New York State plots broadband future New York governor Andrew Cuomo has decided that the 6 Mbps that's out of reach for a million residents of the state isn't good enough, and has created a half-billion-dollar fund to kick things along. The target, Cuomo says, is to get 100 Mbps speeds to everyone in the 141,000 square kilometre state. In his announcement, the …
The telcos and other cable/internet providers will steal that $500M if he doesn't funnel it to municipalities to roll out local community-owned broadband! The only way to get AT&T, Verizon, Comcrap to work to give people good internet for reasonable prices is if they have to compete with the communities themselves. May the best/cheapest service win!
1. States have jurisdiction over Telecom and Media companies operating within their borders:
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/14529/20140831/new-york-leads-states-in-opposing-comcast-time-warner-cable-merger-deal.htm
2. The Federal Government cannot sue States for anti-competitive practices. It can only sue private entities/corporations for violations of the Sherman Act. See Parker Immunity Doctrine, 317 U.S. 341 (1943). At any rate Parker wouldn''t even apply here because blocking the TWC/Comcast merger would be the exact opposite of an anti-competitive action by New York State.
But since both Comcast and Time-Warner Cable are multi-state companies with operations in many states, wouldn't this mean they're subject to the Commerce Clause, which automatically puts them under federal auspices, which in turn trump state matters due to the 14th Amendment?
Half of New York State lives and works in New York City and Long Island. Verizon has failed to fiber up the city as promised, Time Warner's copper is corroding, and these two jerks have the monopoly on 70-80% of the metropolitan area. Public/private partnership with the same bunch of idiots <sarcasm>who have served us oh, so well</sarcasm> isn't gonna change a damn thing (other than put more money in their pockets).
NYC pays $55/mo (including taxes and service charges) for 10Mib/s. If you're privileged enough to afford it, there's 50Mib/s ($100/mo). And if you live in within the "select areas", you could get over 250Mib/s for the dirt-cheap price of $200/mo. The thing is, most people in The City can't spend that kind of cash; they'd rather have the Internet bundled onto their cellphone bill (avg. $65/mo) and have learned to live on 128Kbi/s.
Meanwhile, upstate (where the other half live) can have definite, palpable improvements. There the towns and cities can get funding for training, employment, deployment, and maintenance of the town's own ISP by residents (and I'm sure the local lawyers will somehow offset the legal liabilities operating an ISP brings). Tapping into (onto?) the fiber running the length of the New York State Thruway is a cakewalk, and the state universities are more than equipped to teach the IT trinity (hardware, software, and networking).
It's a good idea, but I don't see any of it coming to fruition. The worst part is that we really need it to,
The trouble with New York City is that it's an old city: full of existing built-up infrastructure above and especially below ground (and this ground is particularly hard at that). The first question you'd have to ask of anyone planning to put down high-speed internet in the heart of Manhattan is, "Where do you plan on laying it all down?"
Compared to the rest of the US, New York is one of the oldest. Not to mention very fragmented and with a peculiar geography and geology to it. Not to mention it's run out of sprawl room so it basically grows vertically.
Here's a hint on how delicate things can get there. Implosion demolition is not allowed in Manhattan.
> Implosion demolition is not allowed in Manhattan.
And exactly what does Implosion Demolition in Manhattan have to do with Cuomo wanting competitive 100Mb/sec Broadband throughout New York State? I didn't know that pulling cable through already existing underground casing required Implosion Demolition.
The reason hgih-speed broadband is so crappy in New York City - and especially Manhattan - is very simple: Time Warner Cable is a de facto monopoly for Broadband Internet. There is zero competition - unless you count Verizon's crappy FiOS which is even worse than TWC's Cable Broadband. At the same time, TWC appears to be very adept at making "exclusive" deals with building owners: the majority of high-rise apartment buildings in Manhattan provide access to exactly one ISP. Guess Who? Time Warner Cable. Your only alternative is 3Mb/sec Verizon DSL, if it still works. I used to have Verizon Business Class DSL - 7 Mb/sec down, 1.5Mb/sec up (Wow, The Speed!). It died after hurricane Sandy, and it never came back. Back to Time Warner Cable we go.
I believe that the motivation behind Cuomo's Broadband Plan is the right one. Whether or not it will succeed as intended, that's another matter. I don't see it succeeding at all if the Comcast/TWC merger is approved. New York City should be allowed to open competitive bidding to other Broadband Internet providers besides Time Warner Cable or Verizon. For a city with 8.5 Million residents, having only two Broadband Internet Providers does not sound very competitive to me.
I live in Manhattan and I've been dealing with TWC and Verizon for 15+ years. To give a concrete example of how crappy Broadband service can be around here: it takes an average of 5 seconds to do a single DNS lookup on TWC Broadband, using TWC's DNS servers.
