The FCC needs to stop 5G fast lanes

> I live in Singapore which is denser than basically any place in the US, and people are obsessed with their phones. Mobile bandwidth works just fine.

For 4k video? No, it doesn't. Also, Singapore is probably spammed with microcells so your phone actually connects to a 5G cell that is only a bit more away than your WiFi router.

I was in Singapore last week, and I'm writing this from China. And no, mobile Internet in both countries can't compete with wired broadband.

> I suspect your underwhelming 5G experience could be related with cells in your area being rather big, so they had many people in them? If you have a higher density of people, you need a higher density of cells.

It's both. The US favors low-density housing, as it's much more people-friendly than any other alternative. The other option is high-density Downtown hellscapes with scyscrapers. Both areas are not great for wireless.

> In any case, that's why I was emphasising the different wires we already have (cable tv, plain old phone cables, power line, and in some places optical fibre, etc) and the wireless options (3G, 4G, 5G, wifi, satellite, and the more directed exotic microwave transmission, etc). I probably missed a few.

Only cable is capable of 1G speeds. Phone wires realistically max out at ~30/10 Mbps up/down with VDSL. There is no Internet over powerlines in the US, and there'll never be because of RF leaks.

So your realistic option is either the coaxial cable or newly laid fiber. And fiber is often owned by the same company that owns the cable.

> Try starting up a new tap water or sewage provider. I don't think the government will let you.

Nothing stops you. There are companies that provide alternative water service, they are often used to fill or drain swimming pools. It's just not economically feasible, unless there are special circumstances.

> If there's insufficient competition in the US, perhaps don't blame 'nature'.

There are no countries that are similar to the US that have competitive "last mile" Internet. None.

All the more successful countries (e.g. Sweden) decouple the last mile, making it a state-owned (or a heavily regulated) utility. And then ISPs can just buy access to it and compete based on services/price.

> It's both. The US favors low-density housing, as it's much more people-friendly than any other alternative. The other option is high-density Downtown hellscapes with scyscrapers. Both areas are not great for wireless.

Alas, the US presents a false dilemma here: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_middle_housing

> Also, Singapore is probably spammed with microcells so your phone actually connects to a 5G cell that is only a bit more away than your WiFi router.

Yes, and that's great. The density of cells goes up with the density of people.

> I was in Singapore last week, and I'm writing this from China. And no, mobile Internet in both countries can't compete with wired broadband.

The free government wifi we get here in many train stations and hawker centres regularly gives me 50 Mbps (on fast.com), and I never got less than 10 Mbps.

That's plenty fast for many applications, especially when it's free.

4G and 5G Mobile broadband is usually a lot faster than that.

> Only cable is capable of 1G speeds.

Singtel advertises that they have Gigabit mobile, and that's on 4G technology. 5G is going to be faster.

> There are companies that provide alternative water service, they are often used to fill or drain swimming pools.

Interesting. How do they get the water to you?

> But I want to stress rather that it is a pressure rather than the only contributing variable. That there are more variables with similarly strong pressures, such that by fixing voting we shouldn't expect to have a stable system with multiple parties overnight.

I'm not sure that's the case, at least if you're willing to extend "overnight" to something like "over two or three election cycles."

If we were to adopt e.g. approval voting, the immediate effect would be that existing third party candidates who currently get ~1.2% of the vote would be able to get 20-30%, because voters would no longer have to be concerned about "wasting" their vote on a non-major party candidate they might actually prefer. In a small number of districts, like Libertarians in parts of New Hampshire or Greens in parts of California, the third party candidate might even immediately win.

Which in turn would change the nature of the very next election, because the media would have no excuse to dismiss a candidate who got 30% approval in the previous election when the losing major party candidate only got 32% -- or 29%. Then third party candidates get into the debates and have the opportunity to turn their 30% into 55%.

Moreover, it doesn't take a lot of seats to make a difference. Suppose the Republicans have 48 seats, the Democrats have 49 and a third party has 3. Those 3 seats are all either of the major parties need for a majority, so the third party would have a significant amount of influence.

> You can of course become just enough representative. This might be a helpful video to visualize this issue

Isn't this exactly the thing which is solved by cardinal systems? If you put candidate A, B and C or policy A, B and C all on the ballot together and have people rate them, there is no longer an ordering problem because you're not holding separate votes for A vs. B and, B vs. C and C vs. A. If Policy A gets a higher average rating than Policies B or C then it will always win when they're all on the ballot until voter preferences change.

The people choosing which candidates or policies make it onto the ballot have a lot of power, but that's always the case. Even if 100% of voters agree that Policy A is the best policy, if the only policies on the ballot are B and C then nobody can vote for Policy A. Obvious solution is to allow any policy or candidate onto the ballot that can gather a threshold number of signatures, instead of giving control over this to some manipulative autocrats.

> See? Free handouts from government, not multiple competing providers.

Huh? We have multiple competing providers for normal paid Internet services.

Btw, I called it 'government wifi', but I think it's actually provided by multiple competing companies (but I don't know how it's financed. I assume the government pays for it. You can research for yourself if you care , it's called 'wireless@sgx'.)