I talked with the mayor of Los Altos Hills, CA yesterday where I advocated for a municipal fiber ISP. It seems crazy to me that in Silicon Valley, and specifically in one of its richest towns, that broadband is not available to every residence.
She makes a good point: the residents don't care. Her argument is that ~20 mbps DSL is good enough for the elderly population. And further - that for those who find that inadequate - Comcast is often (but by no means universally) available.
I write this tethered to the cell network because I can't get a decent wired internet solution here, with direct line-of-sight to Google's headquarters and the mega-offices of many of tech's largest players. As I am stuck at home, constantly turning off others' video streams while I try to engage with my coworkers remotely, I deeply wish that we had either a more competitive marketplace or a more belligerently pro-consumer regulator.
And, by the way, the FCC thinks I have a dozen options for broadband. That is false.
I daresay, it's even worse than that. Your neighbors are actively fighting against the installation of infrastructure that would enable faster internet speeds.
AT&T tried to bring FTTN to San Francisco years ago, but neighbors decried the "ugly" green boxes that would run down the street. Boxes that are standard in literally any suburb with fast internet.
There are limited parts of the bay area with gigabit fiber, including some large apartment buildings. The rent is higher in those places, of course.
I don't think her DSL argument is coherent. The only reason DSL is available to most houses is that those wires were put in by a municipal phone company or highly regulated monopoly. Anybody who has talked to a DSL tech knows that a lot of that infrastructure is creaky, many decades old. We need to figure out what to do for the next century.
Personally, I think we should at least look at the local loop as a natural monopoly. Just like the city is expected to own and maintain the road to your house, it should own and maintain the digital equivalent. From your house to the POP, it's city fiber. From the POP onward, sure, let that be run commercially, with a free minimum tier, say 5 mb/s. If you want anything more, you can contract with any ISP who has a presence in your POP. That way we get both a truly competitive marketplace and universal access.
The city of Zurich has what to my understanding is public fiber which is available to most buildings. (I assume there are some exceptions). It is managed by the electricity company run by the city. https://zuerinet.ch
Setting up routers, billing etc. has been delegated to any third party ISP willing to do the job. I think they can charge what they want, as there are some very small differences in price. I pay ~44CHF/month for 100mb/s. While not dirt cheap, It's ok considering the price of other stuff here. Service so far has been very reliable.
I understand that running physical cable to all locations is expensive, and if there is not a guarantee of minimum customer buy in it makes no financial sense for companies to do that. I grew up in the 80s and should be of the MTV generation, but because of the economics I never had an option for cable until I moved away from the parental units. I couldn't imagine not having access to the internet in today's society.
I have hopes that with 5G, we could have a way to deliver gov't subsidized internet plans that allow everyone to be able to have a minimum amount of reliable bandwidth. Buy your $20USD receiver to receive a basic 10Mbps down, 1.5Mbps up connection. I think that should be free. Just enough to watch some video, enough to push normal attachments in email/web post (homework, resumes, etc). After that, if you want/need more bandwidth, then buy what you want. But at least this would provided a way to get past that last mile problem while making basic internet for all a viable thing.
> Her argument is that ~20 mbps DSL is good enough
that is insane. How having no internet is fine because 20mbps is enough?
That could be a good argument against fiber (which i also think is overkill, decent cooper is lower maintenance and with enough repeaters as good as) but it is hardly an argument against it being available to all as a public utility.
> And, by the way, the FCC thinks I have a dozen options for broadband. That is false.
and the real enemy shows up. FCC, from the bush-omaba-trump admin become the most corrupt organization one can think of. They openly lie and laugh when someone point out the lie.
> ~20 mbps DSL is good enough for the elderly population
I used 30 mbps internet for years till my ISP upgraded my lovest tear and I worked from home. Even gigabit was available I don't really care about speed. If you don't work with big files that needs to be synced often slow speed is fine.
I only care that my internet is stable. In this regard, fiber is way better, but for most elderly even a few hours a week downtime is not a big deal.
All it would take to get muni-fiber to really get going would be for the FCC to get behind it and for federal aid to spur development in places to go to these muni-fiber cooperatives rather than the telcos.
I see the internet as a road. I think it’d be cool if road tech advanced but if it didn’t the economy would still function because all of the things built on the robust road system are there.
