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The Internet Your Rights Online

Independent ISPs vs the Bells: DSL Outrage 28

Posted by timothy from the small-drops-big-bucket dept.
Blowit writes: "The American ISP Association has been assisting independent ISPs with a battle to help regulate the DSL market for fair competition. Yesterday, the FCC Slapped SBC with a $100,000 fine due to "its willful violation of an order to produce information about its provisioning of DSL to ISPs." Across up in Canada, Independent Members of CAIP is also battling Bell Canada's DSL monopoly by filing a claim with the CRTC. ISPs on both sides of the border feel the DSL pinch and is looking for some relief/compensation to be able to offer competitive DSL solutions."
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Independent ISPs vs the Bells: DSL Outrage More

Independent ISPs vs the Bells: DSL Outrage

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  • If somebody actually provided DSL in my area, then I would be interested in getting it. But I'm in the Canadian Bell monopoly area - and too far from the Bell switch to get DSL, at least according to their specs - 12 Km is a little to far for a unit specced as 4 Km - but I do wonder if the lines were open to competitors whether somebody elses equipment could work at that distance. Meanwhile, the only wireless network provider (for high-speed links) in my area filed for bankruptcy last year.

    But the other side of the coin here is cost. Commercial DSL connections are several hundred $CDN a month - home DSL is about $CDN50, and may be why the wireless provider went under.

    Just because one battle (access information) has been lost by The Phone Companys, this doesn't mean that the general DSL landscape is anywhere near changing yet.

    • You're in a Bell area? Bell Canada's DSL is $40 Canadian.

      If you're thinking of Look, the satellite broadband people, they haven't filed for bankruptcy: they've stopped selling the broadband service and retreated to TV only.

      I also wonder where you are. Here in London, a small city with the princely sum of ~300,000 people, we have competitive DSL: London Webmasters sell it. AFAIK they use Bell's lines, though, and have even tighter availability than Bell does. Still, they're there. In Toronto, there are several providers; I assume Ottawa and possibly Windsor as well. You're probably in the country, I'm guessing.

      • Bell Canada's DSL is $40 Canadian plus sales taxes is closer to $50 CDN, still a bargain compared to what many people are paying in the USA.

        And yeah, I'm not in a city. No cable here, either.

        Dunno what 'Look' service you are referring to, but around the Raglan area (North of Oshawa) they had high-speed terrestrial wireless internet, not satellite, that was comparable in speed to a cable connection. And they did file for bankruptcy protection - they just didn't discontinue the TV part of the business 'cos it was profitable. (For all I know, they may offer the internet service again, but I don't trust them at the moment.)

        • Ah yes, I heard about that Oshawa-area experiment.

          Look Communications [www.look.ca] is a satellite TV provider, competitive with StarChoice and Bell ExpressVu. They were running an experimental satellite broadband service [www.look.ca] but discontinued it, basically because demand overran supply of bandwidth. They continue to keep their original subscribers hooked up, though, and have a Contact Me When It's Back email on the page above. UltraFast 2 (the original used a modem upstream) gives 3Mbps downstream, 200Kbps upstream, and costs CAN$39.95 a month.

          Look merged with Interlog, btw: the Internet side of the biz is basically Interlog's old setup.

          If I'm still in Ontario when it becomes available again (no guarantees there :) I'll probably sign up.

          • Yep, Look is the bunch - but their an experimental satellite broadband service [www.look.ca] that you refer to is actually a purely terrestrial radio link.

            This means that there is not the annoying second or two type latencies involved in connections via satellite, but rather, is just as fast as a cable modem connection.

            Unfortunately (similarly to shared cable and satellite connections) the available bandwidth is shared by all of the users connected through the access point - and when a single wireless access point serves an entire city and surrounding area......

            And thanks for the note that they plan to make it available again - but they'll probably need more local station towers before I'll consider it again.

      • You're probably in the country, I'm guessing.
        LOL. Yes, as we all know in Canada, if you don't live in London, Toronto, Windsor or Ottawa (read *Ontario*), then you're living in the country. After all, the fact that Vancouver is second in size only to Toronto is irrelevant ... poor BC folk need to keep living without DSL ... and those unfortunate people in Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Regina, Montreal, Hull, Halifax, etc. they have no high-speed access in sight.

        A lot of Canada (outside of Ontario - self-proclaimed centre of the universe) has DSL, whether you're willing to admit it or not. Alberta is supposedly even installing thousands of kms of fibre through a government program to get all schools on high-speed, even the ones in the middle of nowhere. Especially the ones in the middle of nowhere.

        Rock

        • Dimwit. Read the post.

          The person was complaining that he/she/it couldn't get Bell's DSL because of being too far away from the CO.

