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> I view the broadband industry as a fascinating example of what happens when an infrastructure industry meets the technology industry.

I don't disagree with your comment, but your argument would seem to apply to the rest of the world, whereas in fact the US is in a fairly unique situation among developed countries.

Most of the current situation can be explained by the fact that broadband is currently the only unregulated public utility.

In NYC, I don't really pay much attention to electricity, gas, and water. ConEd kind of sucks, and I wish they were better, but really, they work well enough most of the time, and I'm not sure that I could name anybody else who would do it better.

The problem is that we sold off monopoly rights to broadband without attaching any strings of regulation, etc. Why should they bother to upgrade their infrastructure? Heck, we literally paid the cable companies billions of dollars of government money to do exactly that, and because we failed to enforce that with any real teeth, they just took the money and ran. Of course they're not going to listen when consumers say they "want gigabit". It would make no business sense to do otherwise, especially when 80% of your customers are unable to vote with their wallet and use a competing service[0].

There's a case to be made for either a free-market approach to broadband, or a more "socialized", regulated monopoly. Unfortunately, what we currently have is a hybrid of both, and it happens to hit upon the worst of both worlds.

[0] There's a South Park clip that does a great job of describing this relationship. I won't link to it here, because it's rather crude and possibly (?) a bit NSFW, but searching "south park cable" on Youtube should lead you to it if you want to laugh, sigh, and cry all at the same time.

I disagree in terms of regulation: there is plenty of regulation on broadband internet, except it tends to discourage competition against broadband providers.

This isn't a problem that is going to be solved by placing regulations on the industry. Your example of past subsidies provides an excellent argument for this: given the political clout these entities hold and have in the past used to stilt legislation in their favor, what leads us to believe we're going to do any better with new regulations?

At the end of the day, the market is demanding better internet service. While telecommunications providers are certain to wage war against the injection against honest competition into their sector, things are actually looking pretty good in my mind. The FCC sees market demand and is working to tear down anti-competitive legislative barriers [1]. Smaller efforts such as Google Fiber are doing the hard work of convincing the public that better service is within reach.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/02/20/fcc_s_pla...

It's highly unlikely that the FCC will accomplish much in the way of enforcing net nutrality given that the agency has basically been captured by special interest.

Tom Wheeler, the new FCC Chairman, was a lobbyist and head of the NCTA for 5 years[1]. The idea that he will do anything to hurt the cable companies his old organization represents is ludicrous.

[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/business/tom-wheeler-telec...

What leads me to believe we'll do better with new regulations? The belief, as chimeracoder suggests, that regulation can done right.

One point that caught my attention in an NPR report[1] on this dispute last week:

IHS's Broughton says there was a similar dispute in South Korea a few years ago, and it was ultimately arbitrated by the government.

I don't know the details of the South Korean dispute but I understand South Korea has pretty fast internet speeds.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/02/20/280255...

South Korea also has highly invasive internet censorship.

Would you like that as well?

Oh of course not. We want the great parts but to leave the bad parts. Sometimes it's a package deal. I'll take what we've got, thank you very much.

South Korea's internet censorship has very little to do with their internet speeds. Saying "Well, if you want fast internet, it'll have to be censored" (as if our internet isn't fully monitored) is a false equivalence of the highest order.

Monitoring =/ censorship

If the gov't views the internet as it's possession, then it can make sense for it to be both fast and censored.

Well perhaps this may be the case in some scenarios, but that doesn't mean that the internet can't be censored when internet infrastructure is private, either. p = internet is public infrastructure q = censorship for some (but not all) p -> q for some (but not all) ¬p -> q q -> irrelevant

It's irrelevant to the question of fast internet.

To reiterate, you're saying that censorship and fast internet are a package deal, and if we want fast internet, we have to deal with censorship, amirite?

I'm saying that the political process which leads to things like gov't required fast internet may also lead to greater encroachment upon said internet.

It's an interesting way of thinking of things.

Yesterday I listened to a discussion comparing the less regulated and more stable banking system of Canada to the heavily regulated and crash prone US banking system. Everyone in the US says that they want Canada's banking system, it's a common refrain.

But do Americans want the political system which leads to such a banking system being implemented properly? As soon as you get to the Queen of England appointing US Senators, Americans tend to want to forget about the whole banking system thing.

