8 ms·

It's like you live in a parallel universe from me. My water, electricity, etc utilities are far more reliable (probably by an order of magnitude) than any priv

by ssmoot 12y ago

It's like you live in a parallel universe from me. My water, electricity, etc utilities are far more reliable (probably by an order of magnitude) than any private service I've experienced. They don't cut corners in design or safety, and when there is a problem, it's far easier to get in touch with them (they're usually already aware of it and don't pretend to act surprised like say your Telco or ISP) and scheduling is more flexible. Case in point: I was wondering if my home water pressure could be increased at the meter. I'd gotten conflicting advice from plumbers. I called up one afternoon. They said they'd send someone out to check. I got a knock on my door at 8PM that same evening. I told him I measured 42psi at the hose bib, which was over the zone's minimum of 36. Which was disappointing to me. But still. The level of service just floored me. I've never experienced anything close to that from Time Warner, DiSH, AT&T, T-Mobile, you-name-it. I replaced my 150amp electric meter with a 200amp meter (city provided), it was inspected for less than most people would bother getting out of bed for and I had a fire hazard from our "new to us" house replaced with almost no cost from the utility. I also feel like I get a lot more for my dollar. Obviously the power grid is far more complex than Time Warner's cabling. Not to mention it can kill you. From TWC I get internet access. From the electric company I get 100% Wind Power generated electricity (for an additional $0.5 I believe), and hundreds of kilowatts of power each and every month. I never give a thought to wether my sewer service is going to work. It doesn't have "off" days where it backs up a bit. My water doesn't decide to stop flowing every once in awhile so I have to try turning the faucet off and on until it works. When we moved in a couple years ago, I thought I smelled gas outside near the meter. Someone came out within 30 minutes. They found a minor leak (someone in the alley actually ran into the meter!), had it fixed up in no time flat. No charge. If an ISP could come close to my Utilities experience I'd be overjoyed personally. And it'd be the last time I ever saw an Early Termination Fee, obscene equipment charges for commodity hardware, it'd actually work 99.999% of the time, and (maybe the biggest issue of all with ISPs) I'd actually get the service level I'm paying for.

