Is It Time?

[Bruce Wrenn]

With all this work from home, and on line schooling, is it time for legislators, or congress to declare high speed internet access a utility? We live in the most wealthy county in central NC. Capital building is less than twenty miles away by air, so we ain't exactly in the boonies anymore. In any direction I drive, it's less than two miles to high speed internet (broad band, cable, and fiber) but in our neighborhood, we get (on good days) 0.69MB. There is no way children can do live streaming lessons, unless they like watching a circle going round in the instructor's belly, and lots of it. Is it time?

[Joe Bradshaw]

Amen Bruce. My next door neighbor has AT&T fiber, but internet is not available at my address. I also live in Wake county.

[Brian Elfert]

I don't understand how declaring something a utility automatically makes it available to everyone.

[Frank Pratt]

in our neighborhood, we get (on good days) 0.69MB.

Ouch! My son lives well out of the city & he has pretty slow internet, but he can still watch Netflix without a problem. At my house, our internet provider is trying to get me to upgrade to 600 Mb/sec from 300. I just can't see the need though.

[John Lanciani]

I don't understand how declaring something a utility automatically makes it available to everyone.

In most, if not all states, utilities have a mandate to provide service to all.

[Rod Sheridan]

Yes, it’s time to spend the money to bring high speed internet to almos everyone.

This would require money from the government as many areas do not have the density to make access commercially viable.

[Keith Outten]

The problem is that it is expensive to run Internet services to remote homes. Should your local government mandate that everyone receive access the additional cost will be shared by every subscriber. Is it reasonable for your neighbors to pay for you to have service from a remote location? If your neighbors agree you better get ready for an increase, this is an opportunity for the utility to increase rates and they will not be shy about the new billing structure. Converting a private company to a public utility is a costly endeavor particularly since the new utility will have to satisfy a multitude of organizations. When I worked for Virginia Power we had 137 government agencies with specifications that governed our industry. It's not just the cost of running cable, there are costs associated that will forever continue to increase.

If you open this door the industry will change dramatically. I know for a fact that the big corporations have wanted to convert Internet delivery services to a metered rate system since 2001. Look at the changes in monthly fees in just the last 20 years. Remember when cable TV was just $19.95 per month with no commercials. In all fairness I don't keep up with the industry anymore so my comments are worth what you paid. I once owned an Internet Service Provider business for ten years until 2003 and can tell you when the door is opened we will all regret it.

[Brian Elfert]

Just because you can get a utility doesn't mean it will be cheap. I know a Boy Scout camp in Wisconsin that doesn't have a telephone in a sub camp that was built in the 1990s. The phone company wanted $20,000 so they decided not to have it installed. The main part of camp has phone service so messages were relayed via the camp radio system. They use a cell phone now that cell service is usable in the area.

On the other hand, I know a different Boy Scout camp in Minnesota that is about 8 miles from a paved road yet has fiber optic Internet service. Taxes paid for that installation.

[Bruce Wrenn]

Keith, sorry your arguments don't hold water. Remember now school children are REQUIRED to do lessons on line. Schools systems have been giving out computers, but without high speed access, they are as useful a "tits on a boar hog."Look at your phone bill (land line, or cell) and you will see a universal service fee. That's used to help those who can't afford it, plus pay for 911 service. As a regulated utility, all providers would have to justify charges to regulators. None of this "Mickey Mouse Stuff" you now see on your bill would exist. As an example, Verizon charges for sending you a bill, electronically, or by snail mail. How the heck (polite term) are you supposed to pay them if you don't know what your bill is? Look at the co-op phone companies and how they embraced high speed internet. Friend lives in southwest Virginia mountains. Co-op phone company provides high speed internet to all customers. When he lived in Cary (one of the richest towns in NC) he had to use satillite for internet as neither provider wanted to run lines down his street, a total distance of less than 1/4 mile, serving six houses. Their argument, in ten years, this area will have street widened and housing developments in place. As for rates, and service, only competition regulates price on both internet, and cell service. Across the creek from us (22 houses) less than 1/4 mile away they have three choices for internet, Century Link, Spectrum, and Ting, all offering 200 MB, or faster speed, for less than $50 / month (average,) plus the junk fees.

[Mike Henderson]

Amen Bruce. My next door neighbor has AT&T fiber, but internet is not available at my address. I also live in Wake county.

How far away is your neighbor? I'd talk with him/her and see if there's a way to share his/her access. It's technically against the service agreement to share your service but this may be the only way you can get it.

There's a number of ways to get a connection from their house to your house. A plain Ethernet cable can run 100 meters and there are wireless techniques that can go line-of-sight for longer distances.

Make an offer to pay half the Internet cost.

