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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Full disclosure: I represent telecom companies, but I’m speaking only for myself.

> [The bill] eliminates the ability of local governments to require rules such as an ISP having to serve the whole community

Such requirements kill fiber development. Laying fiber is expensive, and having to lay it through neighborhoods where most people won’t or can’t subscribe just increases the price for everyone.

It’s not just the traditional telcos or cable companies. There is a reason Google Fiber has this concept of “fiberhoods” where you need a certain level of demonstrated interest in subscription before they’ll build in those areas. The city of Baltimore wanted to kick out Comcast and have someone build fiber across the city. Verizon wouldn’t do it because of the coverage requirements. Google wouldn’t do it either. The city is now looking at building the network itself, but it has no money: https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/politics-power/local-gove...

Many of the other things the article complains about are similarly roadblocks to development. It’s actually the same exact thing as NIMBY regulations that stop housing development. Again, look at the places Google ended up deploying fiber. If you ignore webpass, every deployment is in states that are low-regulation generally (Utah, Georgia, Colorado, Texas, etc.)

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>Such requirements kill fiber development. Laying fiber is expensive, and having to lay it through neighborhoods where most people won’t or can’t subscribe just increases the price for everyone.

Odd, laying fiber was deemed "too expensive" to lay in a community where we have a family cabin. Instead, someone formed a co-op. Everyone is getting wired, and the speeds:price is SIGNIFICANTLY less than Comcast, with symmetric up/down to boot.

I appreciate you've got a job to do and a talk track, but it's simply not accurate. What you MEAN to say is: wiring everyone in a community results in a margin profile that's below what large Telco executives find acceptable, so they focus on areas with high adoption rates and low deployment costs and tell community's that it's just "too expensive" to do anything else.

I wish we gave companies even 1/10th the flak that we give people for acting entitled. This right here is a perfect example, but it happens all the time.

Your two examples leave some questions.

You seem to be saying that your cabin community was able to find a solution that would not be acceptable to a large telco. Why isn't that OK? Why should the large company be forced to do something they don't want to do if, by your example, other organizations are capable of servicing those communities?

To rephrase the question: What, if anything, prevents smaller organizations or non-profits or niche companies from servicing areas that large telcos will only do through regulatory mandates? Can the business/regulatory climate be improved to facilitate these smaller organizations? Are there existing regulations (for example access to poles or conduits) in some areas that block smaller organizations?

> Why isn't that OK?

Ask the telcos lobbying to stop it. That's the problem.

>You seem to be saying that your cabin community was able to find a solution that would not be acceptable to a large telco. Why isn't that OK? Why should the large company be forced to do something they don't want to do if, by your example, other organizations are capable of servicing those communities?

Because they're also actively lobbying to kill any local co-op formation. Successfully in many states. They tried here and got shot down, then proclaimed they were going to build out fiber themselves in the co-op's targeted service area (they didn't).

There are states where they were successful in getting laws passed preventing "wasteful government spending on broadband networks" - the end result of this will be people who literally have no possible way to EVER get broadband.

> Because they're also actively lobbying to kill any local co-op formation. Successfully in many states.

How exactly do they do that?

I suspect the same way PG&E has fought public power expansion: channel corporate propaganda through astroturf taxpayer groups misleading about the costs.

In all the various ways that corporations manage to get legislation passed.

These corporations are not stopping local co-op formation. They are lobbying for laws that severely limit (and in some cases, prevent) their ability to operate.

> They are lobbying for laws that severely limit (and in some cases, prevent) their ability to operate.

That's what I'm curious about. What's in those laws they're lobbying for?

>That's what I'm curious about. What's in those laws they're lobbying for?

See[0] for yourself. You keep "asking questions" about stuff that's decades old. It makes me wonder if you're not asking in good faith. Please prove me wrong.

[0] https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...

Why don't you read the article that we are supposed to be discussing and find out?

