19 ms·

Four nationwise carriers? They are all colluding on territories, price, features and service! Why aren't there hundreds or thousands? That would be real competi

Four nationwise carriers? They are all colluding on territories, price, features and service! Why aren't there hundreds or thousands? That would be real competition.

tptacek 9y ago
Why would there be hundreds of carriers? What purpose would that serve in the market? Each carrier would necessarily serve a far smaller number of customers, which would leave each with less capital to build out and maintain a network. We had this with independent ISPs in the 1990s (I ran technical operations for the most popular such ISP in Chicago, EnterAct). It was not an unalloyed good. Most of the independent ISPs were pointless. They were each independent re-implementations of the same basic architecture, each with its own idiosyncrasies and incompetences. Some couldn't bill correctly. Some couldn't keep a Livingston Portmaster online consistently. None of them could secure an email server or reliably monitor all their POPs. Internet service was drastically more expensive, drastically less reliable, and harder to buy.
- bitJericho 9y ago
  And now in Chicago all I can get is Comcast. Thanks a lot. There's no reason why we can't require leasing for all carriers, ISPs etc, to any company that wants to lease it. That works just fine for DSL. I recall having the option with DSL. Obviously I chose my telco and had good service and decent billing. That was a fine arrangement. When it comes to cell phone service? I can use any pay as you go carrier, sure, but not on the Verizon network? What do I get in return for that, I can use a verizon phone on any carrier. Except I can't, cuz they're violating their agreements with the FCC. Screw these cell carriers.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    If you can't get AT&T in your building, then no independent provider was going to help you. Every independent ISP in Chicago in the 1990s was leasing last-mile from existing providers. I've had leases in commercial spaces in Chicago that didn't have AT&T wiring either, and gone over the price quotes to fix that. It's super expensive, and the subscriber dollars aren't there for people to do that work speculatively. Verizon (or MFS, at the time) didn't stop leading last-mile to independent ISPs. Independent ISPs died because the economics weren't there for them: large consolidated providers offered the products 95% of consumers wanted at lower cost and drastically higher performance. To me, this whole discussion about ISP competition is sort of bucketed in the same place my brain reserves for complaints about the fact that ISPs no longer offer shell accounts. Can you believe there was a time where the quality of the Unix shell you offered ISP customers was a major competitive differentiator? I'm sure there's a species of ISP customer that is really unhappy their ISP doesn't make it easy to run their own mail server, or have a freenix-competitive NNTP server, or offer any kind of shell account. But for the overwhelming majority of the market, Netflix matters more than any of those things, and AT&T and Verizon probably do a better job of delivering Netflix than any independent ISP would.
    - tedunangst 9y ago
      What? No tcsh? I'd like to cancel my service.
      - tptacek 9y ago
        You think you're joking but

Four nationwise carriers? They are all colluding on territories, price, features and service! Why aren't there hundreds or thousands? That would be real competition.

tptacek 9y ago

Why would there be hundreds of carriers? What purpose would that serve in the market? Each carrier would necessarily serve a far smaller number of customers, which would leave each with less capital to build out and maintain a network. We had this with independent ISPs in the 1990s (I ran technical operations for the most popular such ISP in Chicago, EnterAct). It was not an unalloyed good. Most of the independent ISPs were pointless. They were each independent re-implementations of the same basic architecture, each with its own idiosyncrasies and incompetences. Some couldn't bill correctly. Some couldn't keep a Livingston Portmaster online consistently. None of them could secure an email server or reliably monitor all their POPs. Internet service was drastically more expensive, drastically less reliable, and harder to buy.

bitJericho 9y ago
And now in Chicago all I can get is Comcast. Thanks a lot. There's no reason why we can't require leasing for all carriers, ISPs etc, to any company that wants to lease it. That works just fine for DSL. I recall having the option with DSL. Obviously I chose my telco and had good service and decent billing. That was a fine arrangement. When it comes to cell phone service? I can use any pay as you go carrier, sure, but not on the Verizon network? What do I get in return for that, I can use a verizon phone on any carrier. Except I can't, cuz they're violating their agreements with the FCC. Screw these cell carriers.
- tptacek 9y ago
  If you can't get AT&T in your building, then no independent provider was going to help you. Every independent ISP in Chicago in the 1990s was leasing last-mile from existing providers. I've had leases in commercial spaces in Chicago that didn't have AT&T wiring either, and gone over the price quotes to fix that. It's super expensive, and the subscriber dollars aren't there for people to do that work speculatively. Verizon (or MFS, at the time) didn't stop leading last-mile to independent ISPs. Independent ISPs died because the economics weren't there for them: large consolidated providers offered the products 95% of consumers wanted at lower cost and drastically higher performance. To me, this whole discussion about ISP competition is sort of bucketed in the same place my brain reserves for complaints about the fact that ISPs no longer offer shell accounts. Can you believe there was a time where the quality of the Unix shell you offered ISP customers was a major competitive differentiator? I'm sure there's a species of ISP customer that is really unhappy their ISP doesn't make it easy to run their own mail server, or have a freenix-competitive NNTP server, or offer any kind of shell account. But for the overwhelming majority of the market, Netflix matters more than any of those things, and AT&T and Verizon probably do a better job of delivering Netflix than any independent ISP would.
  - tedunangst 9y ago
    What? No tcsh? I'd like to cancel my service.
    - tptacek 9y ago
      You think you're joking but