All The Fastest U.S. ISPs Are, Once Again, Small, Independent Competitors Or Local Governments
We’ve spent years laying out mountains of documented evidence on how the U.S. broadband is a heavily monopolized mess largely protected and pampered by captured lawmakers and regulators. The impact of this lack of meaningful competition is everywhere, from historically terrible customer satisfaction rates, to high prices, slow speeds, and spotty coverage.
83 percent of US households live under a broadband monopoly. The U.S. is painfully mediocre in nearly every global broadband metric that matters. And when competitors do still somehow manage to survive in this environment, their positive impact is very clear.
Case in point: PC Magazine once again measured all the fastest broadband providers in America and found that smaller ISPs, or community built broadband networks, consistently provided the fastest speeds:

As smaller competitors, these efforts are all far more incentivized to, you know, try. Or in the case of efforts like Fort Collins Connexion or Longmont Nextlight, both community broadband builds in Colorado, they’re actually part of the local communities they serve, and therefore, more directly responsible to those communities and their voters.
Independent California ISP Sonic, one of the very few larger independent ISPs to survive monopoly power and the lobbyist-induced competitive carnage of the early 00s, has the fastest speeds in the country thanks to its 10 Gbps offerings. All of these smaller operations are about improving the communities they operate in, instead of the traditional monopoly model of extraction and turf protection.
Campaign cash slathered lawmakers and policymakers have literally spent decades embracing one core central policy: throwing countless billions in subsidies, tax breaks, and regulatory favors at industry giants like AT&T in exchange for networks they half deploy or don’t deploy at all. AT&T, in turn, has historically cut jobs, skimped on investments, and ripped off the federal government.
Worse, state and federal legislatures have allowed giants like AT&T to repeatedly write and craft legislation aimed at curtailing competition, whether it comes from a small local government frustrated with market failure, or smaller broadband providers trying to make inroads in the market. At the same time, they’ve lobotomized most federal oversight of market competition and consumer welfare.
Even in this environment, scattered competition continues to emerge and demonstrate its value.
Terrible telecommuting and home education experiences levied historic pressure on lawmakers to try to do somewhat better, resulting in equally historic financial investment in new deployments. And California is exploring some very novel efforts such as the creation of a massive new open access middle mile network aimed at boosting competition and driving down costs without rate regulation.
As somebody who has tracked U.S. federal telecom policy for 20+ years, I can say unequivocally that federal telecom policy has failed due to corruption. The evidence is everywhere; most recently and painfully evident by the telecom lobby’s successful bid to block the nomination of FCC Commissioner Gigi Sohn based on a bunch of half-assed, manufactured attacks.
The vast majority of the most interesting efforts in telecom right now are coming at the hands of a bipartisan collection of states, local towns, small competitors, cooperatives, and utilities — all extremely pissed off and finally doing something about it.
right on. "don't do the thing they incentivize you to do and punish you for not doing" is not a solution. And as I note to others, I also don't like laggy GUIs, tying the GUI to basic HDMI port switching, which still happens if you're offline.
I settled on the LG C1 this last purchase round and love the quality, but I still think the OS and GUI is shitty. And it STILL has the same problem where they tether the GUI (which gets slower as the TV hardware ages in relation to software bloat) to HDMI switching, so doing the basic act of switching ports is way more cumbersome and annoying than it should be (even if you operate the TV without connecting it to the internet).
Sceptre is arguably the dodgiest TV brand you can find and he linked to a dated LED TV. He literally didn't read the post, did a 30 second google search, and concluded the issue solved.
You make caring about competition sound like some kind of venereal disease.
I got a page not found when I went to examine their North American offerings. When I do find a high quality OLED with smart internals it was usually at an absurd and unreasonable premium.
the people who tell you "just don't connect it to the internet!" don't understand how any of this works. Manufacturers are increasingly making it more and more difficult to do this without losing key functionality. And also, I keep having to repeat this, but when you tether the HDMI switching to a laggy smart TV GUI that takes forever to load (and gets worse as the hardware ages in relation to software bloat), it DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU KEEP IT OFFLINE.
security improvements, performance improvements.
