Friday, August 05, 2005
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Bad news on the regulatory front

The FCC has decided to allow phone companies to screw us consumers over just like cable companies do. They really should have gone the other way and forced cable to be more like DSL.

It will be interesting to see what my particular phone company does, as I've been with the same ISP for many years. Now I could be forced to switch to my phone company. Odds of them allowing static IP addresses are probably about as good as with cable - which is to say not good...

In short, the FCC probably just costed me several hundred dollars a year either in buying a hosting service for all my domains and sites, or in buying my phone company's corporate level service which is a lot more expensive than my current ISP.

If it comes to that though, at least I'll get faster service. Our cable company provides a lot faster connectivity and my DSL, and if I'm going to have to pay super-high rates to get a static IP address I'd rather go with cable and get the faster speeds...

While the current goverment might be against raising taxes, they certainly seem to be happy to help corporations get more of our money...

Update: Here's an actual news article on the topic as well.

Friday, August 05, 2005 11:01:43 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [5]  | 

Friday, August 05, 2005 2:10:41 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
Hi, Rocky: Why do you need a static IP? Why not use a free dynamic DNS service like dyndns.org?
Phil Weber
Friday, August 05, 2005 9:42:13 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
I hear ya. WiMax can't get here fast enough for me. They own the only wires for now. Nothing but competition will really fix it...
Chaz Haws
Friday, August 05, 2005 11:28:58 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
This government is all about Corporate Welfare and no social responsibility. You can be sure those phone companies paid nicely with lobbying cash to get that ruling passed by the FCC.

Watch out for cable companies though - although their downspeed is awesome (I have 6megs with Charter) their uplink speed is a dismal 128k and worse it throttles the downlink while sending out data. Talk about paranoia - they are of course worried about people hosting sites at home. My question is why should the cable company care? They're not really in the business market...
Rick Strahl
Saturday, August 06, 2005 4:27:14 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
Good tip Rick, thanks!

Of course I do self-host my sites (lhotka.net, 3 blogs and a couple wikis) all of which are really low volume affairs. While I could use a commercial hoster, it seems like a lot of money given the low volume I'm dealing with - and there's the loss of flexibility (I'm always installing beta this and test that).

Phil asks about dyndns.org. Maybe that is the answer, I don't know. It seems to me that if you are going to run a site you should have a static IP, but maybe there's no downside to the IP switching randomly over time?

My current hope is that the phone company will grandfather existing customers, not wanting to risk losing them to the faster cable competitor.
Rockford Lhotka
Thursday, September 08, 2005 7:44:33 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
Hi Rocky,

We have been in the ISP business since 1995 and have been through the many "improvements" that the FCC has allowed. Basically the FCC's views are that a duopoly is just fine for competition. I would equate it to saying you have two forms of transportation that we will allow on the streets, a Mac truck or a Honda Civic and those are your only allowed choices but you do have choice! Also the FCC says, "Use wireless" but we all know the realities of providing solid connections via wireless.

We currently have found ways of providing T1 based services that easily competes with the large players but DSL and other forms of delivery have been very hard to maintain anything that can approach what the two big players (Cable and CLEC's) can provide.
Richard Reiffer
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