Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

There's a nice analysis in this week's Economist on cellular competition in Europe. There's been a conclusion by some European antitrust regulators that it takes at least four competing cellular carriers before prices come down. Three isn't enough.

The US acts as if one unregulated carrier is enough in cable.

View on HN

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.

Oh they know, they're just all on the take:

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/recips.php?cycle=2014&id=D0...

Relatedly, it's depressing just how cheaply you can buy the house/senate.

Almost makes you wish Apple, Facebook and Google would team up and buy them.

They buy them for their own purposes, not necessarily for the "greater good".

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/google-facebook-amazon-lobbying...

Since we invitably have legislatures heavily influence (and sometimes fully captured) by moneyed interests, often the best we can hope for is competition between the different factions of moneyed interests to shape policy such that the outcome is triangulated to be somewhat more beneficial to the public than if one faction had unchecked influence. Until the last 20 years or so, the media and telecoms industry were separate factions that had some competing interests and sometimes served as a checked on one another. Now they're merged/merging into media telecoms conglomerates, but the tech industry has recently risen as a competitor with even more directly competing interests.

It'll be interesting to see how the lobbyist wrangling behind the scenes works out. The tech industry is the new kid on the block, especially in terms of their presence in Washington DC, and it takes time to build up relationships and influence in politics. It's not quite as quickly scalable as the tech industry is used to, but they also have vastly more resources.

Buying politicians has a great ROI:

http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2014/11/17/fixed-fortunes...

> 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 don't think it's a necessity.

> plus some who believe that the poor ought to be excluded from using basic infrastructure anyway

Do you have evidence for that statement?

I hear you but you can counter-claim it easily for high-speed Internet for business. Just look at how critical the Internet is to all kinds of firms these days. Even those that mostly don't need the Internet often have an expensive, leased line for main HQ. There's also the meme of traveling salespeople and such who benefit from higher speeds.

So, with so much dependence, it stands to reason a country's businesses can be a bit more competitive and efficient if they have high-speed, low-cost Internet. The Internet part is necessary for most even if other attributes aren't. They're certainly useful, though, as they increase capabilities and profit simultaneously.

Do you consider basic telephone service a necessity?

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.

From 2011: 80% of fortune 500 jobs accept only online applications.

http://2010-2014.commerce.gov/blog/2011/12/30/look-ahead-201...

The EU telecom market is just as horrible, most countries have only 1-2 "true" ISP's with actual infrastructure to their subscribers and 2-3 cell providers the rest are ISP's that rent fibers/coax access and MVNOs.

Setting up infrastructure is extremely expensive especially in cities where allot of the European population lives. The US has a different problem where only 4% of the population lives in a major cities so ISP's have to lay allot of infrastructure and historically the more or less remain around their original starting zones and creep out very slowly.

Fiber/Coax infrastructure in the US should be done on a state and municipal levels and then offered to ISP's at a fixed price to recoup the costs via a tender based on the cost to the end consumer

> 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 <100K residents, most people in the UK live in cities with over 250K residents.

The rest of Europe isn't that much different. WW2 caused a major shift of population to major cities while in the US it didn't while the US population is still very urban they size of cities/towns is smaller in general.

Also i really hate when people compare the US to a specific EU country the US is bigger than Europe go out of major cities in Europe and you'll have shitty internet, there are towns and cities in Germany where the best you can get is a 10mbit DSL and it's not a unique case in Europe.

Many small/medium American "cities" are municipalities that are directly attached to (or even surrounded by) a larger urban area. It's basically a quirk of how local government is structured rather than anything that has to do with population or infrastructure density. For example, it's unlikely that many residents of Beverly Hills (<50K residents) think of themselves as living in a small town outside of Los Angeles.

Similarly, the municipalities of Boston and Cambridge remain separated by the natural border of the Charles River, even if by nothing else at all. Cambridge and Somerville don't even have that much justification for existing as separate municipalities: you can accidentally walk across the municipal border and back again without noticing it in some places.

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 lazy to do the math to add it up, but I'd venture a guess than 50% of the US population lives in a metropolitan area of over 100k people.

(Edit: fixed 25 for 19, accidentally added a city twice)

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...

I think last link is the wrong data to use. Despite the title of the article, it is using the largest possible "Combined statistical area" that contains the city, rather than anything commonly known as the metro area.

> A combined statistical area (CSA) is composed of adjacent metropolitan (MSA) and micropolitan statistical areas (µSA) in the United States and Puerto Rico that can demonstrate economic or social linkage. The OMB defines a CSA as consisting of various combinations of adjacent metropolitan and micropolitan areas with economic ties measured by commuting patterns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area

For instance, the "Washington-Baltimore-Arlington, DC-MD-VA-WV-PA Combined Statistical Area" (which is not part of the top 5 cities) includes all of Hampshire County, West Virginia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampshire_County,_West_Virgini...

a Google image search confirms that this is a very rural area.

https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&site=&tbm=isch&source...

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...

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.

Citation needed for the ~34k mi² estimate. Per Wikipedia it's <1/7 that number (and yet has 1/4 the population).

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Los_Angeles_Area

And the corresponding one for NYC:

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

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...

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.

> 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.

Responding with facts is enough, attacking the poster personally as you did in your last sentence isn't needed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com