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Well, we all know they’ll learn to do better because of this: they’ll take all that money from monthly fees and make sure to improve quality of service! Right?

Well, we all know they’ll learn to do better because of this: they’ll take all that money from monthly fees and make sure to improve quality of service! Right? Nope. They’ll probably raise prices if anything, and receive no ill effects as a company for basically failing to provide what they happily accept money for. (Buried somewhere in an “update” to Terms of Service, they probably pardon themselves from exactly this type of outage.) There ought to be strict laws around long service outages, resulting in automatic multiple months of free service, etc. as a deterrent for allowing things to just collapse for hours at a time. This isn’t just Internet anymore; entire businesses can be affected for example.

ajmurmann 8y ago
Of course nothing will happen. Comcast is too good at lobbying and Internet still doesn't get treated with the same legal importance as other infrastructure like road, running water or even snail mail.
- ilyanep 8y ago
  For what it's worth, we let bridges crumble, communities sit without clean drinking water, and are intentionally bankrupting our postal service in the hopes of being able to privatize it. So I would say the Internet is being treated about the same.
  - AsyncAwait 8y ago
    But the government shouldn't be able to run postal services! Socialism something, something, Venezuela, uga buga!
    - TheCrownedFox 8y ago
      This is entirely disingenuous, the United States Constitution explicitly allows the federal government to run a post office (Article 1, Section 8).
      - mattnewton 8y ago
        Gp is being sarcastic (hence the “socialism uga buga”)
        TheCrownedFox 8y ago
        I meant that it's disingenuous to portray small-government proponents like he did by using a strawman of someone upset at a clear government power. It adds nothing to the conversation.
        wahern 8y ago
        For many decades (certainly at least through the 1990s, I think) there was a popular narrative that made poor postal service synonymous with inept government. Almost every citizen regularly visited a post office, and everybody had at least one poor experience. Standing in line at the post office was the equivalent of standing in bread lines in communist countries. This shared experience made the postal service a key talking point by politicians when selling small government, pro-capitalist policies. For various reasons this narrative has subsided. It probably wouldn't even occur to younger people to perceive in the post office reflections of a wider debate about government. Indeed, for some the post office is seen as a pragmatic answer to providing banking services to poor communities, only distantly related to or even entirely divorced from the big government vs small government debate. Actually, I think in general the debate on both the right and left has shifted away from bickering over the size of government, per se, and instead emphasizes individual rights and injuries.[1] It's why you'll hear the echos of demands on the right to completely privatize the USPS, almost entirely from the older generation because newer conservative generations couldn't care less unless you're talking about Jeff Bezos. [1] IMO I think that conservatives won the small government debate in the 1990s, for better or worse. There was a confluence of events in both America and Europe that effectively resolved the debate. Rather, policy proposals these days either rely on some public-private model, or simply attempt to exact concessions from private industry. The government directly doing something themselves is completely off the table. See, e.g., rayiner's comparison of Stockholm's and LA's fiber initiatives.
  - Kalium 8y ago
    If you're thinking of Flint, you may wish to update your reading material. It's possible your talking points could be more up to date.
    - Bramble 8y ago