If you have LOS to GOOG headquarters, you probably have LOS to someone with fast internet. You can set up plug-and-play directional internet bridge over several km for a couple hundred USD, and split their internet bill with them. Yeah there's a lot of hurdles, but if you don't have another option might be worth looking in to.
Common.net is planning on gigabit wireless service in Alameda and San Leandro later this year. And they offer 300mbit service now. The technology is there to do this without laying fiber or other traditional infrastructure. If there are many people that want something better than DSL start a wireless ISP.
> She makes a good point: the residents don't care. Her argument is that ~20 mbps DSL is good enough for the elderly population.
I'd say that's a horrible point. Many people don't care about having guns or being monitored 24/7. That doesn't mean we shouldn't provide those as liberties.
I think we all know that until an amazing product is presented to the customers, and the customers start to actually use it in its designated ways, the truly amazing product will be loved and touted by the people.
For example, China Mobile was routinely instructed by government to cut price [1]. In 2018-09, I visited Shenzhen, and spend 1 RMB and purchased 1GB cellular data package. This change absolutely is critical to China's booming gig-economy, and general digital transformation (I'll leave the privacy and propaganda debate outside, just for economy).
At the time, can China Mobile claim that "people do not care"? They absolutely can. But government is created to think in long-term prospect.
Walk me through this argument - my local utilities are a nightmare! Their pricing is atrocious and regressive (huge flat fixed fees to connect, tiny marginal costs), they constantly have to borrow money from the city to make ends meet. Combined, we pay $350 a month for gas, water & drainage, electricity (over 50% of the bills are fixed costs, unaffected by our consumption). Customer service is awful.
In comparison, our internet is relatively painfree and only $30 a month. I get that there are certain high level concepts of why it is good to treat internet as a utility, but as a consumer the idea frustrates me.
(Our city offers a municipal internet, btw. But it's worse service for more money, and has generally been a money drain for taxpayers.)
The danger with government nationalizing telecommunications networks is that once it is done, innovation and quality go way down. We had nationalized telecommunications for over 70 years and customers could only have one brand of phone, and we're limited in the number of phones available in their houses. In addition, long distance calling was cost-prohibitive. The monopoly only started cracking when MCI introduced microwave based long distance calling.
Fortunately non-governmental is on the way for you. 4G/5G are decent options, many areas (rural and in major cities) have microwave based broadband, and it looks like Starlink will become a reality soon. Putting fiber lines in the ground is extremely expensive (especially in California) and frankly is not really needed by most of the population.
Are you just using a cell phone? In your situation or may make sense to buy a repeater or other dedicated hardware solutions.
AT&T also provided an extremely high quality of service, not really seen since that time, and operated a corporate R&D arm that I think could fairly be called the global center of innovation for decades, designing as an almost side-effect of telephone switches a large portion of the computer technology we use today from silicon to operating system. One wonders where the state of the industry would be today had Bell Labs and Western Electric been able to continue with the lavish funding and long-term vision that their monopolistic parents afforded them. And the reverse, would T-Mobile invent the transistor?
It's hard to argue that innovation and quality of the telephone system went down under AT&T's monopoly when, during that time period, AT&T played a fundamental role in the invention of the computer and famously took measures as extreme as moving buildings while telephone operators work inside in order to avoid service disruption. It seems that other factors must have been in play as well in the eventual decline of "ma bell".
The story of AT&T's monopoly on telephone service and its subsequent breakup at the hands of both court and MCI/Sprint is a complex one that cannot be so simply used as an argument for or against the arrangement. It was a very particular situation in a very particular time, perhaps most significantly because AT&T created an entire market sector which the government had no coherent strategy to manage. So-called competition has also been quite insufficient to revolutionize the landline telephone market, it remains perhaps as consumer-hostile as it has ever been, something forgotten largely only because the cellular industry has replaced it (which, facing stiff competition but the regulatory wild west of the internet, is consumer-hostile in a whole new way).
> We had nationalized telecommunications for over 70 years
No.
Until 1982 AT&T in the United States was a legal monopoly, not a nationalized telecom.
The book, The Idea Factory about Bell Labs has most of the history including why the the defense work Bell Labs did during WWII and beyond helped them justify a nationwide monopoly on telecom.
