{"id":2427,"date":"2017-02-03T14:06:43","date_gmt":"2017-02-03T22:06:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2427"},"modified":"2017-02-03T14:06:43","modified_gmt":"2017-02-03T22:06:43","slug":"our-wireless-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2427","title":{"rendered":"Our Wireless Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a turn of events that should come as a surprise to no one, the Trump FCC today bent over and wiped its ass with net neutrality<\/a>. The way is now clear for Internet providers to decide what gets to you at what cost – basically, the cable-ization of the Internet. It\u2019s not the worst thing this administration has done in the first two weeks, but it\u2019s pretty bad all of itself – because basically it paves the way for the major wireless carriers (plus Comcast) to carve up the Internet however they please and charge whatever they like.<\/p>\n

Why so? Because you\u2019re running out of options. Right now, in the middle of Silicon Valley, in the heart of techno-capitalism red in tooth and claw, my options for home broadband are\u2026AT&T and Comcast. The phone company and the cable company. In a lot of places, you\u2019re not even lucky enough to have two options. \u00a0I have AT&T, I\u2019m not wild about it, and my only alternative is Comcast. As I\u2019ve said before, I\u2019d rather contract with ISIS for broadband than Comcast.<\/p>\n

But how did it get to this point? How did we get an incompatible duopoly? Well, in recent times, it\u2019s because people have hammered the notion that your DSL provider or your cable company has adequate competition from\u2026wireless companies. That\u2019s right, there are FOUR different competitors to your wired duopoly, and please do not look too closely at the fact that your DSL provider IS one of those wireless companies, or that Sprint is circling the drain and T-Mobile is only of use in urban areas (albeit very good), or that the wireless companies have METERED DATA.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s where things were headed before today. Wireless companies weren\u2019t covered by the restrictions of net neutrality. Had the Democrats maintained control of the executive branch, I think you would have seen more and more of a push toward the notion that you can get wireless broadband either through your phone or some home base station or similar, simply because there is no legal presumption of net neutrality and there\u2019s an existing presumption that you\u2019re going to pay by the byte. Because let\u2019s face it, everyone thinks of their home broadband as unlimited. Do you even know how much data you get through at home?<\/p>\n

But with the increasing number of cord-cutters, that doesn\u2019t help much. Consider that where I live, it would actually be more<\/em> expensive to buy Comcast broadband by itself than it would be to get the double-play TV package. Looking at my U-Verse package, it\u2019s becoming increasingly obvious that with the exception of things like HBO (which can be sold separately over the top), actual television service is thrown in for lagniappe on top of data. Just like phone calls and text messages are thrown into your phone plan, which is nowadays almost entirely driven ENTIRELY by whether you\u2019re paying for the handset and how big a bucket of data you want to split between everyone on your plan.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The problem is this: everything is data now. Your voice, your texts, your cable TV, anything that can be reduced to bits – all it needs now is a pipe. And the pipes come in two forms, wired or wireless. And the wired pipes are limited by geography and how willing your neighborhood is to be dug up for conduit or netted over by wires, which is why fiber rollout isn\u2019t very quick. But when you\u2019re at the mercy of available spectrum for wireless, that\u2019s hardly more competitive even before considering the lack of incumbent regulation.<\/p>\n

And the only way AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and the other horse-cocks of the broadband industry can survive is to make sure there are as few pipes as possible. Because once the dumb pipe is a commodity, the only way to keep the price up is to prevent competition\u2026or get the right to jack up the tolls at random. Which we\u2019re now headed directly toward. You can probably expect this to look similar to the airline industry, which starts by pitching its new deep discounts for the minimum legal service and then posits everything else – checked bags, snacks, the right to put a bag in the overhead bin – as some sort of elective privilege that you don\u2019t have to choose if you don\u2019t want. You can already see this in the TV-only offerings like Dish or DirecTV, where you can start with a base of local channels and a few religious and home-shopping offerings – but it jumps a LOT the minute you want ESPN and other sports channels. You know, the only cable channels that drive live viewing numbers.<\/p>\n

So basically, we\u2019re getting a giant handout to the incumbent telecoms and everyone else gets ready to reach for their wallets. \u00a0BUT HER EMAILS HER EMAILS HER EMAILS HER EMAILS HER EMAILS HER EMAILS HER EMAILS…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a turn of events that should come as a surprise to no one, the Trump FCC today bent over and wiped its ass with net neutrality. The way is now clear for Internet providers to decide what gets to you at what cost – basically, the cable-ization of the Internet. It\u2019s not the worst … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Our Wireless Future”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2427"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2427"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2427\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}