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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

I agree, there's no real competition for the "last mile." (If there were real competition, ISPs would be trampling over each other to deliver the best Netflix experience and bragging about it in their advertising campaigns!)

Requiring the incumbent mono/duopolistic last-mile ISPs to lease their lines may improve the situation, but I'm not as sure as Sam Altman that it would bring about real competition, because of the difficulties inherent in enforcing "fair, transparent leasing." Incumbents surely would find lots of clever ways to game any leasing scheme imposed by the FCC while technically "complying" with it.

I expect it would be better for US consumers than the status quo, though.

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One option would be to prevent any company from operating a last mile AND selling it to retail customers.

Honestly, what I find most striking is how bad cable boxes are simply because there is no completion.

Recently, due to their (Comcast's) own stupidity, I ended up having a couple of visits from Comcast techs trying to fix an issue.

Every single one was wowed by my TiVo. Just seeing how fast it was to respond (which has never been a TiVo strong suit) and how reasonable the interface was amazed them.

That's pathetic.

Why bother attacking the comcast techs? These guys are just trying to make a living. The real problems come from well above

Sorry, I meant due to Comcast's stupidity, not the techs.

The two techs I worked with were very nice and clearly frustrated with their inability to help me at times due odd barriers in the way Comcast has things setup, stupid hoops to jump through.

I've edited my comment.

Texas does this for electricity, where the grid maintainer (regulated) is split from the power provider (deregulated). It took a decade to get it to work, but now it works really well and the competition in the power provider market is fierce.

> One option would be to prevent any company from operating a last mile AND selling it to retail customers.

How would that help? As long as there is still the one company owning the one last mile line. Whether it's consumers buying it or intermediaries leasing it in order to re-sell, there is still no competiton. I suppose, an itermediary may have more pull then a consumer, but in the end it's the operator that the leverage as there are no alternatives in that area.

> Honestly, what I find most striking is how bad cable boxes are simply because there is no completion.

Anecdotally, my Comcast X1 is worlds ahead of the old Comcast boxes. Not perfect, but no longer so bad that I look longingly at Tivos. So, slowly but surely, they're making some progress...

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