> The danger with government nationalizing telecommunications networks is that once it is done, innovation and quality go way down.
Who needs nationalization? The market for transit is reasonably competitive. Local municipalities could install fiber along the roads they already maintain at a modest incremental cost, then offer the service to residents for a monthly fee to pay off the bonds without even spending any taxpayer money.
All you really need from the federal government is to have them do something about incumbent ISPs actively interfering with municipalities that want to do that.
> 4G/5G are decent options
No they're not. The nature of wireless is that it's cheaper if you have a low population density, because one tower for hundreds of people is much cheaper than installing hundreds of miles of fiber for hundreds of people.
It flips completely the other way in anything resembling a city. To get a fraction of the bandwidth available from fiber, you'd need a tower on every street corner, which isn't dramatically less expensive than installing fiber (especially when you count all the spectrum you have to pay for) and is still slower even then.
And cellular is even less attractive when you have Starlink -- then you don't even need the towers. It's great for rural areas. But it's hardly going to have enough aggregate bandwidth to let all of New York City watch Netflix in 4K.
I'm currently using a Netgear LB1121 with external antennas connected to AT&T's 4G network. It's maybe a smidge better than DSL, but not definitively so. Both throughput and latency are all over the map (2-sigma 1 to 70 mbps, 30-60 ms). I don't get a publicly-routable IP. So instead I have to buy another service and expend a bunch of IT-administration mental energy to use a VPS just so I can SSH home.
The basic rules of radio propagation should make it obvious to anyone that something like satellite (or even terrestrial) RF links will never achieve the density of fiber. And like power lines, they'll be something we run once and then occasionally fix for many decades. That may be too expensive in some parts of the country, but around here the argument rings hollow.
But you're right. It may be good enough for now. I just don't think it'll be good enough for decades.
> ... government nationalizing telecommunications networks...
Is that extreme the only other option we can imagine? In Texas, for example, the power transmission lines are managed by the Electric Reliability Council [1], and treated as kind of a "electricity market".
We have a private system, and already the quality is low. I live in the second largest city in the U.S. and I can only get spectrum "100mbps" in my building. Nothing I can do, the building is wired for spectrum. 4G reception is even worse, constantly drops.
Some utilities should be heavily regulated, or even owned by the state. Internet access is one of them.
Everything else is just "deregulate everything 'Murica" propaganda
I used to think municipal fiber was the answer to improve internet service, but while it may work, I've seen that it is certainly not the only way.
I moved to Berkeley for university and there are several competing options for gigabit internet (including Sonic, LMI, etc.). When the gigabit service arrived to disrupt the AT&T/Comcast duopoly, suddenly the customer was important, and we were able to get great speeds, prices, and customer service.
What I'm saying is that you don't necessarily need to make internet a public utility to improve service, just to get some real competition. If that competition needs to come in the form of municipal fiber, then that might also work, but it could also be a private company.
>What I'm saying is that you don't necessarily need to make internet a public utility to improve service, just to get some real competition.
You won't get competition in sparsely populated areas. There's not a ton of business sense to expand and try to compete in these markets.
The alternative way to get build-out in the underserved areas is to have gov subsidize a few interests. Canada seems have done a good job getting cell coverage in the middle of nowhere paying Rogers and Bell/Telus to build in remote lands. The US usually gives build-out requirements for stuff like spectrum and then doesn't enforce them when a company like DISH runs a scam: https://www.forbes.com/sites/fredcampbell/2018/07/20/dish-ne...
DISH btw is in full PR mode lending all their AWS-4 spectrum to AT&T and all their 600mhz to T-Mobile, since they previously didn't do shit with it.
More competition is really important for driving down the price and improving the quality of internet supply, however there is still a case for entry level public internet access. You could easily imagine a very slow internet connection (like 1995 level speeds) being supplied by cities as a basic service to help bridge the digital divide and provide basic access to people in need.
I think this makes perfect sense. Competition fundamentally doesn't work when it comes to infrastructure like this. I don't hear anyone saying that we need more privatized competition in our sewer systems. Why? Because it's incredibly costly to build and having private companies build two, three, or more sewer systems in one city/town would be insane. The costs per user of each one of those systems would rise dramatically because you would have far fewer people paying into each system. Same goes for our internet connections. Creating multiple competing networks in this case raises prices for everyone and we needlessly duplicate the amount of infrastructure required to serve everyone. That is why we make services like sewer, water, and electricity regulated monopolies. I don't see how internet, in this day in age, is any different. Just like everyone needs electricity, everyone needs internet. That being said, we do need competent government officials that can balance costs with public good. If we elect incompetent people, we get incompetent results.
