Does anyone remember how the Cable companies used to resemble something between gangsters and a third-world, socialist country, government agency? When you tried to call for service, you'd wait for hours, and then get hung up on. If you arrived in person to turn in cable hardware (as when you got so pissed off you said "to heck with the SOB's; give me my rabbit ears.."), you could wait in line 2-3 hours!??
Well, folks, the only thing that's changed is the technology. We all have a variety of competitive sources of TV programming (i.e. satallite, cable, etc.), so the Cable companies had to clean up their service act a bit. But MOST AMERICAN's still have only one choice for broadband service, and that's by the design of both the providers and certain political entities in government. The only reason broadband technology is bottlenecked, and telecom hardware companies like CISCO are going under, is that the supply has been "regulated" to guarantee obscene, monopolistic profits to the broadband ISP's, along with the least service possible to the customer.
In practical terms, that means that Cox Cable will squeeze as many "clients" or workstation connections onto a single router-trunk as possible, by limiting uplink (which is the choke point for most of us) to < 256 kbps, and download to < 650 kbps. By the way, those numbers drop all the time. Why buy more hardware to deliver more service, when you KNOW your customer's other choice is 56K, or DSL at twice the cost, plus a small fortune for hookup. When I first contracted for cable internet service, I had 1500 kbps up and down, consistently, and with "clean" transmission. Now there are all sorts of choke points in the system. On occasion, I've been able to track down problems and resolve them, but by the time I've talked to Tier I, Tier II, and eventually Tier III support, convinced them that I'm a IT professional, and know what the heck I'm talking about, I've wasted 4-5 hours. Then, two weeks later, they make some more tuning adjustments to squeeze a few more connections out of too few servers and comm. lines, fail to monitor their changes, and my service degrades again.
When I call to complain to customer service, they essentially say that I'm a "user with special commercial needs..", that they will be glad to hook me up to their commercial folks who'll change me $2500 per month for CONSISTENT service.
This situation will continue until the politicians making Telecommunications policy decide that the bribe money these Broadband companies are paying them just isn't worth the political risk of ticking off TWO OUT OF EVERY THREE constituents.
The reason this issue hasn't boiled over is because people naturally assume the problem is with their PC, or their modem, or their Internet Router, or some other mistake THEY'RE making, and just decide they have to live with the problem.
If the government took the "governor" off the business, there'd be 10,000 new providers, cable and DSL prices would drop to $3.50 a month (oh..$15.50 after TAXES!!), and performance would improve 100x.
Next time you talk to your local, smiling politician, given him an ear full!
FReegards, SFS