I suppose the point is this: If you tell the US political system to implement Korea style fast and cheap internet, what you're going to end up with is something much different from what you wanted. The same political forces which got you to your current location will filter this legislation as well. And you may end up with something far worse than the status quo.

Canada's banks were still under the equivalent of Glass-Steagall restrictions at the time, and the government had kept them on a very short leash in many other respects. Your analysis is 180 degrees removed fom reality.

I don't know where the heck you're getting the nonsense about the Queen from either, the Canadian Prime Minister selects senators at his own discretion and the royal involvment in the process is just ceremonial.

Time for you to crack open our nation's history books!

Some things never change. I remember a article on South Korean broadband in Businessweek 15 years ago that ranted on about Seoul's paucity of elevators.

I'm guessing that package deal means we'll also be having to eat pickled cabbage and end our sentences with verbs if we want decent Internet speeds? I just hope we won't have to drink bubble tea, that stuff is gross.

You need to qualify your statements with "in the US", because regulation has been effective elsewhere.

> I disagree in terms of regulation: there is plenty of regulation on broadband internet, except it tends to discourage competition against broadband providers.

Well, yes - when I use the word "regulation", I'm implying the sort of regulation that we see with respect to Con Edison. They can't so much as change the way they itemize fees on my bill (!) without regulatory approval.

That certainly creates problems of another sort, but on the other hand, the actual service provided[0] and the pricing is pretty much a solved problem (as much as one can expect)[1].

I'm sure ConEd would like the sort of legislative protectionism that cable companies receive, with no requirements surrounding price or quality, but thankfully, they don't have that (and altering the status quo is always tough in general - in this case, inertia is on consumers' side).

Obviously regulation could be established to make things worse, but I think it's clear what kind of regulation we're looking for for the purposes of this discussion. And I'm intentionally deferring the question of how any of these policies would be enacted - I'm just comparing two alternatives states to the status quo.

[0] excluding customer service, which is going to be mediocre at best no matter what.

[1] Interestingly, pricing is partly "solved" due to the introduction of ESCOs, which are a way to privatize the supply chain (at the consumer's choice). "Free market" and "regulation" are not mutually exclusive - we could easily establish a regulated monopoly on last-mile copper wire while allowing multiple competing upstream providers.[2]

Your whole post is based on a false premise, which is that customers have a problem with the status quo. I think internet companies have a problem with the status quo. They want somebody else to build the fat pipes crucial to their business. That's why Google fiber is a marketing and lobbying tool and not a real business.[1] But I don't think consumers here are any less happy than in other places. According to Akamai's state of the internet, the U.S. ranks #8 in average connection speed, ahead of places like Sweden. They have no reason to be. I've never heard someone outside my engineer friends complain about the lack of gigabit or even 50 Mbps+ connections. As long as its enough for Hulu, people are happy.

There are also other problems with your post. For example, we didn't sell off monopoly rights. Its been illegal for municipalities to grant exclusive franchises since 1992. Also, franchises don't come without strings attached. Here in Phila, Comcast has to run cable to a bunch of poor neighborhoods and charge $13 per month for service. Distribution requirements and regulated rates exist in the cable world.

[1] At the end if the day, if Google bought TWC instead, Google's average profit margin would go down.

"Your whole post is based on a false premise, which is that customers have a problem with the status quo. I think internet companies have a problem with the status quo. "

I recently had Google Fiber installed. Every single person I've talked to about it has responded with something similar to "Oh man, I wish I had that!" (That includes my tech-illiterate mom and the guy who came to install it who lives in a different city.) Of course consumers want faster, cheaper Internet connectivity.

"They want somebody else to build the fat pipes crucial to their business. That's why Google fiber is a marketing and lobbying tool and not a real business."

So, Google actually does the thing you said they don't want to do, and your response is, "well sure, but they don't really mean it?"

Engineers are lead users for internet usage, they predict what others will want in several years. And even average users would become upset if they found out how much more they are paying than Swedes.

The U.S. beats Sweden in Akamai's study, so are we paying more to get more?

The US allegedly beats Sweden in average broadband speed which is a poor measure for most purposes. I don't think you will find any Swedes telling you that the US has better broadband.

