https://www.huffpost.com/entry/verizon-pennsylvanias-com_b_7...
> By the end of 2003, Teletruth estimates that every household in Pennsylvania has paid in excess of $1,135.00 for a fiber optic service they will never get. Teletruth estimates that the total overcharging to be $3.9 billion or more in excess profits, tax deductions, and other financial perks, including funding other business ventures through cross-subsidization.
And it's far from just PA
In the UK, the lines are owned by the government and ISPs/telcos rent access to provide service.
This allows for pretty strong competition from the ISPs and stops there from being a billion dead lines buried underground.
To me, government owned lines and connections makes the most sense for society.
I think that's also a big part of why the US train system sucks. Private entities generally don't want to own that infrastructure, they want the trains that can haul the goods. So make them rent the line and have the government manage access just like they do with airplanes and roads.
In the US, the rails are private and the government owns the passenger service. In Europe, the government owns the rails and the passenger service is private.
People try to frame these issues as "socialist/capitalist" or some nonsense all of the time. But the reality is that neither system is more or less capitalist than the other. It's just one is better structured than the other.
However, having lived in a town in the US that has had a public ISP for decades, it was abhorrent. Municipalities only care about cost cutting - so there was no investment in wiring infrastructure or customer service. So I think there is an argument to be made that we may take for granted a bit the difference between rails/roads and fiber optics.
But I think that is also what holds up the adoption of public services - the difference between typical customer service in the US and say, the Post Office or DMV, turns a lot of people off from the idea of public ISPs or etc.
(Although, based on some time spent in Munich makes me think the quality/availability of broadband in Europe is also not all that).
Starlink, comcast, hughes.net and at&t customer support can take my RJ45 crimper and stick it where they don’t need network connectivity (sideways).
In many other spheres I will concur America has a better customer service culture. But I think alot comes down to taste and incentives. I am happy with not getting fussed over at a restaurant for example, and the odd frustration comes weighed against the fact I'm not really socially obligated to tip (although usually do).
Well, there's two aspects at play here.
For starters, you do need to be a certain size as an ISP to really offer cheap services. Imagine, for example, being a town of 500 with a municipal ISP. You'd end up with a lot of equipment to store and maintain and to really be effective, you'd have to employ a bunch of people that spend most of their time doing nothing. (After all, how often would the customer service rep for a small town ACTUALLY be answering any calls?).
That's why a state, county, or national? run ISP would probably make more sense, especially in more rural locations.
That being said, in the UK with BT and the line rentals I described earlier those worked unreasonably well. ISPs could complain to BT to fix problems which ultimately left the various ISPs in a region to compete on tech and price. That was a win for the customer.
There's a lot of nitty gritty policy weeds of what went wrong. But the main one was that after the public ISP incorporated in the 90s as a complimentary service to a public cable network, the state passed a legislation regulating public utility rates. Good for power/water/sewer/cable customers. But it meant that the city could not charge customers differently even with wildly different internet speeds.
Going into the 90s, as the internet aspects became more important, they couldn't keep up with upgrading the lines, especially given the costs would be born by all customers regardless of what speed they were getting.
But I think one lesson is that internet and other utilities are not quite as functionally comparable as people claim. Per capita consumption of water has not quadruped in the last 10 years, but home internet has! So the case for internet as a public utility will be stronger when the need for constantly upgrading infrastructure plateaus.
Municipal ISPs and ISPs leasing municipal infrastructure dominated PCMag's speed ratings until they excluded local ISPs. Many have excellent satisfaction ratings. Large private ISPs consistently have some of the worst of any business.
The point stands though that the feedback loop between customer wants and the government is much much longer than between consumer and business.
> would work a lot better if Amtrak could be privatized
That’s a bold claim. While I’m not knee jerk anti-privatization, I’m extremely skeptical that privatizing the NEC will be anything but a fleecing of the public since most of the problems are due to aging infrastructure requiring billions of dollars of investment - which even with your beloved cars and airplanes is not something handled much by the private sector. People who argue it’s bad now just assume you’re too much of an idiot to imagine it could be worse.
