5G networks meet consumer needs as mobile data growth slows

Last I looked the NASA's capabilities of NASA's space telescopes have been improving rapidly. I'm not aware of any competition. Roads where I live have improved immensely during my lifetime. I'd lay long odds yours have too over the decades, despite your claims. All without competition. I recently heard all the lead water pipes are being replaced in the USA. The water supply people have no competition. Open source projects improve all the time. They aren't driven by competition.

"Things don't improve without competition" sounds like a fairy tale somebody tells themselves to justify a position. People like nice things. They don't need competition to motive them to work towards those things. Granted competition usually speeds things up, but it "nothing improves without competition" clearly wrong. There are too many counter examples.

Which is just as well, because the things we are discussing here are prone to forming natural monopolies. Roads, water, the telephone service, electricity supply - the thing they have in common is you will have one supplier, and you can't change to a different one. There is no competition. So the discussion wasn't about "should there be competition or not", because there is no choice. The discussion was about "who should own a monopoly - people you elect, or people whose only primary interest is extracting money out of their assets (which happen to be you)". You seem arguing for private ownership, and then using competition as the justification - when there is no competition.

By the by, other places do this competition thing far better than the USA. The NBN the parent was complaining about is indeed a government owned monopoly. Their asset is "the last mile". The arrangement in Australia is they are a common carrier in the strictest meaning of the term. But they are not allowed to sell to the public, that's the ISP's job. The NBN's prices are thrashed out in some back room somewhere between the ISP's and the government, in front of a set of open books. The ISP's are allowed to use other technologies like 5G and Starlink without penality, by law. As an consequence every Australian household gets to chose between 100's of ISP's, literally. Those ISP's are require by law to advertise "minimum expected speeds", and none of this "unlimited (meaning we get to define the limit)" bullshit is allowed. In other words, it's nearly a perfect competitive market.

One effect of that is there is no "net neutrality" argument here. The NBN is barred from such distinctions because it's a common carrier. The ISP's are free to do whatever they damned well please, and as a consequence you get all sorts of deals that violate net neutrality. 5G with limited downloads, but unlimited streaming from some platform is free for example. If you don't like that, say because your ISP blocks ports move to one that doesn't. You might be thinking "ahh, but moving between ISP's would be hard". But no, the law mandates churning between ISP's is free, fast, involving no more than a few minutes downtime, and requires no interaction at all with the ISP you're moving from.

Creating near a perfect competitive market in an area that is prone to forming natural monopolies does require some heavy handed government intervention. The NBN was one of the most heavy handed interventions I've seen in a while. The private operators where given every chance to build a new network on the condition it be open to all retailers (including them) at a price the government had some control over. They declined. Partially because government price control on a monopoly was too much to bear, but I think also because they thought their ownership of the copper network was too big a hurdle for even the government to overcome. The government overbuilt it with fibre. In a country that's even more spread out than USA, that was a huge undertaking. I suspect it would be impossible in the USA, where 1/2 the population allows themselves to be brainwashed by large corporates into thinking "government always bad, government always inefficient".

Yes, the government is inefficient compared to private operators in a competitive market. But the corporates who want you to think the government always runs things badly are the ones who want to take control of government owned monopolies. If you want to know what inefficiency looks like, join one as an employee. You won't get to see what's happening otherwise. The sausage is ugly, but they unlike the government are allowed to hide it from prying eyes. So they do, and tell you they are doing a wonderful job. Apparently you swallow it up.

Im not reading all this so Ill just respond to the first paragraph. The space industry was dead in the water before spaceX showed up. Minimal innovation and spend trending down every year and now spaceX has sparked a complete reversal. Competition matters.

> I recently heard all the lead water pipes are being replaced in the USA.

We still have lead pipes to many houses in chicago, and will for the foreseeable future. The water supply people(government) have utterly failed at replacing them in a timely fashion.

