Re: [PLUG] Net Neutrality

[Doug Crompton <doug@crompton.com>]

Not sure what you mean by competing. Most small ISP's are defunct. I am
damn lucky to have DCA-net DSL here in Philly, which I do not think they
offer anymore to residential customers. It has been outstanding in the
years I have had it. Pure open static IP pipe to the Internet.

Meanwhile Verizon and Comcast are about the only other choices. I am sure
some will disagree but I consider both of them poor choices especially if
you want to serve from your location. Yes you can get static IP for a big
price. I want a pipe without any other services. Just an unrestricted pipe
in both directions.

While it would be nice to have a aingle pipe with the capability to select
your provider, like the electric company where you can select your
generation provider, I doubt that will ever happen.

Forcing companies to unbundle services and give more choices would be
nice. I don't need 15M+ down speed. I would be perfectly happy with a true
5/2M or so, no blocked ports, static IP, no additional services - mail,
web, etc.

The big providers charge outlandish prices for static IP (and many other
things), like $50/month more for a single address!! This is ridiculous
considering most would be using a dynamic IP address anyway continuously.
I can see a one time charge for setup by why such a big additional rate
per month. DCA-net account gives me 6 static IP's.


The other problem is service and reliabillity. My DCA-net has been down
maybe 5 hours in 5 years. That is a guess as I only remember one major
outage and that was because a Verizon tech screwed up. The DCA-net tech
support is tops. I can only imagine from the horor stories I read how it
would be with Verizon or Comcast.

A lot of this is what you are use to. If you are a relative newcomer to
the Internet (last 5-7 years) then you would not understand the freedom we
once had and thus you would not miss it.

Hey I am old school and I know it. I can't understand why anyone would
text when they could talk or why anyone would want to watch a movie on a
2x3 inch screen when they have a 60 inch lcd or why you would pay Verizon
$80/month for two cell phones when you could pay Consumer Cellular $37
for the same thing and on and on......

Doug

On Fri, 3 Dec 2010, Doug Stewart wrote:

> Not everyone's fer it -- I, for one, am agin' it. I'd rather have
> companies, competing against each other, with a small measure of
> accountability to their customers "in charge" of this field, as opposed
> to nameless, faceless gov't bureaucrats with zero accountability and no
> market pressures to keep them in check.
>
> --
> Doug Stewart
>

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