> “Train geeks” have no meaningful public policy pull, it is silly and counterproductive to insinuate they have much to do with lobbying and promoting long distance rail
So who do you think managed to stuff $22 billion of Amtrak subsidies into the 2021 infrastructure act? Fairies?
There are tons of small, dedicated lobbies that are organized and effective enough that they can pressure the government into these sorts of policies, and the train geeks are certainly one of them. Or maybe they just managed to infiltrate the ranks of policy staffers. These people hated Anderson because he was threatening their favorite “historic” long haul routes, like the Seattle-Chicago “Empire Builder”, in favor of focusing on Acela.
Well congress ultimately, but as far as actual influence? Maybe start with: Labor unions, manufacturers throughout the supply chain, maintenance vendors - you know entities with actual money and financial interests. Also, local constituents and representatives where the train service happens to go, like it or not the train service is hugely important to the chamber of commerce in general of a place like Syracuse for instance where an air carrier just pulled out and one of those destinations is Chicago - it matters not much from optics that the journey takes longer than 100 years ago. The idea that the “train geeks” have anything measurable to do with it doesn’t pass any smell test. Moreover, the companies and organizations that are involved and do exist don’t magically disappear in any imagined privatization future. I also have a hard time believing that a motley bunch of train geeks somehow has any pull over the ReDUcE GoVERNmENT SpENDInG crowd.
> We could privatize Amtrak next year and they could follow that same business plan
The NEC corridor still needs billions of dollars of upgrades and maintenance. Again that is something that the public sector has almost invariably footed the bill on.
As for your initial thesis in this comment, it’s straight up garbage that has been discussed to death, and you have to assume I’m an uninformed moron to believe it uncritically. I’m not going to repeat this: https://viewfromthewing.com/amtrak-is-lying-they-are-nowhere...
The NEC is profitable if you hand wave away most of the costs like maintenance, and the infrastructure so the those brand new trains they just bought (the $10 billion spend just after Mr Andersons tenure, so as not to derail your narrative) can go more than 80mph (there are still major chunks north of NYC that can’t manage that).
I believe you are being willfully disingenuous so will not continue this conversation further.
> I believe you are being willfully disingenuous so will not continue this conversation further.
Wow, such hostility. I'm not being willfully disingenuous; you just have a short temper and have a hard time staying civil, but I'll give you a second chance and try to respond in good faith here.
> Maybe start with: Labor unions, manufacturers throughout the supply chain, maintenance vendors - you know entities with actual money and financial interests.
Sure. Pork barrel politics all around.
> Also, local constituents and representatives where the train service happens to go, like it or not the train service is hugely important to the chamber of commerce in general of a place like Syracuse for instance where an air carrier just pulled out and one of those destinations is Chicago - it matters not much from optics that the journey takes longer than 100 years ago.
I just looked up flights between Syracuse and Chicago, and I can find multiple affordable nonstop flights: https://www.kayak.com/flights/SYR-CHI/2024-05-25/2024-06-01/...
Amtrak (which doesn't provide working deep links, and doesn't let me look up routes unless I turn off my ad blocker) offers a 13 hour overnight train at roughly the same fare as that two hour flight. What practical customer value is Amtrak providing on this route? Maybe train service between Syracuse and Chicago was faster 100 years ago, but it wasn't as fast as as a two hour flight, and it's not going to be. So who actually cares, aside from train geeks and, as you pointed out, people with a vested interest in federal pork?
> Moreover, the companies and organizations that are involved and do exist don’t magically disappear in any imagined privatization future.
I think a lot of them do "magically disappear" if they're dependent on government subsidies in order to remain economically viable!
> I also have a hard time believing that a motley bunch of train geeks somehow has any pull over the ReDUcE GoVERNmENT SpENDInG crowd.
Please, look at any graph of government spending over the past century and then try to tell me with a straight face that the "reduce government spending crowd" has any pull at all. Government spending does not get reduced. On the other hand, the federal government still subsidizes useless train routes that nobody needs, like the Syracuse to Chicago service you pointed out, or the Seattle to Chicago service I pointed out.
> The NEC is profitable if you hand wave away most of the costs like maintenance, and the infrastructure so the those brand new trains they just bought (the $10 billion spend just after Mr Andersons tenure, so as not to derail your narrative) can go more than 80mph (there are still major chunks north of NYC that can’t manage that).
