this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Your ISP is suddenly asking for more money. What are you gonna do? Disconnect from the internet?
The ISP have probably made careful calculations of how much they can increase the price before people start looking for alternative ISPs. So if we could collectively lower our thresholds to look for alternatives, we could probably achieve lower prices.
Here's what happens. Say you have three businesses providing roughly the same service in your area. They know you are going with one of them.
If they compete too much on price is a race to the bottom. There's a point at which one or more companies are losing money to compete. The ones with deeper pockets starve everyone else out then start raising prices.
Now, let's assume these three are the ones that made it.
They are not allowed to collude on price. That's illegal, they would be acting like a monopoly. Can't have that so they passed a law.
What's allowed? Publishing your pricing online. What's crazy is the other companies can see this so it's kind of light all three can still meet and compare pricing.
Because of this, you'll be paying about the same no matter where you go. You might be able to find a reseller that provides the connection but no real service. That's fine, but most people aren't using that.
You might find services bundled with other services like a mobile phone plan, tv packages, etc. That's even worse since they call use "price confusion" to make it look like price diversity but no one is letting anyone else eat their lunch.
All of this should be yelling at you full volume that this business is a de facto monopoly so therefore should be regulated heavily or run as a government utility.
The absolute failure to enforce antitrust laws is possibly the single biggest contributor to all problems in the western world right now.
That only works in a competitive market. A lot of places, even in the developed world, have just a single provider in some of the areas people live in outside of major cities. And even in major cities thereβs often not enough competition to find reasonably cheap internet, all the prices are within stone throw of each other. Essential utilities being privatized is a scam, especially when infra is funded by the public dollar.
I've noticed this starting to break, i.e. more actually starting to compete with each other and enter each other's "turf". Part of that I think is municipal fiber.
And different towns can be charged wildly different amounts for the same service
I've somehow been stealing internet from my ISP for like 2 years.
So I moved in to my new apartment. Go down to the local ISP monopoly's physical store and pick up a modem so I can just plug it in and not wait for a tech or anything. They tell me since it's been over 5 years since my address was connected they have to send a tech out anyway. Fine. But they let me pay my first month's service and give me the modem.
Well I get home and plug it in. It works perfectly. Call the ISP and tell them to cancel the tech appointment, they say no problem. An hour later my account to login to the ISP's website is made inactive. In the next few days I get a full refund for what I paid.
So I figure I'll call them once my internet stops working and resubscribe. But it has never stopped working. I keep getting mailings from them with deals to sign up for internet. They even knocked on my door once to try to sell me it.
This is a dangerous game you're playing (despite the Robinhood like dynamic -- trust me I hate ISPs too, though I will say AT&T fiber has been quite reasonable). You can be sued for all the lost payments plus interest, and likely will be when/if they find out.
It's the same thing as getting an unexpected raise on your paystub, if it's in error and a reasonable person would believe it's in error, they're within their legal right to take the money back.
You're not wrong. Though I'll be leaving here soon enough, and I think the risk:reward ratio is good enough to continue until then. And if they've let me go this long I doubt they'll somehow retroactively figure it out after I'm gone.
That depends only on the competition.
20 years ago I payed β¬65 for 4Mbps. Now I m paying β¬25 for 200Mbps + a landline with unlimited local calls + an android box (that I use for PLEX and retro gaming) that provides 50+ channels through an app.That was the last renewal.
I also switched my cell provider. I used to pay β¬42 for unlimited calls, SMS and Data. Now I pay β¬25 for the whole package.
I'm lucky. For some reason after raising my rates from the introductory period they haven't gone up in 4 years or so and they increased my service from 100mbps to 300mbps.
You could switch to any of their dozen or so competitors.
Wait until I tell who the "competitors" rent the infrastructure from
The way it works where I live:
Company A owns the physical fiber, they also own the point-of-presence where all the fibers end up (basically a room with lots of rack space). Company A does not sell Internet service.
Company X, Y and Z provide internet service to consumers. They rent the physical fiber from company A, they also rent rack space in the PoPs where their customers fibers terminate. Cost for electricity, air conditioning, in the PoP is shared by all companies that use that PoP, by ratio of number of customers. (e.g. if company X has 100 customers connected to one PoP and Y and Z each have 50, company X pays 50% of the utilities bill and Y and Z each 25%).
In case of company X/Y/Z, all the infrastructure is theirs with the exception of the physical fiber and the PoP room, that includes the fiber 'modem' (mediaconverter) or router on each side of the connection, switches, any backbone connectivity from the PoP onwards, all services, etc.
Some of these ISPs also resell their services to smaller ISPs, so company Q could simply be reselling a package from company X. Often they resell only a part of the service, e.g. they resell Internet from company X but add their own TV package.
They can of course also change this later on. My current ISP started by reselling services from one of the bigger ISPs, this basically gave them national coverage with little risk. Once they got established and had a decent number of customers they started rolling out their own network, city-by-city. They would install their own equipment into the PoPs in a city, change everyone over to their equipment (and distributed new media converters and routers) and they were no longer dependent on the big ISP. When they did this they cut the price of my internet connection by half while at the same time upgrading the speed from 200/200 to 1000/1000. Within a year or so they moved most customers to their own infrastructure.
And how do you get in such a situation? Very simple: company A wanted to install fiber and asked for a permit from the government to start digging up the streets and sidewalks. The government basically said: you can get a permit. but we don't want a all this nuisance with digging up the streets every time someone wants to offer internet service, so you as a requirement for the permit you have to offer an open network with identical pricing to everyone who wants to use it.
Hugely location dependent.
Sure, but I live in 'socialist' Europe and I can already choose from 13 ISPs on fiber alone. I can only dream of the amount of choice people in 'free market' USA must have.
Sure, and that's great for you! I am, honestly, envious.
However, you said "you could switch." For many people, including me, we cannot switch while maintaining a reasonable connection. My options are my current ISP (really not too bad, for the first time in my life), an ISP that provides a maximum of 12Mbps, an ISP that still isn't quite sure if it can provide service to me, or satellite (which is pretty awful for a variety of services I use regularly). Even discarding reasonable expectations, this is not a "dozen or so."
While your proposal might be good for you and others in "socialist" Europe, many people (likely even outside of Europe and the USA) don't have that option and it probably doesn't help resolve the parent commenter's complaint.
Edit: also, while the USA is behind Europe in many ways, I suspect this is not so much a Europe vs USA issue as a rural vs not issue.
On the contrary, here the rural areas got fiber way before the cities did. It's a lot less difficult to install fiber in rural areas compared to densely populated cities where the ground is already full of cables and pipes, and where the impact of having to close streets for digging are much bigger.
Even now, the fastest consumer internet is available in a small town in the middle of fscking nowhere, where they installed 10gbit fiber.
Gotcha, thank you for the edification.
I am in the Communist country referred to as Italy, there are only 2 companies who actually have 4g infrastructures AFAIK, and the dozens of other carriers just rent the infrastructure from the tim/Wind3 duopoly