Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

https://www.snl.com/articles/398790780.png (showing US at 15, ahead of Canada, Germany, France, Italy, and the UK).

Our subway and water systems are “public utilities” supporting “good paying union jobs.” How many of them would rank in the top 10-15 in the world? (Note that no country in the top 10 treats broadband like a publicly owned utility.) Moreover, the median age of municipal election voters is 57. What trade offs are they going to want to make in balancing rates versus maintenance and upgrades? (There is a reason that our water infrastructure, for example, is facing a one trillion investment shortfall.)

Sanders proposes to spend $150 billion on broadband. Over what time frame? If it’s the typical 10-year time frame candidates have been using for budget proposals, that’s just about 1/5 of what the private sector is investing in broadband annually.

Public broadband is going to be an $80 billion a year commitment just for capital expenditures. If you demand those be tied to “good paying union jobs” be ready to make it $120 billion or more. Add in operational expenditures, be ready to triple that.

Telecom is a huge sector. Even if you subtract the profits, you’re talking several hundred billion of dollars annually. That’s half the size of the military budget.

Your first link is misleading, as it just indicates that part of the US is using cable where most european countries use DSL + fiber.

> How many of them would rank in the top 10-15 in the world?

Anything would be better than Comcast, seriously.

It’s not misleading. The US broadly adopted cable because the market was mostly deregulated. Europe tends to lag on these measures because it’s more top-down regulated markets tried to evolve the existing phone network with DSL. So the few places that have fiber have great speeds, while everyone else is stuck with DSL. The US has an entire additional infrastructure that offers much faster speeds than DSL. Countries like France and Spain are now rolling out fiber, but the US has enjoyed a huge advantage in speeds for most of the 21st century because of cable.

You realize you cannot make such broad generalizations about Europe? Cable internet has been available and very popular in several countries. And DSL doesn't have to suck, G.fast offers speeds above 500Mbps. Also FTTH rollout has started long ago in most countries.

Even in rural areas the coverage is typically pretty good when horizontal deployment is done by municipalities or local utilities. And you see the exact same thing in the US.

You can make generalizations about Europe. Most of the EU population lives in just five countries: the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. The US has faster internet than all of them, although Spain is pulling ahead in a couple of recent surveys.

> The US has an entire additional infrastructure that offers much faster speeds than DSL.

Maybe download speeds, and even then, probably subject to a temporary boost while the ISPs slows down other people in the neighborhood.

The fact that no upload speeds are ever advertised means to me that the ISP hasn’t made any hardware or capacity improvements or, they’re just reallocating what they already have.

Either way, who cares what other countries have and don’t have. It’s pitiful what the “greatest” country on earth can’t manage to offer due to monopolies having a disincentive to offer it, since they also sell TV and phone service, which they would lose revenue from if people had decent internet connections.

Speaking of unions (can be good, can be bad), before deregulation (1998), it would take about a month to get a new phone line in Germany.

Yes unions can be good, but, my god, do they encourage massive inefficiencies.

It took me 2 years, from order to delivery, to get fiber from a private offering. Plus two contractors, a torn-up lawn and broken sprinkler line.

I don’t think that unions are the cause of massive inefficiencies.

Getting a new phone line and getting fiber run are not really comparable services. There's a massive infrastructure that already exists to get your phone connected; a one-month lag is remarkable in that context. Your fiber delivery was probably a bona fide construction project, in addition to whatever cooperation needed to occur between you, whoever your fiber was run to, and whoever was installing it.

Now go and sum up the gross profits of AT&T, Verizon and Comcast and let us know what they are doing with it.

Why would you sum it up instead of looking at percentages?[1] AT&T’s profit margin is under 10%. For wireline, Verizon’s is under 5%. Eliminating the profits isn’t going to change

[1] I know why Sanders does it, because he is catering to people who are outraged at the thought of “billions in profit” even if that only represents a single-digit percent of revenue. Indeed, if you go read Sanders’ proposal, he makes a point of stating how AT&T’s CEO made $33 million, as if that isn’t a drop in the bucket for a company that spends $140 billion a year on opex.

I would because they are spending barely 40 of that on telco. Most of it is being spent on their content play to capture "premium" customers i.e. not the 163 million Microsoft claims don't have basic broadband speed internet access. Might as well just divide the country and be done with it, if you are quite happy with the direction Big Telco will take us.

OpEx in the Warner media unit is just 4 billion of that total.

Yup looks like I jumped the gun there. I was looking at mobility group opex - 41 billion (150 million subscribers). Assumed rest was content (hbo/warner/turner etc). They have a header called "entertainment group" opex - 36 which I assumed was content. Digging deeper "entertainment group" was actually cable and satellite.

It takes an obese person more calories to take 10 steps than an average weight individual.

Profit margins (or numbers used to get Gov funding) are just a big, fat lie.

We do need healthier Internet, but do you really expect bad math or morbidly obese institutions to be the answer?

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