I included this in the piece above but I guess I should elaborate: Keeping it offline: –keeps you from getting firmware updates –increasingly will lock you out of key features by design as a way to mandate you participate in the walled garden ad and data collection party. –often doesn’t matter anyway because just switching HDMI ports is tied to the terrible smart TV GUI, which lags on load and makes even basic things like switching ports more annoying than they should be
Yeah I get that a lot. Addressed some of that in the piece. THe problem: Keeping it offline: --keeps you from getting firmware updates --often locks you out of key features --often doesn't matter anyway because just switching HDMI ports is tied to the terrible TV GUI, which lags on load and makes even basic things like switching ports more annoying than they should be
It's a low quality LED from a brand with a history of absolutely terrible build quality, but thanks for playing!
err, no. If you read the Ars article it makes clear Comcast falsely claimed they offered broadband service to an address they didn't actually serve (which they do constantly), then informed a guy who just bought a house he'd have to pay $19k to get a service he was previously informed wouldn't cost him any large installation fee (which they do constantly).
I do (Wink). Sorry, it was a brain fart that's been fixed.
Whoops, brain fart. Fixed, thank you!
Re:
I have one, spent that morning tinkering with it, and for me it was completely unusable. I mean the pedals would physically spin, but you couldn't load the OS or log in. So for me at least, you not only couldn't access classes, you couldn't change resistance levels. You just got stuck staring at the circular loading wheel. There was one brief moment where it tried to log me in, but it couldn't authenticate.
Re: but let's ignore the real criminals
lol, of course not.
Re: Re: Re: It's rational people not stampeded by MINOR virus.
also, for whatever reason, people really like to fixate exclusively on deaths, and ignore the fact that this disease is going to cause disability (perhaps permanent) for millions of people. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/health/covid-long-term-symptoms.html
NebuAD
I think often about Verizon's largely successful efforts to modify wireless user packets to track users around the internet, and how they saw really no serious problem with implementing such a system--not only without telling the public it was being implemented, but without providing a working opt-out mechanism. Even now, after the FCC fine, I believe some variant of that same system remains in play across the AOL/Yahoo ad ecosystem, just with a slightly more verbose amount of fine print, and an opt-out tool that actually works. And wow, I'd also forgotten about NebuAd. So many scandals, so few substantive reforms or meaningful solutions in the last decade.
Trust
Privacy is one of those subjects where I genuinely understand, and agree with, the concerns of all involved. As Ernesto and a few others noted, trust has simply been demolished after years of bad faith arguments, trojan horse bills, and outright falsehoods from the private sector. Compounded by a government that has routinely violated privacy itself, turned a blind eye to privacy violations by others, or shown it's too corrupt or incompetent to tackle the mammoth task before it. So I get the skepticism...both from those worried that Congress lacks the competence to craft meaningful legislation without causing even more harm...to those who don't want the worst players having an outsized impact in the crafting of said legislation. In comes a crisis where good faith consensus is needed, and it's seemingly impossible to achieve. I simply have no idea how you even begin restoring that trust. Especially at a time when so many other important problems are going to take priority and resources away from quality privacy proposals.
Stakeholders..
I agree with much of this. So much of this seems to stem from the fact that smaller stakeholders, much like consumers, frequently aren't given a seat at the table because they're incapable of buying influence. Also as Mike hints at, there's a lot of bad actors (see: AT&T) that are often atrocious on privacy (see: location data scandals) that are now pushing for flimsy federal laws designed to LOOK like they're addressing the problem(s), but are actually focused on pre-empting tougher state or federal consensus-driven solutions. So yeah, with AT&T having outsized influence in Congress, calls for "one set of strong, sensible, and straightforward privacy protections" usually ends with AT&T lawyers writing half the legislation, especially in this particular Congress.
I'm genuinely curious...
I think some of the disconnect here is driven by the fact that elecom providers, historically, are fused tightly to the law enforcement and intelligence gathering communities. It is, after all, fairly hard at this point to see where AT&T begins and the NSA ends, given AT&T has built dedicated systems geared toward surveillance data collection and have even acted as intelligence agencies time and again. I'm curious if telecoms almost being PART of government accounts for the fact they are often above reproach by many in DC? These location data scandals were monumentally terrible, with location data access abused by everyone. Including law enforcement, folks pretending to be law enforcement, and stalkers. Verizon literally thought it was a good idea to modify wireless user data packets to track users around the internet without telling them (the "zombie cookie scandal"), yet the outrage from DC policymakers is always muted in contrast to the coverage we've seen regarding big tech. Folks like Hawley, for example, can go on at great length about smaller scale privacy scandals out of Silicon Valley, yet very rarely (quite possibly never?) criticizes "big telecom." Seems myopic and dangerous to not have a broader, bird's eye view as we debate what privacy laws should look like. But I'm curious: what are the other reasons for the disconnect here?