My claim here is that you can make up the shortfall by eliminating all the useless routes that fail to compete with other modes of transportation. Maybe I'm mistaken about this, but you haven't really shown me hard numbers that account for the elimination of useless routes.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the point being made (which was why the mention that the train is slower now was even mentioned): a gross miscalculation of general politically relevant public opinion for long distance rail service.
Even so, if you actually want to understand the indisputable utilization of some of these routes, search say only a week out rather than a month and the differential might be more like $120 for a train ticket and $600 for plane ticket. And compare peak to off peak times where plane tickets will sky rocket but rail differentials are far more modest. Those "affordable" fares also have an $80 differential between basic economy and economy, the privilege to even bring a carry-on bag let alone checked baggage. Getting to and from the station is often cheaper than the airport.
> So who actually cares
And here's the thing, many of these routes do sell out or come close to doing so on a daily basis. With a few notable exceptions, they're not running light trains around. In the case of the aforementioned train averaging about 500 pax in each direction. It's not my job to convince you that the majority of these 500 passengers are not train geeks. Yes it is hard for me to comprehend that is the first thing someone would think critically, as if the majority of those using Greyhound and the Chinatown line are "bus geeks".
It's not like I'm saying axing some of these routes is a not a reasonable enough opinion, but my initial reply was pointing out the ridiculous premises.
> Please, look at any graph of government spending over the past century and then try to tell me with a straight face that the "reduce government spending crowd" has any pull at all.
To keep this on topic, compare a system map and timetable of Amtrak today vs 30 years ago.
> My claim here is that you can make up the shortfall by eliminating all the useless routes
And ignoring the $10 billion of outlay for new trainsets and the $16 billion dollar Gateway for starters (these are just for the NEC).
Your point didn't come across very clearly. I'm sorry about that; I also get frustrated when my points don't come across clearly. But I'm operating in good faith here.
I don't understand the relevance of the point that the Syracuse to Chicago train is slower than it was 100 years ago. You can fly from Syracuse to Chicago in 2 hours. No train is going to compete with that--maybe a maglev or hyperloop, but not a train. So if the train service between Syracuse and Chicago is going to compete with air service, it's going to have to compete some other way.
> And here's the thing, many of these routes do sell out or come close to doing so on a daily basis. With a few notable exceptions, they're not running light trains around. In the case of the aforementioned train averaging about 500 pax in each direction.
That's great. If those passengers are willing to pay ticket prices that cover the full long term costs of maintaining their share of the infrastructure they're using, then you could have an economically viable privately operated passenger train service. If not, then the ticket prices are artificially low and should be raised. If raising the ticket prices makes the ridership disappear, then it doesn't have economic sense to run a passenger train route.
> It's not my job to convince you that the majority of these 500 passengers are not train geeks. Yes it is hard for me to comprehend that is the first thing someone would think critically, as if the majority of those using Greyhound and the Chinatown line are "bus geeks".
No, you're right. You've convinced me that the widespread public support for Amtrak doesn't come from people naively romanticizing passenger rail, but rather a coalition of people effectively freeloading off the American taxpayer. As a result I am now even more opposed to Amtrak.
I don't think that's a fair assessment. There's a public non-monetary value that is gained by having broader accessibility to routes that aren't necessarily profitable. USPS has a universal service obligation for the same reason. We also do the same thing (even more explicitly) with air travel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Air_Service
USPS has a universal service obligation but also a legal monopoly. Meaning that if you try and start your own postal service, the feds will literally shut it down and throw you in prison. Its probably no coincidence that USPS also has abominably nonexistent spam filtering, to the degree that the majority of USPS service I’ve received in my entire adult life consisted of myself throwing away and/or shredding the vast majority of crap that they shove in my mailbox six days a week. And any suggestion that maybe they cut down to shoving crap in my mailbox 5 or even 4 days a week is treated like it would be the end of Western civilization.
Can you name one city or town in the US that is dependent on Amtrak for basic transportation? For instance, is there a single town anywhere in this country that doesn’t have a highway or airport but does have a train station with Amtrak service?
