Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Super-Fast Internet Is Coming Super Slowly

online.wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 126 posts

Re: Why Super-Fast Internet Is Coming Super Slowly

#41

Post by barrkel »

jfasi wrote: post #33
chimeracoder wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I view the broadband industry as a fascinating example of what happens when an infrastructure industry meets the technology industry. I don't disagree with your comment, but your argument would seem to apply to the rest of the world, whereas in fact the US is in a fairly unique situation among developed countries. Most of the current situation can be explained by the fact that broadband is currently the only unregu…

I disagree in terms of regulation: there is plenty of regulation on broadband internet, except it tends to discourage competition against broadband providers. This isn't a problem that is going to be solved by placing regulations on the industry. Your example of past subsidies provides an excellent argument for this: given the political clout these entities hold and have in the past used to stilt legislation in their…

You need to qualify your statements with "in the US", because regulation has been effective elsewhere.

Re: Why Super-Fast Internet Is Coming Super Slowly

#42

Post by a_c_s »

edraferi wrote: post #11
bsbechtel wrote: post #3

In 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…

The problem is that instead, Firm B could just follow the lead and also charge $1/month for Netflix, leaving the consumer with no choice. Or they could charge $1/month for other streaming services and leave Netflix alone, so the consumer gets to choose between slow Netflix or slow Hulu & Amazon, with no chance to 'vote' with their wallets for fast everything.

This is the danger of oligopolies - even when they don't collude, their interests are in not competing 'too hard' to gain customers. If there are two firms, and each has roughly half of the customers, then the most money Firm A could get with no competition is 2x what they already have, so getting into a price war could easily result in lower total profits. For example, if they have a 50% profit margin, then lowering consumer prices by 25% (and thus cutting profits to only 25% margin) only breaks even if they are able to sign up every customer of their competition.

Free markets work best when there are many players and markets are easy to enter, as there is much more incentive to compete, which is not the structure of broadband markets.

Re: Why Super-Fast Internet Is Coming Super Slowly

#43

Post by bluedino »

jfasi wrote: post #4

I 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…

>> this business model severely discourages new development (witness the "No one wants gigabit" rationale)

It's not that I want/need gigabit, it's that the only thing I can get in some locations is unusable. I'm looking at you, 1.5mb/768k DSL lines. It's barely enough for web surfing and useless for streaming video or doing things like gaming, video conferencing....

Re: Why Super-Fast Internet Is Coming Super Slowly

#44

Post by sehugg »

I've got to imagine the availability of cheap and fast broadband influences property values in a given area. I've seen numbers like $5k thrown around; I'm tempted to think it's more like $10k-$30k.

When you multiply that amount by the number of homeowners in the country, that's a lot of potential influence. How could it be leveraged to improve broadband?

Re: Why Super-Fast Internet Is Coming Super Slowly

#45

Post by kokey »

It is quite refreshing to see an article clearly stating the problem and the right solution. The barriers to competition needs to be broken, then the neutrality issue sorts itself out. We don't need to see entrenched cartels and monopolies 'fixed' through additional regulation imposing certain quality standards. That makes it hard for new players to enter the market and distinguish themselves, and more importantly it makes it hard for the dominant players to do the stupid things that will make their customers leave them faster for the competition.

Re: Why Super-Fast Internet Is Coming Super Slowly

#46

Post by doyoulikeworms »

dragonwriter wrote: post #38
praxeologist wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> Nonsense. Leftists conflate "state capitalism", cronyism or corporatism with real, free-market capitalism. Leftists -- specifically, socialists -- created the name "capitalism" as a name for a real system which existed in the developed world in the 19th Century, in which the economic order was actively managed to favor the interest of the capital-holding class. The idea that this was system had something to do with…

ITT: pedantry

Re: Why Super-Fast Internet Is Coming Super Slowly

#47

Post by bluedino »

insuffi wrote: post #25
saosebastiao wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 econo…

>> 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?

It depends on where you are. Two different apartment buildings in DC or NYC could differn, one getting FIOS and the other on a congested cable network or low-speed phone company DSL circuit.

But don't get the idea that the internet is generally terrible in the USA. I'd imagine my situation is similar to most others - I live in a smaller town (population < 50,000) and about 90 miles from the nearest 'big' city (Detroit), but for $39.99 I get 30mb cable internet which I'm more than happy with. They offer 60mb and 100mb packages but I don't see the sense in spending any more.

Re: Why Super-Fast Internet Is Coming Super Slowly

#48

Post by res0nat0r »

w1ntermute wrote: post #31
saosebastiao wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That doesn't explain why internet speeds suck in NYC.

Population density in NYC and SFO actually hurt new rollouts. That is why those places and Los Angeles will probably be dead last on a Google Fiber rollout (if ever).

The old NYC infrastructure and all of the physical work (and permits, contracts, everything else) means a huge overhaul would most likely not be worth doing in dense and already wired places like these.

Also rayiner pointed out in another thread that according to Akamai the US already is pretty high up in the list of overall bandwidth. Also I think the HN / Reddit / tech echo chamber overplays the demand for gigabit internet. Most of America has no need for this, nor the willingness to pay for a connection this fast. 10-25 Mb is fine for most people. Browse Facebook, surf the web, stream a couple of movies, play games.

Re: Why Super-Fast Internet Is Coming Super Slowly

#49

Post by njsteinsund »

mahyarm wrote: post #9
jfasi wrote: post #4

I 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?

Take Norway; here all the copper lines used for DSL used to be owned by the national phone company. Then competition was established by forcing the national phone company to sell access to the lines at a set rate to anyone that wanted to deliver internet access. A monthly "line rental" is charged to the end customer - so that the cost is transparent. "Line rental" is about $13/month and a 20Mb/1Mb ADSL is $50/month (Cheapest 100Mb/100Mb (fiber) is $80.) There is a site for comparing prices (telepriser.no) run by the equivalent to the FCC, showing all the suppliers offerings.

Re: Why Super-Fast Internet Is Coming Super Slowly

#50

Post by saosebastiao »

dublinben wrote: post #35
insuffi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 econo…

You're absolutely correct. Population density is a red herring in this issue. The broadband situation is no better in the major cities of the U.S than it is in the rest of the country. Major cities in the rest of the developed world have much better connections somehow. One of the first deployments of gigabit fiber in the U.S. was in Chatanooga TN, with a population density of 471.9/km2. New York City has a populatio…

Density is not something that can be described adequately in a single number. It is entirely possible to have high residential densities in cities with remarkably low average densities. Moscow is a great example of this...their plazas and parks drive down average density way beyond the density that the average person experiences.

Everybody talks about the last mile being the most expensive part of infrastructure, but if the last meter is 90% of the cost of the last mile (I don't know what the exact proportion is, but it is definitely close), then 100 houses in 10 sq km census block is going to be in a cost category that is orders of magnitude higher than 100 apartments in a tower with a 9.9 sq km park around it.

Post reply on HN