AT&T Publicly Humiliated over crappy internet

[leadeater]

37 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

They do provide funds for rural internet. Its just its not enough. Where do you expect them to get the money?

Just take an extra year to develop that new missile, there money found  Jokes aside it totally can be paid for without an increase in tax.

 

37 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

And even if they have the money who's says the telecoms wont just turn around the pocket it? 

Nothing which is the problem and what is happening now anyway, so more won't really help too.

[Rugg]

3 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Just take an extra year to develop that new missile, there money found  Jokes aside it totally can be paid for without an increase in tax.

Debt would beg to differ. Well, on second though considering this modern monetary policy who cares just print money give it out who cares, build all the infrastructure!

[Donut417]

3 minutes ago, leadeater said:

ust take an extra year to develop that new missile, there money found  Jokes aside it totally can be paid for without an increase in tax.

No way they would use the defense budget for this. There is no more money. With how things are going with China, I dont think they want to let us barrow any more. 

 

 

[leadeater]

10 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

No way they would use the defense budget for this. There is no more money. With how things are going with China, I dont think they want to let us barrow any more. 

You don't have to use defense budget, you just change the budget allocations when that time comes. This is nothing more than a choice of where to spend the money, they choose to do it on defense and not infrastructure and utilities. I'm not saying they would change that choice but they can, they won't, but they can.

[leadeater]

13 minutes ago, Rugg said:

Debt would beg to differ. Well, on second though considering this modern monetary policy who cares just print money give it out who cares, build all the infrastructure!

Debt has been a thing for decades, that really changes nothing here. US is part of the group of economic super powers, they have the money to do it.

[Rugg]

5 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Debt has been a thing for decades, that really changes nothing here. US is part of the group of economic super powers, they have the money to do it.

They don't have the money to do it, they just have the ability to spawn the money they need. Exactly my point about modern monetary policy.

[leadeater]

16 minutes ago, Rugg said:

They don't have the money to do it, they just have the ability to spawn the money they need. Exactly my point about modern monetary policy.

That is an extremely simplistic way to look at it but no they do not need to spawn more money to do it, they can use what they have now and reallocate it somewhere else, no other change required.

[Eaglerino]

13 hours ago, Vishera said:

America is behind most of it's allies when it comes to Internet and health care...

I am sitting here happy with 1Gb/s and the best ISP you can ever have. (I am from Europe)

depends where you live. Most european countries have far less footprint to cover than America. I've lived in places with symmetrical 1gbps up/down and places with 10mbps. Starlink can't come soon enough

[Brooksie359]

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

Hmm not really no, cost of it has far less to do with the quality of it. Much of the cost issues have nothing to do with the quality anyway. For the more specialized treatments and medications they can easily stay as they are as private only options.

 

Like your internet costs, the fact that in almost all areas of the US you pay more than I do and on top of that in general have a data cap doesn't make the quality of your internet connection better than mine. It's even worse than that too if you compare the diversity of options, I pay for a business connection and their are different tiers of that too so to be up front I pay for the lowest however that gives me 1Gbps with higher priority than residential connections along with 24/7 support and any outages have to be notified to me in advance. I also benefit from different peering rules and route paths, my connection is peered and routed much closer to where I actually live compared to residential ones which are almost always terminated through to Auckland then routing evaluations done on the traffic regardless of where you actually live. Now this is fine if all you do is general internet stuff but if you are accessing things internal to NZ not so much, I don't have 10ms added on to my RDP sessions remoting in to work.

 

I also pay for my own /28 public IP range, now what do I pay for this service?  $110 USD/month. I'm not aware of any option that exists in the US that is either equivalent or as cheap. You certainly have business connections but those are more like the higher tier ones than mine and they cost far far more.

 

A high cost of a service does not necessarily make it better or allow it to be better and the high cost of it may have little to do with the quality of it itself and rather different factors that have more to do with privatized care and clinical research. Likewise the high cost of your internet has little to do with expansion and upgrades and more to do with lobbying and protection efforts to maintain the current situation.