There are a lot of places where I agree that it should. There are some cities where competition is alive and working well. I think at least we can agree that state governments should not be making it illegal for local communities to create public utility internet, as has been happening in some places.
The internet needs to have a free service tier, that can be given to under privileged people.
The entire government runs on web services, and you must have a decent computer to access it, as well as high speed internet.
Well, some basic cable internet services cost $70/month. That’s over $840/year.
Good grief! How does someone making $40,000/year afford such an expensive luxury?
On top of paying for rent, for food, for transportation, for a phone line, and now, for internet too. This is just too heavy of a burden to bear for under privileged people. Those who are younger, those who are minorities, those who are women that earn less.
The greed of corporate America is quite disgusting, and of our elected politicians that work in collusion with them, to prevent such free public services from being made available.
... or it should be cheap and regulated on pricing. it is crime what western nations charge for it. suppose areas of differing income levels should have different pricing schemes. coming from russia to canada, it is insane that you have to pay 1500% more for same packages for wireless and wired internet.
Has the author never heard of the Lifeline Program for Low-Income Consumers (aka Obamaphones)? This program already provides a benefit designed to provide free access to mobile internet. The $10 per month subsidy may not seem like much, but it'll buy you ~1Gb per month via Tracfone, for example. It's important to note that this program includes a requirement that "Obamaphones" be hot-spot enabled so that they can be used with laptops (i.e. by kids who have homework on school-provided laptops).
I am mildly concerned about the internet being a requrement for participating in society. The utility argument makes sense but people should also keep in mind, not having internet access should not exclude anyone from things like food,safe shelter,clothing,property ownership,trade and employment. Inconvenienced? Sure. Pay reasonable extra costs for having to do things offline? Why not. But let's not go full on dystopian like China here. The cure should not be worse than the disease!
In order for anything useful to happen in our society, we have to vote. It is now abundantly clear which party values what, and for whom. If we would rather vote based on 'abortion preventing our souls from partying with Jesus in heaven' instead of 'municipal broadband for all residents as a public utility', then we're going to continue to complain about this for another 50 years and beyond.
The problem is that saying this out loud means you're politicizing this problem. Well, it's largely a political problem, otherwise we could get the Federal Government to step in and properly fix this. Legislation in the past with the best intensions was purposely weakened at the last moment to allow billions to be taken from Federal programs that left zero actual improvement or infrastructure development. Guess which party is fighting hardest for such loopholes and promising that corporations can do this better than "big government"?
If we don't get our acts together in November, not having quality Internet access is going to be the least of our problems. Anyway, everyone enjoy going back to business as normal by Easter during the peak of this pandemic. I'm sure that will help as well.
This weekend here in Los Angeles is the Native Plant Garden Tour [1] which is in its 17th year but being presented this year as a virtual tour.
The quality from the gardeners streaming video over their home Wifi connections is sometimes okay, mostly mediocre, sometimes unwatchable. Of course this is somewhat affected by how far they venture away from their router into their yard, but still it's surprising how universally awful internet service is even in major US cities. And it's so much worse in rural areas.
Imagine wanting the government to be your ISP. You think private companies mishandle your privacy? Wait until the government has total access to what you do online without warrants. Try putting that genie back in the bottle. Remember, these are the same people whose competence is manifested in pretending the water in Flint wasn’t toxic, intentionally infecting blacks with Syphilis and not treating them, and giving LSD to school children.
Here's a question I have about these types of frustrating monopolies, and I'd love a point towards a book or something that can explain.
Let's say I have a bunch of money (or funding) for a big new internet provider that could easily outperform the existing provider. What makes it so hard to do it?
I hear complaints (and complain myself) about seemingly unfair pricing and slow speeds. The tech is there to make > 100mb internet, why isn't it more widespread? Surely consumers are willing to pay for a competitor that can provide it.
