51–60 of 126 posts
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.
If you read the article it's plain to see that the monopolies are enforced and encouraged by the currently existing regulations. There is no free market in ISPs in the US.
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…
Tom Wheeler, the new FCC Chairman, was a lobbyist and head of the NCTA for 5 years[1]. The idea that he will do anything to hurt the cable companies his old organization represents is ludicrous.
[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/business/tom-wheeler-telec...
I 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
The "free market" that does exist is based on subsidies, bailouts, state protection, monopolies, a huge army, bullying, and resource grabbing (and past 300+ years of colonialism).
Heck, the "free market" is even more mythical than the laughable "really existing socialism".
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…
Well, yes - when I use the word "regulation", I'm implying the sort of regulation that we see with respect to Con Edison. They can't so much as change the way they itemize fees on my bill (!) without regulatory approval.
That certainly creates problems of another sort, but on the other hand, the actual service provided[0] and the pricing is pretty much a solved problem (as much as one can expect)[1].
I'm sure ConEd would like the sort of legislative protectionism that cable companies receive, with no requirements surrounding price or quality, but thankfully, they don't have that (and altering the status quo is always tough in general - in this case, inertia is on consumers' side).
Obviously regulation could be established to make things worse, but I think it's clear what kind of regulation we're looking for for the purposes of this discussion. And I'm intentionally deferring the question of how any of these policies would be enacted - I'm just comparing two alternatives states to the status quo.
[0] excluding customer service, which is going to be mediocre at best no matter what.
[1] Interestingly, pricing is partly "solved" due to the introduction of ESCOs, which are a way to privatize the supply chain (at the consumer's choice). "Free market" and "regulation" are not mutually exclusive - we could easily establish a regulated monopoly on last-mile copper wire while allowing multiple competing upstream providers.[2]
I 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…
In the current ecosystem, I see gigabit connections being useful for multi-user connections where a lot of video is being streamed. Or using cloud storage solutions like Dropbox or Google Drive.
In the future, I could see other use cases. For what we know about Google's self driving cars, the first time a road is driven on (manual driving) it gathers a ton of data about that road. When you park in the garage, it may have to upload gigabytes worth of data for Google to process to make available to other cars. Doing that over the current connections most people have would be painful. If you have a large pipe for uploading lots of data, this becomes a lot more feasible.
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…
One point that caught my attention in an NPR report[1] on this dispute last week:
IHS's Broughton says there was a similar dispute in South Korea a few years ago, and it was ultimately arbitrated by the government.
I don't know the details of the South Korean dispute but I understand South Korea has pretty fast internet speeds.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/02/20/280255...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen articles that it is just not feasible or even possibly to put all of the burden the wired networks carry onto the wireless ones. Besides the ugly data caps we have to deal with there, there's not enough room in the frequencies. Wireless is used as an excuse to not put in effort with wired and it's going to screw us.
There's plenty of room in the frequencies, even just using linear momentum encoding with directional transceivers. Add in MIMO/OAM and and suddenly there's even more bandwidth. the FCC / ownership of spectrum is a whole other chimera. Wireless today is like using a LED and a photodiode instead of a screen and a camera.
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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 ac…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen articles that it is just not feasible or even possibly to put all of the burden the wired networks carry onto the wireless ones. Besides the ugly data caps we have to deal with there, there's not enough room in the frequencies. Wireless is used as an excuse to not put in effort with wired and it's going to screw us.
There's plenty of room in the frequencies, even just using linear momentum encoding with directional transceivers. Add in MIMO/OAM and and suddenly there's even more bandwidth. the FCC / ownership of spectrum is a whole other chimera. Wireless today is like using a LED and a photodiode instead of a screen and a camera.