AT&T's Slow 1.5Mbps Internet In Poor Neighborhoods Sparks Complaint To FCC (arstechnica.com) 213
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T is facing a complaint alleging that it discriminates against poor people by providing fast service in wealthier communities and speeds as low as 1.5Mbps in low-income neighborhoods. The formal complaint filed today with the Federal Communications Commission says that AT&T is violating the Communications Act's prohibition against unjust and unreasonable discrimination. That ban is part of Title II, which is best known as the authority used by the FCC to impose net neutrality rules. But as we've explained before, Title II also contains important consumer protections that go beyond net neutrality, such as a ban on discrimination in rates, practices, and offerings of services.
"This complaint, brought by Joanne Elkins, Hattie Lanfair, and Rachelle Lee, three African-American, low-income residents of Cleveland, Ohio alleges that AT&T's offerings of high-speed broadband service violate the Communications Act's prohibition against unjust and unreasonable discrimination," the complaint says. AT&T is not immune to the ban on discrimination "merely because its discrimination is based on investment decisions," the complaint also says.
"This complaint, brought by Joanne Elkins, Hattie Lanfair, and Rachelle Lee, three African-American, low-income residents of Cleveland, Ohio alleges that AT&T's offerings of high-speed broadband service violate the Communications Act's prohibition against unjust and unreasonable discrimination," the complaint says. AT&T is not immune to the ban on discrimination "merely because its discrimination is based on investment decisions," the complaint also says.
Ajit Pai will get right on it, disenfranchised! (Score:1)
Bwahaaaaaaaa-hahaaaaaaaa
Low what ? (Score:2)
Low Income -> low Bandwidth
or is it :
Low Bandwidth -> low Income
Re: Low what ? (Score:2)
The former. High bandwidth is not a prerequisite for high income.
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The former. High bandwidth is not a prerequisite for high income.
High bandwidth is a precursor to lower income.... uh.. if you're.. like.. already lower income. Yeah.
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Dwarf Fortress World Championships.
Internet Recovery Fee (Score:4, Interesting)
Ever notice that $5 or so "internet recovery fee" on your bill. It's not for the govt taxes. It's for AT&T's shareholders. But it's not part of the advertised price even though it is part of the price. It's supposed to be for upgrading the network but that isn't happening. They should be forced to give back 20 years of internet recovery fees.
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http://www.dslreports.com/show... [dslreports.com]
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its because low incomes dont understand corporate investing and returns and tax deductions.
"Um, like, ummm, because you people that do understand it won't set it up for us for free and make it just work!"
I'm trying to return to solid logic and non-white-trash thought and expression. It's just so difficult once you get in to get back out. [that's what..]
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Poor people don't know what to do with internet. What Berkeley students say anyway https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
They said black people, not poor people. I'm walking away from this RIGHT NOW. :)
3G? (Score:2)
Would these communities get higher bandwidth by using 3G or 4G? Sounds like an opportunity to do some mesh networking if ATT could care to spin this, at least, for the PR value.
My first broadband was 1M/100Kb and I could study and do lots of things, even start a small business, then again this was 2006 and the web was lighter and simpler. It was worth the time to leave most videos buffer for a bit on Youtube, you could get content!
Now I have 60/40 Mb fiber and while I really appreciate the upload speed, the
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I'd say 5/2Mb should be the very minimum for the web today.
Speaking as a WISP customer who has played around in these single-digit speeds for a decade now, 5 Mbps is actually too little. 6 Mbps is the point at which I stopped having regular problems with streaming video. Yes, I have asked services which care to give me a degraded stream right out of the gate.
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Went from DU 56K > DSL 1M > DSL 5M to Fiber 60M. The best service in reliability have been the fiber and I know for a fact it is not oversubscribed, I usually get download speeds in the 80/90M range if the source is good and the latency while gaming keeps the same even at full dl speed, no caps, no issues on peak hours, pretty good service.
