*rant on*

Chuck works at home fulltime, and he makes his living on the Internet. Given that, a broadband connection isn’t a neat thing, it’s a necessity. We started out here in Long Beach with DSL through Verizon, which was okay: upload speed was around 126kbps, download speeds were better at around 500-600kbps. Now admittedly we’re spoiled. It wasn’t too many years ago that 56kbps dialup speeds were considered pretty zippy. But on an average day when Chuck needs to upload files in excess of 10 megabytes on a regular basis, that 126kbps upload speed bascially sucked. So we went shopping. We called our local cable provider, Charter Communications and they were offering 3mbps download and 256kbps. That was okay, but we needed that faster upload speed, so we had to keep looking. At the time, they promised faster speeds were coming. That was two years ago. Today they are still offering the same speeds, nothing faster.

Hey, you’re thinking, what am I complaining about?

Well, my friend Cheryl just moved to Newport Beach, where they are in Cox Cable land. Cox offers two tiers: the slower tier is 3mbps download with 256kbps upload. But the faster tier is 9mbps download with 1mbps upload!! To get an upload speed even approaching that we had to go with a third party provider that contracts with Verizon. We pay over $200/month for maybe 1mbps download and maybe 1mbps upload. I say maybe because we rarely hit the top speeds.

So what’s my gripe? Well, in a nutshell: where’s the competition? We have one cable company to choose from: Charter. Now unless I’m much mistaken that sounds like a monopoly to me. It’s our bad luck that the monopoly belongs to a cable company that is dragging its heels in offering higher broadband speeds to its customers. DSL is no better: we can choose from Verizon, our local phone company, or we can go with AOL or Earthlink – but the dirty secret there is they, too, go through Verizon, so their speeds are no better than what Verizon feels like offering.

Ah, but then there’s the third option – the one we went with. Yes, you can buy higher speeds. But how fair is that? The third party providers (like the one we chose, MegaPath) can nickle and dime us to death for the higher sppeds they offer, and they do, because their customers are businesses and they figure that’s jus the cost of doing business (Verizon actually charges more than MegaPath for their business. To get faster download speeds (say, 1.5mbps vs our current less than 1mbps) we could pay as much as $450 /month. Meanwhile, down in Cox Cable land, my friend can get 9mbps for $48.95/month!!! Argggghhhh!!!!!!

When the government deregulated utilities, I had this cockeyed notion that it would mean more competition and thus lower prices for consumers. Call me crazy, but that’s what I thought. I look around now, at least as far as phone and cable go, and I don’t see competition. I see providers who are satisfied with sitting back and offering just okay services for ever increasing costs. And I don’t know about you, but it really frosts me!

*rant off*