Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

I'm from Sebastopol; sonic.net is a truly great ISP. I've cited them as an example of great customer service in general, not just within the (typically awful) ISP industry.

I now live in Tokyo; I enjoy synchronous gigabit fiber access for a similar price. (It's actually closer to $50, but that's because my whole building is wired for it, and the building management has negotiated a group price.)

The difference is, here in Japan, pretty much anybody in any major metro area can get cheap gigabit Internet service (or synchronous 100Mbps at the very least). That's because here we do have a level of (intelligent) regulation; precisely the kind of regulation that this article points out the FCC eliminated during the Bush administration. There can obviously only be a tiny number of companies who run last-mile cables (telco and electric utilities here). So if those companies aren't required to reasonably resell that acess, you will never achieve the kind of competitive landscape that drives rapid progress.

It's pretty awesome that Sonic is able to do this in sleeply little Sebastopol, but it's pretty sad that most of America languishes under with barbarously primitive connection speeds of just a few Mbps because of its dysfunctional government.

EDIT: My anecdote about their service harkens back to when DSL was fairly new. My connection was flaking out one day, so I called. It rang twice. "Hello, Sonic.net." What, no menu tree? I explained the gist of the problem. "Do you mind if I connect to your DSL modem and check it out?" Of course not. "OK, I'm seeing the problem. Some of these units unfortunately shipped with slightly incorrect settings. I've updated those for you; is it working now?" It was. Total time on the phone was maybe 90 seconds. Even getting a human on the phone in that time was pretty astonishing (and still is).

The argument for forced sharing of the last mile isn’t that it’s a natural monopoly – that’s unempirical but commonly claimed. (Prior to FedEx and UPS, smart people thought package delivery was a natural monopoly.)

The better argument is that the providers of last mile are beneficiaries of prior regulation which meant that they were able to build a gov’t-protected monopoly.

The latter is a legitimate but, to me, not dispositive. We want competition on the last mile (and every mile) and line-sharing regulation simply cements incumbents, as no new entrant would desire to be in a business of regulated rates.

Now, we might simply accept that prior damage has ruined that market beyond repair and the least-bad solution is to force line-sharing. But I’d rather see lots of Sonic’s building a new set of last miles.

Suburbia in general is only possible with supportive regulation. There is a reason Sonic's business model has only developed in very dense neighborhoods (4000 person/mi^2 vs <1000p/mi^2 for other suburbs).

If we are going to live in economically infeasible locations, relying on government subsidy to pay $30m/mi to build highways to shuttle us to work, then we are going to have to rely on subsidy for other aspects of our lives as well. The regulation/subsidy-free ship sailed about the time we started the national highway project, collectively bought an automobile company, etc.

The cost per user to support 1,000 people/mi^2 vs. 4,000 people/mi^2 is not that dramatic. At first glance the distance between houses might seem to be the square root of the population density, but people tend to group together. Picture 2 sets of row houses one of which has a back yard and the other does not. As the ISP's run their wires down roads it makes vary little difference how big those back yards are just how far down the road you need to travel from one house to the next, and how far from the road to each house.

PS: If you’re on city water chances are you’re fairly cheap to wire up to a modern network. Unfortunately the incumbent players tend to also be selling you service on the old network so they have vary little incentive to upgrade you especially if it might lead to you dropping some extras.

It's been well established in the academic literature that infrastructure costs in America cities are related by a power law to population. Costs increase about 80% with a doubling of the size of a city. So we generally would expect infrastructure in a city four times the size of a typical 1000 people/mi^2 suburb to cost about 3.24 times as much, or about 81% as much on a per-capita basis.

There are many well known economies of scale to denser urban agglomerations that suburbanization forfeits. That's not controversial. What is controversial is why suburban living, despite its much higher cost compared to city living, has nevertheless come to dominate post-war America.

Is the answer cars, cheap land, big houses?

