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Comment by geenat | Hacker News Reader

Privatising your internet utility never goes well, as we know from USA, Canada.

Telecoms are extremely profitable, the "lower taxes" reasoning is complete BS - this smells bad.

What! I refuse to believe every American premises isn't wired for fibre. Since we've paid for it so many times. And required it in many lucrative exclusivity contracts.

Some of the spending, for instance: https://www.jsonline.com/in-depth/news/2021/07/14/weve-spent...

In the 1800's the US government paid for the building of its transcontinental railroad by offering cash plus land for every mile of completed laid railway track, with competition for completed miles coming from the other side of the country. That worked incredibly well. If you can find a good documentary on it, it is a fascinating story. There was an unbelievably intensive effort to get that project complete in the quickest possible time, including blasting tunnels through the Rocky Mountains - nothing stopped those companies from delivering the completed tracks.

You'd have fibre to the home if the government paid by the home tested to have symmetric gigabit, with competition between telco's to complete the available homes.

Instead, governments pay for things other than the outcome.

No surprise they don't get the outcome.

Pay close attention to the attempts to build semiconductor manufacturing in the USA. This will fail for the same reason - the government is paying big money, but for the wrong things. It should be paying the big money when the first production quality wafers are delivered in real products. There's a big fail coming up there because they don't heed the lesson of the railway.

> Pay close attention to the attempts to build semiconductor manufacturing in the USA. This will fail for the same reason - the government is paying big money, but for the wrong things. It should be paying the big money when the first production quality wafers are delivered in real products. There's a big fail coming up there because they don't heed the lesson of the railway.

Is that how it is structured in the EU?

And even today the largest private landowner in California is Catellus Development Corporation, which was one of the companies spun off from the railroads. They were given way more land than necessary to build the tracks.

I believe they were given some amount of land on each side of the track - I think it was a mile but that's a guess.

> Privatising your internet utility never goes well, as we know from USA, Canada

Works out well for Rogers and Telus shareholders ;).

These were always private companies from day 1 though.

edit: see upthread, I am wrong about Telus.

Eh? Telecom networks were always privately owned in Canada and the US. They were never privatized.

No. Telus was formed from the privatization of Alberta Government Telephones. MTS was previously a crown corp for telecom in Manitoba but was later privatized and then bought by Bell. Saskatchewan still has their telecom crown corp SaskTel, although there has been rumblings of privatizing it.

Fair enough, I see I am off about Telus, and I presume Sasktel.

Still, I seldom get the complaints. Our industry is private, but heavily regulated.

Yes, there are bumps over the years, and the CRTC at times is not optimal, but the whole "must lease last mile" thing is part of that regulation.

A mix of public control, and private industry can work well. To speak to that, Bell, Rogers constantly squrim and writhe, under their forced requirement to lease to competitors.

They hate it, which to me means it can't be all bad.

They're very good at managing that image, it's true. It's hard to believe that we're in an equitable spot as consumers with reports showing the big three are among the most profitable telcos in the world.

That's not even starting in on the obvious price coordination that highlights the dearth of competition in the sector.

Thankfully that matter was resolved back in 2018 when Bill 40 was repealed. Saskatchewan has plenty of evidence from other provinces what happens when natural monopolies are privatized.

Incorrect. Saskatchewan (SaskTel), Manitoba (Bell MTS, now sold), and Alberta (AGT, sold) maintained crown corporations for telecom.

In Ontario there was the Dryden Municipal Telephone System and the Thunder Bay Telephone Company (now Tbaytel). DMTS was sold but Tbaytel remains owned by the City of Thunder Bay and provides service to various parts of Northwestern Ontario.

And Terra Nova Tel which provided phone service in parts of Newfoundland was built on the legacy of the former Dominion of Newfoundland Department of Posts and Telephones by Canadian National while the latter was still a federal crown corporation.

Here in New Zealand all of the telecom companies are private and the fibre/copper networks are owned by companies that are separate from the retailers. Something like 90% of the population has access to at least 1Gbps speeds.

>Privatising your internet utility never goes well, as we know from USA, Canada.

Never? Really? You're very wrong, privatized internet can work very well, I'm paying $10/mo for 1Gbps up/down here in Eastern Europe.

It only fails in the US because of corruption and NIMBYism. These telecoms buy off the local city council and prevent new development of any lines. Then local residents complain about the hassle of digging trenches, having utility trucks on the block, etc.

When you ban this sort of bullshit permitting process it goes extremely well. Sometimes local authority has to be sacrificed for the long term benefit that residents don't see.

Yeah, I'm not convinced. New York has been ardent about trying to get internet providers to do their damn job and it just simply doesn't seem to work. The companies make out like bandits and routinely flout deadlines and requirements.

- Charter: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/03/ny-says-charter-...

- Frontier: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/frontier-knowing...

- Verizon: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/nyc-sues-verizon...

It just keeps going. I could provide dozens of links here. I just don't think you can make enough laws to get these companies to do the dirty work of wiring up unprofitable connections, and to stop lying about internet speeds.

Oh I don't mean big buildout contracts - those are bound to be failures. It's like the government paying Lockheed to develop the F-35.

I mean if you relax zoning regulations and permitting processes significantly, then private enterprise will get external funding and build it out. You can already get 5G home internet in a lot of areas from Verizon or TMo for way cheaper than the wired companies and it's just as fast in both bandwidth and latency. If we had a mmWave node on every block then the buildout problem gets solved pretty quickly.

> dirty work of wiring up unprofitable connections

It doesn't need to be wired to the home. See: Webpass. The problem is that NIMBYs will block ugly antennas sticking out from every building so you get mired in environmental reviews, neighborhood comments, etc. and nothing gets built.

If running a dozen competing redundant versions of every utility to all homes is your idea of a productive use of resources I'm not really sure what to tell you.

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