          There ain't nobody in Vancouver getting DSL from Bell. :)

          (For what it's worth, most of the Canadians I know on DSL are getting their service from Vibe. I suspect you've never even heard of it. :)

    • g.SHDSL would be able to reach your house. However, unless the Canadian Government finally realizes that Bell needs to offer DLECs the ability to offer these services at wholesale rates, you will never see this technology reach your house.
      • SHDSL would be able to reach your house.

        I rather thought that some technology might be able to. But I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it to get here - 95% of the telco's potential profits live within 4KM of the Bell switches/COs anyway.
  • For the most part this is a mute point. I would love to hear from other people who deal in the ISP industry, but as far as I knew DSL was gone.

    I live in a medium sized city, and thanks to Qworst DSL has pretty much been driven out. With the high cost of equipment, its not even looking like a viable business opertunity anymore. Is there something i'm missing? Has it hit market saturation? Or is it just the fact the telco wont let us have more than 2 COs?

    Sorry, a bit offtopic. but this is something i have needed to get off my chest :P
    • DSL is alive and well in those markets where it does not have to compete against digital cable. I live in Qwerst's region, but they don't offer DSL out here in the middle of nowhere -- so an ISP whose office is a couple hundred miles away sells DSL here.

      Nine hops to the backbone... but still blows POTS away.
    • The ISP I work for resells Pac Bell and Covad DSL. Even in areas where cable is an option we still get sales. People willing to spend the $$ for bandwidth like the fact that we offer static IPs and allow servers. They also like the fact that they aren't sharing the bandwidth. In certain parts of my town the cable is incredibly slow, I'm sure it's the same in other areas we are selling DSL that cable is also available. Of course, the vast majority of people just want to check their email once a day and are sticking with dialup because the bandwidth isn't worth it to them.

  • It's the CLEC's fault (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dark Coder ( 66759 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2001 @04:56PM (#2529577)
    Simply put... The U.S. Telecom Act of 1999 is a joke.

    You've got Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La) sitting on the Telecommunication committee with the fattest wad of unspent baby bell money in his pocket.

    If it wasn't for Mr. Tauzin, I'm pretty sure that the CLEC would have a more favorable competitive environment.

    Sorry, CLEC, you are going to have to setup a Political Action Committee (PAC) to counter the already swayed Telecom committee members of the House.

    Until the CLEC get their collective duffus act together, Baby Bell will win this one: lock, stock and barrel.

    No fine is too big for Baby Bell: it is just the cost of doing dirty business (equates with marketing budget).

    I'm ashame that I voted for that fat cat. I'll contribute heavily to see him gone by next election.

  • IDSL (Score:1)

    by guisar ( 69737 )
    I've very glad to hear anyone who has slammed the bells for not providing adequate access to independent ISPs. I only wish there were further steps we as individuals could take to help the State take further action.

    I have IDSL in my house and it's great- fantastic. When there are problems- you guessed it- Verizon is busy trying to cause problems and then blames everyone but themselves. Why they don't recognize the cable modem threat is beyond me.

    Justin

  • Bell is the dominant player in DSL in Ontario and Quebec. It doesn't provide DSL to the rest of Canada.

    Also, there are several competitive DSL providers in Ontario and Quebec, especially in the larger urban areas. They tend to focus on business service, though.

    Bell is huge. I believe that with the recent Nortel layoffs it has become the single largest private employer in Canada. And it does have its fingers in a lot of other telcos, especially in the four (small) maritime provinces, where it owns the parent company of the local providers. However, it's inaccurate to portray it as a Canadian monopoly, because Bell doesn't even provide local phone service to the majority of Canadians. The major competitor is Telus, which is the main provider of local phone service to Alberta and British Columbia. Telus has begun to provide local phone service to businesses in Bell's areas; IMO it's only a matter of time before it starts selling DSL competitively.

    Note: Telus and Bell hate each other. Passionately. :)

    • Telus and Bell hate each other. Passionately.

      And everybody else hates both of them. Passionately.

      Speaking as someone who has to deal with Telus on a daily basis, they are "the suckiest sucks who ever sucked" (to paraphrase Homer Simpson.)

      Last month, their DSL network for the entire province of Alberta was down for three weeks because their DHCP servers failed.

      Think about that for a minute.. thousands of people were down for almost a month, because Telus couldn't maintain their DHCP servers..

      As a note, it takes me about an hour to make a DHCP server (from a PC with a blank HD.) It took a multi-million dollar company THREE WEEKS to do the same.. granted, their servers are more complex than mine, but I have a hard time believing that it could take more than a day or two.

