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Comment by darth_avocado | Hacker News Reader

I know it’s hard for a lot of people but why do we automatically blame everything on Facebook?

The inaccessibility to WhatsApp completely brings life to a standstill for a lot of people across the world. Isn’t that more of a failure on the part of the governments, people and companies that exist there? How is a app that needs access to internet somehow a bigger necessity than the basic function of the device the app was installed in: Calls and texts?

Shouldn’t we focus on making those services accessible and affordable? Instead of demanding Facebook be responsible for everything?

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We did focus on making the services accessible and affordable. Then phone providers and ISPs took the goverment funds and went "nah". As late as 2005 I was paying AT&T ~$9/minute to call my family abroad and up to $1 per text. If it weren't for tech companies like Skype/WhatsApp/Facebook/Google I have no doubt that would still be the case today.

That's my experience as well. Not sure why tweet's author thinks government will necessarily improve rather worsen a service.

>We did focus on making the services accessible and affordable. Then phone providers and ISPs took the goverment funds and went "nah"

1. I hear this narrative a lot. is there more to this? I find it hard to believe that the government gave phone providers/ISPs $$$ no strings attached.

2. giving $$$ to companies to expand their infrastructure make sense to increase accessibility, but doesn't to make it more affordable. they'll charge what the market can bear, and a few hundred million in government funding isn't going to change that, unless there are strings attached (see above). otherwise we'll end up getting better coverage/speeds, but it will still cost roughly the same.

Ars Technica has a lot of reports about this, if you wish to learn more about it:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/11/big-telcos-slam-...

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/comca...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/06/monticello-appea...

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/09/most-...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/lawsuit-comcast-...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/isps-reminded-to...

> Ars Technica has a lot of reports about this, if you wish to learn more about it:

with all due respect, your links don't seem to be relevant. I skimmed the first few and none of them look related to the question of "did the government give phone providers/ISPs money with no strings attached?"

>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/11/big-telcos-slam-...

appears to mainly talk about unbundling rather than whether strings are attached to government grants/subsidies. at the end there's discussion about them wanting to receive grants similar to south korea, but doesn't say anything about the actual terms of the money that was given.

>https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/comca...

talks about how bad broadband coverage is, but nothing about the conditions attached to government funding

>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/06/monticello-appea...

talks about municipal ISP, not about government funding

>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/isps-reminded-to...

Comes close but seems to be isolated to a single entity, whereas everybody seems to think all the major players are doing it. Is AT&T taking the money and not spending it on broadband, in contravention of the terms of the grant? If so, was there an investigation substantiating this? Or was it simply a case of people expecting them to spend it on gigabit fiber but instead they spent it on copper lines for rural residents?

I don't know why you are so hung up on the "strings attached" part. It doesn't matter how many conditions the government imposes if no one is held accountable for actually achieving them.

>It doesn't matter how many conditions the government imposes if no one is held accountable for actually achieving them.

Is that what's happening though? Are there a bunch of strings attached but the FCC isn't bothering enforcing them? If so, can you substantiate this? At least from the batch of links from the parent post, the only requirement seems to be "needs to be spent on building infrastructure", not that we get gigabit fiber or whatever.

the links are relevant. the isps took billions and didn't expand municipal wifi when promised nor did they lower costs for calls.

>the links are relevant.

They're only relevant insofar as "ISPs bad", not to the original question of what conditions are attached to the funding.

>the isps took billions and didn't expand municipal wifi when promised nor did they lower costs for calls.

1. sources for these "promises"?

2. what type of promises where these? contractual obligations, or optimistic statements on press releases?

https://missoulian.com/news/state-and-regional/montana-psc-r...

The major providers are notorious for not upgrading their infrastructure. The bizarre decision to "punish" centurylink by giving them $91 million is par for the course.

The absurd definition of broadband used by government means centurylink got $91 million and all they had to do was keep up with dsl capabilities. You'd hope that much money would get fiber to the home to a few communities, but nah.

>all they had to do was keep up with dsl capabilities

The terms of the settlement are bizarre, but there does appear to be strings attached to the money, contrary to what you claimed.

>CenturyLink will receive more than $91 million over the next six years to deploy 10 megabit-per-second download and 1 megabit-per-second upload broadband to 33,000 high-cost rural locations in Montana.

6 years later...