Agreed, but this article didn't convince me. Watching the Comcast/Verizon duopoly play out over two decades has overwhelmingly negated the argument for private-sector infrastructure.
If it's public infrastructure, the government has no incentive to innovate and it'll be a good way to ruin it. Electric, gas, and water utilities are natural monopolies and priced per usage. You'd end up paying more for slower internet.
[+] [-] zbrozek|6 years ago|reply
She makes a good point: the residents don't care. Her argument is that ~20 mbps DSL is good enough for the elderly population. And further - that for those who find that inadequate - Comcast is often (but by no means universally) available.
I write this tethered to the cell network because I can't get a decent wired internet solution here, with direct line-of-sight to Google's headquarters and the mega-offices of many of tech's largest players. As I am stuck at home, constantly turning off others' video streams while I try to engage with my coworkers remotely, I deeply wish that we had either a more competitive marketplace or a more belligerently pro-consumer regulator.
And, by the way, the FCC thinks I have a dozen options for broadband. That is false.
[+] [-] cbhl|6 years ago|reply
AT&T tried to bring FTTN to San Francisco years ago, but neighbors decried the "ugly" green boxes that would run down the street. Boxes that are standard in literally any suburb with fast internet.
There are limited parts of the bay area with gigabit fiber, including some large apartment buildings. The rent is higher in those places, of course.
[+] [-] wpietri|6 years ago|reply
Personally, I think we should at least look at the local loop as a natural monopoly. Just like the city is expected to own and maintain the road to your house, it should own and maintain the digital equivalent. From your house to the POP, it's city fiber. From the POP onward, sure, let that be run commercially, with a free minimum tier, say 5 mb/s. If you want anything more, you can contract with any ISP who has a presence in your POP. That way we get both a truly competitive marketplace and universal access.
[+] [-] kekeblom|6 years ago|reply
Setting up routers, billing etc. has been delegated to any third party ISP willing to do the job. I think they can charge what they want, as there are some very small differences in price. I pay ~44CHF/month for 100mb/s. While not dirt cheap, It's ok considering the price of other stuff here. Service so far has been very reliable.
[+] [-] dylan604|6 years ago|reply
I have hopes that with 5G, we could have a way to deliver gov't subsidized internet plans that allow everyone to be able to have a minimum amount of reliable bandwidth. Buy your $20USD receiver to receive a basic 10Mbps down, 1.5Mbps up connection. I think that should be free. Just enough to watch some video, enough to push normal attachments in email/web post (homework, resumes, etc). After that, if you want/need more bandwidth, then buy what you want. But at least this would provided a way to get past that last mile problem while making basic internet for all a viable thing.
[+] [-] tarde|6 years ago|reply
that is insane. How having no internet is fine because 20mbps is enough?
That could be a good argument against fiber (which i also think is overkill, decent cooper is lower maintenance and with enough repeaters as good as) but it is hardly an argument against it being available to all as a public utility.
> And, by the way, the FCC thinks I have a dozen options for broadband. That is false.
and the real enemy shows up. FCC, from the bush-omaba-trump admin become the most corrupt organization one can think of. They openly lie and laugh when someone point out the lie.
[+] [-] ProZsolt|6 years ago|reply
I used 30 mbps internet for years till my ISP upgraded my lovest tear and I worked from home. Even gigabit was available I don't really care about speed. If you don't work with big files that needs to be synced often slow speed is fine.
I only care that my internet is stable. In this regard, fiber is way better, but for most elderly even a few hours a week downtime is not a big deal.
[+] [-] Zhenya|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gigatexal|6 years ago|reply
I see the internet as a road. I think it’d be cool if road tech advanced but if it didn’t the economy would still function because all of the things built on the robust road system are there.
[+] [-] anderspitman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnopgnip|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pgt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MarkSweep|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hanniabu|6 years ago|reply
I'd say that's a horrible point. Many people don't care about having guns or being monitored 24/7. That doesn't mean we shouldn't provide those as liberties.
[+] [-] hkmurakami|6 years ago|reply
https://lahcommunityfiber.org/
I imagine the low density of LAH makes the cost of installing fiber throughout town more of a barrier than other areas.
[+] [-] justicezyx|6 years ago|reply
How can that be a good point?...
I think we all know that until an amazing product is presented to the customers, and the customers start to actually use it in its designated ways, the truly amazing product will be loved and touted by the people.