Mike

[Mike Henderson]

The problem is that it is expensive to run Internet services to remote homes. Should your local government mandate that everyone receive access the additional cost will be shared by every subscriber. Is it reasonable for your neighbors to pay for you to have service from a remote location? If your neighbors agree you better get ready for an increase, this is an opportunity for the utility to increase rates and they will not be shy about the new billing structure. Converting a private company to a public utility is a costly endeavor particularly since the new utility will have to satisfy a multitude of organizations. When I worked for Virginia Power we had 137 government agencies with specifications that governed our industry. It's not just the cost of running cable, there are costs associated that will forever continue to increase.

If you open this door the industry will change dramatically. I know for a fact that the big corporations have wanted to convert Internet delivery services to a metered rate system since 2001. Look at the changes in monthly fees in just the last 20 years. Remember when cable TV was just $19.95 per month with no commercials. In all fairness I don't keep up with the industry anymore so my comments are worth what you paid. I once owned an Internet Service Provider business for ten years until 2003 and can tell you when the door is opened we will all regret it.

I will point out that in our nation's history telephone service was considered a utility and telephone lines were run to rural houses because we (as a nation) felt that telephone service was a necessity. Electric service was similar.

It's possible that 5G will provide high speed wireless access to rural areas but I's skeptical.

Mike

[roger wiegand]

My most hilarious experience with internet access was the last company I started, a biotech in Cambridge, MA in 2015. Our building with physically on the MIT campus, on MIT-owned land, in the heard of the most technologically overloaded city in the country. Our choices for internet access were a telephone dialup line. Period. To get a decent connection we had to mount a directional antenna on the roof that talked to another antenna across the river in Boston to give us a 0.5 mb/s connection at a cost of $5000/month as long as it wasn't raining or snowing. Eventually we had a fiber optic line installed to a connection point at our expense to give us a useable connection.

[Rod Sheridan]

I will point out that in our nation's history telephone service was considered a utility and telephone lines were run to rural houses because we (as a nation) felt that telephone service was a necessity. Electric service was similar.

It's possible that 5G will provide high speed wireless access to rural areas but I's skeptical.

Mike

I work for a satellite company, we provide heavy route capacity into northern and arctic communities where it is then provided to the customer by the local commnications provider.

During this pandemic we've been asked to increase bandwidth to support increased activities.

Today, if you don't have high speed access you can't interact with the government, have telemedicine, distance learning, work from home and a lot of stuff I'm not aware of.

There's a reason Germany declared internet access a basic human right.

We're basically at the point where a conventional phone isn't required, however digital connectivity is.

Mike's comment above is spot on, we subsidized phone, electric, water and gas utilities to provide services to our citizens, this is as important in this century..........Rod.

P.S. High speed internet also has the ability to transform our lives, and the environment. I've been working from home since March 13, looks like I may be home until June due to the pandemic.

I haven't purchased gasoline in 3 weeks, the air quality all over the globe is far better, and over 3 weeks I've saved more than 40 hours commuting to work. It's astounding how much money and time I spent commuting, and how much better the environment is because we're not doing that now.

[Malcolm McLeod]

With all this work from home, and on line schooling, is it time for legislators, or congress to declare high speed internet access a utility? ...

Are y'all Tesla fans? He wanted wireless electricity, and IIRC the documentary said he thought it would be globally accessible and free. He was bit wide of the mark there.

I believe if you look at the history of utilities, they are granted a monopoly for a given area. They get ALL the customers in the high-profit high-density customer areas, and in return build the infrastructure to supply the money-pit low-density areas. Only after the build-out was paid for did Uncle Sugar allow competition. Generally, "monopoly" and "low-cost" are not used in the same sentence - at least in the world I live in.

I guess we could have Congress legislate billing rates, universal service areas, minimum speeds, and service reliability. SWWWEEEEET! (I may have found my next start-up!)

And what was that old, pre-break-up motto of Ma Bell...??? Oh, yeah.... "We don't care. We don't have to! ...We're the PHONE COMPANY!"

[Jim Becker]

There are all kinds of reasons that the idea of making high speed Internet accessible and ubiquitous can be phoo-phooed, but in the end, it's essential to our society that it happens and happens soon. The US is so far behind a huge chunk of the world in this and it isn't funny--we are almost a "third-world" country compared to many countries relative to connectivity. The only way it's going to happen is if the leadership of the country commits to it including both public and private funding to build it out. Big telecom kowtows to Wall Street and short term results and refuses to build out in underserved or unserved areas yet they block community efforts to address the issue in those areas, too. They are not going to make the investments that will lower their financial performance or allow others to address the issue unless compelled to do so. That means hard choices both philosophical/political and financial. But it has to get done almost as much as another key thing that we don't need to go into here. When you have 300+ million citizens, structures and processes have to change to support their needs.