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Comment by rubyn00bie | Hacker News Reader

I really hope Starlink starts a boom in low orbit, low ping, internet providers... Because that's the only way we're going to see any competition emerge in wireless telecommunications. This merger is unlikely to do anyone good, IMHO, and is very likely going to make prices rise in a few years once the FTC isn't watching them. Look at the very expected level of bullshit AT&T has done with Dish Network's pricing...

If the government wanted competition they'd figure out a way to make starting a new wireless carrier cheap by providing network, power, and physical locations for startups. Reducing the barrier of entry enables more competition; consolidating spectrum into even fewer hands, more wealthy hands, does not.

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Its not hard to get any of those things - heck, for about 150k you can build a site greenfield with nothing there - but consider that Crown Castle, American Tower and a couple other much smaller ones, own 95% of tower sites out there - its not as if T-Mobile is renting from Verizon, most of the big carriers dont own their own sites anymore, and have not owned them for decades.

The real thing we're short of is spectrum, not cell sites. I'm skeptical that satellite will fix any of this, they have the same spectrum shortage issues too, with infrastructure that costs gobs more.

This is a perfect example of how Silicon Valley mentality and technocratic solutions often overcomplicate, to a ridiculous degree, the mostly solved challenge of how to get obtainable and affordable high-speed internet in the United States.

It's called municipal broadband.[1] Not everything has to be disrupted the way that SF startup cats want to. There is legitimately no reason you couldn't de-privatize spectrum and return control to local stakeholders in the same manner.

[1]: https://www.thedailybeast.com/chattanooga-has-its-own-broadb...

My municipality cannot even deliver water without making our kids mentally disabled from lead poisoning. Not sure I want them with a monopoly on telecoms too.

The average American "small-government" ruling class mentality chronically starves public goods and the commons from widely available resources, and then points to the failure of said services and goods as a reason why government cannot work. Eliminate this vicious circle and you see massive benefits; Chattanooga's municipal ISP has been extremely successful and popular.

Also, municipal broadband or publicly owned broadband would not, on its own, confer a monopoly. There are numerous examples of industries and market sectors where a public option coexists with market options. This is commonly seen as the most likely solution to the healthcare crisis in the United States today.

> The average American "small-government" ruling class mentality chronically starves public goods and the commons from widely available resources, and then points to the failure of said services and goods as a reason why government cannot work. Eliminate this vicious circle and you see massive benefits; Chattanooga's municipal ISP has been extremely successful and popular.

You can't just use this as a blanket defense. There are plenty of inept and corrupt local governments that are well-funded as well.

> There are numerous examples of industries and market sectors where a public option coexists with market options

It's not rightfully a "public option" if one of those is funded by taxpayer money and is capable of operating at a loss, whereas the private ones have to sustain themselves.

> chronically starves public goods and the commons from widely available resources, and then points to the failure of said services and goods as a reason why government cannot work

This is the lie that people trot out to explain the myriad failures of American government. Our schools suck because they’re “underfunded.” Oh, actually, they’re among the best funded: https://images.app.goo.gl/r4QwEWefuP34DZSj8. Our public transit sucks because it’s “underfunded.” Oh, the New York Subway receives far more public funding than say London’s tube: https://nypost.com/2018/11/06/the-cure-for-new-yorks-ailing-.... If California could build HSR for what it costs France, half the line would already be done for the $6 billion already spent. There isn’t a failure of government that can’t be explained away by lying about its funding levels.

That first graph has no meaning without some granularity. Plot success of school against actual funding. It could easily represent 9 schools with 1000 per student and one school with 9000000 per student and result in 90 percent failing schools.

Texas has a quasi private electric grid. It seems like it would be a good model for data too.

ERCOT (Texas electrical grid system operator) is essentially a mutual company/co-op structured as a non-profit, very similar to muni broadband.

"ERCOT is a membership-based 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation, governed by a board of directors and subject to oversight by the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Texas Legislature. Its members include consumers, cooperatives, generators, power marketers, retail electric providers, investor-owned electric utilities, transmission and distribution providers and municipally owned electric utilities." [1]

[1] http://www.ercot.com/about

Yes, that sounds like an ideal organization for connecting municipalities that own right of way and own or eventually take ownership of the fiber on their poles.