> Open source projects improve all the time

Because theyre extremely competitive. With minimal barriers to entry there are different devs trying to get their code merged and different projects trying to be the top dog. When one shows weakness another pops up.

>And isn't the NBN currently ripping out the FttN, replacing it with FttP, at no cost to the cusytomer? Sounds like a major upgrade to me.

In select areas, some of which are currently served by third party fibre providers, who can provide up to 10G, who now will be forbidden to pipe in to new non business customer dwellings.

>And wasn't the reason we got the NBN that Telstra point blank refused to replace the monopoly copper infrastructure with fibre?

Right, a single giant telco monopoly is bad. Instead of removing the monopoly we built a new monopoly and tipped money in.

>If I didn't know better, I'd be think the major policy mistake Australia made in Telecom was the liberals to selling off Telstra.

They sold it off AND enforced ULL. Its the same thing, monopoly is forced to be better, still lagging behind competitive markets.

>In a competitive market when a new technology came along a telecom is forced to upgrade because their a competitors would use the new technology to steal their customers.

Right see my comment about the singapore model, where they just rent glass instead of a service.

>That works fabulously for 5G, where there is competition.

In the cities we had ADSL2+ competing with HFC and Fixed Wireless. The only monopoly was Telstras, who prevented people running residential fibre in their pit and pipe asset. HFC was a hack to use overhead wires because people could not use pit and pipe. That asset has been gifted to NBNCo who also have a legislative monopoly and also dont play nice.

> absurd situation of having buildings full of federal court judges and lawyers fighting to get reasonable ULL access.

Yeah there were a few instances of them fighting it. Which is another reason why monopolies are bad.

>But replacing the wires themselves - never.

Happened all the time. Actually they negotiated a shutdown due to NBNCo, certain copper services were simply stamped beyond economical repair and Telstra could choose to simply cancel services as part of the deal. I think you are upset about the customer owned piece of copper from the demarc in, which most residents would never upgrade.

>Desperate to make the obvious move to fibre, the Libs then offered Telstra, the Optus, then anybody money to build a new fibre network - but they all refused to do so unless the government effectively guaranteed monopoly ownership over the new network.

No one wants to commit to a national scale rollout of fibre. But many people are happy to roll out community and metro scale fibre. The key is open access. When you have a restricted pit and pipe asset, there can only be one provider. But funnily enough, commercial properties like housing estates and apartment buildings dont give a shit and let people come through and overbuild the NBN. TPG had to take NBN co to court and NBN withdrew rather than risking the rest of their monopoly.

>Oh, that's right, public ownership shared natural monopolies like wires, roads, water mains is bad. The thing I missed is why a private rent extracting monopoly beholden to no one except the profit seeking share holders owning those things is better.

My point is that common carrier sucks. If you instead made the pit and pipe asset the common resource, there would be little to no issue. Or just run glass like Singapore.

It's not even remotely the same thing. It's a simple fact that there's nothing that requires gigabytes of data on a mobile device that can't be more easily done server side, unless it's real-time. And if it's real-time, the maximum amount of data is the maximum fidelity of data that the device can output (pixels times refresh rate plus lossless audio, either the device specs or its compute ability to drive the hardware). Right now, even if you max out your device's physical ability to output data into the real world, you're not coming close to maxing out your connection. The network isn't the bottleneck, and it's probably not even in the top three.

Investing in more bandwidth is a massive waste on the scale of billions of dollars when you consider that time and capital could be better spent improving existing coverage, lowering latency, and making the service more reliable. Creating a next gen standard that requires new hardware and new devices to support a use case that doesn't exist and can't materialize with today's devices is just silly.

Illinois is mandating lead service line replacement. I'm not wild about it. Solubility of lead in Chicago municipal service water is very low, because the lines are mineralized by the phosphates in the water. Have your water service tested; you're probably more than fine. But replacing the water lines disrupts those lines, which ironically does introduce lead into your water (for a time).

Regardless, Illinois munis don't really have a choice about this anymore.