 

Even here when things were worse I've tried to go down this path, there is little to no interest from anyone to actually do it. Because of my work I know how much it costs, where things are and who to talk to, the answer was still no and there wasn't an amount high enough within my means to change that to a yes. That figure to change it to a yes is way the hell up there, like just buy another house up there.

Strange. My father had a house that was located about a mile away from other service areas and he had contacted the isp and was told that it could be done for about 10k. Granted this was coax not fiber as at the time fiber wasn't really a thing. I guess fiber would be much more expensive to pay for it to be installed. As for healthcare I would agree that to some extent that the higher prices don't directly contribute to better healthcare at the general level. What I mean is that in a system where healthcare makes alot of money people who are very smart will have more incentive to go into the healthcare field and that results in alot of very talented individuals working in healthcare at the highest level. At the general level it likely does little to nothing tbh. Isps is an entirely different story as it is basically a monopolistic state where you really only have one option in 99% of cases. Granted the isps will argue that having the option between one company that provides 10 to 25mbs max and the other that can give gigabytes internet is somehow not monopolistic. Sure you have two options if you don't need over 10 to 25mbs but if you need over that you only have one option which is basically a monopoly. And that is in a good case. In some places that isn't even an option. In some places its only one option that is super slow because no isp will invest in the area. 

[leadeater]

41 minutes ago, Eaglerino said:

depends where you live. Most european countries have far less footprint to cover than America. I've lived in places with symmetrical 1gbps up/down and places with 10mbps. Starlink can't come soon enough

Well if you look at the collective size of the EU in land area and population it is very similar to the US, larger difference being population. The size point that always seems to get raised simply does not hold water, everything in these regards must be looked at in proportional scales not totals and if you do that this argument about size and population density dies immediately. Points about rural areas and smaller towns are the case for every country, these are non unique factors as well.

 

People like to find reasons for these types of things and get lost in areas that are actually not the cause, the simple truth is it always comes down to how important the government actually thinks it is and there is no other reason for it. I've lived through these excuses, for a very long time, and it changed exactly when public pressure and outcry over it made it a political issue, one that got put right to the top and thusly addressed with real effort and tax money put towards it, now our internet isn't a pile of garbage.

 

As soon as you can make your politicians think their very survival rests on this issue then they will take notice, only then.

[Doobeedoo]

Ahh, so I just have to buy a huge add mid city like so to get my ISPs build fiber line to me. No problem, I'll do it old school with luminescent spray.

[Jeppes]

20 hours ago, TheBahrbarian said:

I actually don't think the U.S. is all that bad when it comes to internet infrastructure. At least according to Wikipedia, when it comes to average speeds the U.S. is 11th in the world. I'd say that's pretty good, especially since most of the issues that do exist with internet in the U.S. are due to geographic limitations. Lots of people in the U.S. live in rural areas and are very spread out, this inherently is going to limit internet options. 

 

But hopefully soon even this won't be an issue with the advent of Starlink.

Nah. Just use 4G or 5G to give out speedy internet for rural areas. Works great with directional antennas and is very cost effective.

[8tg]

Not to defend the horrible situation that is ISP monopolies in the US, but the main reason these monopolies can exist and why their service sucks is because America is absolutely huge.

Sometimes i think people forget that, that the population of some individual European cities inhabit areas in America 10 times larger than their entire country.

The infrastructure is hard to keep up on an upgrade when a population of 20,000 people takes up 500 square miles.

 

For reference my entire state of Indiana is about the same size and similar population to the entire nation of Austria, to keep things in scale. 

[Donut417]

44 minutes ago, Jeppes said:

Nah. Just use 4G or 5G to give out speedy internet for rural areas. Works great with directional antennas and is very cost effective.

Yeah and be throttled or Deprioritized after 25-50 gigs. T Mobile is the only provider over here that has a "Home" internet option. The rest just offer a hotspot and low data usage amounts. My boss uses a Verizon hotspot + Satellite at his home. He gets 15 Gigs from Verizon. He has to take his Xbox over to his buddies house to update his games. 

