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Are you at all familiar with the history of consumer Internet in the US, and the role AT&T, Verizon, and later Time Warner and Comcast, have played in it and th

Are you at all familiar with the history of consumer Internet in the US, and the role AT&T, Verizon, and later Time Warner and Comcast, have played in it and the laws that regulate it? I'd recommend you read up on municipal broadband, and the war the telecoms have waged against communities doing an end run around their shoddy and expensive service. Likewise, look at the hoops they've forced Google to jump through to achieve even modest fiber rollouts. Google is among the biggest companies in the world. The only thing saving Google Fiber is that they are not some scrappy startup, but one of the most powerful companies in the world; without that power and economic clout, they would die a horrible death at the hands of AT&T's attorneys and pet legislators, as nearly every one of the thousands of independent ISPs did in the 90s and early 2000s. Innovation in consumer internet service has been thoroughly strangled by the telecoms and cable companies. They've divided up the turf, come to some gentleman's agreements with each other about pricing and access, and now we're all just here to feed the cash cow. If ever there was a classic case of collusion (and, hell, I might even call it racketeering) among modern "legitimate" businesses, the telecom and cable business is it. If you believe the lack of innovation and poor service is merely that no one is "competing", I'd encourage you to give that market a go. There's no competition, after all. It should be easy, right?

rayiner 11y ago
> Likewise, look at the hoops they've forced Google to jump through to achieve even modest fiber rollouts. What "hoops" have companies forced Google to jump through to achieve Fiber rollout? Almost all the resistance to Google Fiber has been from municipalities that are not willing to waive build-out requirements, which Google demands as part of the package of "fast track" permitting necessary to be a fiber city.
qaq 11y ago
If I had few Billions I would certainly give it a go. Independent ISPs relied on legacy Telco infrastructure as opposed to doing their own build outs. Google has enough $ and resources to compete they just don't really care to do it (look at the $ they allocated to google fiber). Apple can buy out any of the mentioned companies with cash on hand several times over but they are not interested in competing in this market. So in reality yes none having resources necessary to compete is interested in competing. In my area an independent provider is doing a fiber build out it slow and expansive for them (the area has comcast monopoly) yet none is preventing them from doing the actual build out.
- pyvpx 11y ago
  what do you think makes it expensive? I can assure you that the fiber cable itself is cheap, the equipment to install the cable is inexpensive, and even the labor required is not that expensive. lawyers and red tape/delays/time are very, very expensive.
  - amazon_not 11y ago
    I respectfully disagree. The labor part is very expensive. 80% of the cost is in civil works.
  - douche 11y ago
    If you upgrade every house from copper wire that can pull 10 mb/s down to gigabit fiber, all of your backbone network needs to get boosted. That's not cheap.
    - amazon_not 11y ago
      Not cheap in absolute dollars, but not expensive in the grand scheme of things. Backhaul and IP transit are fairly small expenditures compared to the last mile. There's the 90/9/1 rule of thumb for expenses in last mile/backhaul/IP transit. Furthermore a gigabit fiber customer does not on average use 100x more bandwidth than a 10M copper customer. There is only a small multiple.
      - douche 11y ago
        Could very well be true. I'm mostly going off what I was told by relatives of an ex-girlfriend, who were fairly high up in ATT engineering and loved to brag about how much captial expenditure and investment into infrastructure ATT was making. I suspect that the networks are already woefully underprovisioned for the level of traffic they are already selling. I'm supposed to have 25/5 cable internet, but I've never been able to get more than about 20% of that in practice.
    - twistedpair 11y ago
      True, but once that glass is hooked up, we can use it for the next 40+ years and just swap out transceivers. No more need to upgrade the stuff in the ground. As for backhaul, you can cram 8Tbps+ over each individual fiber, if you need to (like they do for undersea links). So, every X years, you just swap out the racks in some IDF and get 10x-100x the backhaul capacity. In the near term, 1Gbps it plenty for home use. We can drop ship you a 10Gb setup in 2025 when you need it.

rayiner 11y ago

> Likewise, look at the hoops they've forced Google to jump through to achieve even modest fiber rollouts. What "hoops" have companies forced Google to jump through to achieve Fiber rollout? Almost all the resistance to Google Fiber has been from municipalities that are not willing to waive build-out requirements, which Google demands as part of the package of "fast track" permitting necessary to be a fiber city.

qaq 11y ago

If I had few Billions I would certainly give it a go. Independent ISPs relied on legacy Telco infrastructure as opposed to doing their own build outs. Google has enough $ and resources to compete they just don't really care to do it (look at the $ they allocated to google fiber). Apple can buy out any of the mentioned companies with cash on hand several times over but they are not interested in competing in this market. So in reality yes none having resources necessary to compete is interested in competing. In my area an independent provider is doing a fiber build out it slow and expansive for them (the area has comcast monopoly) yet none is preventing them from doing the actual build out.

pyvpx 11y ago
what do you think makes it expensive? I can assure you that the fiber cable itself is cheap, the equipment to install the cable is inexpensive, and even the labor required is not that expensive. lawyers and red tape/delays/time are very, very expensive.
- amazon_not 11y ago
  I respectfully disagree. The labor part is very expensive. 80% of the cost is in civil works.
- douche 11y ago
  If you upgrade every house from copper wire that can pull 10 mb/s down to gigabit fiber, all of your backbone network needs to get boosted. That's not cheap.
  - amazon_not 11y ago
    Not cheap in absolute dollars, but not expensive in the grand scheme of things. Backhaul and IP transit are fairly small expenditures compared to the last mile. There's the 90/9/1 rule of thumb for expenses in last mile/backhaul/IP transit. Furthermore a gigabit fiber customer does not on average use 100x more bandwidth than a 10M copper customer. There is only a small multiple.
    - douche 11y ago
      Could very well be true. I'm mostly going off what I was told by relatives of an ex-girlfriend, who were fairly high up in ATT engineering and loved to brag about how much captial expenditure and investment into infrastructure ATT was making. I suspect that the networks are already woefully underprovisioned for the level of traffic they are already selling. I'm supposed to have 25/5 cable internet, but I've never been able to get more than about 20% of that in practice.
  - twistedpair 11y ago
    True, but once that glass is hooked up, we can use it for the next 40+ years and just swap out transceivers. No more need to upgrade the stuff in the ground. As for backhaul, you can cram 8Tbps+ over each individual fiber, if you need to (like they do for undersea links). So, every X years, you just swap out the racks in some IDF and get 10x-100x the backhaul capacity. In the near term, 1Gbps it plenty for home use. We can drop ship you a 10Gb setup in 2025 when you need it.