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Comment by archmikhail | Hacker News Reader

The economic benefit of vastly improving data speeds across the country far out weighs the costs of improving the network. As the tech capital of the world, the US should not be #10 in LTE coverage.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/08/26/does-high...

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It is a large country and has existing infrastructure. It is hard to compare US to say a West European country and look at internet speeds or LTE coverage. US is just much larger so looking at geographical coverage it doesn't look good at all.

The existing infrastructure part is companies will refuse to update their system for as long as the existing one kinda works. Sometimes with only 1 or 2 companies covering a region. If both stay at 3G, the customer basically doesn't have a choice. So no need to upgrade.

If it was an African country, without an existing network, they might choose to jump to the latest technology (like some skipped installing wired phones and just went to cell phones in the past). In the chart Khazakstan and Uruguay is perhaps in that category.

In the speed category Romania kills it with 30Mbps. That's pretty cool for being a relatively poor European country.

> It is a large country and has existing infrastructure.

The latter part is the real elephant in the room here - the former reason is by now a cliché putdown when it comes to infrastructure investment in the US. Kazahkstan and Uruguay are not small, even less dense than the US, and poorer - yet have better LTE coverage.

But they fall in the other category -- probably didn't have an existing infrastructure already. So no backward compatibility worries, no need to throw away an existing investment if it already makes money.

Same with South Africa. We're a relatively poor country, very large and sparsely populated, but doing quite well on the LTE scale, although we are known as cellphone mad over here.

Yeah, it's really shocking to see how US carriers compare to the rest of the world (choose US in the Countries dropdown under the chart). I knew our wired internet speeds were lagging behind, but didn't realize LTE was that far behind as well.

AT&T and Verizon pretty much dominate and own the industry. Why improve when you can collude? Its not like anyone can actually compete, they own the spectrum.

Sprint and T-Mobile have significantly worse networks and access to spectrum.

Does not help that AT&T and Verizon are also huge stakeholders in the wired telecom oligopoly. They are overflowing in cash to crush competition.

With Google jumping into the wired internet business with Google Fiber, I'm surprised they haven't bought a controlling interest in T-Mobile yet (as Deutsche Telekom is always trying to unload T-Mobile on someone).

I don't understand why they would want to. Cell phone carriers aren't high profit business and has a ton of employees. Verizon has 180k employees and has net income of I see around 5billion profit on around 100 billion in income last year. Verizon FiOS pretty much got last Verizon CEO fired.

Google margins are way higher and Verizon employees more call center reps then all of Google in total.

From my understanding Google fiber is basically cheap dark fiber they got with some great regulatory concessions.

My view of it is Google spends enough just to prompt others to take actions (see their involvement in specturm bidding). Though my post might come off as judgemental, I'm not judging Google - that's merely good business for them to do. Wireless companies themselves are hardly examples of efficiency.

The same reason they acquired a mobile operating system: to prevent the loss of access to an ad delivery channel (mobile, in this case).

I don't see how them having controlling stake in TMobile helps them on that goal. I don't see either how wireless carriers have a real way to limit Googls mobile ad. I think Android alone accomplishes that goal, and until and unless phone carriers role out their own os alternatives that people don't hate, they'll be forced to offer Android.

Their involvement with spectrum bidding got them open access rights for only a few million.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious here though..

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