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A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broadband providers

arstechnica.com

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Re: A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broadband providers

#231

Post by Robotbeat »

baq wrote: post #54
Robotbeat wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is odd that Starlink isn’t mentioned in the article. Starlink has impressive speed and latency and the potential to compete to some degree in every market in the US. Twitter angst aside (some of which is fair but much seems to be either dishonest or ignorant, even by those who should definitely know better), SpaceX has also done a remarkably good job of addressing the light pollution problem such that the satellit…

starlink cannot compete in densely populated area because the sats have comparatively (to dsl, fiber, etc.) limited total bandwidth to spare, just like any other shared medium. musk himself was very open about this. starlink is a game changer where the last mile is prohibitively expensive i.e. sparse/rural areas a few dozen miles away from population centers.

Starlink can, indeed, compete to a degree in more densely populated areas, as I said. (Especially DSL.)

> SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has touted Starlink’s reach, saying it could bring 5G-like service to billions around the world while also handling up to 10 percent of the internet traffic in more congested regions “where people are stuck with Time Warner or Comcast.” https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/17/spacex-testing-its-own-satel...

Re: A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broadband providers

#232

Post by tpxl »

908B64B197 wrote: post #129
wstrange wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The explanation is largely the same as in the US: It's very expensive to run cable / fibre to the house. It's a natural monopoly. Having a US incumbent enter the Canadian market isn't going to change that.

I could see why lobbyists would push that narrative, but deregulation and an open market worked extremely well in Europe.

In my country regulation is what works extremely well, and where there is none, you get price gouging. The government funds the majority of new lines, and in turn, the companies are legally mandated to rent the lines out for a small fee (100/20 lines cost about 30€).

Re: A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broadband providers

#233

Post by adventured »

vagrantJin wrote: post #202
908B64B197 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct except, Microsoft should have won search. They had all the tools to execute and were pretty much at the right place at the right time. Google should have won social networking and messaging. They had the userbase and the network. Yet it's Facebook that did. Same goes for Phones, and yet it's Apple that captured the market.

> Same goes for Phones, and yet it's Apple that captured the market. Samsung and Huawei captured the market Apple created.

Ask Samsung how they're doing in the world's largest smartphone market - China (they barely exist at all now, ~1% market share).

Re: A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broadband providers

#234

Post by kanox »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #78
Robotbeat wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do need and can have multiple fleets up there. OneWeb has already launched a bunch of satellites, and there is enough room up there for several more, particularly as operators get better at safely operating them.

I would agree, but I've seen the mess that e-scooter organisations have made of this. The city is littered with e-scooters whose name changes every few months. If the business plan doesn't work out, who cleans up the satellites?

> The city is littered with e-scooters whose name changes every few months.

You claim to be against monopolies but are unwilling to tolerate even the slight inconvenience of seeing scooters parked around? I personally love them for their amazing convenience and they're also incredibly compact relative to cars or even bikes.

> If the business plan doesn't work out, who cleans up the satellites?

Cleaning up is essentially free as long as the satellites are still operational: just command them to deorbit. Orbits are low enough that the fuel required to deorbit is comparable to a few months of station-keeping.

Re: A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broadband providers

#235

Post by Aunche »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #26

This is such a weird thing. After spending time in SE Asia, where bandwidth is cheap and plentiful (in the cities), it's painful coming back to Europe (and Australia). I'm in Berlin atm, and the wifi is shit, bandwidth is expensive and unreliable. And the phone plans suck. I was in Perth (Australia) before that, and access there is terrible. In Cambodia, 120Gb (per week) of download cost me US$1 (per week) over good-…

In Cambodia, your 4G is subsidized by the low cost of living. The household income per capita in Cambodia is ~$1,400. Also infrastructure in SE Asia doesn't seem to regulated, seeing as there are cables everywhere, which also cuts costs.

Re: A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broadband providers

#236

Post by kanox »

exabrial wrote: post #177

The problem is the proposed solutions really just entrench existing providers, specifically net neutrality policies: They legalize monopolies as long as they're "following the rules!" _You_ _cannot_ _legislate_ _good_ _behavior_ _into_ _monopolies_. So while I appreciate the spirit of Net Neutrality rules, the solution is fundamentally flawed. Let's say you want to open an ISP in your neighborhood. Based on their his…

I don't think this is a monopoly problem as much as a collusion problem: multiple providers exist but many regions each have a single provider. If this is a deliberate agreement then it's extremely illegal.

Where I live there are multiple high-quality ISPs at my building, the US should find a way to encourage multiple ISPs to be present in every single neighborhood.

People who complain about "too many ugly wires" should be ignored: it's much better to have ugly cables on poles than slow internet.

Re: A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broadband providers

#237

Post by kanox »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #206
exabrial wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, feel free to provide an example where we successfully regulated a monopoly to encourage competition and consumer choice...

Basically anything that historically falls under common carrier regs. None of this debate is new. We saw it with railroads. Natural monopolies need counterbalancing regulation. This isn't even remotely a controversial statement in economics.

ISPs are NOT a natural monopoly, you can have multiple sets of wires going to every building. This is the situation in my part of Europe and my internet is pretty damn fast.

Treating ISPs as a monopoly is fundamentally wrong.

Re: A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broadband providers

#238

Post by dekhn »

sib wrote: post #230
dekhn wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? It looks like many cities in LA have AT&T Gigabit fiber. My guess is they deployed in San Mateo pretty early, and are filling out the major cities now. It's also possible that they don't put the service in cities where the expected subscription rate is too low.

Yup, positive. I went and checked immediately before posting, to confirm that the situation had not changed since I last checked about 3 months ago. And I'm not in an outlying city in LA county; I'm right in the west side of the City of LA, less than 2 miles from UCLA, very close to Century City.

Bummer! 10Mbps would make it hard for me to do my job while my kids stream videos or take classes or whatever.

In our area, there was a way to sign up to show interest, which I think they might have used to estimate subscribers, so maybe sign up for that.

Re: A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broadband providers

#239

Post by mastazi »

As a non-American, the first time I heard about the situation with broadband monopolies in the US, it was hard for me to believe! Apparently in huge parts of the country you can only choose one single provider? Is that true just in "regional areas" or in suburbs and urban areas too? Are there stats about how much of the population has no choice?

Edit: the article gives numbers in terms of how many people have access to broadband (and how many haven't) - but what I'm asking is different - what percentage of the population can connect to one and only one broadband provider, based on their location?

Re: A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broadband providers

#240

Post by andromeduck »

mushbino wrote: post #213
andromeduck wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with having an expansive public sector is that it never stops expanding and has an extremely strong tendency of becoming unequal, disconnected or or one-size-fits-all as the scope/complexity of the programs expand. This is particularly the case when our electoral choices at many a level boil down to binary options that may not project well for individuals with values/views that are largely orthogonal to t…

Competition is great for consumers. The government should be allowed to compete along with the private sector. The winners of this scenario are the citizens and the people who work for these companies. I've seen exactly this scenario play out in Santa Cruz. Comcast had a virtual monopoly. Even as recently as about 5 years ago one of the best internet packages was up to 20mbps (4mbps in reality) for $40/month. The cit…

I generally agree at a local/municipal scale but that generally doesn't scale well and is often relatively unstable if it is not operated as an mostly isolated entity given the strong conflict of interest of officials involved easily and often leads to regulating private industry out of existence.
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