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Comment by homosaur | Hacker News Reader

There's zero reason these fat profiteers are still protected businesses. They're simply parasites on the networks the taxpayers paid for. I recommend as step one to stop paying for things like television and unneeded bundled services.

I'd also like to point out that a VPN is about $40-70 a year. Once you have that up, you're only bound by bandwidth restrictions.

It makes me sick that I have to resort to such things simply to extract fair value from my service and believe me, I'm willing to pay my fair share. I'd spend upwards of $150 a month if I could get a legit Internet/TV bundle. What I'm not willing to do is allow these boring shit companies to get rich off subpar services anymore.

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> There's zero reason these fat profiteers are still protected businesses. They're simply parasites on the networks the taxpayers paid for.

It's interesting that you should mention this. Most cities actually sign contracts with service providers. The contract grants the provider access to easements and, generally, exclusivity for the type of service (i.e. only one cable provider/local telephone carrier) allowed to operate in the city).

Convincing providers to bump up speeds and lower costs is going to require cities to kill the exclusivity clause, and encourage competition. Alternatively, allow the cable provider to retain exclusivity, but require fiber upgrades.

This kind of tactic may work better in smaller towns, like mine (Pop. 6000) as residents have very direct access to their city officials, but it's one approach that may work.

Yeah, you're totally right and people would be better off following your advice than mine. Small communities have actually had very good success in strong-arming telecom with the exclusivity contract. In fact, I have a tiny bit of optimism that it might meet success in heavily gerrymandered towns like St. Louis (my area) where most city people actually live in a small incorporated semi-burb. There may be millions in the area, but my actual legal town, Overland, is only 16K residents and has very close ties with the surrounding incorporations. Maybe I should look into starting to attend the city meetings.

Fun anecdote: Both my home town (Pop. 6,000, central Illinois) as well as my work town (Urbana, IL; Pop. 41,000) have actually had recent success using this line of reasoning. In both cases the cities were looking for improvements in the public access facilities provided by their respective cable providers (Mediacom/Comcast). Urbana had a slightly longer fight, but in the end, both cable companies caved.

It was Urbana's fight in which I came to understand the power of that one bargaining chip and that cable contract negotiations really are weighted in favor of the municipality.

I thought that at least here in Missouri[1] and in numerous other states[2], the exclusivity contract is no longer a lever the municipalities have, thanks to statewide franchising laws.

AT&T was the main lobbyist behind these laws during their U-Verse deployment. The statewide franchising would let them deploy U-Verse broadly without having to negotiate with individual city councils (and deal with "sure you can sell cable here, so long as there's free cable for the firehouse, free internet for every school, etc").

With 91 municipalities in St Louis alone, this'd be an expensive barrier to entry for AT&T when they can just buy a state law to avoid it all. The law also lets existing incumbents get out of their franchise contracts with municipalities and go statewide if a competitor enters.

[1] http://www.senate.mo.gov/07info/BTS_Web/Bill.aspx?SessionTyp...

[2] http://www.ncsl.org/issues-research/telecom/statewide-video-...

AT&T got busted trying to test Project Lightspeed (now called U-Verse) in Geneva, Illinois. Geneva figured out that this super-DSL was really and end run around Geneva's CATV franchise agreements and shut it down. That's why they went for the statewide legislative overrides.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/73666

Maybe, but no joy getting state wide franchising in Illinois. In fact, 65 ILCS 5 (Illinois Municipal Code) Section 11-42-11 specifically grants municipalities under 2M people (i.e. the entire state except Chicago) the authority to negotiate and execute CATV franchises.

I'm most depressed by the "fast forward to 2006" part of this article, where they mention 3-6 Mbps service being delivered.

Fast forward to 2013, AT&T will still not offer anything faster than 3Mbps DSL to my home, and they charge a princely sum for it.

I can get 30/4 from Charter for the price of that 3Mbps DSL, but Charter's customer service is so awful that it makes AT&T look like Zappos or Nordstrom.

They won't offer >3Mbit or can't offer >3Mbit?

Where I lived, I was so far from the telco that the copper gave out after 1Mbit. And we weren't scheduled for U-Verse. Remember, all U-Verse does is shorten the run of copper wire from your house to the DSL cabinet.

I just signed up for Comcast at my new house this week. I'm getting 105 megabit internet + HD channels and one cable box for $134/month.

Yeah, that costs $200/mo in my area, not including the TV.

I could live with that, but is that a promo deal for a few months or the going rate?

Yeah I think it is that rate for 1 year, then it goes up by $20.

Last July I signed up (in Boston) with Comcast for a 20MB (download) internet connection for $35/mo. for the first six months. I knew that was an introductory offer and that it'd be $49/mo. after six months.

What I didn't know (because they didn't mention it at the time) is that after one year it will automatically go up to $65/mo.

$65/mo. for 20MB service is robbery in the US in 2013.

Don't be surprised if your rate doubles after one year.

I was paying about 80$ for 50 megabit a year or two ago around here. I just think the rates here might be a bit better.

In my area I pay ~$140/mo for the HD channels, DVR, and only 20 megabit

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