Rod Sims and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) did was structure the NBN so that small operators couldn't join without buying connectivity from one of the large incumbent players.
The original model for the NBN was that there would be 14 points of interconnection nationally, which means if you were a smallish ISP you only need a physical presence in 14 locations to be able to offer service on the NBN nationally. That was the clear preference of NBNco itself, and the smaller (often regional) ISPs who now had a real shot at becoming national operators and challenging large incumbents like Telstra, Optus and TPG.
The ACCC decided that it does not, in fact, want to foster or support competition and that it wanted to continue the status quo, where a handful of large telcos control the market. NBN instead ended up with 121 POIs, which only the best capitalised carriers could service. That lead to massive consolidation in the market; many small to mid sized players either closed up shop or sold out to operations like TPG, and the small operators who survived now buy wholesale connectivity from the incumbents.
Yup - in NZ the infrastrucutre and the provider were separated as part of the nation-wide fibre-to-the-door rollout.
I switched provider the other week, after the old one discontinued a discount. All I had to do was sign up with the new provider and provide the connection number. They organised everything else and my old provider _refunded_ me for part of an unused pro-rata month.
Yeah, the Australian Government was never going to structurally separate Telstra because it would have trashed the share price, which would have made them look bad because they were the ones that sold it off to create the Future Fund (public sector pension fund, sort-of).
Telstra's behaviour post-privatisation somewhat precipitated the creation of NBNco.
And how much did the Liberals and Murdoch media hate that?
I got my FTTH connection a full ten years later than I would have if they hadn't fucked with the original plan. I can't forgive them for that. It's not even personal, it was holding back the progress of the entire country.
The behaviour of Optus and Telstra at the time dictated that the only way to do it properly was to have it done by the government. And they were right, because it was 'for Australia', not for private companies' shareholders.
100% agree. Abbott should be held to account for this forever. The plan wasn't perfect, but the way they messed it up for purely political point-scoring (and keeping Murdoch happy) was criminal.
The original plan was killed by the ACCC. You are thinking of the Rod Sims ACCC "engineered" plan written by the big 4 telcos (expanding the network to 121 POIs, preventing NBN from competing against fibre backhaul providers, generally making it hell for small players to compete), that would deliver FTTH but not the capacity or competition to make it viable. And we would still be undertaking the physical roll out.
The LNP made the last mile worse by some metrics, but they vastly improved the economics. Its a testament to how bad their PR is that they have failed to capitalise on it politically.
What you get from competition is the incentive to lay down fiber optics, so that you attract customers with your higher speeds and can rent the infrastructure to your competition. Though there are other forces at work in urban areas, in my area I know a lot of people out in the 'burbs with fiber optics while those living in the heart of downtown usually only have cable internet at best. Not sure what's happening there, and I imagine is where municipal internet can help (with both the taxpayer dollars and bipartisan buy-in for it).
On the customer service front, the painpoint is usually related to mobile networks. It's very painful to switch from one carrier to another, with limited time offers to keep you or upselling when you've decided to join. It's when this spills over into their internet services that I want to get off the grid entirely.
From your post, it seems the European internet and mobile market is much more competitive than the US one. And yet much more regulated.
It seems that’s two markets where EU regulations have actually created both enough competition (still not a lot of providers, 3, 4 everywhere) and constraints on the licensees to give us cheap very high speed fiber and painless mobile switch (number portability).
Is your city dense? It’s so weird that the center would be left out of fiber when generally that’s where carriers prefer to lay it first.
>while those living in the heart of downtown usually only have cable internet at best
If you're in the U.S. probably exclusive provider revenue share agreements with apartment buildings. The ISP gets exclusive access to the building and the building owner gets a % of ISP revenue.
Anecdotally, that rev share can be tens of thousands a year.
Most people here would not. Comcast is a fun punching bag but for the most part it works fine for most people.
Later
Sorry, when I said "here", I meant (and you couldn't have known without reading my mind) "in my municipality", where I'm on the board that manages the ISP contracts and have some knowledge that normal people in fact actually like Comcast fine, are not especially interested in having a bunch of new choices. But we also have AT&T.
Sounds more like Stockholm syndrome. I used to be ok with comcast even with their incessant increasing of rates that i'd have to negotiate and the terrible service. Finally had enough, switched to AT&T fiber. omg. the difference is night and day. No more caps, no more random outages. Lower pings, half the price and no price increase so far. I don't know why anybody keeps it tbh
While I hate it, I agree with you. My in laws are my non-tech bellwether.
They use Comcast, and love it. It's zero maintenance, comes bundled with their cable, and provides in person customer support for almost any problem at all at no cost.