      It took them the better part of 4 years to bring clean water back to Flint - they only ended their bottled water program in April of this year. Those who were there during the crisis will be living with the consequences of lead poisoning for the rest of their lives. Odd that you view something this recent, and of this magnitude, as an outdated talking point. Anyway, Flint isn't the only place in the US with water problems. https://impact.vice.com/en_us/article/wj4qvx/these-us-cities-are-dealing-with-the-worst-drinking-water-problems-nationwide https://impact.vice.com/en_us/article/wj4qvx/these-us-cities...
      - Kalium 8y ago
        You're absolutely right! It took years to replace a huge number of pipes while keeping a water system working, and those affected will suffer lead poisoning so long as they live. I've seen a lot of "Flint still doesn't have clean water!" talking points in the past month or so. Without passing moral judgment, the talking point is not reflective of current reality.
- tomcam 8y ago
  Snail mail is handled by one designated quasi-private firm, the USPS. Roads are often handled by contractors on a per-job basis. How would handling it like roads and USPS help?
  - nolliebs180 8y ago
    The USPS (at least in my neighborhood) does a far better job than Amazon+OnTrac?
    - H1Supreme 8y ago
      I prefer USPS now. I order a lot from California, and it's to me in Ohio in two business days generally. That's with Priority Mail, which is similar to UPS and FedEx Ground. Both of those are 4-5 business days.
      - emodendroket 8y ago
        Beyond that it's way more economical to use, in my experience.
    - wahern 8y ago
      I thought OnTrac was bad, but then Amazon somehow figured out how to provide even worse service. It was easy to pick on the USPS when people could only compare them to UPS or FedEx. But these days complaints about the USPS fall flat as its more obvious how much value they provide. I'll happily keep shoveling junkmail into the recycle bin if that's the cost of Priority Mail.
  - maimeowmeow 8y ago
    Internet is more like water, and electric utilities than USPS. Should not have middlemen who incease fees every two years when there is no service improvement. The data these companies charge 50-100 dollars to pass on is way less than 1 cents per average customer. A utility company could easily handle the infrastructure logistics, hiring of workers totalling a bill of 10-30 dollars? https://broadbandnow.com/report/much-data-really-cost-isps/ https://broadbandnow.com/report/much-data-really-cost-isps/
- briandear 8y ago
  When a road is closed does the government pay us a fee? Do we have SLAs for roads? When a letter is lost in the mail, does the postal service refund the stamp? Your comparison is illogical. Business internet accounts can and often do have SLAs. But, should consumers pay more for SLAs like businesses do? It’s a question of cost. In France, I had a four hour outage on a business connection once; no refund, not lawsuits from the government. I have also had at least five or six outages that lasted 15 minutes or so. Expecting 5 nines uptime is just unrealistic unless prices rise. My gigabit Comcast connection costs me $101 per month, including taxes. In France, I paid €79 for a “business” connection that had 10mbs down and 0.8mbs up — with an 8 hour SLAS. I am getting vastly better service from a consumer Comcast connection than I did from a business Orange France connection. And France is heavily regulated. My point is to be careful what you wish for.
- dev_dull 8y ago
  What do you suggest happen? We levy criminal charges against them because somebody/something severed important fiber connections?
JohnTHaller 8y ago
Don't forget all those folks without home phone service and unable to make emergency calls.
- briandear 8y ago
  Are they using Comcast internet for their phone or do they likely have a cell phone?
- dev_dull 8y ago
  The same thing happens when telephone service goes out because of a down power line. Nothing new here.
  - JohnTHaller 8y ago
    Landline phones generally work during a power outage in the United States.
    - zipwitch 8y ago
      As carriers change to fiber for all or part of their network, this is increasingly not true. It does bring back fond memories of trying to explain to WoW guildmates that we needed to hurry up and finish the fight, because my power just went out. (Still online thanks to telco central-office based DSL and a good UPS.)
