Re:Stop Payment: A homeowner’s revolt against the banks (2012)
by scarface74 on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @02:17PM
(#17812257)
That’s basically because ISPs are a semi-natural mononpoly without competition there is really no incentive to do better. Heck Comcast acts like a monopoly in my area and they are competing with AT&T who offers better service - 1Gbps up and down [1] vs 1Gbps/35Mbps Comcast, at a lower price and Google Fiber in some parts of town.
[1] I’ve got to give a shout out to AT&T and BackBlaze, I just changed my Plex Server over to a new computer and my entire 1.7TB collection was uploaded in less than 3 days. I was getting speeds between 500GB per day and 1Tb+ a day.
You're right, but I'm not just talking about the subprime issue. It's bigger than that with numerous companies providing different goods and services. We're beholden to a number of service contracts that are stacked against us. For example, I was stuck with a terrible ISP. Daily outages, constant resets, and times in off-peak ours where my throughput was absurdly low. No matter how much I called and complained, there was nothing I had in my favor, because the speeds "may fluctuate from time-to-time due to the nature of the service". My choices? Pay double for ADSL or put up with it.
According to the contract, they're not obligated to give me 100% uptime with 100% of the bandwidth as advertised. That's understandable. But there was clearly an underlying issue with the infrastructure that was not being addressed. So contractually speaking, they can give me hand-wavy answers about why they can't give me complete uptime and throughput with no repercussions, but as the customer, I must pay my bill in full by the due date.