They're paying more than they should for slow speeds. But they don't care about that. They don't know technology, and their connection plays YouTube and Facebook.
That might be part of it. When I first moved in, Comcast was the only ISP available. Then the city got municipal fibre. Suddenly, comcast decided to lower prices, and increase speeds. I will say that it was still a pain to cancel my subscription when I switched to the new setvice, though.
The underlying technology not the company itself is good enough most people don’t really complain once everything is set up. But for people moving to or from different areas Comcast really comes off much worse than most ISPs.
You can notice differences in web browsing above and beyond what the highly gamed “speed tests” suggest. Wait times for a technician are somewhat region dependent, but it’s never great etc. Total prices are high even when they have some competition and get silly when they’re a monopoly.
My parents are hitting and exceeding their 1.2TiB data allotment streaming TV shows. I'm considering setting them up with T-Mobile home internet.
Data caps alone are extremely anti consumer friendly. It's very difficult for non technical folks to understand how much they're consuming. Especially given the stark different between 1080p and 4k which might not even be obvious depending on their TV and streaming service.
Bingo. You really need to take HN thoughts (or really any nerd haven) with a grain of salt when it comes to _anything_ tech. Lots of strong (often informed) opinions that grounded in a reality that does not exist for most people.
There is competition in my area and it is way faster, and I did switch
But the competition isn't great either, so I get why people don't.
The modem/router the other company uses (can't use my own modem) is terrible and their support had no idea what I was talking about when I pointed to the DHCP table full of random shit that it wasn't freeing up, and logs full of DNS errors. And the wifi access points they provided were terrible too (free, but terrible). Eventually I worked around that by just adding my own router in the mix with a (internal 192.168) static IP, cut their DNS out of my router's list of DNS, and used my own wifi access points (which I had from Comcast days).
After my third support call I got a tech who provided instructions on putting their router/modem combo into bridge mode, but I'm hesitant to actually go through with that because I have no confidence their support can unwind me if anything goes wrong.
Like sibling points out, Comcast does offer faster download speed due to the competition. Still not as fast, but w/e.
It was interesting to see one of the commenters mention Fort Collins Connexion.
I've mentioned them a few times on HN with lots of other locals chiming in, but that service was incredible. I was very sad when I moved to an older apartment complex that refused to allow the buildup and had to go back to Comcast for a year before I moved away. Comcast offered 1.2Gb/s down, which was real, but the second anyone did a small upload, the entire network bogged down to actually unusable speeds (read: HN wouldn't load at all).
Cheaper and significantly better service from the municipal ISP than mega-corp.
That sounds like bufferbloat[1]. You can usually address that by using a router that supports active queue management, but it's a little esoteric. Newer versions of DOCSIS also specify support for simple active queue management on the modem, and I think this has become a little bit better in recent years. I used to have Comcast/Xfinity service and they didn't do terribly with regard to bufferbloat. They didn't do well, either, but it used to be much worse.
Some of the cable ISPs also have such asymmetric service that you can use most of the upload bandwidth just with ACKs while downloading. They often use ACK suppression to reduce the number ACKs and use the link more efficiently.
I'm very unhappy with the only ISP option I have in my apartment. I'll get (physical) spam from other ISPs that don't even offer service in my building, and around once a year I check a ton of common ISPs to see if they've added service to my building, but they never have. Meanwhile, every few months there will randomly be outages in the middle of the day for a few hours, but they always claim after the fact that the outage was shorter than it actually was so I don't qualify for any refund. The one time I tried to chat with their customer service they lied to me about it and then somehow the message asking me "is there anything else I can help with?" didn't show up until several minutes after the timestamp that it showed, by which point it came with a follow-up saying they were closing the chat due to a lack of response.
Maybe your building has an exclusive contract with the only ISP available.
That was the case with our last apartment. There was AT&T fiber running in front and the building was wired with cat5e. I can almost guarantee there was an AT&T fiber ran to a wiring closet somewhere but Spectrum (cable) had an exclusive servicing contract.
i had the same experience with fios over webchat with a customer service rep-- told them the price increase was too much for me and if there were no other options i'd have to go back to spectrum and they immediately opened up with my original rate again
One thing I like about the UK is the concept of regulated competition. The purpose is to ensure that there is always a competitive market place - so for instance in Internet technology, wholesale provider provides DSL layer 1/2 to multiple ISPs, who provide the PPPoA/E termination and value added services (e.g. email). There is often other technology available to the same addresses - cable, FTTP. The result is that for most addresses there is a choice of about 200 ISPs. The one I use (Andrews and Arnold) is expensive, but I have a /28 and a /48, I can run servers, the line is monitored once every second using their custom-build hardware, and I've had them ring me to say there is a fault on the line which will be cleared within half an hour. Also they implement the Shibboleet protocol. I pay for this, and for most consumers it would not be worthwhile - but that's the point. There is genuine competition with real differentiation between ISPs.
