My electricity is stable and reliable, and any power outages I've experienced have been brief, and exclusively due to exceptional weather events.

I'm also a Comcast customer, and I would say that I have some sort of partial or total service interruption (internet is completely gone, or set top box stops working) on average, once every other week or so. These outages are usually relatively brief (a few minutes), but at least once a year I lose one or both services for 6 hours or more. Plus the internet speed varies wildly from "high-end dialup modem" at the low end, to "significantly less than the advertised value" at the high end. Needless to say, I have never actually experienced the advertised speeds.

If I got the same service from my utilities as I did from Comcast, I would end up brushing my teeth with raw sewage about once a month, and trying to toast bread would occasionally cause a power dip that would brown-out every other outlet in my house. I probably wouldn't be able to shower some nights because the cold water pressure would be unusably low, and I would have to reset every clock in my house a couple times a month. The one similarity is that I would still be unable to shop around for better service, because Comcast is the only option in my area.

If you want a TLDR, it's that I would figuratively kill to get Internet service that's even just half as good as my utility service, because right now my internet service is much worse than that.

Then at year 4, for whatever reason, it started to have issues. At least once per month.

How I miss those 3 blissful years when it Just Worked.

The single time I had a problem with how it was billed, I called the state regulator who worked with my telco to sort out how taxes were being calculated. It turned out that they were billing me correctly, but couldn't explain it over the phone.

I replaced my landline with an Ooma (a VOIP phone which let me port my old landline number) which sounds WORLDS better, lets me manage personal blocklists, aggregates community blocklists to automatically filter incoming calls from telemarketers, political parties, etc, sends voicemails to my email, integrates with Google Voice, can ring on multiple phones or devices, and other such things. It's in a completely different class of service, and it costs a fraction of what my competing local offerings do.

However, your VOIP will not work during a power outage, during an internet outage, or any other time the VOIP company's servers are down.

Landlines work during power outages, during internet outages, and they provide around 5 nines of uptime (that's less than 6 minutes of downtime a year).

Those are the things your $35 a month buys you. How important that reliability is to you generally depends on your health. I know more than a few folks who would never give up their landline, because they have medical conditions which depend on reliable access to 911.

That leaves only VOIP provider outages as a concern, and I've yet to experience one of those in a few years.

When I had a landline telephone, I was completely happy with it. It was inexpensive and reliable, and if I was unsatisfied with my service I could choose from several other providers. I could use my own equipment with it, all of the consumer electronics were interoperable with any service provider, and I never had an outage (to my knowledge; I didn't get a lot of phone calls). I had a wide variety of options for dialup internet at the time, either through my phone provider or other competing providers. This was in a small town in northern Idaho, too, and it wasn't exactly known as a telecommunications hub or city of industry.

I am unhappy with my cable TV service, which is provided by the same company as my cable internet service. My cable provider is the only one in my area, and has no incentive to do anything other than take slightly more of my money every year in exchange for performing zero upgrades or service improvements.

This is just a single data point, but only one of the two companies I mention above is subject to Title II regulation currently, and it's coincidentally the one that I had a good experience with.

Shouldn't you be looking at water restrictions which the utilities blame on drought? This is the most similar type of event to the Comcast outage which you are describing. Both could have been prevented through better planning, capital expenditures, and forethought. If this is the comparison, both Comcast and many water providers fail, though the internet providers have gradually improving products, while the utilities do not (as far as I know). Most industries' products do not fall from the sky, yet they still manage to provide an adequate supply.

I'd consider that comparable to a utility pumping sewage.

I do not understand the desire to compare problematic internet service to sewage-pumping through the potable water supply. Are you desperate for superlatives which will make the internet service providers look bad?

I work partly from home and, while not quite "utility pumping sewage" level of crisis, a badly-timed internet blackout at my apartment can be a serious problem for the whole team.

In contrast, I've had several 30 minute to 2 hour power outages, and lots of power outages lasting less than a minute.

On the other hand, a short internet outage would not necessarily be noticed, because there's not a big change in ambient noise when the internet fails, nor do i have to reset the time on my appliances.