From the FCC: "The United States is 26th out of 32 countries in the 15-25 Mbps speed tier (advertised) with an average stand-alone broadband plan price of $56.50. The lowest advertised price for stand-alone services is in Slovakia at $18, while the highest charges are found in Switzerland at $180"

Although they don't summarize the findings above 25 Mbps the story looks much worse.

Why do you rely on a study that uses advertised speed instead of actual speed like Akamai's? Akamai also has a category for 10 Mbps+ availability, and the U.S. ranks very well there too.

Because there aren't many international broadband studies that incorporate cost and I don't see any Mbps/cost breakdown in the Akamai study. The FCC report incorporates Ookla data (Speedtest.net) which uses actual broadband speed and costs submitted by users. It corroborates the conclusions of the FCC study.

With respect to availability: There is a world of difference between 1Gps@$1000/mth and 1Gps@$50/mth though both qualify as 1Gbps availability.

Finally >10Mbps is pretty broad bin today and fails to meaningfully differentiate "very" high speed services.

Us and Sweden are in the same ballpark, users everywhere are missing an order of magnitude or three. Gigabit is old and cheap, and after 10 gig last mile tech development stalled due to lack of interest. We should be running 10 gig on the fiber to apartments and 100 gig on the uplinks from buildings by now.

Instead, wired net connectivity has been overtaken by puny LTE...

and the railroad network before that, etc

And don't forget: The telegraph industry! Neal Stephenson writes about it in "Mother Earth, Mother Board:" http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html , which is fascinating and worth reading.

On one side there are irritated customers wondering why their service is so poor and why their bills are so high

One other "don't forget": a lot of people who pay attention are unhappy about franchise agreements and telco efforts to prohibit local utility fiber deployments by outlawing them at the state level (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7271044). Local municipalities that say, "Fuck it, we're going to roll our own" often find themselves forbidden because of successful lobbying at the state level.

US achieved its greatness because of free flow of movement of people and their ideas. Roads and freeways and highways were plenty, fast and easily accessible, to both sellers of services/goods and consumers.

In this new world, internet access is the new road. Good internet access will generate new services/goods and encourage consumption by consumers. This will inevitably lead to snowball effect of creating more wealth for the society.

US shouldn't be held hostage by a few people in an executive suite in Philadelphia who want to make a few bucks so they can own a few extra mansions and a private jet or 2. US is a greater country than that.

So why does broadband in other countries not have this problem, like Scandinavia, or Korea & Japan?

Take Norway; here all the copper lines used for DSL used to be owned by the national phone company. Then competition was established by forcing the national phone company to sell access to the lines at a set rate to anyone that wanted to deliver internet access. A monthly "line rental" is charged to the end customer - so that the cost is transparent. "Line rental" is about $13/month and a 20Mb/1Mb ADSL is $50/month (Cheapest 100Mb/100Mb (fiber) is $80.) There is a site for comparing prices (telepriser.no) run by the equivalent to the FCC, showing all the suppliers offerings.

Sweden here: 15 years ago we were happily renting a 1.5Mbps internet connection in a very small village in the desolate areas of northern sweden. The network was fiber though and was quickly upgraded to 10 and 100 Mbps. Cost was about $60 per month in the start, now it is $38 per month. No limits the last 10 years.

For the same reasons those countries implement things like universal health care. The crux of the issue with the US however is that being powerful here can mean greater power elsewhere. For example, if I have 100% market share in Sweden, it doesn't necessarily give me the capital and muscle to become the biggest internet provider in all of Europe. Whereas if you become the superpower in the US, expansion (read -> growth) is much easier to obtain.

Sprawl makes infrastructure investment orders of magnitude more expensive. For example, a small business [1] provides the fastest consumer access in the city of Seattle, but they refuse to do business outside of extremely high density buildings. There is no way a small business could do the same in McSuburbia. In the sprawly world outside of the US's dense cities, only municipal governments with a lot of political willpower have the resources to invest in the infrastructure needed for fast internet.

[1] http://www.condointernet.net/

I don't have direct experience with the state of the internet in the U.S., but isn't it terrible in large, metropolitan cities as well? I'm really just using the anecdata I've been reading on HN.

Furthermore, afaik many small towns even in eastern europe(while making great strides, no particularly huge cities) boast 100 mbit connections.

Assuming both of those statements are true, It doesn't seem to me like the economies of scale argument is valid here.

