391–400 of 726 posts
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woah, I didn't know this. How many states have laws banning municipal fiber?
https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc... It’s from 2023 but says 16 to 19 states.
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this is a great example of where the government should step in and say “welp, you took too long, we’re now funding municiple fiber and we’ll give it to everyone cheap. sorry.” i truly do believe competition can often drivr things forward but we have countless examples where executives get comfortable and decide their best course of action for profits is to do little to nothing. if a community has been screaming for f…
That's nice in theory, but look at how much money has gone to Verizon in the name of rural broadband, and how much they (haven't) delivered. And the consequences.
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this is a great example of where the government should step in and say “welp, you took too long, we’re now funding municiple fiber and we’ll give it to everyone cheap. sorry.” i truly do believe competition can often drivr things forward but we have countless examples where executives get comfortable and decide their best course of action for profits is to do little to nothing. if a community has been screaming for f…
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"Companies optimize to make as much money as possible, which is why there is cheap stuff" does not logically follow. I get what you're saying, but it's not related to the concept of companies trying to make as much profit as possible. Some will simply chase higher profit margins.
The math doesn't support this. There is great confusion about this point. Imagine, for example, that there are people that want to buy one unit of a product made by a monopoly that is a greedy corporation trying to maximize profits. And to keep things simple, make everything discreet in dollars. 10 people are willing to pay $2 5 people are willing to pay $3 1 person is willing to pay $4 and no one is able or willing…
There are countless companies working with excellent profit margins.
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Yes but you cannot make up more than about 10-15 examples everyone will agree with, seeing as those are subsidized in practically every country on earth, and then apply the thinking the guy above you gives for everything else. In my opinion internet access is as fundamental a right now as water access so I think it should be subsidized to a fair degree. But not for example if it is to supply only a small island of ri…
I agree with you. The internet is now important enough that it's required for almost everything past basic sustenance. Governments worldwide are moving services to the internet, so it's not even optional any more.
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Yes but you cannot make up more than about 10-15 examples everyone will agree with, seeing as those are subsidized in practically every country on earth, and then apply the thinking the guy above you gives for everything else. In my opinion internet access is as fundamental a right now as water access so I think it should be subsidized to a fair degree. But not for example if it is to supply only a small island of ri…
I agree with you. The internet is now important enough that it's required for almost everything past basic sustenance. Governments worldwide are moving services to the internet, so it's not even optional any more.
In that technological era of horses and handwriting, it became the US Postal Service, but I think if it occurred today it would be the US Networking Service.
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this is a great example of where the government should step in and say “welp, you took too long, we’re now funding municiple fiber and we’ll give it to everyone cheap. sorry.” i truly do believe competition can often drivr things forward but we have countless examples where executives get comfortable and decide their best course of action for profits is to do little to nothing. if a community has been screaming for f…
If people truly want something and it can be done profitably, just start a company and do it yourselves. If you need subsidies, that means the people who don't want that think are paying for it, just so people who do want it can have it cheaper. With subsidies, the cost is still there, it's just hidden in some tax or other.
There is a specific problem with last mile services: It costs approximately the same amount to install fiber down every street whether you have 5% of the customers or 95%.
So you have an incumbent with no competitors and therefore no incentive to invest in infrastructure instead of just charging the monopoly price for the existing bad service forever. If no one new enters the market, that never changes.
However, if there is a new entrant that installs fiber, the incumbent has to do the same thing or they're going to lose all their customers. So then they do it.
Recall that it costs the same to do that regardless of what percent of the customers you have, but they currently have 100% of the customers. Now no matter what price you charge, if it's enough to recover your costs then it's enough to recover their costs, so they just match your price. Then you're offering the same service or the same price, so there is no benefit to anyone to switch to your service now that they're offering the same thing, and inertia then allows them to keep the majority of the customers. Which means you're now in a price war where you'll be the one to go out of business first because customers will stay with them by default when you both charge the same price. And since this result is predictable, it's hard to get anyone to invest in a company destined to be bankrupted by the incumbent.
Which means that if the customers want someone to compete with the incumbent, they have to invest in it themselves. At which point going bankrupt by forcing the incumbent to install fiber is actually a decent ROI, because you pay the money and then you get fiber. Furthermore, you can even choose to not go bankrupt, by making the basic fiber service "free" (i.e. paid for through local taxes), which then bankrupts the incumbent and prevents the local residents from having to pay the cost of building two fiber networks instead of just one.
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30MB/s is not a lot. Which client was that? KTorrent can easily deal with more than three times that, which is what I get here in Poland on a plan that's not even the fastest one available.
It was KTorrent! But to be fair I just arbitrarily thought that 30MB/s would be more than enough speed (at my place in France that's probably the fastest my internet connection is capable of), tried that, it worked, in a few seconds the file was there, and that was it. I didn't try to see how fast I could go before a crash, maybe if I would have set it to 100MB/s it would have still been ok.
Despite presence of some very big names (Jio, Airtel), there still is healthy local competition, and the former haven't been able to play any monopoly-related games yet, since it's quite easy to switch. The past few years have been a significant upgrade compared to what I've observed happening in the US. Providers might even start offering 10+ Gbit for consumers in the future, but I doubt there's a market for it right now.