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Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.

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