Right back at you? The bill in the article is a call for deregulation. Zero to do with killing competition

>How exactly do they do that?

Through groups like ALEC[0]. And that's nothing new.

[0] https://alec.org/

> There are states where they were successful in getting laws passed preventing "wasteful government spending on broadband networks"

The devil is in the details but arguing that municipalities shouldn't compete with private businesses is not the same thing as arguing that private businesses shouldn't have other private competitors.

I have no doubt that telcos lobby heavily to restrict competition. Last mile infrastructure regulation is complicated but I'm more in favor of a level playing field (i.e. regulation) for access to poles/conduits/rights-of-way than having municipalities operate their own broadband architecture or even worse operate and then protect themselves from competition by other providers.

Sure, small co-ops can have cost structures for smaller projects big companies often cannot match. That’s true of any kind of business. That doesn’t change my point.

Again, you don’t need to rely on assumptions about the motivations of “large Telco executives.” Look at what Google did with Fiber.

Pointing to google as a positive example hasn’t made since in quiet some time.

> Pointing to google as a positive example hasn’t made sense in quite some time.

I don't usually get pedantic about typos, but the twofer here really made it hard to understand what you were saying

I'm ignorant. What is incorrect?

Looks like "since" vs "sense" or "quiet" vs "quite"

I didn't notice either until flylikeabanana pointed it out

Hah, I was reading his quoted response looking for the problem and didn't realize he changed the spellings in the quote. Got it, thanks.

What does “positive” mean in this context? What’s relevant is that Google has a tremendous financial incentive to prove fiber can be built cheaply, because it has a much more profitable product built on top of broadband. And they couldn’t do it.

Google, the surveillance company with the attention span of a gnat? Why are you holding them up as an exemplar? They can't even stick with software projects that create returns over years, of course they failed at infrastructure that creates returns over decades.

...the company famous for shuttering anything that doesn't make ridiculous profit margins is not a good example for that.

The point of Google Fiber was to spur broadband development to benefit Google’s other businesses. I don’t think Google Fiber has ever made a profit. https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/09/18/reports-of-google-.... I haven’t seen Fiber numbers broken out specifically, but the “Other Bets” segment which is mostly Fiber and Verily looses about $900 million per quarter.

>Sure, small co-ops can have cost structures for smaller projects big companies often cannot match. That’s true of any kind of business. That doesn’t change my point.

That's just ridiculous across the board. I guarantee, with 100% confidence, that a small local co-op does not have a cost structure below the big Telco's. My co-op pay SIGNIFICANLTY more for:

Routers

Switches

Conduit

Fiber

ONTs

Trenching Crews

Support

They pay less for:

Executives

???

It's laughable that you say it's true of any business that small businesses pay less than large. I can tell you what the discounts are for switches that I've sold in the past to a Fortune 500 vs. Joe Shmoe's Trucking - large corporations are frequently paying HALF of what a small business would for the same thing due to their volume.

I'm more-or-less convinced that people who complain about executive pay and its impact to end users don't know how to do basic math. Let's take AT&T as an example. From a rough search[1], they make let's say $70m total. Now let's see the number of subscribers they have using another rough search[2] - 217m. That's about 30 cents _every year_ from each sub for executive pay.

What's likely is the co-op doesn't have the same level of support, uptime, or redundancy major telcos need to sustain. Every bit of which adds a hefty amount to the overall cost.

[1] https://www1.salary.com/ATANDT-INC-Executive-Salaries.html

[2] https://www.wallstreetzen.com/stocks/us/nyse/t/statistics

Wal-Mart also gets large discounts because of its size. But that doesn’t mean it can open a small grocery store in a town that’s too small to support a normal Wal-Mart. That’s also true of Walgreens, or Best Buy, or lots of other large chains. Big companies have high organizational overhead that makes it hard for them to do small scale projects.

And it’s not a matter of having fat margins. Wal-Mart’s margin is under 3%. Verizon’s wireline operating income margin is usually under 10%, often under 5%.