emcrazyone 12y ago
seemingly good point but I think you're comparing apples to oranges. Providing electrical power, sewage lines, etc.. is not very difficult compared to handling Internet traffic. To make more clear what I mean, I wonder how your electric company would deal with a set of problems like when a torrent shows up on one of your customer's computers? Not to mention that IT support is probably more expensive than having your gas line checked for a leak.
- ssmoot 12y ago
  To check for that leak they had to have customer service reps, city vehicles, fleet insurance, technicians qualified to work on a live, potentially leaking gas line, gasoline for the vehicle, and they arrived at my home in less time than a phone-call to TWC generally takes. I really doubt some IT staff costs more. As for the Torrent: Give the customer what they pay for, and no more. If my internet issues are because of Torrents, I have to ask: Why does the lack of competency ISPs have never seem to work in my favor? edit: Also "not very difficult compared to": I have an amateur's idea of the utility side (mostly from DIY and having relatives in the trades) and I think you're sorely underestimating the skill and care involved in making sure this stuff actually works. Large scale projects for anyone can be challenging, but it'd be amazing if anything ever worked at all if utilities put the same (lack of) planning care into their projects that most tech companies do. Most people probably don't even know what a P-trap is for. Or ever noticed that their gutters are actually sloped for drainage. What material their plumbing is made from. How many receptacles can be placed on a circuit. That the brick on your house isn't actually load-bearing. What weeping holes are for. This stuff has to last decades.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- avn2109 12y ago
  >> "Providing electrical power, sewage lines, etc.. is not very difficult compared to handling Internet traffic." There is no question that each of these things is difficult at scale. Furthermore I have never done either of them. However, power systems EE is perhaps the most widely-known example of Big Boy Engineering except building rockets. In the power business, they have an distribution/cabling problem which is at best isomorphic to that found in the ISP business (though probably greater, because ISP's don't have millions of volts to worry about) wedded to far greater stationing/substationing/production problems, and they still have (as noted by someone else in this thread) far more 9's of uptime than Time Warner. As compensation for this, ISP's have a greater Signals and Systems flavored problem, but it doesn't seem like it balances out. So basically I'm trying to say that "... not very difficult..." seems inaccurate.
ams6110 12y ago
If you want to swap meaningless anecdotes I can tell you that my cable service is more reliable than my electrical service. Neither are perfect but I have not yet had an internet outage this year that I've noticed; my power has been out for significant amounts of time (> 1 hour) at least a couple of times, and if you count momentary off/on outages it's been closer to a dozen. Where I grew up we had persistently poor water pressure. It took over a decade for the city-owned water utility to admit there was a problem and install a booster pump for that neighborhood. All my area utilities have fees for establishing service, deposit requirements if you have low credit or are a new customer, and if you call them out for service and the problem turns out to be with your plumbing or your wiring, you can bet there will be a charge.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  I think what we are really seeing here is that different municipalities have different degrees of success... In mine, no one even thinks about power/water/sewage/roads (except during road repair), but the poor quality of internet service is a weekly subject.
- duaneb 12y ago
  Just this morning, comcast had a massive outage across philadelphia and southern new jersey. Comcast is BASED in philadelphia. There was no explanation or warning, just as the work day started. If that were electric, it'd be national news; instead, it's just another day in the shitty world of comcast: accountability is way down on the list compared to fees, bugging me to upgrade my service. So still anecdotal, but hundreds of thousands of people were affected.
nickff 12y ago
You are addressing the 'seen' issues, but not the 'unseen', and to paraphrase Bastiat, "[the] bad [analyst] confines himself to the visible effect; the good [analyst] takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen". Please address this part of my post: "none of those areas has [seen] any significant improvement in service level, cost, efficiency, or technology for many years". ISPs and cell service providers have many faults, but they have been constantly improving the service level (bandwidth); I would like to know what comparable improvements have been made with respect to electricity, sewage, potable water supplies, police protection, fire services, or other utilities. These utilities have been constantly increasing in price (at least nominally, and in most cases after correcting for inflation), while providing no improvement in the basic service. Most utilities providers have not even been improving their back-end technologies, which would serve to reduce costs, or improve the service's availability. As I mentioned in the previous post, this is likely because of how governments use utilities' capital improvement funds as 'piggy banks', preventing infrastructure and technology upgrades. In addition, you are not addressing any of the drought/road quality & cost/police abuse/fire department cost which I raised, and which are real problems.
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  > Please address this part of my post: "none of those areas has [seen] any significant improvement in service level, cost, efficiency, or technology for many years". What improvements are you expecting? Some things don't need to change. It serves its purpose the same way it did a hundred years ago and there is nothing wrong with that. > ISPs and cell service providers have many faults, but they have been constantly improving the service level (bandwidth) That's the terminating equipment. The expensive part, which is the wire or fiber in the ground, hasn't changed materially in decades or more. You could easily have a municipal last mile and competing providers who supply their own terminating equipment at the endpoints. > In addition, you are not addressing any of the drought/road quality & cost/police abuse/fire department cost which I raised, and which are real problems. Would you like to explain how a monopoly for-profit entity can be expected to do any better? Why would they care about droughts or abuse if it isn't costing them money?
x0x0 12y ago
to be fair, pge did just blow up a city and completely fuck up record keeping for their gas pipelines But... fuck comcast, their high prices, their annual price increases, their data caps, their shitty service, their missed appointments, their slow speeds. We need government owned broadband.

by ssmoot 12y ago

emcrazyone 12y ago

seemingly good point but I think you're comparing apples to oranges. Providing electrical power, sewage lines, etc.. is not very difficult compared to handling Internet traffic. To make more clear what I mean, I wonder how your electric company would deal with a set of problems like when a torrent shows up on one of your customer's computers? Not to mention that IT support is probably more expensive than having your gas line checked for a leak.