simplify 8y ago
They actually do give a prorated rebate when outages like this happen. At least they did for me.
matte_black 8y ago
Why months of free service? It’s easy to just calculate the lost hours during the outage and compensate for that with maybe a multiple of 2x, or 5x or even 10x on the monthly bill. Multiple months of free service for an outage of a few hours just sounds like consumer greed.
- makecheck 8y ago
  This is one of those cases where I might agree if these companies weren’t actively trying to monopolize, failing to invest in their services, or trying to charge hand over fist in every possible way. Since ISPs are generally terrible though, they absolutely deserve to pay through the nose for every failure. It has to be punitively bad for them to fail, or they have proven that they just don’t care.
- chillacy 8y ago
  And to take a parallel into the business world, usually you'd pay extra for lines with higher SLAs, and I bet most consumers wouldn't bother.
aksss 8y ago
What’s that saying? Poor Pornhub planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part. Actually they do give rebates, unlike the road system. When’s the last time you got money back or a tax rebate from a massive road closure?
- sli 8y ago
  When's the last time you had literally only one route available to drive somewhere and it was closed? When your ISP goes down, you can't just switch to another one on the fly. Many people can't switch to another one at all in the first place. When there's a road closure, you just go around.
  - briandear 8y ago
    If you need the Bay Farm Island bridge tonight, you are SOL. I guess you could charter a ferry boat. https://alamedaca.gov/alerts https://alamedaca.gov/alerts
  - tenken 8y ago
    December 2017. California "Thomas Fire" shutdown 101 (and trains) for weeks. Taking the 5 inland sucks.
  - pkaye 8y ago
    You can use tether to your phone data plan in a pinch. Enough for email and light browsing for sure.
zzzcpan 8y ago
It's not really possible for a single ISP to get to the level of quality that has no hours at a time outages. For minutes per year outages level quality you need at least two ISPs independent from each other and not sharing infrastructure. Which means they won't even be available to consumers in the US and other countries, where internet access market is monopolized. I mean I can't imagine a law mandating ISPs to effectively split into two companies with each providing an independent link to the premises and all that. But when there is a competition a consumer at least has an option to just pay for multiple links to multiple ISPs.
- makecheck 8y ago
  They are in the business of Internet service, whatever that means. If there are things legitimately beyond their control, then pricing and/or claims of service must reflect that. Instead, we see many issues of their own making (monopolies and refusal to invest, mainly) that make it hard to sympathize.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
A fair amount of the money is wasted on adverting. Mailers, TV adverts, etc. Sure it's bought in bulk but it eventually adds up. I can't imagine what they pay to acquire a new customer, or worse, get a disgruntled customer to come back. Verizon? Same shit different name. Even where there's competition, they don't try to compete. I presume it's mainly a ruse to avoid any further regulations, etc.
paulddraper 8y ago
> They'll probably raise prices of anything > There ought to be strict laws around long service outages, resulting in automatic multiple months of free service, etc. as a deterrent for allowing things to just collapse for hours at a time. FYI, that means even higher prices...
rayiner 8y ago
I don’t understand this trope that ISPs don’t invest in network upgrades. A decade ago you 25 mbps was the fastest Comcast offered. Today, Comcast is rolling out gigabit around the country. What else has gotten 40x faster/better over the last decade? Even your iPhone CPU has gotten maybe 10x faster in that time. Maybe the GPU has improved that much.

