Earlier quoted context omitted.
> South Korea is almost entirely urban much like NYC Is this even true?
Nope.
Not counting city states and small islands, South Korea has the 2nd highest population density in the world.
One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other
81–90 of 119 posts
Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other
#82Earlier 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.
Citation needed for the ~34k mi² estimate. Per Wikipedia it's https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_metropolitan_are...
Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other
#83Earlier 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…
> 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 numbe…
Responding with facts is enough, attacking the poster personally as you did in your last sentence isn't needed.
Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other
#84> What Charter really wants is the flexibility to buy up other cable companies in the future, and it'll have a harder time selling those deals to government regulators if Charter has been competing with the target firms the whole time.
So, FCC wants them to enter a territory to increase competition, and Charter says "we want to reduce competition down the road buying the competitor". FCC should simply make it a requirement, that Charter should be forbidden from buying competitors in that market. That's all, problem solved.
And Charter must be really stupid to claim they want to reduce competition when talking about monopoly restricting conditions for the merger.
Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> I suppose theres not a good way to share the local loops in cable plant as they are mostly fiber now
Well, here in Canada they're mostly fiber also -- but it still works. See, for example, https://www.teksavvy.com/ and https://www.start.ca/ ... "TPIA" is what they're called.
In looking them up, I stumbled on mailing lists for TPIAs hosted by Torix. Realised at that point that TPIAs have a lot in common with Canadian IXPs -- both put pressure on prices from Canadian ISPs, TIPAs by consumers and IXPs from businesses/services aghast at how much certain folks charge. See https://cira.ca/sites/default/files/cira-ixp-overview-web.pd... for more on IXPs. I wonder if there's a book on this somewhere, or what ISPs think. Rogers Cable peers with Torix, so it's not exclusively smaller players, in fact I'd say it's the everybody-but-telcos club but I'm sure telcos and US players are welcome if they cared to... (let's pretend they simply are unaware of the ahem, savings...)
Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other
#86Can 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'd wager that the short term (~10 years) consequences would be vastly superior service for every day citizens. In the long term, not certain I think that you'd see the same phenomenon as in any country which socialised an industry: at first things are — as you guess — much the same, because the same people keep coming to work in the same buildings, operating the same machines according to the same processes &c. Bu…
Nonsense; we're talking about natural monopolies here. Of course the government can't make a better grocery store. There is relatively little barrier to entry for that market.
Infrastructure has massive capital costs. If roads were owned by car dealerships and only permitted cars of their associated brands to drive on them that would be somewhat analogous to having multiple communication providers lay duplicate fiber (and just as wasteful).
Cable and ILECs are acting perfectly rationally by not competing with each other; there is little to gain when you can just squeeze your captive customer base for more money.
Fiber is fiber. The government could setup a public benefit corporation tasked with delivering fiber broadband last-mile infrastructure and keeping up with the latest innovations. If they fail to follow through, the courts can force them to follow the PBC charter.
If you want to leave maximum room for innovation (with resulting higher costs) the PBC could only be responsible for terminating fiber on both ends and any ISP who wants to compete would have to install an ONT on the customer site and light the fiber at the exchange. Then the ISP can replace equipment to wring faster and faster speeds out of the fiber if they want.
You can go the other way and task the PBC with lighting the fiber and delivering packets. It makes the process of starting an ISP much easier but you're reliant on the PBC to keep up with potential 10GB upgrades in the future. That sure would be a nice problem to have though...
Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other
#87Can 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 runni…
So why do you still get enough clean water and electricity? Not have brown/black outs and so on?
Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other
#88Earlier 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.
Local loop unbundling works very well in the UK.
Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other
#89Headline is clickbait; could the HN title be changed to something like "cable companies won't compete because they want to leave acquisition options open?" About as long, and far more informative.
Re: One reason cable companies won’t willingly compete against each other
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we still have some cultural inertia such that things like high-speed internet and cell service are seen as luxuries and not basic infrastructure (plus some who believe that the poor ought to be excluded from using basic infrastructure anyway). I'm also not convinced that Capitol Hill has fully realized that Comcast isn't competing with rabbit ears anymore.
> high-speed internet and cell service are seen as luxuries and not basic infrastructure I would never want to live without high-speed mobile Internet (which can provide the equivalent of cell service), but is it really a necessity to live? I was a boy before cell phones even existed, and anyone outside academia and a few tech companies had the Internet, and life was fine. It's certainly extremely convenient, but I d…
Even more previous generations' people would make the same argument: "Is telephone really a necessity? We lived without telephones and we were fine, our life was fine" and so on. Replace telephone with telegram or a car for even earlier generations.
Now the problem with this argument is that we're not living in that generation. We're living in the present generation, where a decent, if not high speed internet is absolutely essential in order to progress. Can you still live without internet in the present generation? Sure. But is there a remote chance that such life would be comfortable and painless? Absolutely not. Not even a chance.