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posted by janrinok on Wednesday June 17 2015, @04:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the promises,-promises dept.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/06/internet-nightmare-att-sells-broadband-to-your-neighbors-but-not-to-you/

Mark Lewis and his wife bought a house in Winterville, Georgia, in August 2012. They figured getting Internet service would be as simple as calling up AT&T, because the prior owners had AT&T DSL (Digital Subscriber Line). The neighbors also have AT&T DSL service providing about 3Mbps.

"The previous owners had left their DSL modem and everything in the house," Lewis told Ars. But when he called AT&T, the company said they were "at maximum capacity, but if someone else in your neighborhood terminates their service that should open up something for you."

In October 2013, two of Lewis' neighbors moved out, and he called AT&T to see if that opened up a spot for him. The answer was no. It continues to be no.

Lewis isn't alone. Nearly a decade after AT&T promised the US government that it would bring broadband Internet service to 100 percent of its wireline telephone territory, many people who are desperate for AT&T Internet face a maddening problem. They can get AT&T phone service through the DSL-capable copper cables coming into their homes, their neighbors have DSL Internet service from AT&T, but they themselves cannot get wired Internet service because AT&T claims its network is full.

A handful of people like Lewis, people who have been refused DSL service by AT&T, contacted Ars after we last wrote about AT&T's broadband shortcomings. Together, these stories highlight a confounding situation involving minimal oversight, miscommunication, and millions of customers left with sub-broadband speeds or no Internet service at all.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by aristarchus on Wednesday June 17 2015, @08:00AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Wednesday June 17 2015, @08:00AM (#197187) Journal

    You are an imbecile. Have you never heard of RECs? Rural Electric Cooperatives. They set out to provide a public utility to those that for-profit corporations did not deem it profitable to provide such service to. So, the REC would talk to a bunch of farmers, in one area, figure out what would be the most equitable distribution that would cover everyone, and they started stringing line. The private "utility" (and I do use the term advisedly) would start stringing line on the opposite side of the county road, since that state law said that whoever got a wire to a customer first had a right to hook them up. The thing is, the for profits would not serve everyone on the planned circuit of the REC, but only the in-close farms they could make a profit off of, and the left the rest out to dry, in the dark, so to speak.

    So before you get your Rand Paul libertarian panties all in a bunch, and claim that it was the "first to provide service" that was a market interference, let me point out that without the competition of the Rural, Grange, American, Socialist Rural Electrical Cooperatives, the corporations would have not been willing to provide any service, at all, much like AT&T (spit!) in this case. There are such things as natural monopolies, and running a line to a bunch of farms is one of them, because if two companies, whether private mercenary bastards or a people's collective, first installs infrastructure, the cost to a competitor to duplicate that infrastructure will prevent anyone from competing. That is why the line crews on either side of a county road raced each other. The winner totally negates the losers investment. And that is why we the people, as a whole, have to allow that someone is going to have that advantage, and prohibit them by the Force of Law from exploiting we the people. Force of Law, see that? Trumps your fantasies about being Donald Trump every time, you Madoff wanna be!

    Of course, if technology were to make "lines" obsolete, whether POTS or twisted-pair, or fiber optic, then of course all bets would be off and we could have a competitive market based on consumer choice and quality of service. But that is not where we are now, particularly in Georgia. Natural monopolies are a fact of economics. And I wouldn't worry about them until we can kill the unnatural monopolies, like Systemd and Micro$erf!!!

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  • (Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday June 17 2015, @06:46PM

    by edIII (791) on Wednesday June 17 2015, @06:46PM (#197430)

    It's interesting that we are all talking about regulation... but I thought DSL *did* have capacity limits like this. There is only so much bandwidth that can actually flow through copper lines, and unlike the artificial scarcity of bandwidth with other broadband providers, DSL limitations were real.

    That was the bonus for getting DSL back in the day. On cablemodem any other jerk in the neighborhood could completely suck the bandwidth away from everybody (I was that jerk elsewhere). On DSL I was guaranteed my 3 Mb/s, and it wouldn't be shared with another subscriber. I believe this wasn't bullshit, as I had it maxed out 24/7. Cablemodem subscribers in my area always complained about shitty service and bandwidth, but the DSL subscribers basically reported, "slow, but steady". It also helps to remember that *unlike* coaxial based broadband, that hooks up to fiber, DSL still needs central offices (CO) to deliver all of that bandwidth with telephone grade copper lines over great distances. What the article doesn't mention is just what is his distance to the CO again? Depending on his distance, it might not even matter if extra capacity opens up. In fact, I can see that what AT&T *meant* was something else. It always took me several phone calls and escalations before I got to *anybody* in AT&T that knew their ass from a hole in the ground.

    AT&T can be shitty, and I know this personally. I just got the "message" to fully disconnect my relatives landline telephone. It was nice because it worked in a power outage (which they have frequently in their rural area), but AT&T literally raised the price by THREE TIMES in a single pay period. Yeah, I can read in between the lines on that, "Please, oh Please, we just want to exit the market and we need you to close your account". Otherwise they expect to be paid near $100 for an ancient landline telephone with no features, and that's bat-shit crazy.

    That being said, I can't immediately dismiss their claims of capacity problems as bullshit, because, this is DSL after all... capacity problems are from design IIRC.

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