Walmart literally has small grocery stores:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Walmart+Neighborhood+Marke...

That's not a small grocery store despite the name. And there's a supercenter less than a mile away from that, so that example is not even relevant to their point.

Yeah, Wal-Mart Neighborhood Markets are average sized standalone supermarkets, like Safeway. And that area is obviously quite populous—there’s a Sam’s Club (also Wal-Mart), and Aldi, a Food Lion, and a Fresh Market all within a quarter mile it looks like.

Uh huh, so is that the only thing the bill does not let local governments decide? Of course not.

Let local governments regulate for their city. If they make bad decisions, they will reap the consequences.

In any case, telcos should never get immunity from any local laws and regulations.

Edit: And it's not like telcos can't go to city council meetings and explain, with numbers, why certain regulations are bad.

In addition, I bet that if the telcos were forced to build an entire neighborhood, they would actually lower their prices to get more people to sign up in order to better recoup their costs. That would be a good thing!

Telcos want the monopoly without regulations. But if you're a monopoly, you have to be regulated or you're going to abuse your position.

So I don't feel sorry for telcos at all.

Also building fiber infrastructure for city is multi-decade investment. For corporation its whatever next fiscal year result investment.

Small city with fiber everywhere is pretty attractive place for people that can work remotely and that brings money to local economy.

Why is running fiber somehow more expensive than dsl, cable, or power cables? Spoiler; It's not. Chattanooga's EPB runs fiber to every home that has power.

Internet should be treated like the essential utility it is. If we were successfully able to run electricity to farm houses in the 1930s, I see no reason at all they shouldn't have fiber internet in 2023.

The fiber is, to my knowledge, cheaper than the equivalent copper per mile. There's bigger than you'd think costs basically every step of the way to lay a new line regardless of the medium, with the local power utility often times being a major hangup. The question is almost never about the cost of laying fiber vs laying copper, it's about laying a new line (fiber) or laying nothing (use existing copper).

You have to get permission from every land owner whose ditch/yard you need to dig up. Using poles is usually not an option because they're typically owned by the local power utility who either won't let ISPs use them at all or drastically increase operating costs to the point where it's not feasible. Power supply for actively powered equipment can be hard in lower density (ie. rural) areas (from a bureaucratic standpoint). Copper nodes can sometimes be passively powered, but there's not much in fiber optics that can outside of GPON splitters.

> The question is almost never about the cost of laying fiber vs laying copper, it's about laying a new line (fiber) or laying nothing (use existing copper).

Yep, exactly. 99.99% of the cost of laying anything (underground, above ground, wherever) is in the permitting and digging/hanging. The cost of the material itself and the labor of handling it is rounding error.

> Why is running fiber somehow more expensive than dsl, cable, or power cables?

Because we’re running fiber in the 21st century while DSL, cable, and power have mostly already been in the ground for decades. The cost of building any kind of infrastructure has increased exponentially over the decades. We literally could not build today a lot of the infrastructure we already have in the ground—e.g. the New York subway.

> Chattanooga's EPB runs fiber to every home that has power.

EPB got a $110 million grant from the ARRA ($1,000 per fiber subscriber), and also leverages economies of scale because the fiber network is used both for the electric grid and the fiber service.

I think that’s actually a great way to deploy fiber, but it doesn’t tell you anything about the economics of a fiber provider that isn’t the electric utility.

The bill does way more than that, all horrible things. Care to comment on them?

Also, I lived for a time in Irvine Ca, one of the nation’s high tech hubs. Apparently Irvine did not have a whole community requirement on fiber. Parts of the city had google fiber and also att fiber. But Guess what att offered my neighborhood?

My neighborhood was one of the fairly central areas developed in the 70s and they only offered 5mb/s DSL.

