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Comment by kdkdkrjrj | Hacker News Reader

To be fair: this is an america regulatory capture problem.

Regulatory capture is only a secondary reason why many parts of the USA still lack cheap, reliable broadband Internet access. It turns out that running fiber everywhere is expensive, and in some areas the potential customer base doesn't justify the cost.

It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth.. unless and until there's competition.

Funny how quickly my internet options went from expensive cable internet, to 1 gig symmetric fiber for $90, to 10 gig symmetric fiber for $50. And now, magically, Xfinity has 1Gbps+ service for $50 as well.

> It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth...

You can start a company right now and lay fiber in these places and start your own telecom.

You probably don't have the money for that but, if you put together a solid business plan, a bank would give you a loan.

You may not have the experience or expertise to do that, but there are plenty of people who do.

Why hasn't that happened yet? It turns out that laying down miles of fiber for a handful of customers isn't profitable.

Google dod it in a few places that were low hanging fruit. Places that had telephone poles where they could get relatively easy access to them.

There are certainly places where access to those poles is more difficult than it should be but most places are hampered by either being too remote to justify the cost of burying lines to a few customers (rural areas) or the digging is too expensive to many customers (suburban areas) because they'd be digging up streets.

Profitable vs unprofitable is not black and white. No doubt there are some places where it's simply not profitable to run the fiber today.

However, there are a TON of places where the business strategy you outline is a great idea, and would be profitable.

..... until the incumbents lower their outrageous prices in the face of the competition, and bam, now your business model is no longer profitable.

I most certainly don’t have 1 Gps+ service for $50 though in practice my circa 50-100 Mps service for about twice that works fine does for me from Xfinity. I care a lot more about reliability.

We do a lot of things that require subsidizing, very much including the things commonly found in/around a lot of the rural farms where these services would target. If broadband internet access is a fundamental need for contemporary communication--much like the postal service, telegraph, and telephones were--then historically we do what's necessary to provide them.

Sure, subsidies are potentially an option to increase broadband availability. But that's not really a regulatory capture issue.

Yeah, a primary reason would include "spineless legislators who allowed carriers to say "We'd need tens of billions of subsidies to even consider doing this", and then when given that money to do so, just... largely didn't. And kept cruising without consequence (and with the money).

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