[toddb]

Originally Posted by BucsLose

I hate how we ate not given choice and are limited. To allow companies to basically own territories is not free market. These companies have no fear because there is no competition.

I have Comcast. Have to have internet but I cit my cable and phone and the bill is still $70/month. That is too much imo.
They need to end the territory garbage and allow it to be more open.

I 100% agree...they claim there is competition by, at best, having one cable-services provider, and one phone-services provider. That smells like government enforced duopoly. There is another option called wireless, but oh wait - the same phone companies own the only quality service there as well. Yes, I know there are technically other wireless providers, but the services and access can't really compare.

The big incumbents claim there is such a huge infrastructure investment and they couldn't possibly support the massive overhead required to share the lines with other carriers. Except, they could. This was the same issue 30 years ago with local vs. long distance. Eventually people got so fed up the government was forced to intervene, contradict their old policy, and force the phone companies to allow other services. Frankly, this is not very different - we can use "local calls" to stay within the Cablevision or Comcast (or whatever provider) networks, and then use "long distance" to access the rest of the Internet via a different provider. I have no issue with paying a fair fee for the bandwidth I'm using out of the local cable provider's network, provided it's done fairly. $50+/mo for half-decent speeds with very little Quality of Service is abominable. At this point I would even vote for turning home Internet access into a government-regulated utility like electric or water.

[bomgd3]

Originally Posted by toddb

I 100% agree...they claim there is competition by, at best, having one cable-services provider, and one phone-services provider. That smells like government enforced duopoly. There is another option called wireless, but oh wait - the same phone companies own the only quality service there as well. Yes, I know there are technically other wireless providers, but the services and access can't really compare.

The big incumbents claim there is such a huge infrastructure investment and they couldn't possibly support the massive overhead required to share the lines with other carriers. Except, they could. This was the same issue 30 years ago with local vs. long distance. Eventually people got so fed up the government was forced to intervene, contradict their old policy, and force the phone companies to allow other services. Frankly, this is not very different - we can use "local calls" to stay within the Cablevision or Comcast (or whatever provider) networks, and then use "long distance" to access the rest of the Internet via a different provider. I have no issue with paying a fair fee for the bandwidth I'm using out of the local cable provider's network, provided it's done fairly. $50+/mo for half-decent speeds with very little Quality of Service is abominable. At this point I would even vote for turning home Internet access into a government-regulated utility like electric or water.

I agree, the service is absolutely terrible. I actually have no complaints about the speed of AT&T DSL or Comcast cable, but the service is abysmal. And I'm convinced that they arbitrarily update their hardware constantly in order to force us to buy new modems/routers. AT&T doesn't even offer a plain modem anymore, you need to spend $100 to buy their combo modem/router, and they won't allow me to use my two-year-old modem which works fine.

And I must have spent 6 consecutive months last year asking them to adjust my bill each month because they continued to overcharge me. Each time, the rep would say "It's fixed now. Your next bill will be correct". Then one month later, I'm wasting another 30 minutes of my time finding a new rep to fix my erroneous bill.