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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

Or downloading a high-definition, full-length feature film in less than five minutes.

Did you hear that? It sounded as if millions of hollywood executives suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced...

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The sad thing is that hollywood execs are scared by news like this when they should be looking at it as an opportunity.

The ability to download a full HD movie in <5 minutes opens up a treasure trove of revenue possibilities. It makes content delivery much more convenient and thus much more compelling for customers.

I think purchasing will become much more of an impulse decision— much like what the App Store has done with software.

Companies like sony have much capital tied up in movie theaters right? This would be a negative impact to those revenue generation mechanisms.

Was that what it was? Because I think it sounded a lot like scandinavia sighing that we've had this for a decade. (I'm sure other countries has too, the US really has backwater infrastructure.)

Admittedly this probably has a lot to do with luddite technology policy, but surely it has more to do with the U.S. having 10 times the land mass and 15 times the population as Scandanavia [1].

[1] Stats from Wikipedia, summing Norway + Sweden + Denmark area and most recent population vs. United States.

Actually, Norway and Sweden has a lower population density than the US has; we've got even more land mass per person.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependenc...

I think it has more to do with that we don't leave infrastructure development squarely in the hands of the market.

> Actually, Norway and Sweden has a lower population density

I realize that. The multipliers I gave necessarily imply exactly that: 15x pop. and 10x area => U.S. has 1.5x the population density.

I would imagine that non-uniformity of population (i.e., cities are high-density, backwater rural states are not) is exacerbated by the greater land area of the U.S.

Sweden and Norway has very non-uniformly populated areas as well. Don't blame your land mass, blame your telcos. They are screwing you over.

well for the most part, the US has no market for utilities - it is all monopolies

Government-issued monopolies. This is terrible stick to try to bludgeon markets with; there's hardly a market to be found.

If we've got 10 times the land mass and 15 times the population, and rolling out speedy broadband is more cost-effective given greater population density, doesn't that mean the US should be faster and cheaper than Scandinavia, not slower and more expensive?

Perhaps I'm not thinking about this clearly, but I'm figuring that greater population density makes it less cost-effective because you have more endpoints, and therefore need more network branching, more wires, more intermediate nodes, more digging, and more time per square km.

If your revenue is what you get paid every month by your subscribers, and your cost is your total mileage of fiber (plus switching equipment, upstream connection, etc.), then the more subscribers you have per mile of fiber in the ground, the higher your net income.

More saliently, the justification most often trotted out when US consumers complain about being so ill-served by broadband providers is the higher population density in Japan and South Korea.

Ah, I was stupidly neglecting the profits from subscribers after the infrastructure was in place. However, wouldn't this run counter to the OP's argument that it's the free market economics preventing this from happening? With the greater profits available afterwards, why wouldn't the money-grubbing bastards invest in it?

I'm not saying the reason for the US's poor infrastructure development is decidedly because the US has left it in the hands of the market, I'm just saying I have a feeling it has something to do with it, that it's one of the factors.

In Sweden, government policy and government subsidies have ensured widespread broadband coverage, not just in major cities, but in large but sparsely populated areas as well. This is true for both internet infrastructure as well as mobile networks. It hasn't been squarely up to the market to decide which areas deserve high capacity broadband and mobile infrastructure.

I remember back in 2001 when I traveled to the most northern part of the country to teach programming; Kiruna — the world's second biggest city by area, population 19,000 — had wi-fi network connectivity over the entire downtown area (which admittedly wasn't as large as it may sound). This was not due to the power of the open market.

In Sweden there is no such thing as lack of cellphone connectivity. Calls suddenly disconnecting does not happen. The only reason I even know of these phenomena is because I've heard Americans speak of it. And, finally, service is cheap, dirt cheap, by US standards.

Sorry to get meta now, but I think this is why downvoting is a bad idea. You're discouraging me (and others) from working through any confusion they might have.

Having a larger userbase should actually make your service cheaper since you can spread your fixed costs across more users and get serious economies of scale.

This certainly does qualify as disturbance in the Force :-)

On the other note, I do hope that Hollywood would embrace this as an opportunity not as a problem.

However, if anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it is that you can expect big media to cling to the old ways of doing business for as long as they can...

Why? They still control the content and the licensing. I don't think they really care about the carrier media (DVD or packets), they care about extracting every last possible dime from the consumer for the content.

If the content can be distributed AND billed effectively over this pipe, then it's fine. If the content can NOT be billed appropriately, it simply won't be licensed for this distribution channel.

I think their concern is that it will be distributed over this channel whether it's licensed for it or not.

The repercussions of this on the next generation of gaming consoles would be very intriguing.

I thought the "download" part was funny too. 1g is as fast as many people's laptop hard drives anyway, so local storage is pretty much pointless.

Local storage still matters since bandwidth is not the only thing people care about: http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latency.html

Yeah, I know, I was sort of joking.

The hard drive certainly quickly becomes an OS-managed cache though like ram is for hard drives now though.

Don't have time to find the source, but latency is comrable as well.

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