5 ms·

I hear a lot of people being dissatisfied with Comcast. What is it that makes them so hard to compete with that people have to resort to city-run networks?

skykooler 9y ago
They have a lot of lobbying power.
jclulow 9y ago
I don't really see why having the city run its own Internet service should be considered a resort. Getting the profit motive as far away from basic utilities like Internet transit as possible seems like a win, because you don't want an undifferentiated bit pipe to have to continue to make more and more money over time.
- prophesi 9y ago
  My city has a pretty sweet hybrid of this. We have a local company that provides electricity/cable/internet which received grants from the city to get off the ground. But it's now self-sufficient while still remaining cheaper than Comcast, with gigabit speeds.
- Bromskloss 9y ago
  > I don't really see why having the city run its own Internet service should be considered a resort. It's not about the Internet specifically. It's just that every law or public spending is a shitty thing for those who don't want it, but have to pay for it anyway, or play by some rules they can't opt out of. In every other situation, we would consider such things shitty behaviour, so I think it makes sense to acknowledge that consequence and only do it if we really must.
sigstoat 9y ago
it's expensive to lay cable through a whole city. digging / horizontal drilling aren't cheap, and if you're not the city, you've got to deal with the permitting process and accompanying hassle.
alexbeloi 9y ago
This site has some opinions on the matter: https://consumerist.com/2014/05/10/why-starting-a-competitor-to-comcast-is-basically-impossible/ https://consumerist.com/2014/05/10/why-starting-a-competitor... https://consumerist.com/2014/03/07/heres-what-lack-of-broadband-competition-looks-like-in-map-form/ https://consumerist.com/2014/03/07/heres-what-lack-of-broadb...
_greim_ 9y ago
Comcast is in rent-seeking mode at this point; extracting as much money as possible from existing infrastructure. By "infrastructure" I mean last-mile fiber buried/strung throughout neighborhoods and into peoples' homes. It's expensive to build such infrastructure, due to varieties of local laws, right-of-way access, and for the same reasons leaf nodes are most numerous in typical tree data structures. So, Comcast's approach is to extract as much money as they can from existing infrastructure which they've built, acquired, or gained exclusive rights to, while directing minimal resources to building new such. Along with that, they expend a lot of effort lobbying to protect that infrastructure from encroachment or competition by other entities, like other private ISPs, unbundling laws, municipal broadband, and the like.
c0nducktr 9y ago
City run broadband delivers a higher quality service at a lower cost everywhere I've heard of it happening. It's hardly something they have to 'resort' to. I wish my city was so lucky.
rayiner 9y ago
The real explanation is that cities make competing hard through well intentioned but misguided requirements. Getting a cable franchise means shouldering substantial public interest obligations, in particular the obligation to serve a whole city without regard to proven demand. (You can tell that’s the real reason because waiver of that requirement was the key concession Google demanded where it rolled out Fiber.) Your financial viability as an infrastructure provider is do, instead by your uptake rate. Most of your cost is in passing each house. Your cost per customer is thus driven by your uptake ratio (subscribers divided by houses passed). Fiber deployments struggle to get to 0.4 or so, meaning you have to pass 2.5 houses for each paying customer. Forcing build out in all neighborhoods tanks your uptake ratio by forcing you to build in lots of places where people can’t necessarily afford your service.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  At the same time, without those requirements, only the most profitable (read: rich) neighborhoods would be cherry picked, leaving the rest of us without service. That would make the digital divide even bigger, widening the gap between rich and poor.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    My neighborhood isn’t rich by any means, and I can get gigabit fiber from either Verizon or Comcast. Verizon is about breaking even on FiOS at $110/month per subscriber (including television). That’s affordable for a lot of people. (It’s about as much as my electric bill, and less than my heating bill or car insurance). It would leave out people near the poverty line. But the government can subsidize those people specifically, or build municipal networks in those areas. Better to do that than to distort the entire market by requiring every telecom provider to basically run a public service arm. That ensures only mega-corps can afford to get into the businsss. It’s illustrative to look at what Stockholm did. A municipal entity built the dark fiber, but it was not subsidized. Nor was it subject to any build out requirement or mandatory cross subsidies. The entity built out based on demand, targeting businesses first. The resulting service is actually pretty expensive (about $130 for gigabit, plus a fee for building the fiber if necessary). For rural areas, the government simply gave a tax subsidy for rural residents to pay to wire themselves with fiber. I’ll also note that we don’t build other kinds of utilities this way either! If there isn’t sufficient demand for sewer or water, a water utility simply doesn’t build it. And it charges every house about $20-30,000 to do so, regardless of whether they can afford it.