In one of the highest tech areas of the nation and surrounded by fiber networks, my neighborhoods internet options was cox cable or att DSL that they happily charged the same price for their 5/1 DSL service that cox charged for 50/10. Not only that, they spammed adds for att fiber just to add insult to injury.

Sounds like community requirements are very much needed to prevent neighborhood red lining.

Even Silicon Valley did not really get residential fiber until about 10 or so years ago.

Speaking of tech hubs.

Good. Because the end result is that someone eventually WILL bring fiber or a fiber alternative and the other company will be SOL for having a service that is never available for part of the community.

Right now I have a situation where AT&T has fiber across most of my city, but not my neighborhood. And Spectrum has fiber in my neighborhood, but not my side of the street. So I'm stuck with T-Mobile wireless after having used AT&T DSL for the past 4 years because neither Spectrum nor AT&T will run fiber

The aforementioned requirement would have pushed fiber everywhere. There's zero difference between the homes on my side of the street and the other side. Or the homes in my neighborhood and the next one over. Same size, same prices, same sort of people in the same tax brackets with the same economic conditions.

I'd rather see a company lose out on an entire market than establish itself only over part of it. Internet access is opportunity.

You'd rather no one had fiber than some people have fiber?

Yes. Because full demand is better than fractured demand.

Maybe they wouldn't have to trench and lay fiber if they could make use of the public utility poles. But even that has been fraught.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/att-and-comcast-...

I'd think the local governments know what they're getting into, and if not they figure it out after a few years. Nobody is requiring providers to enter those local markets and be unprofitable.

Telecoms could raise local prices until covering 100% of the area is profitable. "Local government requiring customer service standards" might be a harder thing for them to comply with.

Local governments don’t care if their regulations keep out fiber, just like they don’t care if their regulations keep out housing development. When I lived in Baltimore, Verizon was trying to wire it up with fiber. The city wanted Google to come in and it wouldn’t. A decade later, there’s still no fiber in Baltimore. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/snubb...

Raising prices doesn’t work, because the other customers won’t pay that much more for fiber versus cable. My parents just switched from fiber to cable because they liked the TV packages better.

The communications monopolies are quasi-governmental entities whose primary business is crafting plausible sounding narratives about why they can't be bothered to do anything without one-way handouts from the de jure government. In reality municipal fiber has no problem building out out complete cities and towns, with obvious mandates to the serve the whole population, and from what I've seen they're doing a great job. Regardless of density, infrastructure has an intrinsic capital cost that needs to be accounted on the order of a decade, and moribund dinosaurs based around short term revenue extraction aren't capable of doing that.

It sounds like Baltimore's problem is, as you said, having no money. Getting an advance from a loan shark when you have no money is a poor idea, as you will be under their thumb and paying it back forever.

My own experience: GPON. moderate density (power goes out at least several times a year due to trees), under $80/mo fixed (no continual price hikes, no deliberately confusing fees, no contract), full gigabit up/down with no usage-based gouging, no incentive to surveil my traffic and sell the proceeds. If in 30 years 1Gb is considered slow and it's stuck there because "government", I'll let the municipal fiber doomers say I told you so - assuming Ma Bell isn't still offering 384k ADSL on the two pairs of copper they'll have left.

They get the monopoly without the universal service requirements that the utility and wire-line phone companies have.

> It sounds like Baltimore's problem is, as you said, having no money

That’s true of most municipalities. And they have higher priorities for infrastructure expenditures. Cities and states need to spend $745 billion just to bring water infrastructure up to existing health and environmental standards. Broadband is way behind lead pipes or crumbling bridges on governments’ list of priorities.

> Regardless of density, infrastructure has an intrinsic capital cost that needs to be accounted on the order of a decade, and moribund dinosaurs based around short term revenue extraction aren't capable of doing that.

I heard this a decade ago, when Google was going to show up the “dinosaurs.” How is that going?

