4 ms·

This pisses me off so much. I live in a rural area and have to use a damn unlimited Sprint cell phone shared through Windows Internet Connection Sharing as my

This pisses me off so much. I live in a rural area and have to use a damn unlimited Sprint cell phone shared through Windows Internet Connection Sharing as my home's only source of internet. AT&T has DSL across the street but refuses to allow me to have DSL and calls to them pleading to extend service go nowhere, I may as well be talking to a chatbot. I think of this fraud the telco industry perpetrated a lot when I have to deal with the constant problems a setup like mine causes.

rayiner 9y ago
A lot of the industry's problems can actually be traced to the government's attempts to ensure service in rural areas. The government wanted rural areas to have telephone service, but didn't want to pay for it with tax dollars. So it gave various companies monopolies as a carrot in return for the obligation to serve rural areas (or rural parts of municipalities). Post-deregulation, it imposed a huge extra tax on the industry which it then diverted to phone service in rural areas. Of course there is no free lunch--the end result of all that intervention was entrenched incumbents with little incentive to upgrade their networks.
- dv_dt 9y ago
  This would be believable except that lobbyists often step in at the state level to knock out community buildouts of self-financed infrastructure at much lower costs than what the big telcos claim.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    It's important to break down barriers to community fiber deployment, but it's a footnote in the big picture. In most states, there is no restriction on such deployment, yet you still see very little of it.
    - dv_dt 9y ago
      Because all it takes is a very few public examples to discourage the activity at all. Just like businesses want stability to make capital investments, so do community projects. What happens if you get 90% of the way through, and state lobbyists make your project illegal? All the invested capital becomes stranded or lost - do you risk that in your state if there are examples of that outcome in other states?

rayiner 9y ago

A lot of the industry's problems can actually be traced to the government's attempts to ensure service in rural areas. The government wanted rural areas to have telephone service, but didn't want to pay for it with tax dollars. So it gave various companies monopolies as a carrot in return for the obligation to serve rural areas (or rural parts of municipalities). Post-deregulation, it imposed a huge extra tax on the industry which it then diverted to phone service in rural areas. Of course there is no free lunch--the end result of all that intervention was entrenched incumbents with little incentive to upgrade their networks.

dv_dt 9y ago
This would be believable except that lobbyists often step in at the state level to knock out community buildouts of self-financed infrastructure at much lower costs than what the big telcos claim.
- rayiner 9y ago
  It's important to break down barriers to community fiber deployment, but it's a footnote in the big picture. In most states, there is no restriction on such deployment, yet you still see very little of it.
  - dv_dt 9y ago
    Because all it takes is a very few public examples to discourage the activity at all. Just like businesses want stability to make capital investments, so do community projects. What happens if you get 90% of the way through, and state lobbyists make your project illegal? All the invested capital becomes stranded or lost - do you risk that in your state if there are examples of that outcome in other states?