So this isn't about providing people with access to transportation, because people do, in fact, have access to other transportation options. It's about catering to the whimsical preferences of people who like to ride trains. I don't think catering to those whimsical preferences is a necessary public service.
Exactly. And the pros and cons for trains, as a mode of transportation, have made them a less viable option for most American journeys ever since the mid-20th century. When you say "there are people who do not drive or fly but use trains", you're not describing the typical, reasonable person who weighs the pros and cons between different modes of transportation, you're describing someone who refuses to even consider alternate modes of transportation. Maybe it's not necessarily a whimsical romanticism for trains, but it's certainly something well short of any actual necessity that's deserving of public subsidy.
These things should be done exactly because they are not the norm. There are people in unique circumstances in every corner of this country who rely on niche options. I know some of them who have relied on these things. The free market can take care of “normal” people and circumstances just fine.
Lots of it is just about marketing though.
But in that case, doesn't it make more sense for the government to just cut out the middleman and offer internet to consumers directly? What is the company's value-add?
They might even own the peering network closet (which is often a weatherproof enclosure with a backup generator).
As a user though you pay for bandwidth at the interchange because that's how the old privatised and divested government monopoly did it.
The model, last mile public utility but all the speed private wouldn't be all that awful if it weren't butchered by various vested interests. In theory the current last mile company will be sold once it becomes profitable.
From there, any ISP can rent rack space, and arrange their own backbone/uplink, and get wired to whatever customers they can. Municipality charges a fee to use the fiber, and that's it.
Muni provides the line to the CO, ISP is responsible after that. They can compete on their internet speed, price, support, and whatever else they want (Netflix box, email, low latency to game servers).
Muni could even add a "no-internet" free service that just provides access to city services, library, etc.
We have a variant of that here. An indy company just laid fiber here but they don't provide service. Instead I have a choice of 8+ competing fiber companies.
Before fiber, I had 1 'choice' of ISP and paid $124/mo for 1Gb/40Mb w/ 40ms latency to the IX.
Now my choices include 1Gb/1Gb $49, 2Gb/2Gb $79, 10Gb/10Gb $199 w/ 4ms latency to the IX.
Providing Layer 3.
Just like the government owns the roads and highways, and lets UPS and FedEx use them for delivery.
The theory is that roads/fibre are natural monopolies, but the services that use them can be competitive. There just needs to be a fee for the upkeep of the infrastructure (but it doesn't necessarily need to make a (hufe) profit).
For the smallest issues, you can expect a single bundle to already have spare connections. For bigger issues, almost anything that takes out one bundle will take out the neighbors too.
Meanwhile diverse ISPs wouldn't be using the same A and B. ISP A has a central office in a high rise downtown, ISP B primarily targets single family homes and has their switching equipment on a piece of land next to a substation in suburbia, so if you subscribe to both you not only have links coming from opposite directions, they're each operated by independent organizations instead of a monoculture.
In the last decade a number of ISPs have popped up and decided to fibre up areas. They are invariably buying OLTs from Nokia or Adtran (the same two vendors as BT OR) putting them in a BT OR exchange because that is cheap and very convenient, good access to backhaul etc and then renting BT OR ducts and poles to install the fibre in/on (PIA). To top it off they often are using the same fibre vendor as BT and sometimes even the same contractors to install it. Worked example of this; netomia/youfibre (though there are dozens).
What resilience are we really gaining here? Organisational, and that's pretty much it.
Now suppose that anyone could run an ISP out of their house. They wire up a few of their neighbors and then make a single long-distance run to one of many backhaul providers, none of which has a dominant market position like BT. The backhaul providers connect to their customers and each other in telco hotels, but they're smaller and more numerous because each of the largest providers has their own, so the city has three or four instead of one.
Meanwhile even if you have a BT, organizational independence in itself is better than nothing.
It is a fine concept but you'd have to actually ban infrastructure sharing between ISPs and be building a completely Greenfield network. Quite theoretical. I'm aware of former eastern bloc countries that have dynamics somewhat reminiscent of what you describe though.
