FCC wants to hear from Americans who've been ignored by broadband industry:
The Federal Communications Commission wants to hear from Internet users about their experiences trying to find good broadband service. The FCC announced yesterday that it is seeking "first-hand accounts on broadband availability and service quality directly from consumers" as part of a new data collection effort. People who live in areas where ISPs either haven't deployed service or have failed to upgrade old networks may be especially interested in participating.
"Far too many Americans are left behind in access to jobs, education, and healthcare if they do not have access to broadband," acting FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said. "Collecting data from consumers who are directly affected by the lack of access to broadband will help inform the FCC's mapping efforts and future decisions about where service is needed." Rosenworcel shared those sentiments on Twitter as well:
Take note. We're going straight to consumers. https://t.co/bZzsFo46ap
— Jessica Rosenworcel (@JRosenworcel) March 22, 2021
Anyone who wants to participate can fill out the "Share Your Broadband Experience" form at this webpage. While the FCC is trying to find unserved areas, people with broadband access can also tell the FCC about the quality of their current ISPs. "Your experience with the availability and quality of broadband services at your location will help to inform the FCC's efforts to close the digital divide," the FCC said.
If you have a specific problem and want a response from your ISP, you can also file a complaint against the ISP at the consumer complaint center that the FCC has been operating for years.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 25 2021, @01:12AM (5 children)
It ends with 37 million "My experience is great, thanks" submissions from ISP bots.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 25 2021, @03:12AM
Update: FCC deletes 1 million comments from Ameribots who've been ignored by the broadband industry.
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday March 25 2021, @03:13AM (1 child)
Maybe not: most government forms are so arcane and obtuse it might just foil the bot - or drain the botmaker's patience.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by krishnoid on Thursday March 25 2021, @03:26AM
"Ok, instead of working on Xfinity's streaming updates, you're all pulled off to a ... um ... form-filling project. No complaints, or it'll show up on your next review."
"Sure, whatever, we get paid the same either way."
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 25 2021, @07:29AM (1 child)
Nice try, but a democrat is in the white house now and all of the corruption has ended.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 25 2021, @10:35PM
Say only the bitter losers that really wanted their christofascism.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 25 2021, @01:15AM (2 children)
People without internet access can't fill out your web form, dumb broad.
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday March 25 2021, @03:21AM
Well, they do have internet access. Just not broadband.
Problem is, to fill the form, they'll have to load 50 megabytes or Google Analytics and gstatic scripts, 10 megabytes of Cloudfront scripts, 20 images of fire hydrants and motorcycles to get past the recaptcha, 5 CloudFlare "suspicious activity detected" pages, 200 cookies, to finally get to a ginormous 10-page government PDF that makes absolutely no sense. Kind of long with a 56K modem.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 25 2021, @09:42PM
Hmm, misogyny + stupidity = MAGA qwat? Seems likely! Never heard of dial-up ir libraries ya daft cunt?
(Score: 3, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Thursday March 25 2021, @01:22AM (3 children)
If you click the link, they ask that you give a BRIEF statement, 2 or 4 sentences long.
I thought about eliminating punctuation, so that my three paragraphs would only be three long sentences. ;)
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday March 25 2021, @03:25AM
Especially when you want to write
Go.
Fuck.
Yourselves.
You.
Corrupt.
Bastards.
That's 6 sentences right there.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 25 2021, @05:34AM (1 child)
Shut the fuck up, Runaway! Your idiocy has become tiresome! And annoying! Go back to Arkansas, and leave America alone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 25 2021, @06:41AM
If he is this racist, misogynist, and asshollish, on dial-up, think how much worse Runaway would be with broadband? Of course, he would be running around, or away, looking for all the broads in the band. And the boarders.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 25 2021, @01:27AM (5 children)
Internet is a utility, a natural monopoly.
Pour tax money into publicly owned "pipes," let private ISPs compete buying capacity from them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 25 2021, @04:08AM (4 children)
No.
People get this wrong. It's as if when they're talking about technical stuff, anybody who uses the wrong word gets crucified, but when it comes to economics, nothing fucking matters.
Natural monopolies are goods that are non-rival, but excludable. Internet access, which is what is under discussion here, is very much a rival good. Whether you're talking about hotspot bandwidth, DSLAM activity, cable loops or whatever, it's an absolutely rival good.
Try that again - but first, for the love of Smith, get your terminology right.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 25 2021, @04:24AM (2 children)
Internet is not a utility, a natural monopoly.