ajmurmann 8y ago

Of course nothing will happen. Comcast is too good at lobbying and Internet still doesn't get treated with the same legal importance as other infrastructure like road, running water or even snail mail.

ilyanep 8y ago
For what it's worth, we let bridges crumble, communities sit without clean drinking water, and are intentionally bankrupting our postal service in the hopes of being able to privatize it. So I would say the Internet is being treated about the same.
- AsyncAwait 8y ago
  But the government shouldn't be able to run postal services! Socialism something, something, Venezuela, uga buga!
  - TheCrownedFox 8y ago
    This is entirely disingenuous, the United States Constitution explicitly allows the federal government to run a post office (Article 1, Section 8).
    - mattnewton 8y ago
      Gp is being sarcastic (hence the “socialism uga buga”)
      - TheCrownedFox 8y ago
        I meant that it's disingenuous to portray small-government proponents like he did by using a strawman of someone upset at a clear government power. It adds nothing to the conversation.
        wahern 8y ago
        For many decades (certainly at least through the 1990s, I think) there was a popular narrative that made poor postal service synonymous with inept government. Almost every citizen regularly visited a post office, and everybody had at least one poor experience. Standing in line at the post office was the equivalent of standing in bread lines in communist countries. This shared experience made the postal service a key talking point by politicians when selling small government, pro-capitalist policies. For various reasons this narrative has subsided. It probably wouldn't even occur to younger people to perceive in the post office reflections of a wider debate about government. Indeed, for some the post office is seen as a pragmatic answer to providing banking services to poor communities, only distantly related to or even entirely divorced from the big government vs small government debate. Actually, I think in general the debate on both the right and left has shifted away from bickering over the size of government, per se, and instead emphasizes individual rights and injuries.[1] It's why you'll hear the echos of demands on the right to completely privatize the USPS, almost entirely from the older generation because newer conservative generations couldn't care less unless you're talking about Jeff Bezos. [1] IMO I think that conservatives won the small government debate in the 1990s, for better or worse. There was a confluence of events in both America and Europe that effectively resolved the debate. Rather, policy proposals these days either rely on some public-private model, or simply attempt to exact concessions from private industry. The government directly doing something themselves is completely off the table. See, e.g., rayiner's comparison of Stockholm's and LA's fiber initiatives.
- Kalium 8y ago
  If you're thinking of Flint, you may wish to update your reading material. It's possible your talking points could be more up to date.
  - Bramble 8y ago
    It took them the better part of 4 years to bring clean water back to Flint - they only ended their bottled water program in April of this year. Those who were there during the crisis will be living with the consequences of lead poisoning for the rest of their lives. Odd that you view something this recent, and of this magnitude, as an outdated talking point. Anyway, Flint isn't the only place in the US with water problems. https://impact.vice.com/en_us/article/wj4qvx/these-us-cities-are-dealing-with-the-worst-drinking-water-problems-nationwide https://impact.vice.com/en_us/article/wj4qvx/these-us-cities...
    - Kalium 8y ago
      You're absolutely right! It took years to replace a huge number of pipes while keeping a water system working, and those affected will suffer lead poisoning so long as they live. I've seen a lot of "Flint still doesn't have clean water!" talking points in the past month or so. Without passing moral judgment, the talking point is not reflective of current reality.
tomcam 8y ago
Snail mail is handled by one designated quasi-private firm, the USPS. Roads are often handled by contractors on a per-job basis. How would handling it like roads and USPS help?
- nolliebs180 8y ago
  The USPS (at least in my neighborhood) does a far better job than Amazon+OnTrac?
  - H1Supreme 8y ago
    I prefer USPS now. I order a lot from California, and it's to me in Ohio in two business days generally. That's with Priority Mail, which is similar to UPS and FedEx Ground. Both of those are 4-5 business days.
    - emodendroket 8y ago
      Beyond that it's way more economical to use, in my experience.
  - wahern 8y ago
    I thought OnTrac was bad, but then Amazon somehow figured out how to provide even worse service. It was easy to pick on the USPS when people could only compare them to UPS or FedEx. But these days complaints about the USPS fall flat as its more obvious how much value they provide. I'll happily keep shoveling junkmail into the recycle bin if that's the cost of Priority Mail.
- maimeowmeow 8y ago
  Internet is more like water, and electric utilities than USPS. Should not have middlemen who incease fees every two years when there is no service improvement. The data these companies charge 50-100 dollars to pass on is way less than 1 cents per average customer. A utility company could easily handle the infrastructure logistics, hiring of workers totalling a bill of 10-30 dollars? https://broadbandnow.com/report/much-data-really-cost-isps/ https://broadbandnow.com/report/much-data-really-cost-isps/
briandear 8y ago
When a road is closed does the government pay us a fee? Do we have SLAs for roads? When a letter is lost in the mail, does the postal service refund the stamp? Your comparison is illogical. Business internet accounts can and often do have SLAs. But, should consumers pay more for SLAs like businesses do? It’s a question of cost. In France, I had a four hour outage on a business connection once; no refund, not lawsuits from the government. I have also had at least five or six outages that lasted 15 minutes or so. Expecting 5 nines uptime is just unrealistic unless prices rise. My gigabit Comcast connection costs me $101 per month, including taxes. In France, I paid €79 for a “business” connection that had 10mbs down and 0.8mbs up — with an 8 hour SLAS. I am getting vastly better service from a consumer Comcast connection than I did from a business Orange France connection. And France is heavily regulated. My point is to be careful what you wish for.
dev_dull 8y ago
What do you suggest happen? We levy criminal charges against them because somebody/something severed important fiber connections?