Yes, the problem of looted local institutions is pervasive. This doesn't mean that a Faustian bargain with the incumbent communications monopolies is a good thing, especially when they're insisting on offering a substandard product - lack of coverage area, hostile billing practices, DPI based surveillance/throttling, etc. Such crap was passable for cable TV, which was essentially an elective entertainment service, but is utterly unacceptable with the importance of Internet connectivity in the 21st century.

I said this in another comment, but I don't know why you're holding Google up as an exemplar. They don't even have the attention span to follow through on software projects that bear fruit over a few years. Meanwhile my electric company has been providing electricity for well over a century, with de jure government successfully preventing it from running away with extractive customer-hostile dynamics.

From other comments I believe you live in an area where you have a choice of several competing corporate wired providers. That's fantastic, and I'm glad your own needs are taken care of that way - where a functioning market can exist, we should celebrate it. However, most people don't live in such an area, including even people in dense areas with horror stories about their buildings signing monopoly contracts with a single provider.

> I said this in another comment, but I don't know why you're holding Google up as an exemplar.

Because Google has enormous financial incentives to disrupt the industry and drive down prices. Google delivers their product over infrastructure owned by other companies, and thus has tremendous incentives to commoditize that infrastructure. https://marginalfutility.substack.com/p/11-commoditizing-you...

If Google is complaining that build out requirements make building fiber too expensive, that tells you an important fact about the economics of building fiber.

> Meanwhile my electric company has been providing electricity for well over a century

… over last mile infrastructure that pretty much hasn’t changed in that time. The fact that public utilities can maintain that infrastructure doesn’t tell you much about how to build completely new infrastructure. The difference in costs is massive. We couldn’t even build the electric grid again at today’s costs.

That also means that public utility infrastructure in this country is a ticking time bomb. For the stuff that does need large scale replacement, like water and sewage pipes, there’s a multi-trillion backlog because public utilities have not invested sufficiently in the infrastructure.

> From other comments I believe you live in an area where you have a choice of several competing corporate wired providers.

Because it’s a county that makes it easy to build stuff. We also have pretty affordable housing, for the same reason.

> However, most people don't live in such an area, including even people in dense areas

It’s especially the people in dense areas that have the most trouble getting broadband. What do these dense urban areas have in common, I wonder.

This argument doesn't follow. Internet access is already mostly commoditized. Pushing Google's complements to be even better commodities are things like DoH, Net Neutrality, and free-as-in-beer Android. Taking on the business of running an ISP doesn't make Internet access more of a commodity. The adage is "commoditize your complement", not "enter the business that is your complement" - the point is to squeeze their margins while growing yours.

> What do these dense urban areas have in common

Higher population density such that any activity in the public right of ways affects proportionally more people and thus receives more scrutiny and review?

I honestly don't have any easy prescriptions for facilitating new Internet buildout in dense areas. I do agree that zoning and permits have gotten us to a condition where it would be effectively impossible to rebuild what has already been built (eg the common example of most walkable duplex/triple deckers not conforming to the lots they currently sit on). FWIW this would imply that the incumbent communications companies should continue to be highly regulated due to new entrants being unable to duplicate their existing buildout.

My comments are focused on the not-dense areas where laying/stringing new lines is perfectly straightforward, but there are no incentives for Ma Bell or Ma Coax to build new infrastructure (aka FTTH) as they're perfectly content milking a captive market. There are multiple comments in this thread of people suffering Ma Coax with some ridiculous bills, fiber being promised but not available, etc. Then a newcomer enters the market, whether municipal or private, and then all of sudden Ma Coax snaps to attention and starts competing. As I said, in places that new privately-funded competition actually does enter we should celebrate. But that shouldn't involve municipalities abdicating their own interests (eg mandates to build out the complete city/town) in the hope that it might make competition magically appear, since that's a race to the bottom - especially if we're talking about relaxing requirements for the incumbents, meaning competition still hasn't arrived.

