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One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

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Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#71

Post by jsjohnst »

chongli wrote: post #65
jsjohnst wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your numbers are way wrong, even if we discredit another commenter's point about city vs metropolitan areas. The top FIVE cities in the US total over 19 million people. If you instead use the top FIVE metropolitan areas you get just shy of 70 million. That's 20% of the US population living in or directly around the top five cities. Furthermore, there are over 300 cities in the US with populations over 100k. I'm too l…

If you use metropolitan areas then you're just proving the original point. Metro areas in the US are HUGE! For example, the Greater Las Angeles area is ~34k square miles. The entire country of England is only ~50k square miles! Understanding this is key to understanding why the cable and telecom businesses in the US are so difficult to enter.

Per this link [0], there's 10 million homes (out of 90 million with broadband) in the US with fiber to the premise, versus 250k in the UK. The number seems a bit suspect, but I generally trust Ars.

[0] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/how-th...

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#72

Post by russell »

dogma1138 wrote: post #28
0xcde4c3db wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm not sure where you got your numbers. The 10 largest cities in the US have a population of 26M (2015 estimates, Wikipedia). Generally population estimates are given for the metropolitan area. The 10 largest have a population of 73 million. There are 53 MSAs with a population over 1M with perhaps a total population of 150M. (I was too lazy to do all the addition.) The US has a large area, but it is primarily urban.

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#73

Post by jsjohnst »

jessriedel wrote: post #61
jsjohnst wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your numbers are way wrong, even if we discredit another commenter's point about city vs metropolitan areas. The top FIVE cities in the US total over 19 million people. If you instead use the top FIVE metropolitan areas you get just shy of 70 million. That's 20% of the US population living in or directly around the top five cities. Furthermore, there are over 300 cities in the US with populations over 100k. I'm too l…

Where are you guys getting these numbers? The top 5 cities in the US have 19.2 M residents, and the top 10 have 26 M. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... This one is more sensitive to noise, but still pretty different than what you quote: The top 5 metro areas have 56.9 M https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_metropo...

Fixed my 25 figure, accidentally added one city twice I think.

For the ~70 million figure, see here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_o...

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#74

Post by jsjohnst »

chongli wrote: post #65
jsjohnst wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your numbers are way wrong, even if we discredit another commenter's point about city vs metropolitan areas. The top FIVE cities in the US total over 19 million people. If you instead use the top FIVE metropolitan areas you get just shy of 70 million. That's 20% of the US population living in or directly around the top five cities. Furthermore, there are over 300 cities in the US with populations over 100k. I'm too l…

If you use metropolitan areas then you're just proving the original point. Metro areas in the US are HUGE! For example, the Greater Las Angeles area is ~34k square miles. The entire country of England is only ~50k square miles! Understanding this is key to understanding why the cable and telecom businesses in the US are so difficult to enter.

Also, the point I was refuting from the parent post is the claim that Europe is urban where as the US is not. That's simply not factual, as others have also pointed out.

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#75

Post by bogomipz »

warfangle wrote: post #50
imgabe wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's called last mile unbundling, and is one thing the FCC has refused to consider. 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.

Yep, local loop unbundling was a thing in the US, it was basically a provision in the 1996 Telecommunications Act to promote competition. It largely worked too, you used to have your choice of 10 or 12 DSL providers in the US. You could do that with things like copper local loops, I would love to see it with Cable but I suppose theres not a good way to share the local loops in cable plant as they are mostly fiber now. It too bad EEOC(ethernet over copper) never took off.

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#76

Post by Camillo »

dogma1138 wrote: post #28
0xcde4c3db wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

This is a nonsensical statistic to use, irrespective of whether the numbers of right or wrong. Imagine taking the UK and copy-pasting it 10 times. Make the new deca-UK a single country, let's call it 10UK.

Obviously, 10UK has exactly the same proportion of people living in "major cities" as the original UK. Obviously, the infrastructure serving the 10 copies of each major city is equally affordable for a country with 10x of everything (or even more affordable, due to more economies of scale).