DSL is capable of the specs in the requirements. Centurylink has done basically nothing but maintain status quo and upgraded minimal copper and dsl connections. Wibaux montana can get satellite or dsl. Centurylink pocketed the cash and called it good.

Wolf Point has a similar situation. Montana is about to see about 300 million in federal funding and big ISPs are lobbying to slurp it up, and guess what they'll do with it? Probably bonuses for regional execs, and some marketing to make the local yokels think something has been accomplished.

>DSL is capable of the specs in the requirements. Centurylink has done basically nothing but maintain status quo and upgraded minimal copper and dsl connections.

right, because the terms of the funding seems to be that they bring access to new homes, not upgrade existing lines to faster connections. is this just a disconnect between what the public was expecting (ie. "dsl gets upgraded to fiber!") versus what was actually required (ie. "more people get dsl!")?

"Shouldn’t we focus on making those services accessible and affordable? "

This. If calls and international calls were acessible, whatsapp wouldnt exist

> This. If calls and international calls were acessible, whatsapp wouldnt exist

Whatsapp offers a whole lot more: read receipts, group chats, images and video, voice notes, location sharing, a web client (albeit a quite limited one), and it has a generally pretty good UX/UI (much better than Androids stock messaging app). Regardless of the economics, on a technical level calling/texting isn't competitive with Whatsapp.

Whatsapp also provides a very nice payment feature in India. I use it very often.

"at the technical level calling/texting isn't competitive with Whatsapp."

This does not seem to an a comment informed about how the network works

VoLTE is better quality audio than what's app, it gracefully works in large crowds and countryside instead of degrading into individual sylabiles the way whats app does. Latency is 10x lower. There is no central server that cam fail like it did last week. Calling is an intrinsic, optimised part of the mobile network, replacing it at a higher layer will always be inferior.

Its the economics that moves the needly, my mom would have neber installed an app to get all the other fluff like read reciepts

With "technical" here I mean the featureset that's delivered to the user.

Maybe your mom doesn't care about the "fluff", but your mom isn't the person in society that sets the standard for apps that intrinsically require a network effect, and the people that do set such a standard, do care about what you dismiss as fluff.

"people that do set such a standard, do care about what you dismiss as fluff"

Quick poll among my friends, 15% care about read reciepts but 100% care about money.

My mom is about the median age of a what's app user, who are these magical people that set the standard more than she does? Based on what evidence do you believe their preferences are different to her's?

What ever became of RCS? Wasn’t that supposed to support a good number of these features?

RCS tries to offer the feature set of WA and iMessage while engaging the mobile operator. WhatsApp and iMessage are "over the top" services that "only" leverage mobile data / TCP etc.

RCS was an awful compromise in order to pander to the telcos. Being a simple data service avoids a lot of the problems introduced by cellular infrastructure. We can expect all of the same functionality/robustness/compatibility issues of SMS/MMS.

RCS "engaging with mobile operators" means that it will enable spam and marketing.

Assuming an increase in the adoption of the technology, users will still mainly use OTT services.

WhatsApp Business is a saint in comparison to the Wild West of telcos.

It requires news infrastructure on the telco side as well as client-side support:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

There seems to be only lukewarm support for it from all parties involved. (Apple isn't even bothering to do much/anything, so that's a huge installed base where nothing is happening.)

What is "accessible"? I can call anywhere in the USA for free, and its $0.01/minute to call an overseas relative, yet I almost never call.

Accessible would be the mobile networks allowing people to call overseas for $0.01 per minute.

I would not dare try to call an international number via ATT/Verizon/T-Mobile outside of Canada/Mexico, because I would expect to pay at least $10 for the call if not more.

I do not know where one would get $0.01 per minute international calls from the US, but it is most likely not as easy as an app on your smartphone.

Honestly, is there a good reason this hasn't happened yet? If people use WhatsApp, the mobile networks get $0, so they ought to be offering at least somewhat competitive prices...

Why and how would the telephone networks compete with $0.00? As far as I understand, the whole telephone protocol is decades old and involves various networks paying each other based on who knows what per years old contracts at years old prices.

VOIP from tmo/vz/att is still 100x better quality than voip from WhatsApp or zoom, I’ll choose tmo calling if it’s cheap or free over WhatsApp every time.

> If people use WhatsApp, the mobile networks get $0

Doesn't the network get at least the fee for the internet connection?

