171–180 of 217 posts
The telephone companies seem to actively push for you to get rid of your land line. My monthly bill recently dropped $75 ($50 for local-only phone service + fees like 911), when I canceled my land line. My 100mbit VDSL2 bonded internet line is $75, so it was a very noticeable monthly decrease. My ISP/Telco is Windstream in the eastern USA.
I live less than. a mile from a mid-sized town (15k peopl), 25 miles from the heart of Silicon Valley. The only reliable internet access available is 8mbit DSL using copper and satellite (HughesNet). No cable, no fiber, dodgy cell service, and at last try Starlink was not remotely reliable. Last big rainstorm we lost service for 5 days. I’d love to be able to ditch copper, but if AT&T is allowed to pull the plug, it…
>will be the sole option. I mean this sincerely: you could move. In 2012, I left the Castro Valley part of sfEastBay and moved to a small Southern town with fiber optic 10gbps available at every electric-supplied address (I lived 8 years inside a rustic national forest with a fiber/copper jack on my ramshackle cabin's powermeter).
Apropos of anything else, I can't imagine the culture shift from the Castro in SF to a small southern town...
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Even in this version of the free market, monopoly is still the incentive and end goal. Eventually, either a single player wins out (possibly by buying or merging with previous competitors) or a few big players agree that colluding with each other is more profitable then competing (remember there is no government interfering in this free market to prevent this). Once this happens, new players won't enter the market be…
Monopoly is only an incentive if it is clear that it will be permitted.
And by monopoly, I am also referring to systems where there are a few big players that just don't compete against one another, or one where there is a big player and a few small but inconsequential players. All of these result in the same effect as plain monopoly.
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> This stat says the USA is on the lower end of density Yes, but America's population isn't evenly distributed across the entire dry surface area. The population is clustered tightly in cities like it is in many other countries, it's just that the cities are further apart from each other. [1] The better metric, IMO, is the percentage of people who live in urban vs rural areas. [2] The US is 85.8% urban, which is righ…
US “urban” areas are much less dense than many other countries. Imagine servicing a building with 100 apartments vs 100 detached homes spread out over a square mile.
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Nope, you can’t the-free-market-will-fix-everything this one. The telco lobbyists wrote the government regulations. Wireless is slow and coverage is spotty. Satellite is unreliable, expensive, and has a fixed latency cost that can’t be eliminated.
> The telco lobbyists wrote the government regulations. This is the issue. There isn't a free market in this (or many) sectors because of regulatory capture. If that were gone, if competition was even possible, then we would see improvement.
Physical networks like this also clutter up the skies or create areas you can't dig in, and accrue damage while decreasing in value each year until they are abandoned or upgraded.
Abandoned Telecom infrastructure is a serious issue all its own as well, no one wants legacy unused cabling running under their streets or in their building.
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At least every home that has copper should get fiber. The excuse that the US is too big or we can't do it is bull. You did it before for electricity and telephone. It just requires competency, money and an infrastructure that isn't for profit. Don't get me wrong, the services provided on the infrastructure can definitely be for profit but not the glass itself.
You did it before for electricity and telephone. Not completely. There are still tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of Americans who never got electric, telephone, or even water service available in their homes. Every six months or so there's an article in the Navajo Times about the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority managing to hook up another couple of dozen homes to electricity, but there are still many thousands to…
I've kept my AT&T landline mostly to reduce the amount of spam calls on my cell phone but also to see just how long it would last. It fails every year or two from squirrels sharpening their teeth on the wires. The last time I had it fixed, the service guy told me I was the only active line on the street. I've had the number so long, it used to be (415) instead of (650).
I personally think that this reason to keep a landline also became outdated. There are so many tools and features on cell phones to identify and stop spam, and it seems like carriers are finally starting to get ahead of it. At this point the people I know in my life who still have landlines mostly get spam on them especially because they aren’t actually using the landline for much, so almost 100% of the calls going o…
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Monopoly is only an incentive if it is clear that it will be permitted.
But it always is though. In a government regulated economy, there is regulatory capture and lobbying to create industry friendly laws that allow monopoly (aka our current system). In a fully free market, then there is no laws to prevent monopoly. And by monopoly, I am also referring to systems where there are a few big players that just don't compete against one another, or one where there is a big player and a few s…
The rare times you see overbuilding there is always a scheme involved, whether it's Comcast's recent edge outs to appear as though they aren't bleeding internet customers, or government money incentivising an overbuild cause the current ISP didn't document that they serve a set of addresses.
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It's not quite that simple. Sonic focuses their fiber services only in areas that are most profitable to install fiber. As far as I know, they only install fiber on telephone poles that have free space, in areas that are high density. The cheapest install option for the highest possible revenue. I live right next to an area that has Sonic fiber, but there's no telephone poles, and an install would require an expensiv…
Stupid idea, I know, but what do you think of Telephone-pole-as-a-service TPaaS What are the regulations in place for putting up telephone poles and what are the associated costs?
I believe this is legally required for gas & electricity in Europe, and some of the privatized national phone companies here have similar obligations.
I'm fine with AT&T no longer supporting landlines if they start supporting fiber to every household. US broadband is a joke compared to many other parts of the world.