But the 10 largest cities of 10UK are the 10 copies of London, and thus the proportion of people living in the 10 largest cities of 10UK is equal to the proportion of people living in the single largest city in the UK. Clearly, this is the wrong number to use to estimate anything related to the problem at hand.

This is one of those rare situations where avoiding the wrong conclusion requires zero knowledge of the world; cognitive ability on its own is sufficient. In other words, you are demonstrably stupid.

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#77

Post by zanny »

riskable wrote: post #3

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 live in a town that got municipal broadband at the turn of the millennia. Since about 1999 they have offered 10/2 up to 10/10 speeds for $25-$50 a month over coax.

Except... that is all they have. All they have ever had. And as the population has risen, they have no budget to deploy more servers to meet demand, so every night the speeds crash and you have intermittent outages. Especially on weekends. They are running 20 year old switches that have to handle Netflix loads on a nightly basis.

So you go to town council meetings to find out whats up and it turns out that over 15 years later they still owe some ~3 million on the original bill of 22 million, and the whole town is 10 million in the red (with a population of 3 thousand) so it cannot spend money on practically anything.

So main street is like driving on a cobble trail with potholes that go unfilled for years, and school taxes are the highest in five surrounding boroughs and its still not enough for them.

Sure, you can be certain they got ripped off with whomever they bought the original deployment from back then, given its just coax and not even fiber, and the municipal ISP is only a small piece of general budget mismanagement, but it is a reflection on how bad in general politicians are at budgeting, and nobody should ever be surprised when someone cannot make a reasonable budget when they are doing it with other peoples money and they have no consequences to themselves besides possible reelection issues.

IMO, it is just a more fundamental reflection that politics and political office as it is arranged in the states is both systemically intentional and attracts people who are not technical, not actuarial, and often lawyers and other "people" persons who can talk big to get elected and then go into an echo-chamber of self-reinforcing superiority with all the other elected officials such that they never attract the kind of critical thinking or knowledge to approach anything close to municipal... anything, really, with any degree of competence. They just defer to their friends friend at a teleco wiring company or a water treatment operator or a civil engineering corps and get turned into a money faucet for terrible results. I'm not saying every government has to behave that way, but at least from my observations all the ones I have been under have, at best, been incompetent, and have often been of malicious intent towards its own citizens at their expense for corporate donors and insiders to their social circle. But it is certainly systemically intentional.

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#78

Post by tomkinstinch »

colechristensen wrote: post #36
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

In Rochester, NY we are fortunate to have a local company competing with Time Warner by offering gigabit fiber to the home[1]. The local company is hugely popular, and based on their rate of expansion, very successful.

When my house was built in 1890 it did not have electricity, and all rooms were illuminated by gas lights. As of last year, it has gigabit fiber. Infrastructure can change. It helps to have locals take action, and citizens have to be vocal.

1. https://greenlightnetworks.com/

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#79

Post by harryh »

csydas wrote: post #59
harryh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Out of curiosity, what provider and what advertised speeds and what speeds during actual use? I'm not doubting your statement so much as just honestly curious, since getting access to the Internet in the US, from my experience, has been significantly worse than other places in the world where I've lived. In most of the EU, Asia, and in Russia, getting Internet was a breeze for my partner and I whenever we moved, and…

Time Warner. 100MBPs both advertised and actual.

For another $10 I could go to 200. For another $20 I could go to 300.

Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other

#80

Post by jsjohnst »

jsjohnst wrote: post #58
dogma1138 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your numbers are way wrong, even if we discredit another commenter's point about city vs metropolitan areas. The top FIVE cities in the US total over 19 million people. If you instead use the top FIVE metropolitan areas you get just shy of 70 million. That's 20% of the US population living in or directly around the top five cities. Furthermore, there are over 300 cities in the US with populations over 100k. I'm too l…

One last post to further emphasize my point, in the UK there are zero areas with a population of over 10k per square mile (highest[0] is ~15k per km², which is very roughly ~6k in miles²). In the US, there's >100 cities, per Wikipedia [1].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_districts_by... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...

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