Hacker News Reader

Comment by teamonkey | Hacker News Reader

This is going to sound like trolling, but compared to the European mobile telecoms services, you in the US are paying high rates for an antiquated service (specifically, non-GSM use is still common, everyday data speeds are slower, dropouts are higher, call quality is lower).

Judicious government investment into telecoms infrastructure in certain European countries has led to fast, cheap and stable communications. Government investment doesn't always equate to bad; if it's bad it means that particular government body did a bad job in that particular case, that's all.

View on HN

I don't think there has been significant government investment in mobile telecoms in Europe (citation requested if I'm wrong).

There is much higher levels of competition, enforced by government regulation though.

There has not been significant investment into mobile, there was regulation that forced carriers to cover even the areas that would otherwise prove unprofitable, if they wanted the frequencies that is.

And mobile network is also heavily dependant on landlines, which were built by government owned telcos.

Just to add nuance: mobile was heavily dependant on landlines. In my experience, not any more.

Recently began (2009) a national gigabit to the mast rollout project in a medium-sized European country which is almost complete now.

This didn't use a legacy copper investment (or even legacy fiber, not that there was a lot of that).

I didn't know that. Thank you for clarifying - this project would be probably taking place in Finland?

However 20 years ago the ubiquity of state sponsored infrastructure is what enabled fast and competitive coverage of Europe with mobile telecommunications.

It's just an example of how what our US colleagues would call "socialsim" can provide better results than "free market".

There is a point I just realized. Whenever there is a state sponsored monopoly in Europe - it is forced to provide a service to all, even if it means loss in some cases. However whenever there is a state sponsored monopoly in US it just removes competition, while internally the organization still sticks to the "profit first" doctrine.

Can you provide some examples of these European state owned monopoly telecommunications companies or does government investment signify something else?

I'm not sure about European tel-cos, but i can tell you of a north American telco that is a virtual government monopoly (no other private company has comparable rates and service), Sasktel, they have an interesting history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasktel

They were the first, or one of the first companies in north america to offer: Video-On-Demand, Fiber to the home, IPTV, HDTV over IPTV, HSPA, ADSL, etc.

This is while servicing a province with roughly half a million people and is larger than every American state minus Alaska and Texas. While at the same time serving hundreds of small communities with full speed access.

This is at the same time as offering plans and service that is much better than what you can get in the surrounding provinces that have cities that have more people than the whole province.

In some ways, privately owned companies that only have to compete with 2 or 3 other entities is far worse than a government monopoly.

what has made the difference there then? good management? down to earth hard working employees? reasonable cost of living?

I believe its a mixture of both good management, and not putting profit maximization first, although they do still make a healthy profit every year...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com