The hike in latency started around 2013 so Im mostly blaming that on some "magical hop" right before entering to the US in FL (Im across the pond to the south) This
simple enough solution (Score:3)
Have AT&T lobby the FCC to define 1.5Mb/s as High Speed Internet. Like they did to change the definition of high speef from 25 to 10 Mb/s.
Once enough money has changed hands, everyone will be satisfied.
Except of course the people who have to download everything they want to watch or access with a day or so wait for the download to complete.
Phones (Score:3)
Poor people nowadays don't have home computers - they have cell phones.
Which, even for the lowest-price plans, have better data speeds than 1.5 mbps. And no, they're not all bandwidth-starved.
(I was in a crappy part of New Orleans recently and was getting 50 mbps on my phone... which didn't need that much to stream videos, by a long shot.)
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I can get an iPhone 5 with an unlimited dataplan for $20/m cheaper than a basic cell phone.
No, you cannot get a data plan $20/m cheaper than a "basic" cell phone. I pay about $3 - $5 per month for prepaid cell phone service and usage. You can't get $20 per month cheaper unless your SP pays you $15 - $17 per month to use their unlimited data plan.
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You're confusing "poor" with "homeless."
Yeah, there are the people at the bottom of the economic ladder - but when I ride my bike past Home Depot, and all of the guys hanging around trying to get work are playing with their smartphones, it's hard to pretend that "poor people don't have them." When I ride the bus, the people who get on the bus in poor neighborhoods, and who spend the trip talking to their friends about their minimum-wage jobs? Smartphones. The only ones who have old-school phones are the Lud
Nothing unjust or unreasonable about it (Score:2)
While AT&T is picky about where it deploys its high speed services*, if this lawsuit happens, where do you draw the line ?
Do you sue X for not building a local store in your neighborhood ?
Perhaps Y for not having local franchises of your favorite restaurant ?
*AT&T is picky about where it deploys high speed services because they know that the number of households that will be able to afford or will use said service will not justify the cost of its deployment in the first place. Contrary to popular b
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While AT&T is picky about where it deploys its high speed services*, if this lawsuit happens, where do you draw the line ?
Do you sue X for not building a local store in your neighborhood ? Perhaps Y for not having local franchises of your favorite restaurant ?
In your example, X and Y are not contractually obligated to provide service in your area. That was the deal with the telcos, "We'll grant you a monopoly (and give you a shit pile of money) if you agree to provide service to everybody"
Here's the rub... (Score:3)
The telecoms, do this for financial reasons, understandably. A low income neighborhood is less likely to be able to afford the higher tiers of internet. However, the government knows this, and has enabled massive subsidies for decades for just this reason. The number of incentives, fees, tax.
The telecoms benefit from the extra $$$ but rarely put any good faith into the efforts.
At first glance (Score:3)
this seems like redlining [wikipedia.org].
And that has cost some banks money. Let's see if this meets the courts' tests for redlining, and how much they may force AT&T to both build out and actually offer/provide equally capable services to all customers regardless of location... Fining them is not a solution, and being forced to build is a tacit fine, not allowing them to use excessive fees for inadequate services and poor physical plants to subsidize services in apparently more affluent locations.
Discrimination? (Score:2)
"merely because its discrimination is based on investment decisions"
At some point this framing of the word "discrimination" sort of devalues the concept.
When even logical business decisions are pushed under that umbrella, they serve as distractions from actual cases of bigoted discrimination.
Re:Shut the fuck up poor people! (Score:5, Interesting)
Go get a job and buy better internet!
The complaint is that they *can't* buy better internet. Being a rich white guy in an area where 1.5M is the fastest available, I feel their pain. No reasonable amount of money can get me faster internet. Less than 5 miles away, I can get 100M but it would costs 10s of thousands if not 100s of thousands for me to personally have a line ran. There *might* be some esoteric solutions. My brother was in a similar situation and put a 100 foot tower at his in-town office and beamed internet to a 100 foot tower at his house in the country several miles away but this cost him several thousand dollars and is out of the price range of even most middle class people.
