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Nothing is really stopping new entrants from joining the market -- other than the fact that deploying a broadband network in the US is really, really expensive

Actually, a lot is: Google "cable franchise agreements" or "city broadband franchise agreements" and you'll find that many if not most cities and counties either forbid or make prohibitively expensive real competition. Here is one news article about a lawsuit related to them: http://stopthecap.com/2012/06/19/court-invalidates-existing-... .

Many states are also passing telco-financed laws prohibiting local municipalities from creating Internet access as a utility. Examples: http://www.infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard/big-carrier... or http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/12/30/municipal_bro... .

I live in California and was hoping to lobby my municipal government to bargain for better service when our cable franchise came up for renewal.

What I learned was that this bargaining power had been transferred to the state level in 1996. When I talked to those who'd been in charge of the process previously, they claimed the state CPUC served as a rubber stamp.

http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/PUC/Telco/Information+for+providing+s...

If you live in California, the CPUC is, theoretically, the organization you want to lobby. When I tried to get a roadmap for broadband expansion in my area, I did not have much luck.

Yeah, unfortunately there's not much you can do. The big telcos are so politically powerful that any individual market (especially if it's a smaller one) doesn't have much bargaining power. This isn't a problem specific to telcos; this just happens anywhere you have one large unified side negotiating with a number of fractured parties with different interests (and would likely be the same when dealing with a government bureaucracy vs. a telco.)

This drives me crazy. The whole reason they are given a decades long monopoly is so they build the infrastructure. Once it is built there is absolutely no good reason to renew the monopoly. It's like continuing to pay on your 30 year mortgage after 30 years!

And when local governments had this power they renewed the cable monopolies anyway?! In 2005 San Francisco, for $8 million upfront and $500k a year, the SF government sold Comcast exclusive rights to SF's 800,000+ residents for 4 years. And this has effectively been extended indefinitely.

This is a good example of the difference between the public and private sectors.

[1] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SAN-FRANCISCO-Board-pa...

Yeah, and laws like that are unfortunate (and likely to get overturned).

Franchise agreements exist specifically because the buildout costs are so high. Many locales place regulations on telecom companies (such as the aforementioned requirement that a company serve an entire city and not just the wealthy neighborhoods) but in order for companies to be able to be profitable under those regulations, they ask for a franchise agreement in return.

Google Fiber has so far been able to avoid these complications because they're picking and choosing their markets. They go after unencumbered markets where they can deliver service to only the wealthy parts of town (Austin being a great example -- anything inside the city limits is relatively wealthy while the less wealthy folks live in the far-flung suburbs. Kansas City is another; the poor part of town is in Kansas and the wealthy part is in MO and governed by a different authority.) I'm not convinced they'll ever go nationwide exactly because they don't want to deal with these complications.

> Additionally, US telecom regulation requires that if you're going to cover a city, you have to cover the WHOLE city; or at least you can't discriminate based on income.

This is exactly why negotiations to deploy FiOS broke down in Wilmington, and why Verizon won't deploy to Baltimore. Wilmington demanded that Verizon build out to the whole city, even though almost the whole downtown is too poor to afford fiber.

F'ing poor people...

There's no free lunch. U.S. cities are geographically the most suitable for deploying things like fiber, but are for historical reasons also much poorer than the surrounding, less dense suburbs. In the U.S., "dense == poor" in a way that is just much less true in Europe. This creates not just an inhospitable geography for telecom providers, but also a very different political climate. American cities are battlegrounds for class issues, as anyone living in San Francisco knows. That makes it very hard to build infrastructure concentrated in the cities. It's not just telecom, look at passenger rail. Amtrak runs a profit in the northeast corridor, but runs at a loss everywhere else because most of the country simply isn't suitable for rail. Yet, it's politically impossible to have an objective of focusing money and effort building a modern high-speed rail network for the northeast, where it makes sense, and abandoning the networks elsewhere.

So how come Ireland, a country in Europe, is in second last place? (There are 4 European countries below USA on the list).

Even Switzerland with is (a) much smaller and (b) considerably more wealthier than USA has worse broadband?

The exchange rate chosen in the comp kills the euro and CHF zones while benefiting £. I have been living in the UK, France and Germany - no chance that the UK pays less per MB than the 2 others who have among the best providers and networks in the world.

On the core of the issue: xDSL is favorable to homogeneously, densely populated areas. Fiber has a CAPEX that home usage can't monetize.

On a similar infrastructure depleted continent, Africa, one telco generation (wired voice/internet) was skipped and they have now a top 3G network. Way to go?

It kinda breaks my mind that the market has been so warped by BS like this.

That's interesting (didn't know about the whole city coverage).

The general telecom issue is also gone over well in this talk called captive audience [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R4xhwy-1oI]. It goes over the telecom industry, how it's not competitive and the current day incentives/problems.

While the underlying reason that this issue cannot easily be fixed appears to be related to a more fundamental problem with American campaign fundraising and how it creates a competing dependency that prevents any meaningful reform from moving forward. This Ted talk by Lawrence Lessig (http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_t...) gives a good overview of this problem.

It is really time for a big push in the United States to get Internet Access declared a Public Utility.

This a thousands times.

You can also add in the incredible expense to lay new fiber. Like you point out, you can't just lay it in certain areas, it has to be the entire city which is a financial multiplier which usually makes this an undesirable task for most companies.

We're still seeing the effects of the regional bell monopolies. They own all the copper and fiber. If you want to get into the game, you have to go through them and your margins are going to be razor thin unless you're willing to incur incredible overhead to dig and lay all the fiber yourself.