JohnTHaller 8y ago

Don't forget all those folks without home phone service and unable to make emergency calls.

briandear 8y ago
Are they using Comcast internet for their phone or do they likely have a cell phone?
dev_dull 8y ago
The same thing happens when telephone service goes out because of a down power line. Nothing new here.
- JohnTHaller 8y ago
  Landline phones generally work during a power outage in the United States.
  - zipwitch 8y ago
    As carriers change to fiber for all or part of their network, this is increasingly not true. It does bring back fond memories of trying to explain to WoW guildmates that we needed to hurry up and finish the fight, because my power just went out. (Still online thanks to telco central-office based DSL and a good UPS.)

simplify 8y ago

They actually do give a prorated rebate when outages like this happen. At least they did for me.

matte_black 8y ago

Why months of free service? It’s easy to just calculate the lost hours during the outage and compensate for that with maybe a multiple of 2x, or 5x or even 10x on the monthly bill. Multiple months of free service for an outage of a few hours just sounds like consumer greed.

makecheck 8y ago
This is one of those cases where I might agree if these companies weren’t actively trying to monopolize, failing to invest in their services, or trying to charge hand over fist in every possible way. Since ISPs are generally terrible though, they absolutely deserve to pay through the nose for every failure. It has to be punitively bad for them to fail, or they have proven that they just don’t care.
chillacy 8y ago
And to take a parallel into the business world, usually you'd pay extra for lines with higher SLAs, and I bet most consumers wouldn't bother.

aksss 8y ago

What’s that saying? Poor Pornhub planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part. Actually they do give rebates, unlike the road system. When’s the last time you got money back or a tax rebate from a massive road closure?

sli 8y ago
When's the last time you had literally only one route available to drive somewhere and it was closed? When your ISP goes down, you can't just switch to another one on the fly. Many people can't switch to another one at all in the first place. When there's a road closure, you just go around.
- briandear 8y ago
  If you need the Bay Farm Island bridge tonight, you are SOL. I guess you could charter a ferry boat. https://alamedaca.gov/alerts https://alamedaca.gov/alerts
- tenken 8y ago
  December 2017. California "Thomas Fire" shutdown 101 (and trains) for weeks. Taking the 5 inland sucks.
- pkaye 8y ago
  You can use tether to your phone data plan in a pinch. Enough for email and light browsing for sure.

zzzcpan 8y ago

It's not really possible for a single ISP to get to the level of quality that has no hours at a time outages. For minutes per year outages level quality you need at least two ISPs independent from each other and not sharing infrastructure. Which means they won't even be available to consumers in the US and other countries, where internet access market is monopolized. I mean I can't imagine a law mandating ISPs to effectively split into two companies with each providing an independent link to the premises and all that. But when there is a competition a consumer at least has an option to just pay for multiple links to multiple ISPs.

makecheck 8y ago
They are in the business of Internet service, whatever that means. If there are things legitimately beyond their control, then pricing and/or claims of service must reflect that. Instead, we see many issues of their own making (monopolies and refusal to invest, mainly) that make it hard to sympathize.

chiefalchemist 8y ago

A fair amount of the money is wasted on adverting. Mailers, TV adverts, etc. Sure it's bought in bulk but it eventually adds up. I can't imagine what they pay to acquire a new customer, or worse, get a disgruntled customer to come back. Verizon? Same shit different name. Even where there's competition, they don't try to compete. I presume it's mainly a ruse to avoid any further regulations, etc.

paulddraper 8y ago

> They'll probably raise prices of anything > There ought to be strict laws around long service outages, resulting in automatic multiple months of free service, etc. as a deterrent for allowing things to just collapse for hours at a time. FYI, that means even higher prices...

rayiner 8y ago

I don’t understand this trope that ISPs don’t invest in network upgrades. A decade ago you 25 mbps was the fastest Comcast offered. Today, Comcast is rolling out gigabit around the country. What else has gotten 40x faster/better over the last decade? Even your iPhone CPU has gotten maybe 10x faster in that time. Maybe the GPU has improved that much.