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Re:Shut the fuck up poor people! (Score:5, Interesting)
I am going to be a little tougher, those end users, well, they are poor and poor people do not own houses, they rent them. Now those houses are owned by investors and crappy internet services devalues a house by quite a lot. Best internet to worst internet is now some thing like 5% to 10% drop in property value. Now that loss is being created purposefully by the service provider as a choice to save money, regardless of the losses incurred by property owners (not occupiers, owners). Those owners have every right to consider legal action against those companies provided degraded services which devalue the properties and we are talking tens of thousands of dollar per property. Interesting thing here, is no contract and hence no arbitration clauses and so class action law suit by property owners as a result of the purposefully provision of degraded internet services which in turn devalue a property, due to reduce market access, having to compete with properly provisioned properties with actual high speed internet access. They are choosing to attack the value of peoples assets by purposefully providing degraded services.
Re:Shut the fuck up poor people! (Score:4, Informative)
Perhaps you're new here. Otherwise, I can't think how you'd have missed countless articles about telecoms providers lobbying heavily to prevent and prohibit municipalities - i.e. groups of local property owners - from competing by offering internet services to their community.
Re: Shut the fuck up poor people! (Score:3)
And many apartment complexes do just that. If you find a complex, often it will boast 20/20 or 100/100 internet services (around here at least) even though TWC only gets me to 20/1 if I pay a lot of money.
They contract with Level3 or another fiber company and invest the $100k to get it hooked up.
If I owned section 8 housing, I wouldn't do it either, it doesn't matter how much your property is or isn't worth, you get a stipend from the state for it and hope it burns out so you can collect the insurance.
Re:Shut the fuck up poor people! (Score:4, Informative)
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I have no idea what you Americans are doing.
I suspect the DSL problem in the US is that many central offices were consolidated in the early era of Electronic Switching System (ESS) deployment, and this is the reason for our crazy long local loop lengths [blogspot.com] that average 4.25 km. Works fine for voice, horrible for DSL speeds above a few Mbps.
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And *MOST* people simply don't have these issues in the US. Those that do are usually well aware of why they are having these issues -- usually because they chose a location that is far away from other people or surrounded by undeveloped land.
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but this cost him several thousand dollars and is out of the price range of even most middle class people
If a few thousand measly, inflated dollars are outside your price range, you're no longer middle class.
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If a few thousand measly, inflated dollars are outside your price range, you're no longer middle class.
The other issue is having somewhere to terminate on the other end. That would require someone in town willing to let you put a tower on it. Basically, even being firmly in the middle class, it's sometimes hard to do that last mile yourself.
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One place I worked it cost $18,000 for us to run fiber about 1/4 of a mile. We had to bore underground because the incumbent power company wanted to charge so much in attachment fees that it was cheaper to go underground, despite the fact that this was on private property and the poles serviced no other customers. Extrapolating out, it would be ballpark $288,000 to $360,000 for your 4 to 5 mile loop. But of course, every situation is different.
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One place I worked it cost $18,000 for us to run fiber about 1/4 of a mile. We had to bore underground because the incumbent power company wanted to charge so much in attachment fees that it was cheaper to go underground, despite the fact that this was on private property and the poles serviced no other customers. Extrapolating out, it would be ballpark $288,000 to $360,000 for your 4 to 5 mile loop. But of course, every situation is different.
Yeah, that sounds about right for the labor. The other problem would be actually getting permission to run fiber thru the state park and all the other properties between here and there. Other than my neighborhood of 20 houses, most of the rest of the area is farms so that would be a pretty expensive proposition for 20 houses.
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My mother has AT&T internet, and the fastest she could get is 1Mbps. I expected at least 1.5Mbps but they said it wasn't available.
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,... Being a rich white guy... it would costs 10s of thousands if not 100s of thousands for me to personally have a line ran.
I'm going to call bullshit on this person who lacks elementary English Grammar.
An Immigrant Indlish speaker MIGHT be rich and make these mistakes, but not a Citizen White Guy unless the money is all inherited.
