So the big news lately here in the US is that the FCC has said that DSL is an information service.

Big deal. Everyone knows that. So what gives?

Well, that means that it no longer qualifies to be under regulation. That means that phone providers, like SBC or Verizon no longer are required to resell the lines for use by secondary providers, like DSL Extreme, or Yahoo, or MSN.

So what happens if you have one of those secondary providers? Good question. There is supposedly a year transitional period. Not sure what the transition is, either.

Perhaps this will force companies like Microsoft or Yahoo to have to buy a telco just to provide broadband to their customers.

I hope the change isn't as drastic as people think it will be. We've got DSL Extreme with 6 megabit down and 600+ kilobit up. This comes at a mere $60 a month, too. Is SBC were to dump DSL Extreme, what would our recourse be? The next fastest connection is probably cable, not SBCs own offerings. (In fact, their fastest is "1.5-3.0M" down and "384-512k" up for $75 a month with static IP or $25 a month with dynamic -- we have static, but that's because it didn't cost $50 extra a month (it cost nothing extra a month)). Cable, on the other hand (via Comcast) is advertised as up to 5x faster than DSL -- their site clarifies that it's 786k DSL (SBC doesn't get that slow), which puts it at about 3.8M down for $43, or about 2/3rds the speed of our guaranteed DSL rates (from high bandwidth sites, we do get at least 600 kilobytes per second transfers).

So this will only HURT us in the long run. How is this supposed to help consumers?

Maybe when they dump us we'll be able to get fiber or something.

Posted by Shane on August 15, 2005 9:34 AM | Permalink