Oh, I guess that’s true! But only if the user isn’t on wifi, and only if they don’t have an unlimited (or semi-unlimited) data plan.

even then, with an unlimited (or semi-unlimited) data plan, the provider/ISP would have been paid at some point. Same with wi-fi, except that the user might not be the one paying for the connection between the wi-fi hotspot and internet, but the entity providing the connection to the WA servers would have received some money. In both cases, there's no direct relationship between messages sent/minutes of voice call and the money paid to the network provider, but the network provider still receives money in exchange of providing the connection.

I would not stop paying for internet access if calls were free and I didn't need what's app. I don't think anyone would

I assume it's more profitable to milk old customers that don't care about price rather than try to get new customers onto POTS.

Realistically the only reason any of us would switch is lower latency calls to people that have shitty WiFi. That's an shrinking market.

Phone calls are essentially dead technology, kept alive by people who can't or won't install an app. Thus the price is whatever squeezes out the most revenue out of the residual users until the well runs dry.

In some countries this process is happening faster than in others.

Entire economies have been built on the principle that the price of a call or message is 0 and you only pay for data used (if any). That is the future that is coming, even for the US, but it might take a few more decades there.

But don’t you see what you’re saying? If the phone companies (TMobile, Verizon, etc) offered competitive pricing these apps/internet services wouldn’t exist! We would all happily pay Verizon the reasonable fees, instead they try to milk us and end up losing our business entirely.

I and my partner have several telephone packages that allow practically unlimited calling within Europe (which we regularly do) yet we mostly use Telegram and Signal because they are more comfortable.

Edit:// in my phone I even have a internet only SIM, without number attached.

not necessarily, because WA offers options that normal calls and text don't, like group conversations/calls, easier documents and picture sharing and video calls. I mean I have rather affordable texts for my usual correspondents, but I'm mostly using WA to chat with them

What’s stopping the phone companies from offering that? The point is that they’ve chosen to not innovate.

re-reading this, when I said "rather affordable texts", I should have said that I've got unlimited texts for contacts in the country, as part of my subscription (5€, got also 2 hours of call and 100 Mo per month)

but it is most likely not as easy as an app on your smartphone

You mean an app like Google Voice, or one of the many other SIP/VOIP apps out there? I use Localphone as my home SIP provider, and they have an app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/localphone-international-calls...

There are tons of ways to make cheap calls from your phone -- when I used to travel internationally a lot, I set up my Android phone dialer with my SIP provider, then I could make and receive calls from the default phone dialer.

But now I don't even bother, I just call home via a video call using Hangouts/Meet or Zoom and use my local SIM to make a local call.

That's on top of paying for the internet itself. You must be young. If international calls are what you are looking for, calling cards and prepaid phones have been easy and cheap since a decade before these messaging apps. Then there was Skype and desktop messaging, and VOIP.

I kept calling cards in my backpack to make my international calls before WhatsApp and mobile data came along. But they are certainly not easy compared to WhatsApp, nor “cheap” compared to free.

Paying for the internet is not a consideration since people will be paying for the internet anyway.

T-Mobile used to have some kind of international roaming deal...

You ever tried calling anyone in Guam? It's part of the USA (albeit as a territory). Or the US Virgin Islands? US Samoa?

I don't know many people overseas (other than my relatives), but Guam and the US VI are free from my cell, Samoa is 7 cents/minute. (unless I use my home VOIP provider, then it's 2c/minute if I buy a block of 500 minutes).

The demand is to not make Facebook responsible for everything. They shouldn't be in charge in what's ostensibly a public utility for most of the planet.

Yes, there is a lot of blame on governments for relying on WA.

But let's be real here, Facebook is also marketing WA as a better alternative to sms, mail etc.

So if Facebook wants to position WA as critical communications infrastructure, they should maintain it as such.

WA _is_ a better alternative to SMS and mail. Outs not the only one perhaps, but that doesn’t make that statement less true.

Calls can be listened to and texts can be read by Governments. In my opinion that's unlikely to change so there will always be a good reason to use apps like WhatsApp or Signal for communication.

Yep that's why Signal, Threma and Telegram are big. But how would that explain Whatsapp success?

The US gov obviously had and likely has access to the WhatsApp infrastructure

Matrix is the solution.

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