Re:Shut the fuck up poor people! (Score:5, Interesting)
Wycliffe didn't say he couldn't afford it. Rather he stated the price. That's the best way I know of to stay rich: Don't assume that everything you can afford is worth the price.
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Wycliffe didn't say he couldn't afford it. Rather he stated the price. That's the best way I know of to stay rich: Don't assume that everything you can afford is worth the price.
You need to think about utility theory here. If you are truly rich fast internet is worth the price because your time has value.
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You need to think about utility theory here. If you are truly rich fast internet is worth the price because your time has value.
Then again, the time wasted making use of high-speed internet may be a net drain for some, making it a matter of choice to not purchase it. That is the same reason that I have not had cable for approaching 20 years: I could easily afford cable, satellite, or any number of online TV subscription services, but I value my time too much to just sit there watching TV for endless hours.
As a result, I am judicious about what I watch (usually on DVD/BD from my local library or RedBox, or BlockBuster when they were
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And I can think of no better way to spend that valuable time than watching streaming videos!
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That's the best way I know of to stay rich: Don't assume that everything you can afford is worth the price.
No, the best way to stay rich is to have a significant stream of income. A saving mentality helps allow middle class individuals maintain a more risk free life and a comfortable retirement, but it doesn't make them rich. I know rich is a subjective term, but at least in my mind if someone thinks a $100k home improvement project is unreasonable they are not rich. A rich person may not think it is important enough to do, but they wouldn't call the price unreasonable.
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You're assuming that in that person's mind "not important enough to do" at that price is not synonymous with unreasonable. If you don't feel that it is possible to get $100k utility (whatever that utility may be in your mind) out of a home improvement project, that price is unreasonable regardless of whether you can afford to pay the price or not.
Correct, I am assuming that. And I would bet I'm right. Maybe Wycliffe is worth $50M but still decides to live in an area where he cannot get the electric / gas / phone / internet utilities he wants, but I doubt it. He is probably an upper middle class individual living in a working / middle class area.
Re:Shut the fuck up poor people! (Score:4, Informative)
You are not rich.
A household income of $115K will put you in the top 20%.
One can be rich without being filthy rich.
Absolute value are useless (Score:2)
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So if Bill Gates retired to a private island or a ranch in Montana, he would no longer be rich? I ain't buying it.
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I still don't buy it. Cash is freely exchangeable for any other property. You are in a far more powerful position to have $1m in cash than to have $1m in real estate. He could live off of the land like a hermit in a cabin with 100% of his assets in cash under his bed and still be both rich and wealthy. You are going to have a hard time convincing people otherwise, and I'm not sure what your goal is anyway.
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Right, but let's say you go to the deserted island with only a satellite phone and a hoard of cash sitting in a bank somewhere. You still have "wealth" because you could call in a helicopter full of whatever it can carry. The liquidity of your assets is independent of your wealth, that is my point. A guy who lives in a 1 bedroom 5th floor walkup in Manhattan and has $4 million sitting in his 401(k) is wealthier than a guy with a 4 bedroom colonial in Alabama with $400k in his 401(k). Quality of life is a fu
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So if Bill Gates retired to a private island or a ranch in Montana, he would no longer be rich?
The fact that Bill Gates would always be able to travel to where goods and services are, or have them transported to him, is a red herring. If he is on some tropical island somewhere, then it takes far more money to enjoy the same goods and services than than if he was where the goods and services were to begin with. This alone proves that money isnt wealth.
You are grasping to define wealth as money when it isn't. Consider health-care.
Thats a service that in countries that have socialized medicine requ
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You are grasping to define wealth as money when it isn't. Consider health-care.
No, I'm using money not to define wealth, but as a convenient benchmark. Within a given context, wealth and money are highly correlated.
So yeah, you can go to France where the entire society pays a 50% tax rate and the entire society gets "free" health care. You can then find an individual in France who makes peanuts but is living a lot better than some guy in a society that does not have socialized health care. I can also find a healthy guy in the same society who pays a 20% tax rate and is doing a lot bet
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No, I'm using money not to define wealth, but as a convenient benchmark.