[wamred]

12 hours ago, Intergalacticbits said:

CenturyLink DSL is all you can get where I live too except for old school satellite internet which around here is very expensive and I've heard has a bad rep for unhappy customers.

I can only get 1.5Mbps down and .5 up.

For all practical purposes they are like the only game in town for people who live outside of the small towns in the area and they know it.

The only game in town equals  no matter who owns that service.

 

Yeah it kinda sucks. 

[leadeater]

4 hours ago, Donut417 said:

Yeah and be throttled or Deprioritized after 25-50 gigs. T Mobile is the only provider over here that has a "Home" internet option. The rest just offer a hotspot and low data usage amounts. My boss uses a Verizon hotspot + Satellite at his home. He gets 15 Gigs from Verizon. He has to take his Xbox over to his buddies house to update his games. 

Rural broadband here is done using 700MHz 4G and has no data cap options for around $40USD/month. Speed wise I know somebody that has it and gets around 30Mbps to 40Mbps, they are pretty far away from the tower.

[Donut417]

14 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Rural broadband here is done using 700MHz 4G and has no data cap options for around $40USD/month. Speed wise I know somebody that has it and gets around 30Mbps to 40Mbps, they are pretty far away from the tower.

T Mobile offers 50 Mbps for $50. But like all providers in the US they will deprioritize packets after x amount of data use. Hell I even heard that their home internet is just deprioritized regardless of data usage. The issue for T Mobile however is their more of a Metro network and have very poor rural coverage. Verizon on the other hand has great rural coverage but they dont offer home internet, at least not via LTE. You can get a hotspot with like 15 gigs of data, thats about it. Even then Verizon is not necessarily the fastest. I know this because my employer uses Verizon LTE as a primary and AT&T LTE as secondary connection for our warehouse. Mind you we have access to Fiber, the Fiber has been run to our telecom rack. But my employer is cheap. Also you have to be mindful that not all of the US has cellular coverage. Most should have wired phone lines, but not all of those can be used for internet, due to the distance limitations of DSL. 

[The1Dickens]

I'm gonna focus on the completely wrong thing here for a moment, but... THAT is not a "public humiliation". I'm low-key taking it more personal that everyone is calling that ad "humiliating" than cable companies BS business models/practices. I wish that was what passed as humiliating when I was in school. I feel like if I wanted to end AT&T's whole career, I could hit 'em with the "Guess what? CHICKEN BUTT!" to blast 'em into the Shadow Realm. Also, that's coming from "The Verge"??? How are they, of ALL people, going to call that a "humiliation"? Didn't they do the PC Build Guide that folks still grief them for to this day? Like... anyone could have clapped back like, "Hey, Verge, if we wanted help building a PC, we'd call you. Let the real business handle real business talks." Like, my childhood wasn't the worst, not by a long shot, but what kind of life have you had that someone saying "Hey, we'd like faster internet on my block" comes off as a personal assault on your character that you have to remedy it post-haste?

 

Shoot, if that's all it takes, though, to make large scale infrastructure changes, who wants to start the GoFundMe for the "humiliating ad" against Comcast/Spectrum/whoever? Because I got 20 on it.

[Donut417]

19 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

Verizon

FIOS they use a standard ONT with separate router. AT&T uses a crappy Combo device that doesnt do bridge mode, only allows pass thru, at least on Fiber. Most Cable and DSL providers allow 3rd party modems. Though how good of support they give for 3rd party modems varies. 