You could require them to provide those services for their competitors at regulated rates, but then you're not actually breaking that monopoly, you're just regulating it while cementing it in place.
If you have an existing monopolist then first you have to thoroughly break them up, not just mitigate the continued existence of the monopoly.
Ensuring there isn't a single point of failure is not just as simple as 'putting it in the contract.' Carriers can and have groomed their primary and backup circuit on to the same L1 path without realizing it.
I've never seen it happen in 20 years. Although of course small parts of the path change over time and sometimes that means bits get put in the same duct for a short run but that also happens when you buy from different providers to be honest. With some carriers you can insist they send you updated route kmls when they change either path and you can detect the change as you'll see different losses/otdr traces before and after a maintenance/fix.
Most of the country has more than one physical fibre (or FTTB/FTTC/CATV) provider available.
Privatizing publicly built infrastructure did not inoculate us from surveillance.
To actually do it we need to exercise control through the collective mechanism we call government. Laws, regulation, oversight, audits, sunshine policies. It's the only way to curb it. Mistrusting your only mechanism of control and putting blind faith into private markets did not work. We tried it. It failed.
The actual problem is the centralization, regardless of whether it's public or private. There shouldn't be two ISP options, there should be a thousand, so that anyone wanting to compromise all the traffic has to compromise a thousand independent entities, some of which can then be operated by stubborn curmudgeons who would rather loudly go to jail than silently betray the public.
A. Break up the companies, assume mergers and acquisitions don't happen, consolidations never happens and that someone will be defiant of the law in the public interest at a crucial point
B. Change the law
It's important to note that AT&T was broken up and there once was many mobile carriers and there were many surveillance and spy programs going on during that time unabated and then they just bought each other up.
So instead of wishing on a hope and a dream that some invisible hands will orchestrate unexplainable market magic, let's just change the law. There's actual historical evidence of that working.
Or just prohibit them. That's a change to the law you can actually see is being enforced.
The problem with changing the spying law is that the spying is happening in secret, so there is no way to verify that they're not lying to you as they have in the past. Laws with no accountability mechanism are a farce. They need to be backstopped by verifiable structural inhibitions on the practice, like diverse decentralized infrastructure subject to competitive pressure and plausible independent reimplementation by anyone who doesn't trust the incumbents.
> someone will be defiant of the law in the public interest at a crucial point
This is required to turn back injustice. But it's more likely to be achieved the more people have the opportunity to do it.
The trick is simply to ensure you pick a government that isn't going to pass that kind of invasive legislation, or will remove it and retrospectively revoke all access granted under the legislation that they're repealing.
As for Great Firewall of USA, what makes you think it doesn't exist already?
I thought BT was owned by the government (particularly because every ISP ends up renting from them).
I still think that a centralized network that is rented out ends up working better than one that's deployed by different ISPs.
I can understand that perception. Essentially, Openreach is regulated so heavily by the government that it might as well be considered public, from the perspective of 'what services it must offer, on what basis, to whom, and the prices it must set.' However, it is a private company, being a 'firewalled' part of BT
Because of the way physics and fiber optics work, having a common carrier that rents out access to wavelengths or bandwidth on the fiber strands is the best economic model, by far.
*except in very rural areas for highly specific use cases, or in the case of wavelengths for medium range high capacity backhaul.
OpenReach is a private company, and has many loopholes to not support you if they do not want to. If you have a line issue and they cannot find the root cause, they will black list you.
I had an intermittent fault on my line which OpenReach couldn't (wouldn't?) resolve when I was with Zen. Magically after switching to BT, they sent out BT engineer, who escalated to OpenReach, who then found the fault and replaced the dodgy part in the green box.
It might be "firewalled" but that's not my experience. It shouldn't be firewalled, it should be a separate entity. The only reason to bundle it with BT is if BT was getting a benefit from it.
We've had BT/OR announce several times over the past 5 years that they are installing proper fibre in the area to squash competition, and then quietly cancel. Funny how we have an AltNet laying fibre here and suddenly BT/OR are getting their act together to upgrade the area.
I hope you complained to your MP, and/or ofcom?
What alternative would you prefer? It would be ideal to turn openreach over to either it's own heavily regulated PLC or a MIC/COOP, but can we really force that in a capitalistic society, when the current status quo is 'acceptable'?