Now, my Internet being slow...that's not uncommon at all. I've also had them randomly charge me an extra $50 "by mistake", as well directly and repeatedly lying to me about what services/packages are available.

I'm in central Austin, and so ready for Google Fiber. My parents live out in the middle of nowhere, and Internet outages are quite common for them, easily exceeding power outages.

It's clear that Parent is saying "Comcast delivers shitty service" -> "water utility delivers shitty water".

It's a (possibly unintentional) pun, and I'm quite certain that Parent was able to get their point across regardless of technical inconsistencies.

But don't let that stop you in your quest to nitpick on the internet.

I'm not nitpicking, I just think the comparison doesn't make any sense unless one is trying to make Comcast out to be some sort of villain spewing sewage through everyone's taps. An internet outage is rightfully characterized as similar to a power outage or drought. The latter two are caused by poor planning and capital investments by power utilities, and the former is caused by similar behavior by the ISP. Both are fairly common.

Define "clean". It may be sanitary but most tap water in the US tastes (and smells) like swimming pool and has tons of other trace amounts of harmful substances in it like benzene, pesticides, styrene, trichloroethylene, pharmaceuticals, etc:

http://water.epa.gov/drink/contaminants/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_water_quality_in_the_...

If you want "clean" water you need water from an aquifer (like Fiji) or water that goes through a reverse osmosis treatment process. Even then it's not going to be perfectly clean, but it'll be a hell of a lot better than the vast majority of tap water out there.

Those two links seem to contradict your point that tap water isn't "clean" since they point out that it is, in fact, very clean.

I come from a country where that is not the case and water had to be boiled before you could consume it. Oh yeah, and it wasn't fluoridated so I had multiple teeth rot away before I was 10 years old (luckily I moved to Canada before most of my adult teeth really started growing).

I'm also really curious where you get your water since most bottled water comes from "municipal sources" (i.e. it's tap water).

If you actually read the links you would see that "clean" is simply defined by the EPA as "what we allow by law". And that there are many chemicals known to be harmful to humans that aren't regulated or monitored at all... not to mention the fact that tap water in many towns and cities across the US regularly has chemical levels that exceed the EPA's defined limits (and many scientists argue that these limits are too high as it is).

Here's another link: http://www.nrdc.org/water/drinking/uscities.asp

>I'm also really curious where you get your water since most bottled water comes from "municipal sources" (i.e. it's tap water).

There are several dispensers in my area that provide reverse osmosis (plus carbon) filtered water (water source is usually local tap water) and it costs about 25 cents a gallon or a dollar for 5 gallons. Most Walmarts have one, back by the beverage section.

It's also pretty easy to find inexpensive bottled water that's RO filtered, you just need to look on the bottle and it'll tell you where the water is from and how it is processed/filtered, if at all.

>Oh yeah, and it wasn't fluoridated so I had multiple teeth rot away before I was 10 years old (luckily I moved to Canada before most of my adult teeth really started growing).

Correlation does not equal causation.

I am. My water is clean and I've never had an outage. My power is reasonably cheap and quite reliable. The state doesn't allow either one to raise rates exorbitantly from year to year, either, and despite that both have made major upgrades to their facilities in the last few years.

(To be fair, we have less natural disasters.)

So, you're right that we're missing a lot of context - including the duration. A 30 min outage due to an accident is very different from a 3 day outage due to a storm.

And like you said, AC can be a big drain on the grid during the summer.

(Disclaimer: I'm not sure what the weather in San Antonio is like...)

(I'm in Austin, which is pretty close to San Antonio, but I see now is considerably hotter: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/ewx/?n=100degreedays.htm ww.usclimatedata.com/climate/san-antonio/texas/united-states/ustx1200 )

It's just not a simple check and you're not going to find people to fix your internet with a proverbial wrench. When is the last time your water pipe had a virus? It will often taken digging into the problem with a fair bit of domain knowledge. And if Obama care (healthcare.gov) is any indication of the US Government's ability to manage or enact such things, I'd be worried too.

