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> I’ve put my hopes on fiber optical arriving soon, which exposes a much larger market on which multiple providers can compete

I live in Lithuania which has a pretty good fiber rollout, and has fair rules for consumers on common access to physical infrastructure by different providers.

In reality though it means you still only have one choice on who your internet provider is. It's not worth it for multiple providers to wire up an apartment or neighbourhood when there is already an existing provider there.

I live in Sweden where there is a national plan for rolling out broadband internet throughout the country until 2025 [0].

In Stockholm the physical infrastructure is rolled out by the municipality through Stokab [1] exactly to avoid this issue, the physical infrastructure, which is the most expensive and least competitive part of the deal, is public while leasing it out and providing access to the last mile customers is done through private companies. It seems to work pretty well so far.

[0] https://www.government.se/496173/contentassets/afe9f1cfeaac4...

[1] https://www.stokab.se/Documents/Stockholms%20Stokab%20-%20A%...

Yeah this is pretty much how VDSL works in the UK. The infrastructure is owned by one company, but you can have different any internet provider. I'm not sure I'd say it works well though, as in the UK I'd pay 3x the price for 1/20 the speed :-)

"It's not worth it for multiple providers to wire up an apartment or neighbourhood"

That's not how it is in Russia. In a city not far from Moscow we have 2-4 providers in an apartment building (FTTx). Just checked my bill -- $5 for 60 Mbit/s and $7 for IPTV with ~80 channels included. Hurray to free market :)

"It's not worth it for multiple providers to wire up an apartment or neighbourhood when there is already an existing provider there."

Except that it is kinda worth it if they'd think for a moment just how many folk would instantly switch to any competition that arrived in an area that's been consistently screwed over by the only provider there… All they'd have to do is offer honest services at a fair price and they'd steal a massive chunk of the area's subscriber base.

Imagine the cost of providing fiber is $50/month, and Company A has wired up a town and charges customers $100/month.

You're the CEO of Company B, and you have two choices:

You can wire up the same town, charge $60/month, Company A will drop their prices to match, and you get to make a profit of $10/month from half the town.

Or you can wire up a different town, and charge $100/month - giving you a profit of $50/month from the entire town.

Which one would you do first?

It's actually more like "Company A will drop prices to $40/mo in your coverage area as soon as you start your build-out". Company A has already sunk cost into the infrastructure so they can afford to do this and remain cash-flow positive. As soon as you go out of business they know they can just raise the price again.

For this reason, "overbuilders" tend to target high-income areas where additional bundled services increase the ARPU (annual revenue per user) beyond the base service. There's also usually a higher "take rate" (subscribers per total homes served) in high-income areas. The up-front capital investment required to build out telecom services is absolutely staggering -- we're talking billions for even a small area of a city.

This is why we need municipal competition, we have a last-mile cartel where they have agreed to not compete and just extract rent in the US.

You'll almost nothing a month, as the price races to the bottom - it'll likely be worse than $10 a month

I think the issue here is there isn't much profit to be made though. This isn't the US where you pay $100/mo for slow DSL with a ridiculous datacap.... I pay €19/mo for FTTH at 1gbit up/down and no data limits.

My apartment building has 20 properties, so if a competitor came in offering the same for €15/mo and managed to convert half of the properties that would be... €150/mo revenue. How long would it take to even pay back the GPON hardware they need to install in the building?

My provider hasn't attempted to screw us over at all yet (been with them for 4 years), but I am concerned that they are our only choice, so if they wanted to double prices we'd probably pay.

> I consider the root problem the monopoly the cable providers have, as its by far the fastest way to driver internet compared to ADSL. As such, I’ve put my hopes on fiber optical arriving soon, which exposes a much larger market on which multiple providers can compete.

Not that this a grave KPN - the ex-state phone and copper network company - dug entirely for itself. There were a lot of fiber companies and rollouts happening over the last decades, but KPN all bought them out and stopped the rollout, to prevent competition with its aging copper network.

So now the result is Ziggo - the merger of all the ex-state cable companies - has a virtual monopoly on fast internet, as xDSL/copper hasn't kept up with DOCSIS/cable by a long shot, and KPN controls all the FtH but has a dismal coverage percentage.

So the situation below the ground is not better than in Germany. We call the former monopolist with the violet T the "World champion in cramming data on a bell wire". Here its also just the choice between rather slow xDSL via ancient Copper, mostly older DOCSIS with abysmal upload speeds by Vodafone (Which bought out all Cable companies and is slowly rolling out D3.1) or some vey specialized construction when you are living in a rural area.