EDIT: 100 mbit/$20, 500 mbit/$30, checked my ISP.

You're absolutely correct. Population density is a red herring in this issue. The broadband situation is no better in the major cities of the U.S than it is in the rest of the country. Major cities in the rest of the developed world have much better connections somehow.

One of the first deployments of gigabit fiber in the U.S. was in Chatanooga TN, with a population density of 471.9/km2. New York City has a population density of 10,640/km2. Romania's third largest city, Timișoara, with population density of only 2,446.58/km2 is considered the city with the fastest internet in the world.

http://www.romania-insider.com/romanian-city-comes-out-first...

Density is not something that can be described adequately in a single number. It is entirely possible to have high residential densities in cities with remarkably low average densities. Moscow is a great example of this...their plazas and parks drive down average density way beyond the density that the average person experiences.

Everybody talks about the last mile being the most expensive part of infrastructure, but if the last meter is 90% of the cost of the last mile (I don't know what the exact proportion is, but it is definitely close), then 100 houses in 10 sq km census block is going to be in a cost category that is orders of magnitude higher than 100 apartments in a tower with a 9.9 sq km park around it.

That still doesn't explain why there's no gigabit FTTH in NYC, with its high average density.

It sure as heck doesn't explain why there's no gigabit FTTH in Manhattan proper--by your reckoning the borough should have a residential density even higher than its overall average would suggest by virtue of Central Park taking up so much of the upper half.

High density doesn't eliminate millions of other reasons that a given city doesn't have it. It just provides a floor for cost competitiveness, and a major input into ROI. Even in Kansas City, google has stated they won't roll out FTTH to every neighborhood, even in the long term...and in the short term, they have focused on the neighborhoods with the fastest ROI. I'll let you guess whether the high density or the low density gets built first.

Then why did you bring up density in the first place?

Unless you're saying that urban and suburban America each lack FTTH for their own wholly unrelated reasons, an explanation that seems rather lacking in parsimony.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

Because a huge and significant chunk of America lives at a density that is prohibitive for small competitors to provide FTTH. The only way to get it is through municipal funding, because the large broadband providers certainly aren't going to provide it.

Density either prevents better infrastructure in the US, or it doesn't. My use of statistics was merely to show that density has no relation to the existence of fiber internet infrastructure. The US cannot be too sprawling for fiber if areas with lower density in other countries have better internet. Major cities cannot also be too dense when cities with higher densities abroad also have better internet.

This is a commonly repeated argument in favor of the status-quo in the US, and I'm just trying to refute it whenever possible.

Your use of statistics is meaningless because average density is meaningless. It suffers from the same resolution problem as the coastline paradox [1]. I'm an example of this: If you measure density by the block, I live in a density of 120,000 persons/km2, but if you measure density by the city, I live in a density of 1720 persons/km2, and if you measure density by the MSA, I live in a density of 168 persons/km2. I have gigabit, and the fact that I live in an MSA with 168 persons/km2 is in no way a refutation of the fact that density matters for infrastructure costs.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox

Saying average density is meaningless is like saying, because of the coastline paradox, even a small island's coastline is the same length as a large continent's coastline -- they're both infinite!

Correct. However, if you can define a level of resolution to measure the coastline/density, then then it can be compared. Average density/coastline is meaningless without context.

Great point.

>> I don't have direct experience with the state of the internet in the U.S., but isn't it terrible in large, metropolitan cities as well?

It depends on where you are. Two different apartment buildings in DC or NYC could differn, one getting FIOS and the other on a congested cable network or low-speed phone company DSL circuit.

But don't get the idea that the internet is generally terrible in the USA. I'd imagine my situation is similar to most others - I live in a smaller town (population < 50,000) and about 90 miles from the nearest 'big' city (Detroit), but for $39.99 I get 30mb cable internet which I'm more than happy with. They offer 60mb and 100mb packages but I don't see the sense in spending any more.

Population density is a complete red herring in this context. It is the excuse that telecom and cable companies rely on for their lack of investment. See my comment below for the hard numbers of how this is simply not true.

That doesn't explain why internet speeds suck in NYC.

Population density in NYC and SFO actually hurt new rollouts. That is why those places and Los Angeles will probably be dead last on a Google Fiber rollout (if ever).

