\n<\/a>\nSo I happened to wake up and wanted to check something online.\nNo DSL service. (Yes, I rebooted the DSL modem.)\nDetermined the modem was working and the problem was beyond it in\nAT&T’s network.\nThought maybe there’s a tree down on the line.\n
\nCalled AT&T. Message said “high speed” Internet technical support\nhours are 6AM to 11PM, so please call back then for best service.\nExcuse me?\nThe Internet is supposed to shut down overnight?\n
\nStayed on, outwaited the robot, got a tech in the Philippines,\n\n\nwith very loud noise on the line as soon as he came on.\nOutwaited his checklist about irrelevant details on my side of the DSL modem.\n
\nHe finally got around to checking and discovered there was a posted outage\nin their DSL network.\nWhy?\nMany people from my area code (area code? this is the Internet!)\nhad been calling in complaining about slow service.\n
\nI’m not surprised.\nI was one of them a few days ago, and they sent a tech who made it slower.\nAnd AT&T claimed that even though I’m paying for 3Mbps service,\nthey could provide it as slow as 1.5Mbps and still be within the\nterms of service.\nWhat other business could get away with that?\n“Oh yes, we sold you a car, but it can only go 30 MPH.\nYes, the speedometer can read 55 MPH, but it doesn’t have to actually\ngo that fast to meet our terms of service.”\n
\nETA for uptime? 8AM Sunday.\nMore than a full day of complete outage.\n
\nWhy?\nIt will be faster.\nGreat.\n \nSo how am I sending this?\nFortunately, we have plan B: Verizon EVDO service, through VZ’s cell phone 3G network.\nEven slower than AT&T, but at least it works.\n \nAs I told the AT&T tech, I realize it’s not his fault, he’s\njust reading from a checklist and following orders, but if AT&T\nwasn’t a monopoly, it would be out of business due to such shoddy service.\n \nDid I mention that the tech also said that if AT&T manages to keep\nDSL up for three days straight then I could call customer billing\nand ask them for credit for the service I paid for that they didn’t\ndeliver and they “might” credit it?\n \nThis is why we need net neutrality.\nThis is why we need real competition in Internet service provision.\n \nUnfortunately, with the\n\nlobbying power of the telcos and cablecos,<\/a>\nit seems likely that the only way we’ll get real competition is\nthe way we got it for automobiles.\nDomestic providers will continue to provide increasingly bad products.\nDid you know that for the price you pay for Internet service\nin the U.S. you would get \n10 to 100 times the speed in Japan<\/a>\nor Korea or Finland or France?\nThat’s right, 100Mbps anywhere in Japan, for about $30\/month.\nWhile U.S. Internet providers call 3Mbps “high speed”.\n\nU.S. is number 18<\/a> even by average Internet speed.\nU.S. isn’t in the top 10 by Internet broadband service, either.\nNot a single U.S. city<\/a>\nis even in the top 20 for broadband quality.\n \nWith such shoddy speed and service eventually NTT and TEF and even France Telecom\nwill move in and out-compete the domestic duopoly,\njust like Honda and Toyota and Kia and the rest did.\n \n\n \n-jsq\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AT&T is upgrading DSL service and requires more than a full day, until 8AM Sunday, to do it. So I happened to wake up and wanted to check something online. No DSL service. (Yes, I rebooted the DSL modem.) Determined the modem was working and the problem was beyond it in AT&T’s network. Thought maybe […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[19,132],"tags":[883,31,506,1522,1530,8709,4444,4443,4445,516],"class_list":["post-1947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-internet-access-speed","tag-att","tag-automobile","tag-broadband","tag-competition","tag-dsl","tag-history","tag-internet-service","tag-internet-speed","tag-net-neutrality","tag-verizon"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-vp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1947\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"http:\/\/www.quarterman.com\/images\/netneutrality_large.jpg\")
<\/a>\nBut they need to take it down entirely for more than a day to do that?\nWhat do they think it is, cable TV?\nOh, right, \nthat’s exactly what they want to make it into.<\/a>\n<\/a>\nMeanwhile, maybe Lowndes County and Valdosta should do what\nThomasville and Thomas County did:\n\nbypass the duopoly and put in municipal broadband.<\/a>\n