41–50 of 119 posts
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...and 200x slower than those in Korea.
They also have 1/6 the population density as the United States.
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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…
This is why I think the makes the most sense for cities to own their own broadband infrastructure (just like they often own their road & water/sewer infrastructure). Maybe let out a contract for management of it comercially that gets periodically reviewed - maybe even split the basic infrastructure maintenance with companies competing to deliver data from common data centers across the last mile wiring/fiber so multi…
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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…
There _are_ places where small companies are stepping up to place residential fiber. http://fiber.usinternet.com/
Can someone explain to me what innovation cable companies provide that they deserve their anti-competitive monopolies? If we were to replace them all with municipal broadband what would the short and long term consequences be? I'd wager that the short term (~10 years) consequences would be vastly superior service for every day citizens. In the long term, not certain but I suspect it would be much of the same as long…
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…
> In other words, the same number of subscribers now have to pay for 4x the infrastructure costs.
In other words, building into each others' territories raises the cost of serving customers while putting downward pressure on pricing. The executives recognize that and try to avoid it.
If the cable companies and telecommunications companies had competing services when they were building their networks in the 20th century, I imagine that they likely would have avoided overlapping service areas too.
I think this article is the best proof we need to show that basic connectivity infrastructure should be paid with tax dollars and licensed to operators by the federal government since there's no incentive whatsoever to create a real market around it.
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...and 200x slower than those in Korea.
Actually, my speeds are about the same as those in Korea as I live in NYC. Which makes sense because South Korea is almost entirely urban much like NYC. It's not really fair to make cross country comparisons between countries with vastly different geographies.
Is this even true?
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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…
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> The US has a different problem where only 4% of the population lives in a major cities That requires a rather narrow definition of "major cities".
The largest 10 cities are home to 16M Americans, the 10 largest cities in the UK are host to 12M Brits. The 100 largest cities in the US are home to 59M Americans, the 100 largest cities in the UK are home to 34M Brits. The US is 5 times as populous but there is only 30% difference between the top 10 cities in the US vs UK and 50% in top 100. Most people in the US live in cities under The rest of Europe isn't that mu…
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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…
True. I recall reading somewhere that Japan has a law requiring the owner of the physical wires to lease them to anyone as long as they pay some set fee - sort of like mechanical royalties that we have for music. This is part of the reason why Japan has some of the fastest and cheapest Internet in the world.
aDSL used to be unbundled, too. And while it was unbundled, speeds were increasing.
aDSL speeds have been pretty flat since they removed the requirement, even though newer DSL technologies are available.