[leadeater]

23 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

My health care is free, and I have 1 Gb/s net too, American.  Having fun with VAT?

mmm I'm pretty sure you pay for it, just like I do. How and how much is just different 

 

Spoiler

Whether it be:

• Taxes
• Part of your wage package
• Employment benefit

You most definitely do pay, ain't nobody getting free healthcare anywhere (unless it's DIY, but is that really health care? lol)

 

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, Donut417 said:

T Mobile offers 50 Mbps for $50. But like all providers in the US they will deprioritize packets after x amount of data use. Hell I even heard that their home internet is just deprioritized regardless of data usage. The issue for T Mobile however is their more of a Metro network and have very poor rural coverage. Verizon on the other hand has great rural coverage but they dont offer home internet, at least not via LTE. You can get a hotspot with like 15 gigs of data, thats about it. Even then Verizon is not necessarily the fastest. I know this because my employer uses Verizon LTE as a primary and AT&T LTE as secondary connection for our warehouse. Mind you we have access to Fiber, the Fiber has been run to our telecom rack. But my employer is cheap. Also you have to be mindful that not all of the US has cellular coverage. Most should have wired phone lines, but not all of those can be used for internet, due to the distance limitations of DSL. 

I really do think all that is besides the point, the point was 4G can be used for fast long range quality broadband for all the areas claimed to be too difficult cost effectively. It not being a thing there or currently having terrible prices or conditions doesn't actually make it not possible or profitable.

[Loote]

There are many problems, quoting Verge's article from the OP:

Quote

Currently, if a single ISP claims it can deliver a single 25Mbps down / 3Mbps up internet connection anywhere in your entire census block, much less your home, the FCC considers its job done. Oh, and the FCC doesn’t even audit those numbers!

I've had similar problem here, I found some analysis performed by the government and the place where I live is also rated at 'broadband over 25mbit available', which is true and false at the same time.
1. Cables offer only ADSL, speeds of maybe 6/0.5mbit/s
2. 4G is available and goes over 50/30 mbit, there are unlimited offers, we pay ~$20 monthly for one.
3. But the 4G gets overcrowded so much, I get timeouts 16-23, basically the most important part of the day is often spent with unusable connection.

After years of fruitless struggle an ISP has showed up and promised to install fibre by the end of q1, since I've heard of this there wasn't a day I haven't thought about it, $30 for 800/80, which is going to be max for now, but as it's fibre it should be able to increase over time like ADSL used to.

[Donut417]

3 minutes ago, leadeater said:

. It not being a thing there or currently having terrible prices or conditions doesn't actually make it not possible or profitable.

Just because it works in New Zealand doesnt mean it works in the US. We are a much bigger country. ISP's would still have to run a shit load of Fiber to feed those towers. Its not like a cell tower can handle unlimited amount of usage. There are limits to what each tower can do, what each transmitter can do. 

 

Its not like the cellular providers can just erect a tower when ever they want. That requires permits and planning, plus the investment in the tower its self as well as backhaul. Then just like DSL, cable and Fiber providers, they will want to make sure that they have a decent amount of users on each tower for ROI reasons. 

[Dillpickle23422]

gahh someone needs to do this for Xfinity, my 5mbps upload is dogcrap

[leadeater]

12 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

Just because it works in New Zealand doesnt mean it works in the US

I'm not saying just because it works in New Zealand, many countries do it and the technology is 100% capable of doing it. Edit: But to be very blunt yes it in fact does, I'm actually sick and tired of these type of excuses. If it works here it will work there, period. The entire point is to service long range low density rural areas on a dedicated frequency band only used for this purpose so no phones will be on it only fixed directional connections.

 

There is nothing about the US that could possibly not make it work, nothing beyond the fact the ISP's there are already massively profitable so there is no incentive to deploy less profitable infrastructure in new places they do not currently service.

 

12 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

We are a much bigger country. ISP's would still have to run a shit load of Fiber to feed those towers.

Again size literally has zero to do with it, you have the scale. If every other country can do it you can to, because again EU is as large land area and 100 million more people and if the wider EU can do it you CAN too. Also edit: Australia also has one of the best cellular networks in the world and is also the same size as the US, still not seeing a valid reason due to size.

 

It not being a thing now is irrelevant to the point it can be. You can 100% service the areas with long range 4G, it's just less profitable, but not not profitable.