Every time this topic comes up, people like to try and compare it to the utilities services and you just can't.

>A bad DNS can make it appear your Internet is out in one way

broken wire in the power system between your house and the pole (is your neighbor digging?)

>while a broken cable inside the house can make it look broken another way

i think thats pretty direct. a broken wire in your house makes it seem like the power is out.

>a virus on a computer is another

I could have a device flipping my circuit breaker, or corrosion on wires. My faucet could have any number of bacteria.

>When is the last time your water pipe had a virus

http://www.fair-safety.com/fair-outbreaks/view/county-fair-w... 1999

>It will often taken digging into the problem with a fair bit of domain knowledge

like electricians and plumbers?

A bad circuit breaker or wiring issues can make it look like problems that someone might blame on the grid, there are user-side config issues there too.

"And if Obama care (healthcare.gov) is any indication of the US Government's ability to manage or enact such things, I'd be worried too."

It would still be the ISPs responsibility to manage their issues, there's no isp.gov planned.

Fuck no! My appliances' fuses might burn out, my home breakers might be tripped, and my neighbor might dig into a powerline, but electricity is still "a utility".

It's a style of business relationship, with the regulatory, legal, and social expectations that come with it. The technology (and failure modes) are secondary at best.

"From 2005-2006, 20% of US outbreaks of virus and bacteria in water were caused by old, dirty pipes"

http://www.premierwatermn.com/water-quality/water-contaminan...

I actually own two companies. One is an ISP and the other is a PCO (Private Cable Operator) where I provide Internet over DOCSIS along with CableTV. I also have had experience dealing with right of way like utilities for putting fiber in the ground, and public WIFI.

I promise you my support costs per man-hour are much higher than your electric company or water utility; not to mention a homeowner can do most troubleshooting their self. Any schmuck can flick a breaker and turn a wrench and at a minimum it can be explained over the phone what to look for or what to smell for.

but it's not so easy when you need to understand tools like Cisco routers, BGP filters, DNS (nslookup) outputs, some dude has a virus or, worst, a torrent... NAT, DNAT setup on some brain dead Linksys routers, the list goes on.

Supplying Internet to people is an endless battle of convincing them, at times, it's their machine. You just don't have this with utilities that are either on/off, flowing or not. Rolling a truck to investigate, I just don't find as many skilled IT people as you do plumbers and electricians and it cost more to train IT people too.

We have one property that is Section-8 housing (don't ask). We supply them CableTV along with Internet. Learned the hardware this was a mistake. You have the I know it all type who will yell at my techs. even has his own cable modem running Linux, you have the crybaby type who complains her internet is too slow and pleads for us to come fix her computer, then you have the old people who don't know how to turn on a computer. These issues don't exist with utility companies. You don't have to educate end users about how water flows through a pipe, or how to flip a circuit breaker...

See with utilities, it's not that hard to figure out what the customer is complaining about REALLY. With IT/Internet, you have things that can become problems for other people. Someone running a torrent in apartment 1B, for example, can cause someone in apartment 1A to call and say the Internet is out. Of course we have ways to track this, but the equipment is expensive and it cost considerably more to teach someone how to configure a Cisco router for traffic profiling, how to look at SNMP reports, MPLS bandwidth reports, etc...

Please tell me how gas, electric, or even water has a challenge nearly as close or as costly on a per/person basis?

Yes, networks are complex and require skilled techs to keep running, but that's completely irrelevant to the F.C.C. classifying Internet access under Title II. ISPs will not have any notable new burdens regarding customer service/support/troubleshooting, but will have restrictions on being permitted to engage in a few predatory practices.

I've dealt extensivley with at least 7 ISPs in the US, and not a single one would even consider helping even a business customer troubleshoot their own equipment.

If you are supporting peoples privately owned equipment you are going WAY above and beyond what any service provider i have dealt with in the US is willing to do.

You won't be kicked out of your house for canceling cable.

I don't have other options for all my other utilities, but so far they have overcharged me and screwed things up royally exactly zero times.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/01/fcc-chairman-mocks-i...