For example, China Mobile was routinely instructed by government to cut price [1]. In 2018-09, I visited Shenzhen, and spend 1 RMB and purchased 1GB cellular data package. This change absolutely is critical to China's booming gig-economy, and general digital transformation (I'll leave the privacy and propaganda debate outside, just for economy).
At the time, can China Mobile claim that "people do not care"? They absolutely can. But government is created to think in long-term prospect.
[1] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201803/23/WS5ab491d8a3105cdcf...
[+] [-] legitster|6 years ago|reply
In comparison, our internet is relatively painfree and only $30 a month. I get that there are certain high level concepts of why it is good to treat internet as a utility, but as a consumer the idea frustrates me.
(Our city offers a municipal internet, btw. But it's worse service for more money, and has generally been a money drain for taxpayers.)
[+] [-] bgorman|6 years ago|reply
Fortunately non-governmental is on the way for you. 4G/5G are decent options, many areas (rural and in major cities) have microwave based broadband, and it looks like Starlink will become a reality soon. Putting fiber lines in the ground is extremely expensive (especially in California) and frankly is not really needed by most of the population.
Are you just using a cell phone? In your situation or may make sense to buy a repeater or other dedicated hardware solutions.
[+] [-] jcrawfordor|6 years ago|reply
It's hard to argue that innovation and quality of the telephone system went down under AT&T's monopoly when, during that time period, AT&T played a fundamental role in the invention of the computer and famously took measures as extreme as moving buildings while telephone operators work inside in order to avoid service disruption. It seems that other factors must have been in play as well in the eventual decline of "ma bell".
The story of AT&T's monopoly on telephone service and its subsequent breakup at the hands of both court and MCI/Sprint is a complex one that cannot be so simply used as an argument for or against the arrangement. It was a very particular situation in a very particular time, perhaps most significantly because AT&T created an entire market sector which the government had no coherent strategy to manage. So-called competition has also been quite insufficient to revolutionize the landline telephone market, it remains perhaps as consumer-hostile as it has ever been, something forgotten largely only because the cellular industry has replaced it (which, facing stiff competition but the regulatory wild west of the internet, is consumer-hostile in a whole new way).
[+] [-] heymijo|6 years ago|reply
No.
Until 1982 AT&T in the United States was a legal monopoly, not a nationalized telecom.
The book, The Idea Factory about Bell Labs has most of the history including why the the defense work Bell Labs did during WWII and beyond helped them justify a nationwide monopoly on telecom.
[+] [-] AnthonyMouse|6 years ago|reply
Who needs nationalization? The market for transit is reasonably competitive. Local municipalities could install fiber along the roads they already maintain at a modest incremental cost, then offer the service to residents for a monthly fee to pay off the bonds without even spending any taxpayer money.
All you really need from the federal government is to have them do something about incumbent ISPs actively interfering with municipalities that want to do that.
> 4G/5G are decent options
No they're not. The nature of wireless is that it's cheaper if you have a low population density, because one tower for hundreds of people is much cheaper than installing hundreds of miles of fiber for hundreds of people.
It flips completely the other way in anything resembling a city. To get a fraction of the bandwidth available from fiber, you'd need a tower on every street corner, which isn't dramatically less expensive than installing fiber (especially when you count all the spectrum you have to pay for) and is still slower even then.
And cellular is even less attractive when you have Starlink -- then you don't even need the towers. It's great for rural areas. But it's hardly going to have enough aggregate bandwidth to let all of New York City watch Netflix in 4K.
[+] [-] zbrozek|6 years ago|reply
The basic rules of radio propagation should make it obvious to anyone that something like satellite (or even terrestrial) RF links will never achieve the density of fiber. And like power lines, they'll be something we run once and then occasionally fix for many decades. That may be too expensive in some parts of the country, but around here the argument rings hollow.
But you're right. It may be good enough for now. I just don't think it'll be good enough for decades.
[+] [-] jt2190|6 years ago|reply
Is that extreme the only other option we can imagine? In Texas, for example, the power transmission lines are managed by the Electric Reliability Council [1], and treated as kind of a "electricity market".
[1] http://www.ercot.com/
[+] [-] tinus_hn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdff|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bananabreakfast|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nixass|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schwartzworld|6 years ago|reply
Don't most areas of the US only have one cable / internet company? I live in a major city and we have 2 choices.