> relying on government subsidy to pay $30m/mi to build highways to shuttle us to work

Highways are paid for overwhelmingly by user fees (largely fuel taxes), not general revenue. On the federal funding side it's over 90%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#Finan...

There's little to no evidence that the Interstate Highway System couldn't be self-sustaining if that were desirable. As it is, the federal government decides instead that about 1/6 of the money raised by fuel taxes and other fees should go to public transit, and states prefer to get their funding contribution from property and other taxes.

This appears to be dependent on how you interpret the numbers. See http://uspirg.org/reports/usp/do-roads-pay-themselves for another view.

Well, of course Naderites are going to have that perspective. But stuff like this isn't particularly persuasive:

> Since 1947, the amount of money spent on highways, roads and streets has exceeded the amount raised through gasoline taxes and other so-called “user fees” by $600 billion (2005 dollars), representing a massive transfer of general government funds to highways.

$600 billion 2005 dollars over 64 years? That's an average of less than $10B/year for a system that serves literally every American, either directly or indirectly through the goods that are delivered by trucking.

Even if road spending has been growing faster than the rate of inflation, that would still be a bargain at twice the price. If I were a properly motivated advocacy group, I bet I could produce a number with a T at the end of it and somewhat plausibly claim its the economic activity currently dependent on the asphalt transportation system.

It takes a real ideological bent to call that a "massive transfer of general government funds". After all, some of those general government funds are filling in gaps left by drivers subsidizing train, bus, and subway passengers. Presumably a not insignificant chunk of the rest represents municipal costs, where it's hard to use tolls or gas taxes to build local roads that literally everyone uses even if they're just biking to the train station.

In most countries, the rights to lay those cables are highly restricted by law, and while that reality is perhaps not ideal, it is also unlikely to change.

So I'm not arguing that it's a natural monopoly, just pointing out that with the existing government regulation that limits the number of entities that may run last-mile cable, we won't see effective competition unless those restrictions are balanced by requirements for shared access.

I too would love to somehow have a whole bunch of companies able to lay cable right to my house, but I doubt that will happen. Managing such right-of-way is actually a very hard problem to solve (which is why governments regulate it in virtually (literally?) every country. So I think that's an unlikely outcome.

This is like TekSavvy in Toronto, at least in my experience. I call, less than one ring, "Billing press 1, Support press 2" 2 "Hello, TekSavvy Technical support" Hi, I can ping 4.2.2.2 but it seems I'm getting 96% packet loss and the web is completely unusable. "Mac, Linux or Windows" Linux. "Awesome. Can you check the dhcp settings" Sure, I just forget the command "dhclient" Awesome [...] Find out it is a problem with the cable box for the building in under 2 mins. If I were with rogers they probably would have had to send someone to my house to get this type of response.

Correction, that's how Teksavvy used to be. However recently they've gotten too big to be able to offer that level of support. A few months ago hold times were up to 1-2 hours because they couldn't hire quick enough. They've since hired enough staff that the hold times are down but obviously it takes a while for staff to train up to that level.

But they do appear to be doing it right: instilling the right attitude in their employees and treating them properly so that they stick around.

I had the exact opposite experience with sonic.net service and customer service. I got unbearably slow speeds with disconnects more than once per hour, no help from customer support (they tried, just nothing helped anything), it was a pain to cancel, and I had my credit card charged even after canceling.

I switched to Comcast and got faster-than-rated speeds at a totally reasonable price.

I'm from Santa Rosa. I only think about Sebastopol when I have to pass by it on the Highway ;) Anyways, like veidr just said, Sonic is a great ISP. I've tried several times to try and get Sonic in my house to replace Comcast, but without luck.

What reason do you have to believe that it is the regulation and not the considerably higher population density of Japan that leads to the better speeds?

Why would you think that population density would be the limiting factor when NYC, SF, and other dense urban areas in the US don't have internet access that's as fast and cheap as is available in Japan and Europe?

Note: I'm not talking about access to the vast majority of unpopulated area that is the rural US; I'm talking about the well-established high-density urban areas.

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