Honestly though, large utilities are a good case of a "natural monopoly".

Going back to the days before cable, when high speed was whatever the regulated its a utility phone company decided I was allowed to have

There is no free lunch and regulation will just mean normalization at best, to the lowest allowed numbers. People below the allowed numbers will eventually be put on a schedule where their area will be upgraded, after meetings and such mostly all not public. You might get lucky and see movement in five years.

Where they really need to be acting is mobile data. This is where the real thievery is going on.

I am all for having no fast or slow lanes, but if regulation comes out dictating speeds you can guarantee the lowest allowed levels will be met with gusto

Yeah, well my internet speed has been stagnant in all the areas I spend decent amounts of time for basically the last 5 years anyway.

Except where Google Fiber threatens to come in.

So, we can revisit this question when Google Fiber is a choice for 80% of the US.

And, Google fiber might be exempt because it won't be a cable provider. That would be an interesting thing, now, wouldn't it?

What did you get, and what did you want instead?

Customers in Muskegon, MI were always shocked that we didn't know what local street they were talking about. How could we? We were in Pennsylvania.

I don't think anyone has run a truly local call support center, for anything, in decades.

It's also your duty to replace the pipes leading up to your own house off of the mains in most cases, so I guess take it up with your landlord.

Actually, it does. Water loss due to deteriorating infrastructure is becoming a significant issue as water supplies get strained. The EPA estimates that the average US water system loses 16% of their water during distribution, and about 75% of that can be prevented or recovered by maintaining and upgrading the systems.[1] Here in Texas this is a serious issue because our reservoirs are increasingly strained by population growth.

[1] http://water.epa.gov/type/drink/pws/smallsystems/upload/epa8...

And then I call into Time Warner spend more time trying to get them to understand what I'm talking about than I've ever spent on the phone with my other utilities.

i. I can't fire my power company, nor can I ever really expect to gain that ability.

ii. As nice and hardworking as the power company employees are, there's still only one main power run for the 1/8th of Oak Park that I live in, and any time a tree goes down in the alley along that run, or a squirrel detonates a transformer along it, I lose power for 6-8 hours. My block has a truly awful electric service uptime.

It's not poor customer service I worry about. It's a total lack of infrastructure investment.

The same is true for many folks and Comcast or Time Warner - it's hardly unique to utilities. Here in Rochester, NY TWC is the only reasonable option for high-speed internet in most areas - the local phone company Frontier is crap, and the upstart fiber company is only in a few high-density spots thus far.

Meanwhile, your city and state governments can really give the power company a rough time if enough citizens are complaining.

Maybe the problem isn't whether Internet access should be regulated as a utility service but simply that utility services in the US are crap?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron

Is that power run an overhead ComEd hasn't/won't bury?

Yes. Do you remember what happened in California when power was deregulated and Enron was causing brownouts?

Compared to my private utilities (phone and home internet) I freaking love my public utilities.

I'm very torn on this - I want net neutrality, but I have zero faith in the ability of a bunch of unelected bureaucrats to write 10,000 pages of regulations that will make things better.

Yes, absolutely. My water is clean, potable and available with at least 99.99% uptime. Same goes for electricity, which is only slightly less reliable (down for a few hours in a major blizzard several years ago)

If my electricity were slightly cheaper, that'd be nice, but it's still less than half my cable/internet bill. Power is already deregulated here, so if I really cared, I could shop around for a cheaper rate, or for electricity generated from renewable sources.

It's also worth contemplating if the brute fact of the matter is that public goods & natural monopolies (cable companies, cell towers perhaps) should be regulated as a utility. Particularly if the preferred mechanisms for interacting with a government in the US require/highly suggest the use of a computer or cell phone. If that assumption is being made (and it is), then it's not just a luxury, or even a popular service... it's becoming a common utility.

The government regulates the utilities pretty tight, but there is also little to no room for competition in those spaces anymore either. Which is one thing that's improving service in Google Fiber markets.

So, I'd be okay with that service.

I argue that with competition, electric companies could innovate their distribution, ie bury the power lines, and the price of water would be cheaper.