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Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

It's a good question, but I think one of the issues is that physical networks are a natural monopoly in the same way as most public utilities, so it's not just about enabling more competition but about establishing a regulatory framework around that competition, much like exists with airports and railways. OR, alternatively, changing to a public sector provision model like plumbing or roads.

What actually bothers me the most is the rules that (in most places) prohibit cities and towns from offering new municipal broadband service as a competitive offering. This used to be more common in smaller towns that had not been able to get good commercial service, and it adds valuable options and competition, but my understanding is that it's extremely hard for cities who don't already have municipal broadband to start offering it now.

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I mean, if it's a natural monopoly, then it should be public. Roads aren't private right ?

Not all roads are public. Many toll roads are actually privately owned by the toll company.

Most toll roads are actually public but then under a management contract with a private party for toll collection/enforcement.

I'd compare it to utilities like PG&E or ConEd.

These are private companies. But since they're considered natural monopolies, they are more highly regulated than a typical company.

And that has not worked out well for PG&E. Or rather, for its customers. I'm sure its executive team is doing fine.

Some are.

Local Loop Unbundling works fine in the UK

And worked pretty well[0] for the seven or so glorious years we had it in the United States before the Bush FCC ended it.

0 - Yes, I know, it wasn't perfect or even "great" most of the time but that was largely because the incumbent carriers dragging their feet on doing literally anything and the FCC not enforcing the competition rules. And when, largely out of spite, the copper-based incumbents simply didn't do anything to upgrade their networks while the not-at-all-regulated cable companies blew past them in speed and reliability, people switched in droves which gave the incumbent phone companies even more reason to throw up their hands and say "not worth it."

> one of the issues is that physical networks are a natural monopoly

When telephones were first installed, competing telephone companies stringing wires sprang up everywhere. Regulation put a stop to that.

>physical networks are a natural monopoly in the same way as most public utilities

But ISPs are not, generally speaking, a monopoly. There's usually at least two wired options and they compete with cellular and satellite options. Profit margins generally reflect this. The large ISPs are around the average for the S&P 500.

>There's usually at least two wired options

Per https://www.fcc.gov/internet-access-services-reports approximately only about 25% of census blocks have two or more providers for wired internet. Often within a census block most households will only have one option.

Census blocks aren't equivalent to households. Most of those census blocks are going to be rural with few people living there.

That is true, and you can look at the data in different ways. But still most households don't have at least two different high speed internet providers.

That's just not true. Depending on what you count as broadband 60-90% of households have two or more fixed options:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/50-mi...

Yeah, if 1 household has an option greater than what, 5mbps, that whole census block is considered as having options...

For my home, 2.5mi from the Capital Building in Washington State, I'm offered four wired broadband providers: 1. Comcast, "advertised 100mbps to 1gbps" (true enough, although you can only get 150mbps, so I'm not sure if that's bracketing) 2. CenturyLink, "25-50mbps" (CenturyLink's own website says "Our systems indicate that our High Speed Internet is not currently available at your service address." I tried several other streets in the area that indicated that none of them had availability either.) 3. Platinum Equity LLC, "10-25mbps" (err, Platinum Equity is an investment firm - oh, one of their portfolio offers "T1 and Bonded T1" lines to businesses and after further investigation would offer me 192K SDSL as a residential offering) 4. Integra Telecom Holdings, "3-6mbps" (a Vancouver telco that does business fiber). So there's one - Olympia, WA.

Low latency, low packet loss, high upload and download bandwidth, unmetered internet service is certainly a monopoly. None of this is possible with wireless. You're lucky if you live in a place with symmetric gigabit fiber service. There's only one provider. And quite frankly, there's no need to string multiple fibers to every house.

Everyone else has a subpar coaxial connection from Comcast/Cox/Spectrum.

If you segment any market enough eventually you end up with a monopoly. And your segment is unreasonable. Very very few people need symmetric gigabit fiber. Using that as the criteria is like saying Lamborghini has a monopoly on cars because they're the only one that makes one that goes 200 mph.

If you're laying fiber, it costs next to nothing to make it gigabit versus 10Mbit.

The issue is that fiber internet itself is a much better product than non fiber internet. And tell the people who have kids and are also working from home that they can't stream video because an HD video stream is 3Mbps+ and 4 people in a house streaming at the same time at high quality is basically impossible.

Some people also have security cameras streaming upload too. The applications for increased bandwidth are numerous. Remote doctor visits can use high quality video, you can stream things from your home NAS, backups are quicker.

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