It’s Official.. North American ISPs cannot, will not and do not compete

In regards to the current Comcast deal to buy Time Warner Cable (making it the dominant player in 19/20 US markets)

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts had an interesting response to this criticism: The deal won’t hurt competition, he essentially said, because there’s already no competition.

He told Reuters:  ‟[The deal] will not reduce competition in any relevant market because our companies do not overlap or compete with each other. In fact, we do not operate in any of the same zip codes.”

Wait, what?    I think this ‘mistep’ immediately proves that these companies have been manipulating this market for so long, they aren’t even aware that their behaviors are completely unethical, unfair and are stifling innovation.

For god’s sakes, look at the Countries that have better Internet performance than the U.S of A.   It’s even more embarrassing when you consider that the US invented it.

global_speed

ISPs have refused to improve infrastructure for so now long (while scheming up ways to slice up markets and figure out new ways to rip off customers), that their offer is now dated.   REALLY dated.   Like dated to the point where it’s a bottleneck and the very definition of a botteneck.

See Google’s comparison to general computer technology innovation / improvement trends over the last 10-20 years

GF_technology_trends

The really odd thing here, is that these companies and the cities they serve have the ability to offer these speeds and rates and make them more affordable yet choose not to and instead are signing agreements with municipalities all over the Country agreeing to anti competitive practices.

This suddenly hit home for me when I was attempting to simply download a large file (a PC Game) while attempting to watch a 720p feed on another device.   Their technology / offer cannot even handle two devices both doing very legitimate, common tasks.   These days people have ipads, Androids, laptops, netbooks, TVs, Bluray players, etc. etc. etc.   No Internet Service Provider (ISP) even has a place in your home in 2014 with a connection max this low while ALSO limiting concurrent connections when bandwidth stream is saturated.

I’m ready for some Google Fiber… download rates that are 48 times faster, uncapped, un-throttled and the upstream?   At 1 Gbps upstream (compared to the 1.5 I get now an increase of over 650 times), I’ll be able to stream video games, home movies and pretty much use my desktop computer as a data hub for my own personal “cloud”.  Very exciting!

More on exactly what Google Fiber is and why it’s different below [58 minutes]