Wealthy Suburbs Get The Best Deal Per Mbps

[HipChick]

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Ookla-Discloses-Broadband-Gaps-Our-300-Million-Map-Wont-112846?nocomment=1

Uncle Sam has released a new $300 million broadband map that tracks connectivity by speed, type and ISP. As we (and most of our users) noted last week this early expensive beta isn't particularly accurate, listing phantom ISPs that don't do business in certain markets, too few ISPs, and/or inaccurate speeds. Part of this is because the map is just getting started, but part of this is because ISPs fought tooth and nail to prevent the disclosure of both price and real-world speed information.

American University's Investigative Reporting Workshop last week dug into 4,294 records provided by Ookla and found that wealthier, suburban markets pay less per Mbps but more per month. Surveys from around DC indicated that the cost per Mbps in the poorer ZIP codes was $31.17, while the cost per Mbps in the wealthier ZIP codes was $9.58. The median number in poorer areas was $10.42 per Mbps, while the median figure in the wealthier areas was $3.66 per Mbps. Rural residents stuck on aging DSL lines made out the worst of all, paying $30.28 per Mbps.

Also note the data doesn't necessarily mirror deployment discrimination as clearly as it will be suggested (though rural users forced to use HughesNet or folks in Baltimore will certainly acknowledge such practices exist). While some discrimination based on returns on investment for next-gen services is obviously playing a role, initial deployments of services like FiOS weren't aimed at multi-tenant housing in part due to fiber and hardware issues that have since been overcome. Verizon's belatedly pushing FiOS through DC, NYC and Philly

[Keith Bee]

1. God Bless Uhmericuh!

:sarcasm:

[spooky3]

2. this map is completely inaccurate for my zip in NoVA area

Map says most of us get 10 mbps and higher, and that there are 5 providers, but we are out of range of DSL (even though Verizon is more than happy to accept customers' $) and the only other provider provides about 4 mbps and awful service.

My guess is that there are a few tiny parts of the zip for which the 10 mbps is true.

Even the website has a caveat about questionable accuracy.

So my point is that I wouldn't trust any of their conclusions.

[ThomCat]

3. Here in NYC, the neighborhoods of single family homes

got FIOS years ago. The areas that are largely apartment buildings, many of them STILL CAN'T GET FIOS.

So there is definitely an issue with where they choose to allow deployment of fiber broadband. The cost discrepancy does not surprise me at all.

If you'll let me meander down (fairly recent) memory lane, I have a point to make:

When I was still able to work (still just 2 years ago), one of the things I was doing as a telecom management consultant, one clients gave me signature authority over their telecom departments (the parent company and as many to 51 U.S subsidiaries at one point and a very few misc. European expenses). They required me to review all their U.S telecom invoices and expenses every month and sign off, stating that everything was correct, before any check could be cut to pay for anything.

Because of this, I became very familiar with every type of telecom invoice from every vendor and carrier for every service used by every subsidiary company. For some of this stuff we got the information electronically, instead of from paper invoices. So I would either get CDs every month with cumulative billing information in the vendors proprietary billing system. Or I would have to log in to the vendor's website every month and download billing information each month.

(Though, you would be amazed at how much invoicing Still depends on old fashioned paper invoicing even today.)

Regardless, I had to became very familiar with the billing systems from every vendor.

If I could only convey to all of you how slipshod and sloppy the billing always was for broadband services, not just in the very beginning, but as an ongoing rule year after year, you would be disgusted that those companies were able to get away with it and stay in business.

Just One very damning example from one ISP: the broadband one client used for their centralized email and the main data center:

We're talking about DS-3 and MPLS. Not household stuff. So you would damned well expect that they would keep the billing clean and very cleanly auditable. But it was deliberately impossible to audit. They way they groups and presented the numbers on one page would not be the way they grouped and presented and the numbers on the next page, with no baselines or units or common references so that you could figure out exactly much they were definitively charging where, or whether numbers were pre- or post tax, or pre- or post discounts, or which discounts had been applied if multiple were applicable.

It was a mess, and clearly it was deliberately so. Every request to present clean information was met with the answer that We had to conform to their billing system. They would not provide billing information in the format we needed.

I had to audit this mess every month before a check could be cut. Every month they would bring in their billing specialists with her spreadsheets and hand-written notes supposedly explaining where the numbers broke down and then lined-up again, and she and her vice president would try to get me to sign off that the billing was acceptable.

Even though their explanations didn't pass any kind of basic logic tests, and even though they kept changing what the numbers supposedly represented, and kept presenting breakdowns that contradicted the line-item breakdown they sent with the invoice, and the previous explanation, I was supposed to accept that their explanation made sense and made everything okay. And then they couldn't provide a printed itemized bill that matched their latest explanation.

If you can't provide and itemization in which the numbers add up to the total, only a fool signs off on that bill.

I suggested to my client several times that it was out-and-out fraud. But there was so much other money on the table, and the executive I advised was only an EVP (not the CFO or CEO) and he wasn't politically secure enough to send his company fighting battles against one of the world's largest telecom giants.

Those bills only got paid every month because the EVP himself said so.

Broadband as a whole, all the major companies were that bad. A few small companies had clean billing but they were too small to really handle big accounts. I hope that has changed. It would be nice if honest companies are now big enough to take business from the bad guys.

Anyway, if these ISPs will be This blatantly fraudulent with their large corporate clients then there is absolutely no reason at all that they won't rip off their poorest residential customers too. Generally they treat their corporate customers with More Respect, and More Honesty. So whatever dishonesty their biggest customers get, their poorest customers see far, far more.