I would prefer openreach were force to sell a regulated single strand dark fibre product, that can be used however the CP wants, but it would cause genuine chaos for ORs business model e.g leased lines would be cancelled.
I spent three months trying to get them to switch my line over to fibre after OpenReach had stated it was available. Their approach was to hope that waiting long enough would fix the problem.
Eventually someone just closed my existing line and immediately opened a new one.
It just hasn't blown up as big as Thames Water, decades to get a fibre connection (other countries did fibre 15-20 years ago so it was possible) doesn't annoy as many people as filling rivers with sewage.
Someone posted this below, sums up the situation rather nicely. https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...
Have you tried interacting with a state service recently, like renewing your passport maybe? They are not exactly the pinical of innovation, speed and efficiency.
The fact most of us can get a 1Gb full fibre service for 30-40 pounds a month (and faster is available, for a little bit more) is not bad.
The 1996 US Telecom act did this and all kinds of local ISPs popped up to compete. We suddenly had cheap DSL all over the place; people left dial-up in droves.
But citizens don't write laws, lobbyists do. Within 10 years, ISPs had clawed back all their monopolistic control. Now most of the US is under a monopoly/duopoly again.
Since at least the 1950s, AT&T has been so tightly tied to US Gov+NatSec, it's practically another agency.
To illustrate that: AT&T once faced a lawsuit for aiding US Gov's unconstitutional, warrantless wiretapping (also for cloning backbone traffic for the NSA).
When Congress presented a bill to grant retroactive immunity to AT&T, both Obama and Clinton paused their presidential campaigns. They flew back to DC to cast their Yea votes and protect AT&T from any possible accountability.
US news orgs weren't able to spot anything out of the ordinary in that.
Your facts are a little scrambled: are you referring to 2008 [0] or 2012 [1][2] or both? I guess you meant 2008 because both Hillary and Obama were running for President; but Hillary was absent from the 2/12/2008 vote, [2] claims Obama voted against it. I located the bill: [3] "S.2248 - FISA Amendments Act of 2008" and that Senate vote record from 2/12/2008, although it says "Clinton (D-NY), Not Voting", "Obama (D-IL), Not Voting"(?). You'd expect journalists to get important facts right. Meanwhile US media barely covered that vote.
[0] 2/2008 "Telecom immunity remains intact as Democrats split on vote" "Obama voted with 30 fellow Democrat Senators, but not the absent Hillary Clinton, to allow the telecom companies to face lawsuits... on the [Bush] admin's programme of warrantless wiretapping. But the immunity survived, with 18 Democrats crossing over to support George Bush." https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2008/feb/12/terrorism.u...
[1] "US Supreme Court finalizes gift of immunity to the telecom giants" - Glenn Greenwald https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/10/suprem...
[2] TheAtlantic: "The Supreme Court Isn't Bothered By the NSA’s Warrantless Wiretapping" ... "refused to hear a case that holds telecom companies accountable for letting the warrantless NSA spying" https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/10/supreme...
[3]: 02/12/2008 "S.2248 - FISA Amendments Act of 2008", click through on "14 roll call votes" https://www.congress.gov/bill/110th-congress/senate-bill/224...
Mostly not. Hillary did vote against the bill so thank you for clarifying that.
> are you referring to 2008 or 2012
2008 because Clinton campaign + Obama campaign + AT&T Amnesty bill.
[3]: 02/12/2008 "S.2248 - FISA Amendments Act of 2008", click through on "14 roll call votes" https://www.congress.gov/bill/110th-congress/senate-bill/224...
The full story: https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...
The downside of having the government do it is that if the government screws it up, it takes decades to fix, while private companies can swoop in much faster if one company is doing a bad job.
They charge ISPs for use of the infrastructure and that funds maintenance and upgrades. For the sort of core upgrades that occur every few decades, they can do a bond referendum to cover shortfalls.
It's the same setup our private infra does here. They own the fiber in the ground and ISPs pay then to sell services.
It can be harder for a private infra company to get in the ground because they're limited to municipalities that aren't captured by telecom/ISP lobbying orgs - but still have a dense enough population.
