The 2021 infrastructure bill did some very good things for broadband. Not only did it include a massive, $42 billion investment in broadband deployment and require better mapping, it demanded that …
Comcast, AT&T try to kill new requirements to be transparent about their shitty pricing::The 2021 infrastructure bill did some very good things for broadband. Not only did it include a massive, $42 billion investment in broadband deployment and require better mapping, it demanded that the FCC impose a new "nutrition label for broadband," requiring that ISPs be transparent about all of the weird restrictions, caps, fees, and limitations…
So this isn't asking them to detail how they arrive at the base monthly cost for your tier of service, it's asking them to detail all the extra fees? What does an internet bill look like in the US that there are unattributed fees tacked on?
If its too hard to communicate it's probably to hard to implement as well. Let's just dissolve these cancers on society and provide free Internet services to everyone whose been wrongfully overcharged the last few years.
A few years back I worked for a regional Internet service provider in the northeast US. One day a guy who did finance and regulatory work for us asked me how many of our customer point to point links with A and Z locations in different states were either dedicated to voice traffic or carried more than x percent voice traffic.
After asking a few thought provoking questions like if the percentage was based on traffic measurements or link capacity and how we would make that calculation on a circuit with asymmetrical speeds, I explained that it would be nearly impossible for us to tell unless the customer declared it to us.
He then told me that there was some new federal tax on interstate circuits carrying voice traffic and that if we couldn't tell if a customer circuit was carrying voice traffic or not, that we would just need to start charging them all the tax no matter what. It might even apply to regular Internet services where the edge router and customer site were in different states.
And that is the story of how the ISP that I worked for added yet another fee to all of its customers.
Whether the tax was valid or not I have no input on. Taxes are created for many reasons but our method of assessing it on customers who should not have been paying it was wrong.
Anyone know why some of the titles on lemmy are showing the code for & (amp) in the titles? Is it a format input thats messing up and displaying the HTML?