For my Parents, I built a 7 GHz Microwave Link to a neighboring Town with goodish network access. Luckily, there is direct LoS and we get 18-25MBit of the 30 through.

I am astonished tho, as I always had the impression that your mobile network is pretty good. In fact, as I work about 300m away from the dutch border, we regularly use VodafoneNL as Benchmark Network for our RF Products, as there atleast we get full 4G and not only 3G as on the german Vodafone Network.

Mobile data is not a flat fee per month, they all have data caps above which you either start to pay extra or get a throughput comparable to POTS modem speeds. So it's not a viable replacement for the wired Internet connection everyone has at home.

The "problem" everywhere is streaming. 4G/5G would be a decent replacement for basically everything else. But streaming breaks every data cap, sadly.

Oh, and games. I just read that some modern games have patches(!) of over 100GB. What the hell?

pings/latency/spikes on 4g/5g are not quite as good as general broadband either.

At least that has been my experience in the US.

Some countries have a flat fee, with unlimited volume per month.

On mobile networks the situation is quite good. Vodafone, KPN and T-mobile have 3 separate networks and are heavily competing which each other.

Except for the availability of fiber, the broadband situation is fine, especially in cities. You have 40-500 Mbps down from Ziggo, and 40-100 Mbps from KPN. No data limits. Newly built and revitalized neighborhoods usually have FtH.

For the the consumer result of the duopoly is ok for consumers for now, but I fear for the effects in 5-15 years. You already see Ziggo growing bolder and more expensive as their lead increases.

Where I live, a medium-sized city in the US, there is NO fiber option. One cable broadband provider is the only choice.

I live in a rural part of Drenthe. One of the most sparsely populated regions of the Netherlands. I have Gigabit internet through a small ISP, over the fiber that is owned by our local coop, for just 50 euro/month.

The crazy thing is that the rural areas all seem to have fiber whilst the towns are stuck with Ziggo.

It’s policy, the towns already have Ziggo so they already have fast internet. Rural areas typically don’t have that yet.

At least, that’s how I understood it.

I think the policy is that they’re first adding fiber to these regions, as people living in larger cities / more populated areas typically already have access to fast cable internet.

Or is this something that you guys did totally independently?

It’s totally independent. The local government is backing the loan though. But they knew they had to after they realized their mistake of giving commercial parties a permit to lay fiber in the village centras, without connecting the outside area. Now thanks to us all houses are connected to fiber, even if they don’t use it. People who do use it pay 11 euro/month to help pay back the loan.

There are many more projects like this throughout the country. But this doesn’t work in areas where people are not seeing (or don’t care) how this will benefit their environment.

Maybe Covid will help a lot of these projects achieve their threshold.

That’s great to hear, I love these kind of community projects.

Do you have a website or some more information about it? I would love to be able to use it as a reference to see if I can convince my local homeowners alliance to invest in this (I don’t have great hopes though, too many old people).

These are the rules and regulations for our coop: https://www.sterkmiddendrenthe.nl/cooperatie/statuten/

You can probably translate it to English with DeepL.

Assuming you haven't rooted your Apple TV, how does piracy help with the lack of an Apple TV app (aside from bypassing paying for the content, which is independent of Apple TV)?

To watch on your computer, HBO works fine.

To watch on your Apple TV, you have to stream from a computer z whether you use AirPlay (supported) or piracy.

Wait, HBO Go isn't available on Apple TV?

Last I heard they were discontinuing support for older Apple TVs, not all Apple TVs. Are they gone entirely in your region?

I live in the Netherlands as well and I have had diner for many years. Your comment makes it seem as if there is no fiber in the Netherlands yet.

Living in Rotterdam it does appear that way. Lots of announcements over the years but no actual fiber availability

Good for you. If you live in the Randstad or most cities, FtH is nonexistent outside of recently build suburbs [1]

[1] https://www.kpnnetwerk.nl/netwerkkaart

The rest of your point still stands but, plz, do your research. Vodafone did not acquire Ziggo. VodafoneZiggo is a joint-venture where Liberty Global (owner of Ziggo) and Vodafone Group are both 50% owners.

FYI the downvotes are for the phrasing. If you had written "Small correction:" instead of "plz, do your research" it would have gone the other way.