The old NYC infrastructure and all of the physical work (and permits, contracts, everything else) means a huge overhaul would most likely not be worth doing in dense and already wired places like these.

Also rayiner pointed out in another thread that according to Akamai the US already is pretty high up in the list of overall bandwidth. Also I think the HN / Reddit / tech echo chamber overplays the demand for gigabit internet. Most of America has no need for this, nor the willingness to pay for a connection this fast. 10-25 Mb is fine for most people. Browse Facebook, surf the web, stream a couple of movies, play games.

Look, you can't have it both ways. Either population density helps or hinders a fiber rollout--if it helps, then why is the urban U.S.A. just as far behind as the rest? If it hinders, then why do HK and SK have it when NYC doesn't?

As for the remainder--well of course they're not making use of a service that they have no way to buy in the first place...and your insinuations remind me of the people in the early 19th century who howled that the first locomotives' 10 mph crusing speed was far faster than any sane person would ever want to travel.

The urbanized parts of the U.S. aren't behind in general. If the east coast states were countries, a number would be top-5 on Akamai's list for highest average bandwidth. As for HK and SK: there is only one city in the U.S. as dense as Hong Kong or Seoul, and that's NYC. And it has FIOS. So why does everywhere in NYC not have FIOS? Is it because of lobbying? No, its because building infrastructure in dense places requires coordination, and its just not a big political priority the way it is in Asian countries. Its why infrastructure projects of all kinds cost more in the U.S. from trains to telecom. In other countries, the government makes it a priority to remove roadblocks to infrastructure development, in a top down way. In the U.S., every infrastructure project becomes mired in NIMBYISM. Look in the back yard of Silicon Valley. Why isn't SF wired with gigabit. Is it because Comcast had more lobbying muscle than tech in tech's own back yard? Its an absurd proposition. The roadblock is instead the same dysfunctional government and the voters that complain about Google busses.

I must say your dichotomy between lobbying and political priorities is positively Martian.

And I haven't noticed the U.S. public rallying in horrified opposition to faster internet speeds in a big way. Or at all, really.

They haven't been rallying in support of it either.

You attributed the slow broadband rollout to public hostility, not public indifference.

Where did I say the public was hostile to faster Internet? The public is for it, just that this group is too small for them to be relevant yet.

I would be willing to pay for a gigabit connection if the prices were lower. In Japan and South Korea for instance, a consumer can get a gigabit connection for the equivalent of about 40USD. I currently pay more for a connection 1/20th the speed. If their telcos can do it, ours can too. However ours want us to pay more (much, much more) for gigabit, which is why there is the argument that Americans don't want to pay for gigabit. Yeah, charge a reasonable price and you'll have more demand for gigabit speeds.

Also: I know my dissent in pointing out that gigabit internet for $30/month everywhere in the USA isn't going to magically happen isn't popular around here, but you shouldn't down vote something you disagree with.

You're being downvoted because you're wrong. Density is a red herring that can be easily demonstrated by looking at comparative examples.

A single city in another country is apples and oranges, it is wrong to assume that since a single city in another country can do it, then it should be simple to implement across the USA or in cities which are wholly different politically in the US.

Its a combination of density, economics, and politics. Japan/Korea are best case scenario. Not only very dense, but people believe in tech as a way forward economically. In the U.S., the places that are dense also have intractable politics. Outside the tech set, you're not going to sell San Franciscans on the idea that gigabit should be an important priority. They couldn't care less.

> Japan/Korea are best case scenario. Not only very dense, but people believe in tech as a way forward economically.

This is a common misconception. When it comes to actually using technology, the Japanese are at least a decade behind the West, thanks to their aging, collectivist, and risk-averse society. Fax machines continue to be widely used[0].

The primary difference is that in Japan, the government nationalized the last mile, resulting in a ton of competition. You can pick between a dozen ISPs in Tokyo.

0: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/asia/in-japan-the-fa...

My internet speeds are pretty spiffy here in NYC; granted, not fiber spiffy.

Of course, I'm with Cablevision - when most of the city is limited to TWC.

>> this business model severely discourages new development (witness the "No one wants gigabit" rationale)

It's not that I want/need gigabit, it's that the only thing I can get in some locations is unusable. I'm looking at you, 1.5mb/768k DSL lines. It's barely enough for web surfing and useless for streaming video or doing things like gaming, video conferencing....