Small fibre companies have also been allowed to use Open Reach ducts and telegraph poles to speed up the fibre roll out. This has meant I've been able to get FTTP before Open Reach had brought it to my village.
I see that A&A have finally started offering uncapped data plans since August, good on them, since that originally put me off and I never signed up with them despite all the praise they get on HN
I've been a customer of A&A for a few years - I had the same reticence at first but thought I'd try them anyway. The only time I've come close to the 1TB monthly usage quota is this month, entirely because (for work) I had to download a very large number of docker images, in addition to a normal usage of 500-750GB. I think it helps that some unused portion of the usage quota gets rolled over too. Out of curiosity, what are you doing that would make you regularly exceed 1TB?
Kinda rich that the guy that thinks we don't need next-gen image formats because "bandwidth is cheap in most places" is making purchasing decisions around bandwidth being expensive.
I don't switch my ISP because of their excellent customer service, instead I keep them because I have no idea how good their customer service is. When you need to know how good a company's customer service is that means the company has already failed at some level in the delivery.
The best feature Comcast has added in recent years is the ability to request a $5 bill credit each time there's an outage. I use it more months than not. I suppose that's good customer service although it'd be better if it wasn't needed.
How recent is that? More than a decade ago, my friend related to me how his grandmother was subscribed to cable TV through comcast, but one channel wasn't working.
And every day, she'd call them to complain about the one channel that didn't work, and they'd apply a minor credit to her bill.
As far as I'm aware the "self-service" version of it on their website is in the past year. I think you're right that it's been possible over the phone for a long time though.
Readit News
Either the customer or regulator needs to hold companies to account. In an industry that is a natural monopoly like last-mile internet delivery, then regulators need to step in and work hard to structure the market such that it actually functions properly, with as much competition as possible.
In Australia this had the government own the wires, which rented the capacity to companies, that sold internet service to consumers. An actual functioning market with competition, instead of one company owning all the wires for a town/city/state, refusing to rent them to anyone else, and charging sky high rates.
Theres a natural Pit and Pipe monopoly, but ISPs are hardly bound to it. The Pit and Pipe asset is a gift from the federal government to Telstra, who sold it to NBN for a steal. There are multiple fibre companies in a lot of our pits. PIPE, Vocus, Optus. They are prevented by legislation from diverting any of that asset towards residential users. The only exception where theres any kind of competition at all, was TPG taking NBN to court over apartment buildings, otherwise its illegal to overbuild NBN. The penalty is quite hefty too.
In fact NBN is being directed to overbuild other fibre providers. NBN says, we arent coming to this community. Community organises their own fibre. NBN says hey we actually do want to be in this market now. Now its a legal grey area as to whether the existing provider can continue their rollout.
Thats before we get into fixed wireless. I spent 99% of the NBN "debate" with a 300M residential fixed wireless service. Shady operators give it a bad name, but a well engineered wireless link is a godsend.
We had a functional market in this country. It was ULL. Legislation forced Telstra (through gritted teeth) to sell ULL copper instead of reselling their services. It lead to the largest sharpest increase in internet speeds in this country. The ULL model allows providers to provide their own hardware and upgrade it as demand requires. It removes a middle man from their logical networks. Why we trashed this model for an NBN cost recovery makes no sense. Singapore rents glass, it was a big undertaking and it has been extremely successful. Companies competing to be the first to roll out 5/10/100 gig services.
Any discussion in this area needs to acknowledge it is illegal for me to rent pit and run a fibre cable into a residential dwelling thats already serviced by the NBN. There's nothing natural about it.
The original model for the NBN was that there would be 14 points of interconnection nationally, which means if you were a smallish ISP you only need a physical presence in 14 locations to be able to offer service on the NBN nationally. That was the clear preference of NBNco itself, and the smaller (often regional) ISPs who now had a real shot at becoming national operators and challenging large incumbents like Telstra, Optus and TPG.
The ACCC decided that it does not, in fact, want to foster or support competition and that it wanted to continue the status quo, where a handful of large telcos control the market. NBN instead ended up with 121 POIs, which only the best capitalised carriers could service. That lead to massive consolidation in the market; many small to mid sized players either closed up shop or sold out to operations like TPG, and the small operators who survived now buy wholesale connectivity from the incumbents.