skykooler 9y ago

They have a lot of lobbying power.

jclulow 9y ago

I don't really see why having the city run its own Internet service should be considered a resort. Getting the profit motive as far away from basic utilities like Internet transit as possible seems like a win, because you don't want an undifferentiated bit pipe to have to continue to make more and more money over time.

prophesi 9y ago
My city has a pretty sweet hybrid of this. We have a local company that provides electricity/cable/internet which received grants from the city to get off the ground. But it's now self-sufficient while still remaining cheaper than Comcast, with gigabit speeds.
Bromskloss 9y ago
> I don't really see why having the city run its own Internet service should be considered a resort. It's not about the Internet specifically. It's just that every law or public spending is a shitty thing for those who don't want it, but have to pay for it anyway, or play by some rules they can't opt out of. In every other situation, we would consider such things shitty behaviour, so I think it makes sense to acknowledge that consequence and only do it if we really must.

sigstoat 9y ago

it's expensive to lay cable through a whole city. digging / horizontal drilling aren't cheap, and if you're not the city, you've got to deal with the permitting process and accompanying hassle.

alexbeloi 9y ago

This site has some opinions on the matter: https://consumerist.com/2014/05/10/why-starting-a-competitor-to-comcast-is-basically-impossible/ https://consumerist.com/2014/05/10/why-starting-a-competitor... https://consumerist.com/2014/03/07/heres-what-lack-of-broadband-competition-looks-like-in-map-form/ https://consumerist.com/2014/03/07/heres-what-lack-of-broadb...

_greim_ 9y ago

Comcast is in rent-seeking mode at this point; extracting as much money as possible from existing infrastructure. By "infrastructure" I mean last-mile fiber buried/strung throughout neighborhoods and into peoples' homes. It's expensive to build such infrastructure, due to varieties of local laws, right-of-way access, and for the same reasons leaf nodes are most numerous in typical tree data structures. So, Comcast's approach is to extract as much money as they can from existing infrastructure which they've built, acquired, or gained exclusive rights to, while directing minimal resources to building new such. Along with that, they expend a lot of effort lobbying to protect that infrastructure from encroachment or competition by other entities, like other private ISPs, unbundling laws, municipal broadband, and the like.

c0nducktr 9y ago

City run broadband delivers a higher quality service at a lower cost everywhere I've heard of it happening. It's hardly something they have to 'resort' to. I wish my city was so lucky.

rayiner 9y ago

The real explanation is that cities make competing hard through well intentioned but misguided requirements. Getting a cable franchise means shouldering substantial public interest obligations, in particular the obligation to serve a whole city without regard to proven demand. (You can tell that’s the real reason because waiver of that requirement was the key concession Google demanded where it rolled out Fiber.) Your financial viability as an infrastructure provider is do, instead by your uptake rate. Most of your cost is in passing each house. Your cost per customer is thus driven by your uptake ratio (subscribers divided by houses passed). Fiber deployments struggle to get to 0.4 or so, meaning you have to pass 2.5 houses for each paying customer. Forcing build out in all neighborhoods tanks your uptake ratio by forcing you to build in lots of places where people can’t necessarily afford your service.

s73ver_ 9y ago
At the same time, without those requirements, only the most profitable (read: rich) neighborhoods would be cherry picked, leaving the rest of us without service. That would make the digital divide even bigger, widening the gap between rich and poor.
- rayiner 9y ago
  My neighborhood isn’t rich by any means, and I can get gigabit fiber from either Verizon or Comcast. Verizon is about breaking even on FiOS at $110/month per subscriber (including television). That’s affordable for a lot of people. (It’s about as much as my electric bill, and less than my heating bill or car insurance). It would leave out people near the poverty line. But the government can subsidize those people specifically, or build municipal networks in those areas. Better to do that than to distort the entire market by requiring every telecom provider to basically run a public service arm. That ensures only mega-corps can afford to get into the businsss. It’s illustrative to look at what Stockholm did. A municipal entity built the dark fiber, but it was not subsidized. Nor was it subject to any build out requirement or mandatory cross subsidies. The entity built out based on demand, targeting businesses first. The resulting service is actually pretty expensive (about $130 for gigabit, plus a fee for building the fiber if necessary). For rural areas, the government simply gave a tax subsidy for rural residents to pay to wire themselves with fiber. I’ll also note that we don’t build other kinds of utilities this way either! If there isn’t sufficient demand for sewer or water, a water utility simply doesn’t build it. And it charges every house about $20-30,000 to do so, regardless of whether they can afford it.