Convenient in that you can be dishonest about what wealth is by saying this is wealth.
Transport yourself back in time and you would make the argument that the rich are wealthy and you would give as reason that they dont have to do things like wash their own clothes, hunt their own food, carry buckets of water to their homes, and so on.
I think the term that you should use to be more clear is "standard of living" rather than wealth
Standard of living deals with wellbeing ("comfort") as well as wealth.
China is growing to eventually be the wealthiest country in the world because its citizens are pro
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Transport yourself back in time and you would make the argument that the rich are wealthy and you would give as reason that they dont have to do things like wash their own clothes, hunt their own food, carry buckets of water to their homes, and so on.
They were still "rich" and "wealthy" compared to their peers. Both words are relative measures, so what is the problem?
but still you will deny this and its because you have a naive cash envy.
Careful, you are slipping into a logical fallacy.
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"Being a rich white guy"
"No reasonable amount of money"
You are not rich.
Just because I think the price is unreasonable doesn't mean that I couldn't afford it if I really wanted. There are very few people rich enough where price is no object and those people don't tend to stay rich for long. I currently use cellular hotspots for internet which is faster than what I can get on a hardline and it suits my needs just fine.
Re: Shut the fuck up poor people! (Score:2)
Everybody has different priorities. Some people would pay extra to live in an area where the social culture isn't such that an extremely fast internet connection is a top priority.
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"No reasonable amount of money can get me faster internet. Less than 5 miles away, I can get 100M but it would costs " So why don't you just move less than five miles away? Are you really this dumb that you don't take internet connections into account when choosing a house? Because if you are, you deserve what you get.
I like where I live. I live on 4 acres and there is a state park between me and the city 10 minutes away. I wish I could get faster internet but it's not a deal breaker. That buffer zone is why I can't get faster internet but is also why I moved here in the first place.
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Form a community like us
http://www.wafreenet.org/Home
My neighbors and I have been discussing exactly this. Getting a shared tower installed.
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Poor people can't just "get" a job. There aren't any jobs. None. Rich people have all the money and they don't feel like paying poor people to do jobs. Rich people still advertise plenty of jobs to keep the HR departments busy. All the jobs are fake though. Every job application gets deleted immediately. Fake jobs are never filled but the same jobs get posted every month so they look like they're still open. But really there aren't any jobs. Poor people just waste their time applying to fake jobs until th
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Poor people can't just "get" a job. There aren't any jobs. None. Rich people have all the money and they don't feel like paying poor people to do jobs. Rich people still advertise plenty of jobs to keep the HR departments busy. All the jobs are fake though. Every job application gets filed away and ignored immediately. Fake jobs are never filled but the same jobs get posted every month so they look like they're still open. But really there aren't any jobs. Poor people just waste their time applying to fake jobs until they starve to death.
FTFY. Gotta stay in the category of following gov't regulation, you know, just in case you're investigated.
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I don't think my local supermarkets and restaurants post "help wanted" signs in their windows to keep HR busy.
I don't think it's legal (or maybe it is, just bad tact) to say, "Part-time help with no benefits wanted".
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You get paid only what it takes to avoid replacing you
Thus offshoring, H1-B and any other tactic to cut wages by rendering employees "redundant"
I'd rather it was a public utility (Score:4, Insightful)
It's kinda tough to get tough to do all that at 1.5mbps, especially if you're sharing a connection. How many geniuses have we lost out on because they didn't have knowledge in their formative years. Despite what you want to believe adversity doesn't really make people better, it gives them PTSD. Support and nurture makes people better.
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That means people in the US watch 213,406 hours of non-funny-animal videos a day. I don't know if you intentionally broke your own argument or not, but you did.
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No, but there is an issue if you walk into the local Lexus dealership with enough to buy an LS600 and they will only sell you an ES350 used because of your zip code.