"The reason hgih-speed broadband is so crappy in New York City - and especially Manhattan - is very simple: Time Warner Cable is a de facto monopoly for Broadband Internet. There is zero competition - unless you count Verizon's crappy FiOS which is even worse than TWC's Cable Broadband."
You just contradicted yourself. You mentioned Verizon (and I was expecting this since one-half of Verizon was GTE). FiOS is supposed to be Fiber To The Premises: just about as good as you can get in terms of consumer broadband. I have that available where I live, and the quality is excellent enough to make it a viable competitor to the cable company. Yet you denounce this supposedly top of the line as "crappy". That indicates something is interfering with the quality of FiOS where you live, and I have to suspect it's the infrastructure.
Which goes to my point about no implosion demolition. Manhattan has been dug up so many times there's no telling what's underneath you. Meaning disturbing the ground can result in unintended consequences, and this also goes to getting right of way and especially digging permissions. Meaning Verizon is probably having a hard time putting down all the fiber it needs for good FiOS service (my location, not nearly so built up, was much easier to transition).
Quit grasping at straws. You probably work for Time Warner, or Verizon, or one of their PR companies.
Verizon's FiOS deployments have been very limited in NYC and the QoS is pitiful. That's not competition to TWC. To make a claim of competition between Verizon FiOS and TWC, both would have to be available in all NYC Boroughs, to every single building. That's not the case with FiOS.
Didn't the latter four get messed up during World War II? Since the war never came to the lower 48, New York was mostly unaffected (the worst that happened was a B-25 accidentally crashing into the Empire State Building--but since that's an old-school building with massive foundations, it survived the incident)? Point is, a city that suffers lots of damage has room to rebuild. London's had several fires. Tokyo wasn't exactly state of the art and got firebombed. And I don't think Paris or Rome escaped the war unscathed, either.
I live in Manhattan, in the heart of the new "startup district" and a short distance from IBM's new Watson building. I pay for 50Mb/s but actually get 15-20 most of the time except for friday and saturday evenings when I can struggle to get 1-2Mb/s.
The issue is not with technology or infrastructure, it is with greedy, inefficient, lazy cable companies who have little to no competition in pricing or service. As someone else says up the thread, the state should start by speaking out and lobbying the Feds to prevent the Time Warner / Comcast merger which will degrade service and increase prices even further. Ironically in the US most people have a single monopoly cable provider to choose from and the companies know this. My building is unusual in that we have two providers that mysteriously collude to offer exactly the same price and race to the bottom in the depths of their lack of service. For this I pay 3-4 times what I would in the UK.
If NY state and NYC want to get serious in this effort they should provide municipal broadband services in competition with the cable companies. And when I suggest that the corrupt, inefficient mess that is NY state would be better than Time Warner, Comcast, Verizon, or RCN you know things must be bad with those cable companies.
Works well for me; I'm paying for 75Mbit/s Verizon FIOS. Here are some regular "wget" calls I make to check the speed from http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
2015-01-20 13:50:11 (9.99 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [104857600/104857600]
2015-01-20 14:05:11 (10.0 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [104857600/104857600]
2015-01-20 14:20:12 (9.99 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [104857600/104857600]
2015-01-20 14:35:11 (9.99 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [104857600/104857600]
2015-01-20 14:50:11 (10.0 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [104857600/104857600]
2015-01-20 15:05:12 (9.99 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [104857600/104857600]
2015-01-20 15:20:11 (9.99 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [104857600/104857600]
The trouble is that ALL the wiring for phone is ancient in NY state except at new buildings where they built out with new cable (black plastic insulation). All the other existing phone wiring is covered in corroded gray lead, is full of water and electrical noise. So DSL is a crapshoot with Verizon, fiber was only selectively provisioned to new builds and areas where it was already available. The Verizon repair people are deliberately being told by management to not service old cabling unless they have no other option. The minute any fiber is delivered, they remove all POTS services and wiring but they are not even doing that much.
The NY State Public Dis-Service commission is no help as they are already bought off by the Telco's and providers. There is an existing line maintenance fee of about $5.00 per month that Verizon is still collecting and yet not providing proper maintenance.
The same problem applies to Time Warner as they have not improved their fiber backbones and the "last mile" is still Co-Axial cable, not fiber.
The Municipality/Township should own the last mile. It's obvious that no one else knows what they are doing.
The REAL problem in hamster-house-collectives like NYC is that yanking out all the completely overloaded copper cable tracks and replacing it with fiber would probably take down land-line capability of tens of millions for up to two months per user account.
Ain't going to happen. If you want connectivity, move to the 'burbs. If you can afford to rent in NYC, you can probably purchase[1] a home in NJ, less than half an hour outside Manhattan.
[1] As apposed to throwing away your money on rent ...
... meant frequency division multiplexing, not "as many bits per second as I can personally get"?
How many frequency divisions, exactly, does your so-called "broadband" system operate across? And in what frequency spectrum are they running, exactly, Cuomo?
Kids these days. No clues at all, just believers in marketing hype.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
