Hacker News Reader

Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

I can't even picture a scenario where another ISP just says "Hey, we're packing up shop, you've got two months to find a new Internet provider". I guess I suppose it's happened somewhere, sometime, but it certainly feels one of a kind.

It's not a scenario I would have ever planned for, to say the least, but anyone who has service with Google is probably used to it.

View on HN

A lot of dial-up ISPs (at all levels) went bankrupt and disappeared back around the turn of the millennium.

I don't know where this expectation comes from that you should be able to pick a service provider and then use them until the end of time. Hell, it's harder to change your primary bank than to change your ISP. Businesses disappear all the time. Every time I move I go through the same hassle of scheduling an installation of new Internet service.

> A lot of dial-up ISPs (at all levels) went bankrupt and disappeared back around the turn of the millennium.

This strikes me as a particularly poor counterexample, as those businesses were effectively fungible: outside of your local ISPs email address, there was nothing keeping you from stopping your service at 718-867-5309 and switching to 718-387-6962. The underlying infrastructure for either of those ISPs was handled by someone else.

Eh, unless 718-387-6962 was long distance. My family went 1.5 years w/o internet after the local ISP went bankrupt, since nobody offered access that wasnt long-distance. Yes, this was a rural area, but those businesses weren't quite as fungible as you think.

> The underlying infrastructure for either of those ISPs was handled by someone else.

Last mile, yes. But there was plenty of ISP specific infrastructure.

> Hell, it's harder to change your primary bank than to change your ISP.

Is it though..?

I just changed my primary bank. The most difficult part of it was listening to the account manager person tell me about what a terrible mistake I'm making and how the other bank is just using me.

In some of my previous residences there is only one choice for ISP.

I think that's because rather than shutting down, a lot of smaller cable providers are simply acquired, or at least their customers are. Fiber is a different ball game than cable though, as I understand it.

Is it that big of a deal? Most places have Comcast or similar. It takes maybe a week or two to set it up.

It can be. A cursory search showed that the other fiber competitor in the area is AT&T. Google Fiber was $70/mo and AT&T is $80/mo and that was for the highest speed offered. With Google exiting the market, the fiber competition is gone and it allows AT&T to raise prices, if they want as there aren't any other options. It puts AT&T back into the fiber monopoly

$70 wasn't a sustainable price. The competition can use Google's withdrawal as a fairly reasonable justification to raise rates to a sustainable level.

Centurylink is offering gigabit for $65 flat (no taxes or fees) across its footprint, and 100Mbps for $55, 40Mbps for $45. At $70 a month Google was significantly above the average price people paid for internet, but they were offering a premium product (gigabit). Had they offered slower, more affordable tiers to residences that didn't initially jump, they likely could have broken even.

The problem with overbuilding is uptake rates, its not good to only capture 28% of the market or similar, you really need 40+% to break even. The City of Tacoma ran into this with their cable network, and so has Google. Webpass is Google's fix for that, only targetting larger buildings where a 10% uptake rate gets them in the green.

> only targetting larger buildings where a 10% uptake rate gets them in the green

That's not really an acceptable way to operate what is essentially a public utility at this point. We clearly need better regulation of these companies.

> Centurylink is offering gigabit for $65 flat (no taxes or fees) across its footprint

Oh word! They are in Louisville? Where do I sign up?

Hint: "average prices" for high speed internet mean very little in the USA as those prices vary wildly. I pay $30 less for 300Mbps service than a remote coworker does for 75Mbps - from the same company.

Centurylink isn't in Louisville, was just trying to highlight how Google Fiber has encouraged average speed per dollar spent to rise, and how other large providers are getting financially solvent wen running fiber.

Most of Centurylink's territory has only halfhearted competition from the local cable company (Comcast, Charter, Wave), and they just recently lost a lawsuit where the state AGs from Oregon, Washington, Minnesota and a few other states ganged up and prosecuted them for hidden fees and malicious billing practices, thus why they are on the straight and narrow now, with the price you see being exactly what you will pay.

$70 is typical for Google's Fiber 1000 plan. The reason it isn't sustainable in that location is they did a shitty job installing the fiber and they would have to redo the infrastructure. That doesn't mean that the price wasn't sustainable.

A sustainable price is one that has margins large enough that problems like that aren't fatal.

Infrastructure is far different than selling widgets. To make a profit, you want to get as many customers as possible even if you have to mix price points. The goal is to maximize revenue per home passed, not get a handful of homes at $20 a month higher price point.

It can take AT&T 90 days to turn up a fiber circuit. With this volume of customers (assuming there are 10,000 Google fiber customers in Louisville) who knows how much longer that will be

AT&T simply does not maintain enough fiber coverage in Louisville to absorb all displaced Google Fiber customers. These customers will primarily be going back to Uverse (DSL) or Spectrum (cable).

If the other ISPs are qualitatively worse (you mention Comcast here...), it's bound to make a lot of people very angry.

I read this as the Google fiber was terrible- many have probably already switched, and entrenched (pardon that) ISPs probably are better. Now, price-- that's another story.

Well, that's the issue - even with google fiber around, it was the corporate version of plutocracy. Functional triopoly? I'm not sure what to call it.

I expect Comcast rates will shoot up now that another player has left the field.

Funny story, I recently had a broadband provider cancel a 2-day old 2-year contract we had signed with them because they discovered the cable hookup was broken and didn't want to be responsible for repairing it. Never heard of that happening before, but apparently those contracts are only binding for the customer.

IANAL, but my understanding is everybody has 3 days to back out of of a contract. Maybe it's a local thing, though.

A 3 day cancellation for contracts is absolutely not standard.

Um, yeah, it turns out that it is:

https://www.sapling.com/2141544/out-contract-three-day-law

that is a really weird and really wrong thing to think about contracts.

Apparently I'm not the only one

https://www.sapling.com/2141544/out-contract-three-day-law

I think it happens a lot more often than you think, though often it's more directly presented as a particular market being sold to another ISP. However, it really is just an ISP closing up shop in that market and selling off its network/customers to someone else.

Most recently Frontier Communications comes to mind.

It sounds like the ones that went with Google haven't had a good provider since. Maybe those for whom and ISP is critical have already left?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com