      My experiences with Bell aren't much better.. a customer was having problems with their VPN, due to excessive dropped packets.. a traceroute clearly showed that it was a problem in Bell's network (lag increased from 20ms to over 2000ms, once the packets were three hops inside Bell's network.) Emailing the results to them got a response of "traceroute shows round-trip times, so the results don't show it's a problem with us"

      • For the foreigners: Telus is a merged company. There used to be two different telcos in Alberta and BC.

        During my time in BC, I thought Telus was wonderful. However, I only dealt with them as a telco, as I was electronically deprived then. (My computers were in New Brunswick. Long story. :)

        But it's also possible that the Alberta/BC Telus is a split. I know this happened with Aliant, which is the merged company of the four Atlantic province telcos. New Brunswick, which historically had a great telco (NBTel), still gets better service from Aliant than Nova Scotia customers.

        Nova Scotia used to be served by MT&T, before the Aliant merger and subsequent Bell buyout. You want bad phone service, move to Halifax. Glack.

        I used to lose my _dialtone_ for an hour or two, at least once every month and sometimes three or four times a week.

        This is not New Technology. Dialtones have been around for a while. MT&T never quite got the knack of delivering them consistently.

        It did get better when I moved out of the south end. But it didn't get completely better, ever. Haligonians still lose their dial tones sometimes. Unless they switch to getting their telephone service from the local cable co, which is what my mother did. :) (I moved to New Brunswick before this became possible.) However, in New Brunswick, the story is still very different: everybody I know there loves their telco, even though it's legally the same company.

        Now, in Ontario (where I am now), the situation is deeply strange. Bell's a deranged bureaucracy: it loses things. In many ways the technology side of Bell is pretty good; they usually make things work pretty well. But in customer service and billing... hah. they're nuts.

        It's not that they're unfriendly. They'll generally be nice enough to you but they mess up processing absolutely everything. Sometimes they'll process it correctly, sometimes they'll lose the billing, sometimes they'll overbill. It's very random.

  • the telephone companies built the telephone lines. why should some third-party company be allowed the chance to profit from the use of the telephone companies lines in the name of competition? they didn't help build the network in the first place!

    the current (asinine) situation we are in baffles me. maybe this analogy sucks, but just follow me...

    mcdonalds makes big macs.

    wendys, burger king, and arbys wish to resell big macs under their own branding and ask mcdonalds for their consent.

    mcdonalds declines.

    wendys, burger kind and arbys sue mcdonalds, crying 'anti-trust!' and 'anti-competition!'

    i dunno. maybe i'm just completely lost.

    • This is probably too much for your mind to handle, but I'll try anyway.

      The Romans built the first British road system. Today, many of these roads are still in use, even by people who - horror of horrors - are not descended from people who were ever Roman citizens.

      The Italians do not complain that the British use 'their' roads. The Romans got pretty good usage out of them for a significant time, and now the peopo live near them use them as infrastructure.

      Similarly, the telephone companies. The phone companies were granted monopolies for a limited time to encourage them to build the networks in the first place.

      They've now reaped their reward pretty well. It is time to thank them, let them keep all the cash that they have accumulated, and open up the networks.

      At least, this is the approach we're taking in Canada. We now have the lowest Internet connection costs of any country in the world. I'd say it's working.

      • but in america... local/regional/national telecos control everything. if you want on "their" pipe, you have to pay them.

        unless congress specifically says - "you don't own the lines anymore, capishe?" nothing is going to change.

        This is probably too much for your mind to handle, but I'll try anyway.

        thanks, snooty intellectual elitist.
  • their counterproductive bitching and switch their focus [nokia.com] by moving to a different networking scheme.
  • I live in Saskatchewan, in a town of 5000 people.

    Believe it or not, we have a choice of THREE Internet providers here, two of them "high-speed".

    I get my Internet access from Sask Tel (the provincial telephone company) for about CDN$45 per month for a DSL connection. And they provide the DSL modem; I only need to provide the computer, a network card, and the ethernet cable to hook up to the modem.

    The other high speed provider is Image Communications (http://www.imagecable.com) who use microwave transmission towers to provide high-speed Internet access and "cable tv" as well.

    Not bad for a town of 5000, as I said.
  • Acting like a monopoly, who'd a thunk?

    SBC was starting to see a lot of lines being leased for use as DSL lines. So, the started a big program to install DSL lines and used their marketing muscle, monopoloy power, and deep pockets to put all the little guys out of business. Then, when there is no competition they slooow down (nearly stop) deploying DSL and raise price.

    Then when someone dares ask if they broke the rules to control the market they pay a piddling $100,000 dollar fine rather than answering the questions... Sheesh, a $100,000 dollars is more than it costs each time one of their executive asks their research department (TRI) a question.

    Stonewolf

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