I used to think that but now I'm not sure I still believe it. I worry that government owned lines doesn't result in "everyone gets fiber to the home now" but rather "nobody gets fiber yet cause we're still getting cable in Internet to the last X rural users."
I fear that private IsPs will collude to keep internet slow and prices high, while never delivering to rural.
The majority of British lines are owned by OpenReach, which is a subsidiary of BT, which used to be run by the government, but was privatised back in the 80s.
But they have not been owned by the government in decades, and there are competitors who have run their own lines.
i mean this honestly: an investor may not get crazy returns every year, but they get stable returns every year. why is owning and maintaining infrastructure unattractive?
https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/ad-hoc-commitee-surv...
So for those poles running down the street in front of your house, ISPs are already paying ~$20 per pole per year. Places like NYC probably also take a cut of the revenue on top. In some regions, this is the primary gatekeeper against competition!
It's really hard to argue that this is a subsidy - if anything it's the municipalities using the power of their natural monopoly.
So low? That's approximately 0% of what the ISP makes from the homes served by that pole. I figured it would be more.
So the cost for the pole rental works out to about 5% of Comcast's service cost to me.
Keep in mind some poles cost more than others (up to $250 according to the report), and that there are also hookup costs for the pole are ~$1000.
I'm not saying ISPs are suffering here, but cities are not providing this infrastructure at a loss.
Hah. We live in veeeeery different housing densities I guess. I was thinking this was NYC, which would be closer to mine. If it's the whole state then probably somewhere in between.
[0] https://www.srperspective.com/post/telephone-poles-a-high-wi...
There's a federal law from the 1990s banning any such taxes or fees from being charged on internet service, so cities don't collect anything based on that.
Your franchise fee, for example, could buy permission to build your own poles. But it would not pay for you to put lines up on city-owned poles.
This seems like saying "there can only be so many condos in a city, so we have to ration them." Hypothetically if you had billions of fiber optic cables running along the same street you could physically run out of space, but that's an implausibly high number. Meanwhile you could easily have hundreds to thousands without any trouble.
> so in return for that privilege, you have to provide this in return.
The point of even wanting to do that is in order to charge a sustainable price for the service. If you had to provide the service below cost, why would you do it at all?
Broadband is a natural monopoly, housing is not. These are well understood economic terms.
Like this is a reasonable approach, but you are artificially creating a specific market, maybe there are other kinds of market we can as well.
All regulatory systems result in a specific market. There is no natural form. In the absence of any laws, people use violence or coercion to seize power and then start making their own rules, effectively becoming the new government and shaping the market with whatever rules they impose (or refuse to impose while excluding another government from forming).
The question is, what kind of rules have good outcomes? Lots of people propose dumb rules, like price controls, that have dumb outcomes. Some rules have okayish outcomes but are still subpar and less efficient or effective than better rules.
The best rules create a market with vigorous competition. Because then you don't need the rules to specifically create other outcomes you like, you just choose the provider who provides them, since the rules have done the most important thing and ensured that you have that choice.
I work for an ISP. We actually build our own fiber networks by stringing fiber along aerial infrastructure to cover whole neighborhoods and then doing drops to individual houses on orders and supplying the ONT, and we can make that work and be profitable after a few years at ~$50/mo, but that's what I would consider many multiples more expensive to deliver than providing service over existing infrastructure, if that's actually what's being talked about here.
And this is in CA and in the bay area and LA areas, so I doubt the regulatory and cost difference factors significantly, unless there's some cost required to be paid to the city to use their infra.
If only a few people can use a limited resources like cable space on a pole, the government should auction off the privilege to the highest bidder. And then let the winner decide how they want to use what they bid for.
The government can use the revenue from the auction (and general tax revenue, too) to help poor people. Though I would suggest to just give poor people money so they can decide for themselves, instead of deciding for them that they should spend their limited resources on eg internet access.
Yes, wireless spectrum is a limited public resource that requires government permission to use, but the government in that case is federal government.
On the other hand these types of rules seem like they would be hard to perfect I would almost rather have municipal run internet.
True, but I think using DWDM this is mostly a non-issue.