Re: Discrimination? (Score:2)
That's not what's happening though, in your analogy they only offer the cheaper model because they know nobody will buy the more expensive model.
Re:Discrimination? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's partially because it usually ends up costing the telco MORE money to provide slow DSL than faster DSL. If the fastest available at any price is 768k/128k, you're already running on the bleeding edge of what ADSL can handle at that distance... your line is going to require more tweaking to get working, and is probably going to require more follow-up service over the long run compared to someone with 18mbps/1.5mbps U-verse VDSL2 from a VRAD that's 500 feet away.
That's part of the reason why AT&T used to not allow people who were too far from the CO to qualify for 1.5mbps/128kbps g.LITE ADSL to get it AT ALL... they didn't want to deal with people bitching about how they were paying the same amount for 420kbps/80kbps that others were paying for 1.5mbps/128kbps. So if AT&T said 'no', but you were technically close enough to get 420kbps/80kbps, your basically had three options:
a) go around AT&T and pay a company like Northpoint roughly $200/month to lease a "dry pair" of wires from AT&T and wire it up to their DSLAM (at the time, AT&T hadn't yet installed a DSLAM at MY local central office, so the only way to get anything faster than ISDN or dialup was to pay Northpoint to connect me to the next-nearest CO, which had a DSLAM about a year before my own did).
b) settle for 112kbps ISDN (112kbps, because with Florida ISDN, local "voice" calls were free, but local "data" calls were 3 cents per minute per 64kbps channel... with a little tweaking, you could get the modem to fake two voice calls with 56kbps data and spend unlimited amounts of time online for free). This is what I ended up doing.
c) pay for two voice lines, use it with a shotgun modem, and pray to ${deity} the phone company didn't just throw a PairGain line concentrator on your original pair to get two useless phone lines that maxed out at ~31kbps apiece. With shotgunning, you could get about 107kbps down and 48kbps up. Thankfully, I didn't have to go with this option.
For what it's worth, NorthPoint no longer exists, I don't think anybody supports shotgun modems anymore, and given that a regular landline is now almost $50/month after taxes, I'd be afraid to even ask how much ISDN now costs per month (I think I paid around $100/month just for ISDN circa 1997, back when landline phone service cost about $30/month after taxes).
Re:Discrimination? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Meanwhile some posters are complaining about Seattle w/Centurylink in particular. Do these fucks even know
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Re:Discrimination? (Score:4, Informative)
Except you're assuming that AT&T is arbitrarily discriminating rather than choosing to not invest in infrastructure where the risk of attempting to make their investment back is too great.
We paid them to do it. They took our money, they failed to build out high-speed broadband to the entire country like they promised, and in the same year we gave them the money, they paid out extra-large bonuses to their executives. They simply stole our money and split it up between them. They're not arbitrarily discriminating, they're discriminating against the customers they think are least likely to fight back against their theft.
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Is there a law that requires Lexus to sell you cheap cars? Do buyers of cars pay a special fee that should go towards subsidizing the purchase of Lexus cars by poor people?
No? Then your analogy is inappropriate and a waste of space.
Re:Discrimination? (Score:5, Interesting)
Lexus does not have a contract that gives them exclusive rights to your area on the condition that they sell to everyone in the area, not just the poor.
If you insist on getting a monopolistic contract with conditions, then you damn well better abide by those conditions, even if costs you some money.
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No. But lets fix this analogy.
If the only car you where allowed to buy was a Lexus, and because you lived in a garbage part of town Lexus decided you can only buy a Lexus bicycle, then yes there would be a problem.
This is a case about abusing service monopolies and is another datapoint in the increasingly obvious case that the internet market is broken and needs some serious intervention to restore fair competition.
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Well, history is not really siding with you on this. Usually, before they die, they kill the rich instead.
Nothing is more dangerous than a mob with nothing to lose if you do have something to lose.