[+] [-] tarde|6 years ago|reply
It's not like the non-telecom segments were flying cars in the 50s.
[+] [-] briandear|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PureParadigm|6 years ago|reply
I moved to Berkeley for university and there are several competing options for gigabit internet (including Sonic, LMI, etc.). When the gigabit service arrived to disrupt the AT&T/Comcast duopoly, suddenly the customer was important, and we were able to get great speeds, prices, and customer service.
What I'm saying is that you don't necessarily need to make internet a public utility to improve service, just to get some real competition. If that competition needs to come in the form of municipal fiber, then that might also work, but it could also be a private company.
[+] [-] joecool1029|6 years ago|reply
You won't get competition in sparsely populated areas. There's not a ton of business sense to expand and try to compete in these markets.
The alternative way to get build-out in the underserved areas is to have gov subsidize a few interests. Canada seems have done a good job getting cell coverage in the middle of nowhere paying Rogers and Bell/Telus to build in remote lands. The US usually gives build-out requirements for stuff like spectrum and then doesn't enforce them when a company like DISH runs a scam: https://www.forbes.com/sites/fredcampbell/2018/07/20/dish-ne...
DISH btw is in full PR mode lending all their AWS-4 spectrum to AT&T and all their 600mhz to T-Mobile, since they previously didn't do shit with it.
In the case of the landline internet providers, there's around a half-trillion USD tax scam that's been perpetuated since the 1990's: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6c5e97/e...
[+] [-] blululu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhgorrell|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keeganjw|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gameswithgo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blackrock|6 years ago|reply
The entire government runs on web services, and you must have a decent computer to access it, as well as high speed internet.
Well, some basic cable internet services cost $70/month. That’s over $840/year.
Good grief! How does someone making $40,000/year afford such an expensive luxury?
On top of paying for rent, for food, for transportation, for a phone line, and now, for internet too. This is just too heavy of a burden to bear for under privileged people. Those who are younger, those who are minorities, those who are women that earn less.
The greed of corporate America is quite disgusting, and of our elected politicians that work in collusion with them, to prevent such free public services from being made available.
[+] [-] pinacarlos90|6 years ago|reply
1) security/encryption
2) bandwidth distribution
3) content freedom
4) Governance rules (federal gov?)
[+] [-] DavidVoid|6 years ago|reply
I live in a city in Northern Europe and we have it in pretty much all apartment buildings here.
I can choose between 17 different ISPs and the prices per month are:
If you live in the country-side though, you sadly tend to have much more limited options for a decent Internet connection.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fibre
[+] [-] perlpimp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcusverus|6 years ago|reply
https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/lifeline-support-afford...
[+] [-] badrabbit|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Iwork4Google|6 years ago|reply
The problem is that saying this out loud means you're politicizing this problem. Well, it's largely a political problem, otherwise we could get the Federal Government to step in and properly fix this. Legislation in the past with the best intensions was purposely weakened at the last moment to allow billions to be taken from Federal programs that left zero actual improvement or infrastructure development. Guess which party is fighting hardest for such loopholes and promising that corporations can do this better than "big government"?
If we don't get our acts together in November, not having quality Internet access is going to be the least of our problems. Anyway, everyone enjoy going back to business as normal by Easter during the peak of this pandemic. I'm sure that will help as well.
[+] [-] malingo|6 years ago|reply
The quality from the gardeners streaming video over their home Wifi connections is sometimes okay, mostly mediocre, sometimes unwatchable. Of course this is somewhat affected by how far they venture away from their router into their yard, but still it's surprising how universally awful internet service is even in major US cities. And it's so much worse in rural areas.
[1] https://www.nativeplantgardentour.org/
[+] [-] BadMrFrosty|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _carl_jung|6 years ago|reply
Let's say I have a bunch of money (or funding) for a big new internet provider that could easily outperform the existing provider. What makes it so hard to do it?
I hear complaints (and complain myself) about seemingly unfair pricing and slow speeds. The tech is there to make > 100mb internet, why isn't it more widespread? Surely consumers are willing to pay for a competitor that can provide it.
[+] [-] rubicks|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miguelmota|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|6 years ago|reply