I switched provider the other week, after the old one discontinued a discount. All I had to do was sign up with the new provider and provide the connection number. They organised everything else and my old provider _refunded_ me for part of an unused pro-rata month.
Suspicously easy.
Telstra's behaviour post-privatisation somewhat precipitated the creation of NBNco.
I got my FTTH connection a full ten years later than I would have if they hadn't fucked with the original plan. I can't forgive them for that. It's not even personal, it was holding back the progress of the entire country.
The behaviour of Optus and Telstra at the time dictated that the only way to do it properly was to have it done by the government. And they were right, because it was 'for Australia', not for private companies' shareholders.
The LNP made the last mile worse by some metrics, but they vastly improved the economics. Its a testament to how bad their PR is that they have failed to capitalise on it politically.
Dead Comment
If there was competition fir ISPs, everyone in my area would move off of comcast the first chance they get.
On the customer service front, the painpoint is usually related to mobile networks. It's very painful to switch from one carrier to another, with limited time offers to keep you or upselling when you've decided to join. It's when this spills over into their internet services that I want to get off the grid entirely.
If you're in the U.S. probably exclusive provider revenue share agreements with apartment buildings. The ISP gets exclusive access to the building and the building owner gets a % of ISP revenue.
Anecdotally, that rev share can be tens of thousands a year.
Later
Sorry, when I said "here", I meant (and you couldn't have known without reading my mind) "in my municipality", where I'm on the board that manages the ISP contracts and have some knowledge that normal people in fact actually like Comcast fine, are not especially interested in having a bunch of new choices. But we also have AT&T.
They use Comcast, and love it. It's zero maintenance, comes bundled with their cable, and provides in person customer support for almost any problem at all at no cost.
They're paying more than they should for slow speeds. But they don't care about that. They don't know technology, and their connection plays YouTube and Facebook.
That might be part of it. When I first moved in, Comcast was the only ISP available. Then the city got municipal fibre. Suddenly, comcast decided to lower prices, and increase speeds. I will say that it was still a pain to cancel my subscription when I switched to the new setvice, though.
You can notice differences in web browsing above and beyond what the highly gamed “speed tests” suggest. Wait times for a technician are somewhat region dependent, but it’s never great etc. Total prices are high even when they have some competition and get silly when they’re a monopoly.
Data caps alone are extremely anti consumer friendly. It's very difficult for non technical folks to understand how much they're consuming. Especially given the stark different between 1080p and 4k which might not even be obvious depending on their TV and streaming service.
But the competition isn't great either, so I get why people don't.
The modem/router the other company uses (can't use my own modem) is terrible and their support had no idea what I was talking about when I pointed to the DHCP table full of random shit that it wasn't freeing up, and logs full of DNS errors. And the wifi access points they provided were terrible too (free, but terrible). Eventually I worked around that by just adding my own router in the mix with a (internal 192.168) static IP, cut their DNS out of my router's list of DNS, and used my own wifi access points (which I had from Comcast days).
After my third support call I got a tech who provided instructions on putting their router/modem combo into bridge mode, but I'm hesitant to actually go through with that because I have no confidence their support can unwind me if anything goes wrong.
Like sibling points out, Comcast does offer faster download speed due to the competition. Still not as fast, but w/e.
I've mentioned them a few times on HN with lots of other locals chiming in, but that service was incredible. I was very sad when I moved to an older apartment complex that refused to allow the buildup and had to go back to Comcast for a year before I moved away. Comcast offered 1.2Gb/s down, which was real, but the second anyone did a small upload, the entire network bogged down to actually unusable speeds (read: HN wouldn't load at all).
Cheaper and significantly better service from the municipal ISP than mega-corp.
Some of the cable ISPs also have such asymmetric service that you can use most of the upload bandwidth just with ACKs while downloading. They often use ACK suppression to reduce the number ACKs and use the link more efficiently.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufferbloat
Another provider had recently entered my neighborhood taking my choices from 1 to 2. I threatened to switch and they kept me at $50/mo.
Monopolies are bogus.
That was the case with our last apartment. There was AT&T fiber running in front and the building was wired with cat5e. I can almost guarantee there was an AT&T fiber ran to a wiring closet somewhere but Spectrum (cable) had an exclusive servicing contract.
Deleted Comment
And every day, she'd call them to complain about the one channel that didn't work, and they'd apply a minor credit to her bill.
Centurylink will only offer me 6Mbps DSL.
A few years ago my electric coop spun up a for profit ISP and ran fiber to all their customers and provides reliable service and decent speeds.
Customer service has nothing to do with it.