I thought the USA was the model of capitalism. However it appears the opposite, monopolies run rampant. The free market is killed rather than encouraged.
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Why Super-Fast Internet Is Coming Super Slowly
21–30 of 126 posts
Re: Why Super-Fast Internet Is Coming Super Slowly
#22I view the broadband industry as a fascinating example of what happens when an infrastructure industry meets the technology industry. TWC and friends were established to enact a business plan that's been viable and profitable for centuries: laying down expensive infrastructure is economically feasible if most of the cost comes up front and you can charge rents on it for decades. Stability is crucial. This is the econ…
So why does broadband in other countries not have this problem, like Scandinavia, or Korea & Japan?
Sprawl makes infrastructure investment orders of magnitude more expensive. For example, a small business [1] provides the fastest consumer access in the city of Seattle, but they refuse to do business outside of extremely high density buildings. There is no way a small business could do the same in McSuburbia. In the sprawly world outside of the US's dense cities, only municipal governments with a lot of political willpower have the resources to invest in the infrastructure needed for fast internet.
Re: Why Super-Fast Internet Is Coming Super Slowly
#23I have gigabit fiber internet and it doesn't feel all that much faster than my old Comcast 20Mbs connection because the bottleneck isn't my connection, it's the servers I'm asking for content from. For some things it's blazingly fast (downloading updates, torrenting, etc) but for general web surfing the benefit is barely noticeable.
I think that's why fiber adoption is slower than broadband adoption was. There's not much that you can do over a gigabit connection that you can't do over a 20Mbs connection for the average subscriber. Until some killer app that requires a gigabit connection to work starts to become popular, people just aren't going to demand it and adoption will continue to limp along.
Re: Why Super-Fast Internet Is Coming Super Slowly
#24In theory, if Google Fiber was widely available, would this drastically dilute the effects of net neutrality problems? Or are these two issues completely unrelated?
It becomes much harder to violate net neutrality in the face of competition. Here's an example: Say you have two ISP options at your home. Firm A forces Netflix to pay $1/month for access to enough bandwidth to stream movies in HD to your house, because they want you to use janky-streams.com, which they own. Firm B keeps their peering infrastructure up-to-date without charging Netflix. Where does this leave you as a…
To complete the analogy, even more comically, to enforce the punishment by firm A against netflix, they probably had to make a capital investment in sabotage gear of perhaps 75 cents per month TCO.
Thats kind of how it was in telecom before they gave up on detailed long distance billing. You'd spend 4 cents/min on billing infrastructure which was OK when a LD call from CHC to NYC was $4/minute, not so great when Sams Club was selling LD cards for 5 cents/min.
Never forget that creating false scarcity of a non-scarce good takes a lot of time, effort, and money.
Re: Why Super-Fast Internet Is Coming Super Slowly
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
So why does broadband in other countries not have this problem, like Scandinavia, or Korea & Japan?
Sprawl makes infrastructure investment orders of magnitude more expensive. For example, a small business [1] provides the fastest consumer access in the city of Seattle, but they refuse to do business outside of extremely high density buildings. There is no way a small business could do the same in McSuburbia. In the sprawly world outside of the US's dense cities, only municipal governments with a lot of political wi…
I don't have direct experience with the state of the internet in the U.S., but isn't it terrible in large, metropolitan cities as well? I'm really just using the anecdata I've been reading on HN.
Furthermore, afaik many small towns even in eastern europe(while making great strides, no particularly huge cities) boast 100 mbit connections.
Assuming both of those statements are true, It doesn't seem to me like the economies of scale argument is valid here.
EDIT: 100 mbit/$20, 500 mbit/$30, checked my ISP.
Re: Why Super-Fast Internet Is Coming Super Slowly
#26I thought the USA was the model of capitalism. However it appears the opposite, monopolies run rampant. The free market is killed rather than encouraged.
What are you talking about? Monopolies ARE capitalism run rampant.
Re: Why Super-Fast Internet Is Coming Super Slowly
#27I view the broadband industry as a fascinating example of what happens when an infrastructure industry meets the technology industry. TWC and friends were established to enact a business plan that's been viable and profitable for centuries: laying down expensive infrastructure is economically feasible if most of the cost comes up front and you can charge rents on it for decades. Stability is crucial. This is the econ…
and the railroad network before that, etc
And don't forget: The telegraph industry! Neal Stephenson writes about it in "Mother Earth, Mother Board:" http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html , which is fascinating and worth reading.
On one side there are irritated customers wondering why their service is so poor and why their bills are so high
One other "don't forget": a lot of people who pay attention are unhappy about franchise agreements and telco efforts to prohibit local utility fiber deployments by outlawing them at the state level (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7271044). Local municipalities that say, "Fuck it, we're going to roll our own" often find themselves forbidden because of successful lobbying at the state level.
Re: Why Super-Fast Internet Is Coming Super Slowly
#28thats a borderline moronic article. starts by saying incumbents deny access even to city cabling and explaining the duopoly on most cities and ends by saying that allowing netflix to pass the fee to comcast subscribers is good because people will move companies and a free market is the answer. is this april 1st or something? also extra moronic points for not understanding the first thing about isp to isp agreements a…
The writer is suggesting that the "FCC can mandate right-of-way rules similar to those granted Google Fiber to all credible competitors".
He isn't saying that the "free market" will fix things by itself. He observes that there isn't a free market in providing internet access because the incumbents control things like telephone poles (to hang optical cable on) and municipalities are so addicted to the kickbacks they get from cable franchisees that they won't let anyone else in. The magic of the invisible hand only works if there is actual competition. Those supply and demand curve charts only describe reality if there aren't monopolists.
His claim is that if the FCC mandated right of way to anyone wanting to hook homes up then a company like Google would already be serving many more homes as incumbents wouldn't be able to block them as AT&T is doing in Austin.
This is true, but I'm not convinced that it is the right way to get proper competition here. Is the solution really to have 5 companies each run optical fiber down a street? Better would be for one company to run super-fast tubes, and then sell the bandwidth in bulk to ISPs. Maybe that is the business model that would emerge, but maybe not.
Re: Why Super-Fast Internet Is Coming Super Slowly
#29In theory, if Google Fiber was widely available, would this drastically dilute the effects of net neutrality problems? Or are these two issues completely unrelated?
If Google Fiber was widely available Google would be the one controlling traffic priority.
That is true, and why to the solution to the US's slow internet providers isn't "get Google fiber to everyone". It should be "make it easy for new companies to provide service, even if another fast service is already available".
Re: Why Super-Fast Internet Is Coming Super Slowly
#30I thought the USA was the model of capitalism. However it appears the opposite, monopolies run rampant. The free market is killed rather than encouraged.
What are you talking about? Monopolies ARE capitalism run rampant.
Nonsense. Leftists conflate "state capitalism", cronyism or corporatism with real, free-market capitalism. Internet monopolies like Comcast or TWC enjoy are state-granted monopolies, not "natural monopolies" (which have never existed).