Comment by jariel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jariel | Hacker News Reader

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No, this is totally wrong.

First - airlines, pharma, and financial services are nowhere near 'oligarchy' and don't come close to meeting the definition, just the opposite, they are very competitive.

With Telcos - the issue is real, but the drawback is mostly competitive innovation and price. Stagnant deployments and high prices would be the result. FYI - the US has decent broadband pricing. See: Canada!

Oil is a special one, but the industry is global and very competitive, especially in certain layers of that industry. Prices are widely known and understood. There is zero concern that 'some big entity' will control all of the oil, certainly not in America.

FB, Amazon, Google represent far more existentially problematic kinds of 'monopolies' because it bleeds into other aspects of life (social, media, information) and into other, adjacent industries. These are the real problem.

Search and social also have 'natural monopoly' kind of conditions which exacerbates the problems.

The other industry you didn't mention, wherein there is an existential problem with competition is 'health insurance'.

Canadaian broadband pricing is actually quite reasonable, especially as you have smaller players that are able to buy last mile lines wholesale at/near cost to compete.

Wholesale metro fiber is also considerably less than in the US, as public and utilities infrastructure is much more open. And there is already municipal fiber in Montreal, Calgary, and some suburban parts of Vancouver to name a few.

You also don't have to play games, like with Comcast that periodically raises your pricing arbitrarily and can really rack up if you're not paying attention. A few years back when I kept an apartment in Seattle, I went from $50/mo on promotional offer, to $80/mo regular, and ended up at almost $120/mo by the time I cancelled less than 2 years later. Such practices would never fly in Canada.

I used to pay $60 for a 30mbps line 2yrs ago in Canada. How is this good?

Teksavvy which has pretty good national presence using lines from any of Shaw, Telus, Bell, and Rogers charges $45/mo for 30Mb, $55/mo for 75Mb, and $70/mo for 100Mb. Just in nominal dollars without adjusting for currency, this is better than most pricing I've seen in the US.

Comcast is showing a $65/mo promotional offer for 1 year, with no details showing on what speed that is. If it's anything like the $50/mo offer I used to have, it will most likely increase significantly at the end of the year, and will continue going up in price periodically unless you call and complain.

Which ISP with nationwide coverage in the US offers significantly better pricing than Teksavvy on comparable plans?

"especially as you have smaller players that are able to buy last mile lines wholesale at/near cost to compete."

The US has just as much as this.

US rates are lower for the more common bandwidth options [1][2], and as soon as you consider Purchasing Parity - Canadian rates are very high. 'Equipment' / CAPEX is a tiny part of the cost of said networks, so it really should cost a lot less to manage networks in Canada if salaries are lower. Once that factor is taken into consideration Canadian prices are very materially higher.

That US companies are cheezy with their 'increasing rates' is kind of a different story.

[1] https://mobilesyrup.com/2019/12/18/canada-top-five-highest-c...

[2] https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/693.nsf/eng/00169.html

Which smaller ISP in the US is able to resell lines from Comcast, TW, AT&T, and Verizon with nationwide coverage?

I'm not aware of the US mandating lines be resold at controlled costs dictated by the FCC, but I don't deal with consumer/eyeball networks so perhaps I'm missing something? From the frequent complaints I see about duopolies in most US networks, I'm quite skeptical of this.

In metro Vancouver, I'm able to purchase 1G VPLS fiber links for around $800/mo, and dark fiber in the $1000-$2000/mo range for the most part, with similar pricing in Calgary and Toronto. Quotes I've seen in Seattle and Los Angeles have been typically 3-6x that range.

I can purchase municipal dark fiber in Coquitlam or New Westminster (suburbs of Vancouver) for $400/mo, and I believe Montreal is $500/mo. I'm not aware of being able to buy metro dark fiber for anywhere near that anywhere in the US.

canada is ultra dependent look at south korea

South Korea has a dense population and just came out of a centrally planned economy wherein they had to create a modern network and just rolled out fiber almost everywhere. That's a very special case. At the 'start' of such central/social reforms, leaps of progress can often be made no doubt, the issue is what happens in the long run.

I've managed some local networks (remotely) in this region for some high traffic sites: quite a handful of Asian countries have high bandwidth dense fiber inside the country, but it tends to go to crap as soon you exit the country/bottleneck heavily.

For example, Japan has 1G being common, SK has 1G being common, Taiwan has 500-1G common. They all bottleneck quite a bit exiting the country (except for TW, but to some destination countries only); and as a side effect, many "local" websites are extremely popular as opposed to being subject to other countries' laws and media.

SK has side effect of also having an extensive DNS and RST/hijacking-based national "great firewall" censorship system that is officially deployed for pornography and pro-NK articles, but has also been used for anti-LGBT rights websites and other purposes in the past, in addition to threats of forcing foreign companies to comply with heavy surveillance requirements like requiring national ID to comment on a blog post. Honestly, SK is not a great role model for internet or censorship. On top of that, while your "home" connectivity is fine, content providers trying to set up even CDN/caching nodes in SK are subject to serious annoyances, like the KRNIC/KINX crap where they really dislike it if your ASN isn't allocated by KRNIC - you're literally on the internet exchange already but all Korean ASs will not talk to you or give you time of day because you're not one of them, and are not present on the route server, and you're forced to route traffic that originates and terminates in Seoul through the US or Hurricane Electric or some other insane route.

South Korea is a positive outlier, it isn't representative of most of the western world

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