Quote Originally Posted by Claviusnex View Post
Yes it is their network and much of it is older that 30 years old. To be frank we were talking about cable internet access hitting a wall back when I was still working with the IETF. Even then those of us doing operating system and hardware development were telling the cable companies they needed to start building up their capacity. The responses were like those of many large companies who are slow to change and put more emphasis on milking the cash cow of today while trying to ignore the disruptor of tomorrow.
I honestly do not have the breadth of knowledge and experience as you do within this industry. I have industry jumped from electrical (Power plants mainly) to over seas shipping and stevedoring, to now telecommunications.

I appreciate you sharing your knowledge and history.

What you have stated above reminds me of how at the power plant I was working at, they had the same mentality of milking the cash cow with their current equipment. One of the transformers edging up there in the 20 year range blew out one day after we just got done with a three month outage. We had another month outage to replace the transformer. So, the company lost millions of dollar that month to fix one thing that should have been replace anyway during the three month outage that was planned. But, they had to milk it as much as they can.

Quote Originally Posted by Claviusnex View Post
I have no issue with paying for improvements but it depends upon the end. I think it is the ISPs job to handle the backbone costs. For local infrastructure such as the 30+ year old copper that provides the internet connection to most people I have no problem with payments being the subscriber's responsibility. However I also expect the company to do more than lay it and forget it for that additional cost. The copper network that most of us are on is overloaded yet nothing is being done to fix this. Instead they complain about the backbone connection which is the cheapest place to add capacity. In fact I think it is frequently used as a coverup for the poor quality of their local networks.
Sounds like something I can get behind for the local network upgrading. I don’t mind paying for that as a subscriber.
As for the backbone being the coverup for the poor local area coverage. I can believe that… especially in other countries. If it can happen in other places, it can happen in the USA. So I can argue against that.

Quote Originally Posted by Claviusnex View Post
As for the .com corporations. I could say they do pay their fair share as they pay an ISP to carry their traffic just as I do. So maybe the cable companies should be dealing with their peers or backbone provider. As to the Title 2 protections they worked for phones even after competition opened up the networks. The Internet isn't really any different. As far as rate increases they have been pretty stable in my area, Research Triangle Park, for the last 10 or so years. Mostly because some of the larger towns have a viable alternative service provider which help those of us in the boonies. We also have Google and Ting building or planning to build in the area putting further pressure on the cable/phone companies. Also for full disclosure my rates can never go up due my contract with the ISP but I'm an exception to the rule.
As point taken, though I will say that some of these .com companies do not come to us with the idea of having to have their sites to even match what they are asking for.
This is quite frequent, and it isn’t unheard of between the ISP companies.

Google and Ting planning to build within your area to force the hand of the cable and phone companies is something that I cheer for. That is competition.