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Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government

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Re: Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government

#131

Post by arecibodrake »

Apocryphon wrote: post #69
arecibodrake wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the governments that constrain through force the market so that only a few monopolistic entities are present?

The problem is caused by bad government, but the solution is good government, as exemplified by the BT story. A completely free market would lead to a monopoly in broadband anyways. The irony here is that the government is not doing anything to solve the problem.

Government getting the hell out of the way of people voluntarily interacting the marketplace is the best situation.

For example: cable easements. Get rid of them. Get rid of all easements. Without them, you would have a variety of options and methods of gaining access to a number of utilities (internet, power, etc) as well as new services that have not yet been created.

Re: Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government

#132

Post by arecibodrake »

seabee wrote: post #65
arecibodrake wrote: post #54

The only reason we don't have most metropolitan areas with gigabit fiber to the door is almost entirely teleco/cable easements. The day you stop government from mandating one company per area or delimiting it to a small few monopolistic entities and allow a free market is the day we stop dealing with the hell that is becoming us. The answer is quite simply LESS government, dammit.

That clearly isn't the answer, as the article spends many paragraphs explaining. The answer is "do things that encourage competition and investment". The US government fails at this, but it is neither a limitation of government per se or easily achieved by private enterprise alone.

The article argues that good situations resulted from government action. The reality is that while these situations are viewed as good, they are not neccessarily the best. Only when individuals are able to voluntarily interact in the market do the best services and products meet the best prices and innovation is at its highest. One of the main factors that does not permit government from being able to exist in a market in a positive way in comparison is due to a complete lack of price model interaction. Government (by its very nature) does not depend on consumer response (price model). It thus has no way of allocating resources as efficiently as it would were it to exist without tax dollars (confiscated property, not gained through competition or voluntary interaction). As such, it cannot gauge weather or not the things it is doing are the best or the most effective to meet the demand.

There are mountains of writing on the basics of free markets and Austrian Economics, if you would like me to link you to some resources.

Re: Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government

#133

Post by masklinn »

arecibodrake wrote: post #130
masklinn wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need government to do anything to end up with monopolies, especially in activities with very high cost-of-entry such as utilities or telecommunications. Ma Bell became a natural monopoly all on its own, and barring an extremely disruptive entry into the market (which is, again, extremely difficult in high-entry-cost markets since the rate of new entry is so low) it will consolidate over time as the current…

Monopolies only exist in two situations: 1. They supply the market demand perfectly. 2. Government forces them into that position directly or indirectly. There are no exceptions.

Ah, a libertardian. I should have known.

Re: Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government

#134

Post by prodigal_erik »

arecibodrake wrote: post #131
Apocryphon wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is caused by bad government, but the solution is good government, as exemplified by the BT story. A completely free market would lead to a monopoly in broadband anyways. The irony here is that the government is not doing anything to solve the problem.

Government getting the hell out of the way of people voluntarily interacting the marketplace is the best situation. For example: cable easements. Get rid of them. Get rid of all easements. Without them, you would have a variety of options and methods of gaining access to a number of utilities (internet, power, etc) as well as new services that have not yet been created.

Easements and the monopoly they sanction are the reasons that everyone in an area can get service at all. If they had to write a private contract that would cover the absurdly high cost of laying cable, it would make a cell phone contract look like a love note. It would have to be a covenant imposed on every tenant of the building for many years. It would be just like regulation, only written by people with an immediate incentive to do it as abusively as possible.

Real-world markets lack infinite competition and perfect transparency, so they pretty routinely fail to deliver optimal solutions. Many famously wealthy people got there by exploiting strategies to make markets fail.

Re: Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government

#136

Post by oelewapperke »

timthorn wrote: post #99
richcollins wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they were truly interested in promoting competition, they would make it easier for new companies to offer broadband rather than forcing them to go through an incumbent.

The incumbent is split into separate organisations, which are effectively not allowed to communicate behind closed doors. BT Openreach provides access to the local loop, whereas BT Retail sells broadband to consumers. The setup is designed so that other ISPs have exactly the same interface to BT Openreach as BT Retail. BT offered this arrangement to avoid being broken up - look up the "General Conditions of Entitleme…

And that's great if you want to resell BT's normal ADSL line. You can't do anything else using that particular interface.

There is, unfortunately, no affordable real unbundling (as in "deliver the copper to my equipment") in the UK.

Re: Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government

#137

Post by cdr »

Aloisius wrote: post #121
fourk wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you, as much I tried to resist believing it...the grass certainly is greener on the other side.

I have symmetric 100 Mbps uncapped service in San Francisco for $33/month if I pay by the year or $45/month if I don't through Webpass. It works beautifully.

Ouch. My parents pay $45/month for 2Mbps. But they live in a rural mountain town where there's only one provider (plus satellite, which is even more expensive with interminable latency).

Re: Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government

#138

Post by sbalea »

bobo888 wrote: post #78
ojbyrne wrote: post #2

For those who think this is going to be an anti-government regulation, libertarian orthodoxy type article, here's the tl;dr: "government regulators who have forced more competition"

Well this is how it happend in Romania: ----------------- 2000 - 2002 There was NO regulation. We just threw UTP cables from building to building, and bought external connectivity from bulk sellers. We didn't pay any taxes. We didn't have any signed agreements with "customers". We didn't have any permits from the city council either. There were no employees... heck, we weren't even registered as a business. We just t…

He's right, My dad, who lives in Romania, has a 100mbps internet connection bundled with a 5GB 3G plan for about $13/mo.

I am paying $60 for a 50/8 pipe, and consider myself happy, compared to other US residents.

Re: Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government

#139

Post by afterburner »

americandesi333 wrote: post #96
afterburner wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize the telecoms want tiered pricing because it would allow them to gouge captive customers even more?

That is exactly whats being done in the countries referenced in the article.

I can't verify that, but I'm referring to the tiered pricing structure in the US (or how the US companies want to introduce it). Given what they want to charge for the various tiers, it's opportunistic gouging.

Re: Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government

#140

Post by sbalea »

smutticus wrote: post #88

There is a direct correlation between competition and lower prices in this market. The US has little to no decent competition in many markets. Therefore ISPs rip people off. If you think Western Europe has cheap broadband try going to small countries in Eastern Europe like Croatia, Slovenia, Latvia or Estonia. I've never seen cheaper BW in Europe than in Latvia.

Romania: 100mbps fiber + 5GB 3G bundle, about $13/mo

http://www.rcs-rds.ro/internet-digi-net/fiberlink/pachete

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