13-WHAM has the story of a local man's struggle with an airline. Massa's office is mentioned as one of the agencies helping out.
Mustard Street points to this New York Times article about cheap bandwidth in other countries. Here's a comparison of bandwidth pricing and cost worldwide. Stockholm, Sweden is the cheapest because the city owns the fiber network and has providers compete to provide service on the network.
Comments
There is something fair about paying for what you use. Perhaps the currently charged rate should be for the high end users, and everyone else pays less depending on their usage. In other words, give everyone but the highest users a discount, and keep the highest users at the current rate.
I agree that people should pay for what they use. There are a lot of ways to accomplish that. Your suggestion is one way to do it. But, really, there's already a solution available: Frontier and TWC both had a "lite" offering a while back that was slower than their "full speed" offering. That's a real simple way to let people who don't use a lot of Internet get a fair price.
Overall, though, the myth behind this whole dust-up is that usage is a big cost factor. In today's market, Internet bandwidth is cheap. The main cost is maintaining the wire/cable to your house. That's why Stockholm residents pay $10/month for 10X the speed of RoadRunner. The city maintains the fiber to the home -- the ISP just provides Internet service.
Is Stockholm's fiber superior to that of TWC, or is the difference in speed the result of efforts by the service providers who are competing for the business? It must be frustrating for businesses in a socialist system, where price competition and quality of service determine success.
Yeah, in a real socialist system where businesses actually compete, times are tough. In our "socialist" system where monopolies pay off the government, it's easy for the incumbent.
I think the 100 megabit speed is the native speed of Stockholm's fiber network, and my guess would be that they run fiber to each building and distribute via copper inside the building. TWC's distribution network is fiber but the wire between the house and the pole (and perhaps farther, I'm not sure) is coaxial cable. The new standard for cable modems, DOCSIS-3, can do 100 megabits, but TWC has hinted that they won't be deploying DOCSIS-3 in Rochester because we've been bad boys and girls.
Reading the Times article got me thinking that the Stockholm situation is similar to the old days of TV and radio in the US when we owned the network infrastructure, i.e., the airwaves and the governments set standards for service providers. We had thirteen perfectly good channels and three providers of mostly dumbed-down content. Like AT&T and the Bell network of the last century, cable providers opened up a new era of communications, a huge increase in freedom of expression and a monopoly that controlled cost and quality of service.
Thanks to the DOD, automakers, the trucking industry and developers, the government had no problem developing the interstate highway system -- a world-class, mostly-free network, sprawl, pollution and dependence on foreign oil. No such luck with fiber, or MagLev railroads. Why did they happen in Sweden and France but not in the US? Why do our decisions seem to have so many negative side effects?
Here's one possible answer in the Times .
It's true, as that piece says, that we undervalue future outcomes. That's part of the explanation for why we happily let TWC give us a thousand channels and 10 MB of Internet, and only thought about the long-term effect of that monopoly once it was heavily entrenched. The same is true with cell phones. The wireless industry is just as bad as TWC.
But, unlike the sprawl and pollution that's a result of our preference of roads over rail transport, both Internet and wireless can be easily fixed with a little more regulation.
And if that doesn't work our socialist administration could nationalize the cable, towers and satellites. Heh, heh. BTW, did you catch The Daily Show's expose on how depressing life is in Sweden?
Yes, it's amazing that the socialist government wants to take 3 of my 5 hot blondes.