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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

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.

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

...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.

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.

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.

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