Re:Here in the Seattle city limits... (Score:5, Interesting)
$250,000 right now in Seattle is literally a shitty ass shack considering the current housing market there. (and yes, I'm local to the area too)
But seriously, I came in to bitch about CenturyLink too. For the longest time, they'd only offer 3mbps service to my location. Luckily, for a very short period of time, they offered their gigabit fiber service to my location, I signed up, and still have it over a year later. Even after ALREADY HAVING IT INSTALLED, a couple months later, they claimed I could only get 3mbps in my area. It is total bullshit how they discriminate against certain neighborhoods.
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You probably took the ONLY gigabit-capable node, the cheap bastards, so they can't offer anything faster than 3mbit.
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I live in a small one-street rural village in Germany. All houses along the street are privately owned, meaning not a poor neighborhood by any means.
I can get 448/96 kbps ADSL at best. Complaining about only getting 1.5 mbps boggles my mind.
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"300 baud is the hotness"???
Yeah, like 40 years ago when just getting connected was really cool... But even that speed become completely outdated by about 1984 or so...
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This is hardly mysterious. Before something exists, there aren't many applications for that thing that most people need. People got along fine back in the day without computers, networks, mobile phones, and GPS. It doesn't mean you'd get by today, because what's expected of you has grown with what's available to you.
I downloaded Debian 0.91 over a 300 baud modem and put it on a stack of 35 three inch floppies. It took all day. The latest release of Debian is 60x larger.
It takes 3 MB/s dedicated to ge
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None worth going to.
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My internet is just barely faster than a T1. How ever will I cope?!?!?
A T1 was plenty back before Youtube and Netflix, but is not enough to handle video. I need enough bandwidth so that my wife and daughter can watch two different movies and I can still get work done.
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My internet is just barely faster than a T1. How ever will I cope?!?!?
I don't know why most of the replies to you imply that you must be joking, or that's not sufficient anymore. I came here expecting to find most people saying that.
Way way back, nearly 2 decades ago, I had lost my cable internet service. My cell phone, a motorola flip phone through nextel, had the ability to hook to the computer as a serial device, and you could dial out that way. Using a special prefix got you a modem bank at Nextel. For 3 months, I did all my home browsing using that. It was stuck at a max
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I think the argument, "You're getting Y Mbps! That ought to be enough!!" is missing the point a bit. What's going on is that an ISP offers package A. Neighborhood X has no problem keeping up with demand because the area was expected to draw bigger income earners when the fiber was laid down. Neighborhood Y has issues keeping up with demand because, to the ISP, net income in the area just makes it unattractive to lay more fiber in the area.
WARNING Personal rant below
I've got the exact same thing here wh
Re:ZOMG!-56K is good enough for everyone. (Score:5, Funny)
56K!? Seriously, you had 56K! You lucky SOB! In my day we felt lucky to be able to cradle our handsets into 300 baud modem. The data had to climb uphill, in the snow, both ways.
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56K!? Seriously, you had 56K! You lucky SOB! In my day we felt lucky to be able to cradle our handsets into 300 baud modem. The data had to climb uphill, in the snow, both ways.
300 baud modem? When I was your age we had to "transfer data" over a radio using the NATO phonetic alphabet [wikipedia.org] and we liked it! No respect, I say, you kids got no respect!
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When I was your age we had to "transfer data" over a radio
You had RADIOS??? We used to dream about having a radio. We had to send our packets with pigeons [wikipedia.org]. There were times when our ping times were a fortnight.
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Once they're upgraded, they can now mark their ethernet connection as a metered connection. Those updates can be downloaded off-site and brought in when actually needed.
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ALL the telecom oligopolies suck puss-filled maggots. Jail all the f#cking bastards!
Wait, so you like telecoms? Or not.?....I'm not feeling you here. Please be more clear!
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National broadband map [broadbandmap.gov] Enable all of the top row items to see the real issue. The left coast just doesnt have the infrastructure over very wide swaths. Its all local problems in States whose people that think the Federal government should solve all their local problems for them. I dont know a single left coast person that knows jack about local politics.
Meanwhile in the north east clear through to Chicago just about
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Nope. In my experience, the average legal content is far less useful than the average illegal content.
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