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How's the customer going to pick when their market, if they're lucky, has only two fixed link ISPs? When most have only one (really crappy cable one) that if t

How's the customer going to pick when their market, if they're lucky, has only two fixed link ISPs? When most have only one (really crappy cable one) that if they're lucky provides more than 25Mbit down and who knows what up. (Yeah it's nearly 2018 and those speeds would have been 'OK' 15 years ago.) A lot of the reason Americans are in this mess is the complete lack of competition in 99+% of the country. /That/ lack of competition comes from a broken investment model. Like roads, water/sewer, and other systems regulated as utilities the physical plant is a natural monopoly; it isn't effective for society or companies to build parallel infrastructures. If the base platform (last mile 'wires') were owned by the community and competition occurred on top of it (like with package delivery) then the context of your comment would make more sense.

crmd 9y ago
>If the base platform (last mile 'wires') were owned by the community It's not necessary for the wires to be owned by the people. They could be owned by a private, highly regulated, capital intensive, infrastructure utility company, that is a legally separate entity from the ISPs who compete to provide your data services. Private is not necessarily better than community ownership, but may be more politically viable.
posguy 9y ago
Even in areas with heavy fiber penetration like Seattle, where Centurylink has 70+% of the city covered with Fiber, Comcast is still capping users to 1TB and Centurylink feels little competition. Hell, they're trying to kill off their TV service right now, and pitching DirecTV (with a much slower guide, missing multi-channel preview, and with a dish bolted to your house) as the new thing they're pushing.