FCC, Verizon: Rejoice over your broadband connection
ASPEN, Colo.--Unhappy with your broadband connection? You're not focusing enough on the positives, telecommunications companies and a member of the Federal Communications Commission suggested on Monday.
Tom Tauke, Verizon's executive vice president for public affairs, policy and communications, said the United States has seen a "tremendous deployment of broadband and wireless" in a remarkably short time. Verizon subscribers sent 10 billion (yes, billion) text messages in June, up tenfold from 17 months earlier, he said.
FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell
"Just a few years ago we were talking about trying to get DSL services and cable modem services to 20 or 25 percent of the country," Tauke said during a panel discussion at this year's Aspen Summit organized by the Progress and Freedom Foundation. "Now we have 51 percent of the households in this country, who not only have access to--but have purchased--broadband services."
Joseph Waz, a Comcast vice president and public policy counsel, said that "by the end of this year, Comcast will be America's fourth largest telephone company"--and by the end of next year, it'll be the third largest.
Commissioner Robert McDowell, part of the FCC's Republican majority, was equally enthusiastic. "We have more competition among differing platforms than any country in the world," he said, with cable modem service, for instance, available to something like 92 percent of Americans. (McDowell included the by-now obligatory language, of course, saying there's room for improvement as well.)
So, why would these three senior Washington telecom types be piling it on so deep?
The answer is simple. The audience at this conference has a fair share of congressional staffers on key committees who will be key to writing the next big telecom bill. One last year died without a vote in the Senate, but just about everyone wants some legislative fixes (the Bells want deregulation, Google and its allies would be delighted to see some Net neutrality rules, and so on) so eventually some version will resurface.
The Verizon-Comcast-McDowell initiative, in other words, is simply an effort to look ahead a few months or years. It's preemptive politicking.
Comcast's Waz rattled off a list of eight bad regulatory ideas that he hopes won't be in any eventual legislation, including forcing his company to pay overly high taxes into the universal service fund, subjecting the cable industry to more regulations than telecos, and prohibiting cable operators from investing in exclusive programming. He said he liked PFF's proposed Digital Age Communications Act.
For his part, Verizon's Tauke probably summed up the deregulatory philosophy the best: "Government must ensure it doesn't stop market forces from functioning."
Declan McCullagh, CNET News' chief political correspondent, chronicles the intersection of politics and technology. He has covered politics, technology, and Washington, D.C., for more than a decade, which has turned him into an iconoclast and a skeptic of anyone who says, "We oughta have a new federal law against this." E-mail Declan.
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been substantial advancements recently, but these guys are making
money hand-over-fist. Their marketing tactics are incredibly sly.
And how many times have we seen the costs go down? How about
zero.
month. And each household paid around $2000 already to get it.
The telcoms haven't delivered... they kept the money. What are they
spending money on instead? Expensive equipment to control and
limit data... and marketing to tell us how great what we already
have is. Shame on them!
See: www.newnetworks.com/ShortSCANDALSummary.htm
thing. The providers are interested in the former (a bunch of
services bundled together on the same connection), whereas the
consumers are interested in the latter (namely bidirectionally
fast always-on uncapped and unfettered Internet).
The industry understands that distinction and that's why we
have what we have now. Connections are costly, generally
require that you get a bunch of services from a single provider
(e.g., cable and Internet together or you pay extra), and the rates
and grade of service fluctuate wildly -- like cell-phones, you
often cannot get a concrete price before your service starts (they
add quite a few ambiguous fees and charges, change rates
based on zip codes, etc). Also, you often can't tell what sort of
Internet service you're going to get -- the providers block ports
in some places, don't in others; you oftne can't run a "server",
but it's so ambiguously defined that they could shut you down
for using Windows XP because it has file and print sharing
capabilities.
Lastly, there's a huge disparity in the uploads versus download
speeds, which, while a lot of it is due to poor decisions on
implementation, is also something providers intentionally limit.
If one assumed that everyone was going to download
exclusively, maybe that isn't a problem. But the fact is that many
people are legitimately uploading content -- updating their
personal web-sites, sharing personal videos, video conferencing
and voice-chatting, etc.
The big problem is, of course, that it's basically impossible to
enter the market as a competitor these days. A company that
wanted to provide just high-speed Internet without wasting
money on generating/purchasing content you're not interested
in doesn't have a chance. The average person has 1, maybe 2
providers to choose from. And, as the article indirectly points
out, they providers believe that you should be happy that they
provide you service at all, at any price -- so settle down and
take it like a man/woman.