Fixed?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 25 2021, @04:31AM (1 child)
Internet access is not a natural monopoly, and bears a closer resemblance to a personal service industry.
Access is rival and excludable, and while some very particular forms of provision have some aspects of shared benefits, this is by no means reliably so across the field, so if there is an argument to be made concerning sole providers, it must be analysed in the light of local regulations, sweetheart deals and general access to cooperative arrangements on the parts of participants.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 25 2021, @01:18PM
The transmission network can be thought of as a natural monopoly utility situation.
Like (great example) Texas has done with electricity distribution - one distribution network maintained to a high standard by the collective with many competing entities paying for generation capacity to serve their customers as they see best fit: wind, solar, nuclear, lowest cost, demand or flat pricing, roulette billing - you name it.
Same would work for internet access - you want cable with that? High speed, super speed, ludicrous speed? Asymmetrical, symmetrical, bundled Netflix or Hulu? Bundled satellite access? Service through stores in your grocery shopping plaza, a call center in Idaho, or Calcutta? All those options could be delivered by multiple competing entities through the common network.
All the network service is provided by contractors who slap magnetic signs on their personal trucks anyway, what do they care whose name goes on their trucks?
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 25 2021, @06:44AM
Would that be for the love of Joseph Smith? I mean, if it's LDS, then, well, transmissions to Kolab via the White Salamander are in order, in the ancient sacred protocol, are they not?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by datapharmer on Thursday March 25 2021, @01:44AM (2 children)
Talk about opening the flood gates. They are really going to get a taste of people's pain I imagine. My census block shows I have 5 providers. I of course actually have 1 provider, AT&T, which spitefully provides ADSL that kinda sorta works sometimes. The media converter at the end of the street is bad so it drops constantly, but they won't fix it because it is DSL and they want it to die, and they won't improve it because the area isn't densely populated so it isn't super profitable for them.
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday March 25 2021, @03:31AM
Not really: most internet users know the FCC is powerless at best, or does the bidding of the telcos at worst. Or if they genuinely want to do something good now, they'll probably turn against them when the next administration comes in. People with any sense of reality won't even bother going through the rigmarole.
Not to mention, filling forms and writing paragraphs of feedback doesn't sit well with the Youtube / Twitter / Facebook generation.
And of course, not to mention, by the time the FCC busybodies are done processing all those forms, we'll all be long dead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 25 2021, @08:19AM
In my post, I encouraged the FCC to add an "availability" metric to their definition of broadband. So it's not just "25/3 Mbps minimum", but it's "25/3 Mbps minimum, 99.9% of the time". Otherwise you'll see ISPs pushing the fastest-possible last-mile link speeds, which are inherently less reliable due to S/N ratio. Plus it encourages ISPs to invest in their infrastructure, lest they get de-classified as "broadband" due to unreliability.
The other thing I think would be good is to add a minimum speed to offset the marketing-speak. E.g. not "speeds up to 500Mbps on plan X" but "speeds up to 500Mbps (10Mbps minimum) on plan X". Totally changes things.
Of course the American consumer seems to be moronic and has to have a single number to judge everything by, not multiple dimensions like max/min, or burst/CIR, or availability. So I guess there's probably some formula that could come up with a single number to "grade" a connection on, and we could ask for that. Something like "availability% * CIR_mbps + burst_mbps" could give a single number, although I'd want to tweak it so availability less than say 99.9% drops the "CIR*availability" score rapidly toward zero.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 25 2021, @02:08AM (4 children)
I seriously doubt the FCC has any interest in hearing from white males.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 25 2021, @02:52AM
White males in America, so precious,, so delicate., so "INTERESTING"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 25 2021, @04:27AM (2 children)
White males whining, the older the better, that's what people want to hear! Put it on every channel.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 25 2021, @05:32AM (1 child)
Whining White Males, crystalizing as they fall to the ground! We have a word for those: Snowflakes. Some of them fall into the trash, so we have white trash snowflackes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 25 2021, @05:36AM
All I want for Christmas is my White Male Snowflake Genocide. It would make me so happy. We would be left with just Americans! And we could all live in peace and harmony.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Thursday March 25 2021, @08:07AM
Please come to my wintering marina and impale all employees on dull rusty spikes. Caps out at 500 kb/s on good days. Let's not talk about uploads.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 25 2021, @05:29PM
https://www.jta.org/2021/01/20/politics/all-the-jews-joe-biden-has-tapped-for-top-roles-in-his-administration [jta.org]