Yeah, and the French evening news is read by Melissa Theriau while we're stuck with a hagged out Diane Sawyer.
Posted on 09/24/2012 10:19:28 AM PDT by RightCenter
The U.S. has fallen behind much of the Western world when it comes to phone, cable and Internet service. Americans actually pay much more for inferior service compared to their global counterparts. In his new book, The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use 'Plain English' to Rob You Blind, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Cay Johnston highlights these astounding facts: Americans pay four times as much as the French for an Internet triple-play package—phone, cable TV and Internet—at an average of $160 per month versus $38 per month. The French get global free calling and worldwide live television. Their Internet is also 10 times faster at downloading information and 20 times faster uploading it. America has gone from #1 in Internet speed (when we invented it) to 29th in the world and falling. Bulgaria is among the countries with faster Internet service. Americans pay 38 times as much as the Japanese for Internet data.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
Another case of an industry that does not appreciate our relatively deregulated environment and tries to be too clever by half. Or more like six-ahd-a-half. To the point where highly regulated countries like France start to look good by comparison.
Eventually when people get fed up and elect Socialists these guys will have no one but themselves to blame.
www.speedtest.net
Check your speed and see where you stand against the world...
Might be an interesting study, but I believe from annecdotal evidence that more and more people are sloughing off television service in cost cutting measures. They can access their favorite shows through the internet. That has some real implications to mainstream media and where people get their news.
I suppose what both of you say is semi-correct.
I fall back on the ol’ “supply-and-demand” thing. If many people would suddenly halt their services then the prices would drop dramatically.
Eventually when people get fed up and elect Socialists these guys will have no one but themselves to blame.
///
but wouldn’t it be much better, if the Government controlled it all...
and costs would go down if everyone had to subscribe,
or pay a fee ?
It’s a little more difficult to upgrade infrastructure when you are the size of America, not to mention liberal policies have hamstrung innovation and competition.
As the article states, internet speeds are way behind even in urban areas, where it should be easy to upgrade.
Sure, competition doesn't work in the Telecom industry. It doesn't work anywhere! What a bunch of horse$hit! Of course France, Korea, and Japan are SOOO much larger in area than the continental nation of The USA.
If a company had an advantage by increasing thier speed, it would do so. An upstart company could start up in an undeserved market and through deals with the local government increase the infrastructure beet the competition and replicate it in other communities.
A thing is worth only and exactly what another pays for it.
Deregulation at the federal level would undoubtedly bring down the price.
Yeah, and the French evening news is read by Melissa Theriau while we're stuck with a hagged out Diane Sawyer.
We get crap telecoms service because the market is rigged.
End of.
That’s it, I’m moving to France.
TV related ping
I used to live in a village in England where the main telecoms provider (BT) wouldn’t update the infrastructure from the 1980s (”not economically viable”) and we couldn’t get broadband at all. After six months of pressure they grudgingly installed a copper cable so a few of us could get dialup speeds.
Me and three other technically savvy residents got together and, on a shoestring budget, worked out we could build an infrastructure to give every subscriber 20mbit broadband... for $20 a month. And that would be enough to turn a profit in Year 2, despite borrowing the startup capital at market interest rates (something the major telecoms companies don’t have to do).
By the time I moved, our solution was in place and for about $40 a month per subscriber most were getting 60mbit down, 20mbit up. More than double what the people paying $80 a month to BT or Virgin (the two biggest wired telecoms companies) were even able to dream of.
And that covered the cost of the equipment and cables.
Do you know how much the major telecoms companies wanted to charge us to upgrade their kit to provide 8mbit broadband? £40,000 over 3 years. Guess how much they did the upgrade for AFTER we started poaching their customers with a service that made theirs look positively antique by comparison?
£0.00.
This is the story all over Britain. Big business is constantly waiting for subsidies. They’re DEMANDING subsidies. Even though over 1000 independent projects have proved they don’t need subsidies at all, they’re still holding the hand out.
If it’s possible for a band of amateurs to make a profit providing superfast broadband to a piss-ant village like ours, then the big telecoms companies who already owned half the infrastructure thanks to one of Margaret Thatcher’s public sector fire sales, DAMNED WELL could do it if they weren’t so ruddy lethargic. So time and time again they get spanked on their own turf by the little guys, and that’s when they panic, stop holding their hands out for more subsidies, and spend some of that money they already have sitting in a bank somewhere accruing interest.
Our government keeps giving these useless SOBs public money to get them to innovate. There’s no need. Time and time again the independents, the mom and pop shops, and community enterprises, have been able to prove they can deliver the same for a fraction of the cost.
in the report, did they share how much of other countries cosumer telecom costs are subsidized dirertly and indirectly by their governments
also, comparing service in tiny bulgaria with the u.s., on any basis is absurd; wiring tiny bulgaria vs wiring the vast u.s. is akin to wiring Manhattan vs wiring Montana - apples and oranges;
and lastly, who cares how fast people can download porn, and who says everyone needs and wants and just can’t survive without the Internet anyway? who cares? the business interests of the Internet that’s all, and for that they need to convince everyone that we just can’t live without them
just another populist scheme to bash “big companies” in favor of the Net Neutrality crowd’s free ride on the telecom backbone built and maintained by others
“In his book, he tells of a woman who in 1984 paid $9.51 for her local phone service. He writes:
“By 2003 her bill had swollen fourfold to $38.90. In the two decades since the breakup of the AT&T monopoly, even after adjusting for inflation, [her] telephone cost $2.30 for each dollar paid in 1984. And that was without any charges for long-distance calls.””
Long distance callers used to cross-subsidize the basic local service. Today, long distance calls are cheap — free even. Back then, they were the largest part of the bill, for anyone living some distance from friends or family. Businesses paid a fortune for long distance. Big businesses, and governments negotiated a bulk rate, with the monopoly Telcos.
The simple fact is that telephone calling costs a tiny fraction of what it did 25 years or so ago. (To say nothing of the additional services, such as voice mail, that are included.)
BTW, anyone with high-speed Internet can get telephone service for virtually nothing today. Check out “Ooma” or “Magic Jack Plus”. They plug directly into your broadband router — no computer necessary. (Actually, they are black boxes, with a computer-on-a-chip, programmed to handle VOIP.)
Define rigged.
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