ssmoot 12y ago
To check for that leak they had to have customer service reps, city vehicles, fleet insurance, technicians qualified to work on a live, potentially leaking gas line, gasoline for the vehicle, and they arrived at my home in less time than a phone-call to TWC generally takes. I really doubt some IT staff costs more. As for the Torrent: Give the customer what they pay for, and no more. If my internet issues are because of Torrents, I have to ask: Why does the lack of competency ISPs have never seem to work in my favor? edit: Also "not very difficult compared to": I have an amateur's idea of the utility side (mostly from DIY and having relatives in the trades) and I think you're sorely underestimating the skill and care involved in making sure this stuff actually works. Large scale projects for anyone can be challenging, but it'd be amazing if anything ever worked at all if utilities put the same (lack of) planning care into their projects that most tech companies do. Most people probably don't even know what a P-trap is for. Or ever noticed that their gutters are actually sloped for drainage. What material their plumbing is made from. How many receptacles can be placed on a circuit. That the brick on your house isn't actually load-bearing. What weeping holes are for. This stuff has to last decades.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
avn2109 12y ago
>> "Providing electrical power, sewage lines, etc.. is not very difficult compared to handling Internet traffic." There is no question that each of these things is difficult at scale. Furthermore I have never done either of them. However, power systems EE is perhaps the most widely-known example of Big Boy Engineering except building rockets. In the power business, they have an distribution/cabling problem which is at best isomorphic to that found in the ISP business (though probably greater, because ISP's don't have millions of volts to worry about) wedded to far greater stationing/substationing/production problems, and they still have (as noted by someone else in this thread) far more 9's of uptime than Time Warner. As compensation for this, ISP's have a greater Signals and Systems flavored problem, but it doesn't seem like it balances out. So basically I'm trying to say that "... not very difficult..." seems inaccurate.

ams6110 12y ago

If you want to swap meaningless anecdotes I can tell you that my cable service is more reliable than my electrical service. Neither are perfect but I have not yet had an internet outage this year that I've noticed; my power has been out for significant amounts of time (> 1 hour) at least a couple of times, and if you count momentary off/on outages it's been closer to a dozen. Where I grew up we had persistently poor water pressure. It took over a decade for the city-owned water utility to admit there was a problem and install a booster pump for that neighborhood. All my area utilities have fees for establishing service, deposit requirements if you have low credit or are a new customer, and if you call them out for service and the problem turns out to be with your plumbing or your wiring, you can bet there will be a charge.

sliverstorm 12y ago
I think what we are really seeing here is that different municipalities have different degrees of success... In mine, no one even thinks about power/water/sewage/roads (except during road repair), but the poor quality of internet service is a weekly subject.
duaneb 12y ago
Just this morning, comcast had a massive outage across philadelphia and southern new jersey. Comcast is BASED in philadelphia. There was no explanation or warning, just as the work day started. If that were electric, it'd be national news; instead, it's just another day in the shitty world of comcast: accountability is way down on the list compared to fees, bugging me to upgrade my service. So still anecdotal, but hundreds of thousands of people were affected.

nickff 12y ago

You are addressing the 'seen' issues, but not the 'unseen', and to paraphrase Bastiat, "[the] bad [analyst] confines himself to the visible effect; the good [analyst] takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen". Please address this part of my post: "none of those areas has [seen] any significant improvement in service level, cost, efficiency, or technology for many years". ISPs and cell service providers have many faults, but they have been constantly improving the service level (bandwidth); I would like to know what comparable improvements have been made with respect to electricity, sewage, potable water supplies, police protection, fire services, or other utilities. These utilities have been constantly increasing in price (at least nominally, and in most cases after correcting for inflation), while providing no improvement in the basic service. Most utilities providers have not even been improving their back-end technologies, which would serve to reduce costs, or improve the service's availability. As I mentioned in the previous post, this is likely because of how governments use utilities' capital improvement funds as 'piggy banks', preventing infrastructure and technology upgrades. In addition, you are not addressing any of the drought/road quality & cost/police abuse/fire department cost which I raised, and which are real problems.

AnthonyMouse 12y ago
> Please address this part of my post: "none of those areas has [seen] any significant improvement in service level, cost, efficiency, or technology for many years". What improvements are you expecting? Some things don't need to change. It serves its purpose the same way it did a hundred years ago and there is nothing wrong with that. > ISPs and cell service providers have many faults, but they have been constantly improving the service level (bandwidth) That's the terminating equipment. The expensive part, which is the wire or fiber in the ground, hasn't changed materially in decades or more. You could easily have a municipal last mile and competing providers who supply their own terminating equipment at the endpoints. > In addition, you are not addressing any of the drought/road quality & cost/police abuse/fire department cost which I raised, and which are real problems. Would you like to explain how a monopoly for-profit entity can be expected to do any better? Why would they care about droughts or abuse if it isn't costing them money?

x0x0 12y ago

to be fair, pge did just blow up a city and completely fuck up record keeping for their gas pipelines But... fuck comcast, their high prices, their annual price increases, their data caps, their shitty service, their missed appointments, their slow speeds. We need government owned broadband.