FYI: Internet Bill expected to be passed..

[Brock Samson]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/04/05/BUGNEI3E4U1.DTL

[RD]

wow strat!    sounds like the phone companies (AT&T now that it swallowed up SBC 'reintegrated') feels as if they are not making enough money so they are going to take it to the big companies.

i do not think the little guy will have to worry about slower speeds persay (except in dialup).  this sounds more like the telephone companies getting tired of the internet companies 'piggy backin' or as they said 'free loadin' off of their phone lines and figure since they are making millions of of their phone lines, the phone companies should make millions off of them.

its the proverbial two bullys on the same block ordeal.  cannot wait to see who kicks the others butt though.

I know one thing though, with the increase of price for internet service for the big companies, they wont be paying for it.  they will just pass it onto the consumers anyway, so the lil man is getting screwed again. 

[Old Moparz]

That's typical of any large company that wants, & can, control what they want to do with their segment of the market. I don't doubt they will offer the best services to the highest bidder & leave out the lower priced, & less profitable ones. Salespeople love to sell large SUV's & luxury cars over econoboxes for the same reason, more profit. This is absolutely fine with me, it's all about capitalism. I just can't deal with the "fake" public relations & comments about how everything is in the best interest of the consumer. That's Bulls**t!

I have an example on a smaller scale, that my wife & I just had to deal with. She & I have cell phones with the prepaid cards where you buy the time as you need it & have no monthly bills. Mine is Virgin Mobile, hers is Verizon. Her plan is no longer available because Verizon wants her to get their new minimum plan, which is over $30 per month. She is grandfathered into the prepaid plan, so she can still just buy time every 60 days to keep it active. If she lets it lapse past the 60 days, the acct. is history.

They also want to now charge $3 for everytime you need to speak with customer service instead of going on line. Well, the acct. on line is locked, we can't access it to add time, & we never reached a human on the phone to find out why. Just pushed monkey buttons in hopes of getting a banana. She had to go to a Verizon store at the mall to fix it, which that's a joke & far from convenient. Verizon in my opinion, is making it "difficult" on purpose since we have the "lesser" plan. I have no complaints with Virgin Mobile, & will toss her Verizon phone, along with & the acct., right in the trash if it doesn't get resolved.

I don't have E-Z pass either, tell me that isn't a monopoly.  

[Mike DC]

       
The "Google is freeloading!" argument is probably valid.  But I worry that the bigger ramification is probably the potential information-control aspect of this thing.

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If we let money dictate ease of access to websites, we're all screwed. 

Imagine if DCX was owned by the same parent-company as a certain internet provider.  Pretty soon any website wanting to keep its "fast" status wouldn't be running any stories about the public's REAL reaction to their new 2006 Dodge Charger . . .

And if half the internet gets faster, then the other sites must get even SLOWER in consequence, regardless of how much bandwidth you pay for . . .

And the phone companies could easily argue to keep their decision-making software a secret from the public & congress as a "keeping trade secrets from the competition" issue . . . so then there's no way to prove whether the unreasonably slow load-times of certain "disapproved" sites are really justified or not . . .

Big Brother gets online.

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This proposal seems like a total mess to me.  There's gotta be a less dangerous way to settle the Google issue than to give corporations this kind of power over the whole net.

             

[Brock Samson]

What's EZ pass?... 

[Neal_J]

Don't trust anything you read in that rag.  It's all lies, ain't it?

Neal

[Mike DC]

     
Yeah, I hadn't checked that.
Isn't that a San Francisco newspaper?  It's not always easy to tell their serious papers apart from "The Onion."


But SF paper or not, it's all lies unless the bill passes.  Even a broken clock is gonna be right every once in a while.

     

[Old Moparz]

What's EZ pass?... 

No EZ Pass on your coast?

It's an electronic device to pay tolls with along the turnpikes, thruways, parkways & bridges, that comes with an account. It goes on the inside of your windshield & instead of stopping to pay a toll, you slow down & the amount is deducted from your account. Every now & then you replenish the account so you can save time & aggravation at toll plazas. You can have automatic deposits done from a credit card or checking account.

In theory only.

If there is any kind of error, glitch or whatever, you can be sure it will take 6 months minimum to resolve. There are virtually no humans to speak to when you call. The statement is bi-monthly, so if there is a problem, you may not be aware of it for 2 months. Most times the problems have been that they failed to apply your payment to replenish the account. When that happens, a "Low Account Balance" shows up on the sign as you pass through the booth.

If you are traveling through the newer overhead sensors where you don't have a sign to tell you the balance is low, you won't know. They can issue a summons for not paying, which means you are violating EZ Pass terms & can have your account revoked. If you don't know for 2 months, you can accumulate a lot of violations & penalties.

Of course you can protest the penalties, it's written into your EZ Pass agreement, but you have to pay first & let EZ Pass decide if they will honor your protest & reimburse you. Wait, you won't be reimbursed, you will have your account credited. (Try getting them to send you a check, LOL) My wife has EZ Pass since she crosses a local toll bridge regularly. She's had a few problems & has come close to tossing the electronic device off the bridge, but that's in violation of the EZ Pass terms too since you don't actually "own" the device.

Now what would happen if you actually gave them access to a credit card or bank account for automatic payment? Screw that idea.

[73dodge]

The ISP's and the big internet providers see a money making opprotunity because of more and more people running phone systems that use Voice Over IP the phone companies are losing revenue because they can't charge for phone services. The routers that the ISP and phone companies use now have the capabilities to do what's called QOS for voice packets they can look at the packet coming in from your home and determine if it's voice, data or video then they can divide those packets into q's and determine which packets get priority on the network. If you don't pay for high priority handling your voice packet gets stuffed into a low priority que, thereby making it eligible for discard if the bandwidth gets full. In other words you will be hearing every other word in a coversation with someone if you are talking on a VoIP system like VONEAGE. Because your voice packets are being dropped throughout the network because they are low priority.

I know I install these types of systems, the phone companies are PO's that they can't charge you for phone calls made across the internet and they desperately want to start billing you for making phone calls across the internet. They floated an idea a few years ago that would charge a person per voice bit sent across your high speed internet service and you would get a monthly phone bill based on the amount of voice bits you generated on the internet.

The days of fast inexpensive internet access are fast coming to an end because of people that decided to get a DSL and start doing things like making phone calls and setting up a streaming video server that takes up GOBS of bandwidth and removes a source of revenue from the phone companies.

[Brock Samson]

interesting...

Here we have what's called "FastPass". the bridge tolls are $4.00 and going up again,.. now they want to charge a fee for driving into San Francisco like they Have in London, and I just read last night our garbage pick up is going up 25%! It allready went up 15% in the last two years.
but i'm getting off topic. 

[Charger_Fan]

I'm not too surprised at the story, assuming it's really true. In the back of my mind, I've been expecting something like this for quite a while...especially when they started piggybacking phone serivce through the internet. You just KNOW that whole thing's not gonna stay on a friendly plane for long...there's just way too much money at stake for that.