Most municipalities can do that, so the problem is likely more with your municipality than the concept in general.

Also why would municipal broadband be a monopoly? There are lots of municipal broadband projects that are one of many ISPs.

This isn't a theoretical prediction of the future, there are already lots of examples.

They’re all doing awful: https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/drinking_w...

> water consumption is down, there are still an estimated 240,000 water main breaks per year in the United States, wasting over two trillion gallons of treated drinking water

> While drinking water infrastructure is funded primarily through a rate-based system, the investment has been inadequate for decades and will continue to be underfunded without significant changes as the revenue generated will fall short as needs grow.

Doing awful compared to what? The person I replied to said their municipal water supply was poisoning kids, which is an anecdote that doesn't represent most municipal water supplies.

Now you're moving the goal posts to water main breaks for some reason when the point in the first place was that municipal internet is successful.

The American Society of Civil Engineers gives our water infrastructure a “D.” That’s what I mean by “doing awful.” Poisoning kids with lead is one particular problem, that’s actually fairly common: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lead-in-americas-water-systems-...

Safe Drinking Water Act violations are rampant among municipal water utilities: https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/city-new-york-comply-federa...; https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/12/climate/drinking-water-sa...

The trillions of gallons of water lost to leaks is another piece of the puzzle, wasting a natural resource due to poor maintenance.

Municipal sewer systems are another huge problem. They release enormous amounts of untreated sewage into waterways each year, because municipalities haven’t invested in capacity and rainwater separation: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/09/ameri...

There are isolated instances of successful municipal broadband, but hardly enough to say that the concept is “successful.” (We have some municipal cable systems on the eastern shore of Maryland. They were good at one time, but underinvestment has resulted in speeds falling behind over the years. Underinvestment is the same problem that plagues municipal water utilities.)

Most successful broadband networks around the world aren’t municipal services. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/10/uk-slips-...

Our privatized system does pretty well, doing better than France, Germany, the U.K., and Italy (which together have half the EU’s population). Most of the top countries, like Singapore and Norway, similarly rely on private companies. Part of Sweden (Stockholm) arguably has a municipal system, except it’s not like one that would ever be politically viable in the US. (The utility is publicly owned but not politically operated. They built out based on revenue potential and demand, not mandates to cover everyone. Imagine a US municipal utility that covered rich neighborhoods first and took 20 years to get around to wiring up poor neighborhoods.)

It‘s worth noting that ASCE has an incentive to parrot out bad infrastructure reports, since the employment of their members can be boosted by big pushes to repair „bad“ infrastructure.

A few years ago Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns pointed out that the ASCE was asking to invest more in roads than the economic benefits that would be realized from them, even according to ASCE‘s numbers. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/3/12/revisiting-the...

> There are isolated instances of successful municipal broadband

There are lots of successes, Colorado, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Chattanooga etc. and those are just in the US. It seems like you have some sort of axe to grind, going on huge rants about water and sewers.

> Most of the top countries, like Singapore and Norway, similarly rely on private companies

Interesting you mention that, since the government layed down all the fiber and lots of small startup companies just ran the endpoints. This example couldn't be more contrary to what you are claiming.

Doesn’t matter how many people use the pipes. They get bad over time. Right now a lot of the shit in the suburbs we built for the GIs and boomers is old enough to start falling apart, and public budgets have been cut to maintenance mode.

I used to be a proponent of municipal broadband, and I still am, but as a person now living on the outer edge of a minor municipality, and looking to move further from municipal jurisdiction, I personally find offerings like Starlink a solution to a problem municipal broadband can't solve. At some point there isn't a city that provides utilities to an otherwise inhabitable location, but with existing well water and septic technology combined with emerging renewable energy options, a low-latency high-bandwidth internet option is the last piece of the puzzle to allow a rural technologist to live the life they want.

AT&T owns DirecTV not Dish.

edit: I've always avoided AT&T because they're always the highest priced offering even after bonuses.

Starlink isn’t designed for mobile, or do you mean as backhaul?

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