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Comment by xdissent | Hacker News Reader

But strangely the author of the Economist post concludes that the market should be left to regulate itself. Even stranger, they immediately lament the fact that it's failed to do so in the 75% of America where there is a single broadband provider.

Which makes me wonder - will the FCC action do anything to expand the provider market, or merely ensure the quality of currently available access?

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> Which makes me wonder - will the FCC action do anything to expand the provider market,

No, the provider market is unlikely to significantly expand without local loop unbundling; fair access to poles and conduit may help in some cases, but overbuilding is still going to be expensive and limited.

> or merely ensure the quality of currently available access?

We'll have to wait and see what falls under acceptable and unacceptable network management, to see what happens to quality.

I think there's an interesting interplay between this FCC announcement and the earlier one on classifying "broadband" connection speeds of 25 Mbps and above.

If an ISP is required to abide by net neutrality and can only sell broadband when it meets the above requirement, then the FCC is essentially mandating quality and consistency of service.

Does a service meet the requirement when the highest possible rate is 25 Mbps or when the average rate is 25 Mbps? Underprovisioning is standard practice, and it's possible to get only a tiny fraction of what a link is physically capable of.

Also, I don't see anything there about QoS or uptime guarantees. (Uptime guarantee: "One nine." "90%?" "9%.")

Since I can't reply to the reply to this message.

Not sure whether guarantees or provisioning levels are defined, but today's definition of "broadband" is 4 Mbps, so all else being equal, the FCC is trying to modernize the language.

ISPs can still sell sub-broadband; it just doesn't count for the broadband map ( http://www.broadbandmap.gov/ ). This map is also used to determine how much competition there is in the market. So basically DSL no longer counts and many locations now only have one "broadband" provider.

Does this mean that there's a chance that previous decisions that "DSL is broadband and is thus competition to cable" might be able to be turned over, and therefore it might be possible to sue cable companies under anti-trust laws if they act in a way that prevents competition or otherwise abuse their monopoly?

DSL is not broadband; that's a done deal. Now that DSL doesn't count, Comcast has 56% "broadband" market share. http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/01/comcast-now-has-more... (I question these TWC numbers, though, since almost all TWC customers have access to 25 Mbps.)

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