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One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

washingtonpost.com

111–119 of 119 posts

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#111
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened with netflix wasn't covered under net neutrality anyway (as the links above point out), and they weren't being charged for prioritization, nor were they discriminated against.

This isn't a net neutrality discussion. It's about monopolistic behavior.

I responded to a comment saying "It's exactly like what cable companies would like to do by subverting net neutrality, give preferential treatment to the traffic that profits them most."

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#112
post #64
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also have 1/6 the population density as the United States.

I think S Korea has about 14x the population density of the US. See, for example, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.POP.DNST

Wow, I don't remember what site I used but wikipedia also seems to agree with you [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territor...

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#113
It may be to little too late, but I am an engineer for Charter and we are doing a few things that I think are worth noting. This is my own opinion and not an official statement from the company.

- bringing back all help desk type jobs that were offshored. All of our call center jobs were in the US until recently and some idiot started outsourcing some of them. We are bringing them back immediately. - EPON fiber build outs everywhere (we realize fiber is better than cable but there is existing cable infrastructure and the protocol can support 1gig/s with the current DOCSIS 3.1 standard so for now we are both upgrading the cable system and building fiber EPON) - no data caps in any form - getting rid of DVRs and having both live video and on demand/saved video stream from servers over IP

I would place us as much more techie friendly than ATT but less so compared to Google. Most of the problems with peoples cable service come from poor install jobs, if you have a problem with lost packets or dropping video please be persistent in getting a tech that is knowledgeable on how to troubleshoot line issues.

p.s. use namebench to find the best DNS servers for your area and use those instead of ours.

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cable has a significant difference from oil. Cable is a network technology with value defined somewhere between Sarnof's, Metcalfe's, or Tilly-Odlyzko's laws. Scale, and dominating local coverage, matter. Oil is an extractive mineral resource with very low direct costs vs. use value. Absent some form of central contrl, the price has tended to fall far too low . In the aftermath of the East Texas oilfield discovery of…

Great info thanks. It is entertaining how the stalwart protectors of free markets oppose them when it becomes too inconvenient.

Funny, you noticed that too?

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we still have some cultural inertia such that things like high-speed internet and cell service are seen as luxuries and not basic infrastructure (plus some who believe that the poor ought to be excluded from using basic infrastructure anyway). I'm also not convinced that Capitol Hill has fully realized that Comcast isn't competing with rabbit ears anymore.

Oh they know, they're just all on the take: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/recips.php?cycle=2014&id=D0... Relatedly, it's depressing just how cheaply you can buy the house/senate.

Buying politicians has a great ROI:

http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2014/11/17/fixed-fortunes...

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#117
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is shockingly similar and a lot of the arguments against net neutrality try to dismiss it as applying "laws made for railroads" to the Internet. Back when oil was getting to be useful, lots of people discovered it. Usually, it was in a remote area. The only way to make money off it was to get it to a refinery and then the market. Standard Oil bullied and bribed the railroads into giving them preferential ra…

The thing is, cable is more like the railroad than it is like Standard Oil. Petroleum isn't at all like a natural monopoly. It took a lot of corruption and bribery for Standard Oil to keep competition at bay. But nobody is really stepping forward to lay residential fiber. Google is the exception and it's because they're one of the only companies with enough money to survive a war of attrition with the incumbents, and…

See Eben Moglen's "Invisible Barbeque".

http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/barbecue.html

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#118
post #109
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why do you still get enough clean water and electricity? Not have brown/black outs and so on?

The water actually has a lead warning in east PA, and we do have near weekly evening power outages. But the septic is county based and the electric is at the state level, and in PA you can buy from any electric provider in the state and the lines are maintained near us by Harrisburg.

So it sounds like your area fails in the infrastructure department pretty fundamentally. There are many other cities where it never blacks out, the water and sanitation has been great for decades and the roads are maintained. Those places would do municipal internet better too.

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#119
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is mostly because having multiple companies laying physical wires is problematic. It is very capital intensive, and disruptive to infrastructure (digging up lots of ground). In the end, it might not be better for customers; for example, imagine 4 different cable companies spend all the capital to lay 4 sets of cables to every house in a town of 100,000. Since there are 4 choices of cable company to choose…

> I think it is mostly because having multiple companies laying physical wires is problematic. It is very capital intensive, and disruptive to infrastructure (digging up lots of ground). In the end, it might not be better for customers; for example, imagine 4 different cable companies spend all the capital to lay 4 sets of cables to every house in a town of 100,000. Since there are 4 choices of cable company to choos…

The downward pressure of pricing can't press prices below the cost of the infrastructure and maintenance cost (otherwise, the company will either go out of business or stop offering the service)
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