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Comment by 988747 | Hacker News Reader

In Poland we have 4 big telecoms and they compete like crazy with each other. I can't see why having 3 would be any different.

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Do the Polish telcos also all operate in these spaces?

- Newspapers

- TV stations/channels

- Radio stations

- Content streaming services (a la Netflix)

- Land-based telco (phone, cable, fiber)

- Wireless telco

Each of the providers in Canada does all of those things to some degree or other and because they own news outlets they wield a lot of political influence. Combine that with the fact that most of the people who have been in charge of our telco regulator have ties to these media conglomerates, it becomes pretty clear it's a captured market. So much so that it's newsworthy when someone actually doesn't just rubber stamp everything[1]. It also means external competition is limited to being unprofitable, so newcomers who enter the market don't tend to stay long and generally just get bought out by the incumbents.

It's a mess and no political party seems to think it's an issue worth pursuing.

[1]: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/c...

In this case, I think they have an established status quo, with different providers being the clear winner in certain markets, so they don't compete directly. At least, not very much.

No, it's because telcos cartels are illegal in Europe and there are actual consequences. European telcos are no saints at all but they occasionally get fined and things are a little better for a few years.

Just as an example, many tried to shorten the "month" to 28 days and they got a combined €228M fine in early 2020: https://www.repubblica.it/economia/2020/01/31/news/bollette_...

€228M for essentially a 7% hike in pricing.

I think that's what antimonopoly laws are for. As a Russia citizen, mobile and internet prices in supposedly more technologically advanced countries just blow my mind.

It was like that in Poland before Play joined the market, I remember watching TV and there were ads from established network simply attacking Play "In Orange you can have X, which is 15% better than our competitor <Play logo in background>"

Cant edit this anymore. But telecom prices were stagnating in Poland for a long time, then Play joined the forces and in 3 years prices were cut at least 50% on everything. The trick was that Play built their own IT-telecom infrastructure, not based on existing from Orange.

I once read somewhere that it's been observed in many countries that when telecom markets go from 4 to 3, competition tanks.

I don't know about that, but in CZ (right next to PL), there are 3 telecom companies and competition is pretty much non-existent. You can save some money by switching, but you'd need to do that every year, as those better offers come with an expiration. After many years, I've recently started to think about just cancelling it, because that's probably the only way to let these companies know that they can stick those offers up their...

Fixed lines, on the other hand, are fast, cheap and there's no data cap.

Because of cartels.

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