Furthermore for many places (my own included), the needle was only ever going to be moved by the municipality getting involved. Internet access is basically a solved problem for me now, so much so that I have to wonder why I even started commenting in this thread, apart from saying to people who are wondering if pushing for municipal fiber is worthwhile - yes, it really is.

(And as far as electrical lines and infrastructure in general, I certainly have my complaints but overall I feel it's being decently maintained in my area. Trees are trimmed often, and I often do see lineworkers replacing poles and upgrading lines. Electricity distribution certainly has advanced in 100 years. Looking at the overall national statistics, I see the trends behind the narrative. But I'm also not going to let those general narratives destroy my faith in my local institutions, because that too is a cause of the problem)

The town doesn't want to connect few streets to the internet.

The town wants internet available everywhere because even if boomer parent might not care, their kids when grow up might want to have stable internet for work, same with any new developments, good internet becomes number one priority for many people buying homes.

It might be difference between small town slowly dying and prospering (because people moving in to work remotely will spend in local economy).

Yeah there will always be cases of cities not being reasonable and wanting telco to fork in on putting 10km of fiber per farmer living in vast area (which would be better served by radio), but overall giving for-profit big corporations so much power for city development is insane.

> Such requirements kill fiber development. Laying fiber is expensive, and having to lay it through neighborhoods where most people won’t or can’t subscribe just increases the price for everyone.

I'm sorry, but I just don't see it. I've worked with and for several telcos, I know the value of a customer that is locked into older infrastructure. Fiber is not more expensive, it's upgradable and properly done it's reasonably future-proof and Telcos know it. So no, these requirements do not kill fiber. These requirements force telcos like comcast to be competitive and not selective where fiber is installed. I know this because directional drilling is a very low-cost installation at about $10 a foot, permits for a neighborhood run you about $5000 and fiber runs will cost another $6 a foot. Now fiber network gear can be expensive, but again I remind you that I've worked with telcos... they already have most of the big bad gear in place and only need to put in more expensive singlemode runs to rural areas. So I call bullshit.

So heres my life because of telcos that make these complaints and politicians just don't give a shit: I've been in my house for a few decades and until this year my only choice was Comcast for anything over 100mbit internet. I spend $250 a month because Comcast forces me to bundle my internet with TV and Phone (and they call often to have me add cell and security). Then a local company came into the neighborhood this year offering Gigabit fiber for 1/4 the cost I'm spending now.

All of a sudden, Comcast, Centurylink and even the local utility company are out spending money I guess they didn't have to upgrade their networks to support fiber. 7 months of my yard (easement and telco junction) has been home to a variety of heavy machinery, as they run new upgraded infrastructure using directional drilling.

Somewhere in June I get an email from comcast that my internet was upgraded "for free" and now I have 1.2gb/40mbit, doubling my paid speed and if I sign a 2-year term today (with 6mo payment penalty for canceling), I'll pay 50% less and receive unlimited internet if I put in their modem. Let's just say I signed up with the local company and that activates this next month for synchronous 1gb fiber for $59 a month.

> It’s not just the traditional telcos or cable companies. There is a reason Google Fiber has this concept of “fiberhoods” where you need a certain level of demonstrated interest in subscription before they’ll build in those areas.

You know why google fiber wasn't successful? It's because people are lazy. If I wasn't motivated to kill off TV and Phone services that I NEVER use, I'd just stay with Comcast. Comcast will match the Internet only service price of $59 for 1gb internet the day I call to cancel. I have zero reason to change, but amazingly I can and NOW Comcast is flexible with pricing and options.

> All of a sudden, Comcast, Centurylink and even the local utility company are out spending money I guess they didn't have to upgrade their networks to support fiber.

It doesn’t sound like Comcast built fiber in your story. 1.2 gig down/40 meg up sounds like cable.

> You know why google fiber wasn't successful? It's because people are lazy

I didn’t say anything about Google Fiber being successful or not. I’m asking why Google wouldn’t agree to these community coverage requirements.

Why do you come here and tell lies?

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