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When reading about Comcast I was always wondering why they have no competition when everyone who comments is complaining. I live in France and use Orange as my

When reading about Comcast I was always wondering why they have no competition when everyone who comments is complaining. I live in France and use Orange as my fibre provider. 1 Gbps/250 Mbps without constraints. I used to have Free which was great but did not offer fibre when fiber was installed. I switched to Orange in 5 min via a web page. I have another possibility (SFR) but they are despicable liars and for this reason alone I scraped them. This is France, where competition is not a national sport so I was expecting the US to have 5 other companies banging on the door.

Chriky 9y ago
In a natural monopoly regulation /increases/ competition and freedom for the consumer. The BBC had an article about this a few years ago [0]. Basically the highly regulated countries had cheaper and faster internet. > Rick Karr, who made a PBS documentary in which he travelled to the UK to find out why prices were lower, says that the critical moment came when the British regulator Ofcom forced British Telecom to allow other companies to use its copper telephone wires going to and from homes. > But US regulators took a different approach. Rather than encouraging competition between operators using the same network, the US encouraged competition between different infrastructure owners - big companies that could afford to build their own networks. > Some believe that UK-style regulation is bad for competition and innovation, however, and suggest that the US is already one of the world leaders in broadband. [0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24528383 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24528383
- tankenmate 9y ago
  This UK model is closely related to how roads are funded, as mostly govt funded monopoly on infrastructure (with occasional public private financing, which comes with its own issues, toll roads etc) and common access paid for by users (fuel tax, road tax, etc). The US model is closer to US railroads model, although not entirely accurate, analogy; largely privately owned with some govt owned, funded by large infrastructure companies that charge customers for usage and also due to infrastructure costs are rarely duplicated in close proximity. It's had issues with off and on regulation, profitability, localised monopolies that have a tendency to over charge when they can get away with it.
- trappist 9y ago
  It might be easier to convince me ISPs were a natural monopoly if they weren't also a legally protected monopoly where they are, and generally have plenty of competition where they aren't.
  - brians 9y ago
    I’m not sure that’s evidence against their natural monopoly position. It might be that we’re in a world where in some places, it’s plausible to have two ISPs, and in many it’s not—but if two try, they’ll both fail to get enough people to be profitable. Then any sane provider wants to demand exclusivity as the cost of pulling fiber through a community, and unhappily acknowledges that they’ll have to cover all of their exclusive territory. If we’re in that world, and the service is nearly essential, we’ll see legal monopolies in lots of places, and some places with no legal monopoly and no service—they can’t agree on a price. I’m prone to suspicion of their business practices too, but every one of the Comcast technical staff I’ve met, from Jason down, has been an excellent person deeply committed to the best mission of a telecoms company, enabling human communication. Is that a marketing campaign? Yes, but as far as I can tell it’s an honest campaign of showing the world who they are and what they care about.
    - Bud 9y ago
      This is laughable in light of Comcast warring against net neutrality and lying about it to customers and everyone else. Laughable.
  - sethrin 9y ago
    Do you personally have the ability to create large-scale broadband networks, using only the financial means available to the average citizen? An estimate by Goldman Sachs put the cost of nationwide Google Fiber at $140 billion. Personally, I'm not sure if I could come up with that kind of money, in a pinch.
kls 9y ago
In the US, two infrastructures evolved into internet infrastructure, one was the phone service (pretty much AT&T's long distance network and Ma Bell's local infrastructure). The other was the local Cable Companies, Cox, Bright house, Comcast et. al. So in most locations you have one of two choices, go with DSL and the phone company or Cable which in many areas is Comcast. AT&T just installed fiber here in the Florida Key's so alternatives are starting to pop up in more remote locations in the US, but it's still pretty much a go with the local phone company or local cable company monopoly decision.
criddell 9y ago
A lot of cities grant exclusive agreements to these companies. Lately they are more competitive but historically one cable company would be granted the right to serve an entire city. For an example, here's the page for Portland's agreements: https://www.portlandoregon.gov/revenue/58882 https://www.portlandoregon.gov/revenue/58882
- stephengillie 9y ago
  Regulations can limit new entries in other ways as well. A former coworker was telling me the difficulty of getting a DSLAM installed in a high-rental area, like a Seattle neighborhood. The DSLAM install requires approval from 40% of the property owners, so you might write each landlord a letter, but the landlords aren't opening letters unless there is rent money inside. So installing a DSLAM becomes a political game of convincing the several hundred "rental-transient"[0] people in the neighborhood to talk to their landlord. One of the reasons behind the "Ask your Landlord about Wave Internet" signs you see around. [0] Renters often only plan to stay in a location through their current lease, and thus have less long-term concern over the area. In this way, transience destroys community.
dboreham 9y ago
You were able to switch in 5 minutes because nothing actually changed except who sent you the bill. In the US this isn't possible because whoever owns the physical wire/fiber into your place gets to bill you, exclusively.
- BrandoElFollito 9y ago
  Yes, there is one cable and everyone has to share it, by law. I thought that AT&T was split once in the past to differentiate backbone and service providers - why not in the case of fiber?
  - ninkendo 9y ago
    Probably because the fox is guarding the henhouse now.
  - rhino369 9y ago
    >I thought that AT&T was split once in the past to differentiate backbone and service providers - why not in the case of fiber? So called unbundling was done, but in exchange, the backbone provider got a legal monopoly. Almost everywhere AT&T or Verizon lies fiber has competition, usually with a local cable company.
sokoloff 9y ago
> everyone who comments is complaining "Those who comment" are far from a random sampling of the user base. It's entirely possible that 95% of users are satisfied "enough" with the service and yet nearly 100% of comments to be strongly negative.
- BrandoElFollito 9y ago
  I know, this is the reason I added "who comment". This is not good enough, I know too, but in no comment have I seen praise of Comcast.
falcolas 9y ago
Not to disagree with any of the other points, but it's always worth remembering that any physical utility in the US has approximately 16x more land to cover than France. Not to mention the greater variety in climates (which do impact utilities). Some cities only have one existing fiber line even coming into them, usually owned by one of the local duopolies (typically phone, since they originally were required to offer phone service to everybody). This gives incumbents an immediate advantage in terms of reaching customers with physical infrastructure, before counting any of the (admittedly fucked) politics involved.
- AndyMcConachie 9y ago
  Then why do Americans in large urban centers not have greater choice of ISPs? If it's all about physical distance, why is there still no competition in dense areas? I live in Washington DC, in the city, and I only really have one choice where I live, Comcast.
  - pmorici 9y ago
    Cities grant franchise rights and determine rates charged for access to city poles and cable vaults.
    - parenthephobia 9y ago
      Incumbent ISPs lobby local govermment and sue would-be competitors to ensure the competition are only offered access on less favourable terms.
    - philjohn 9y ago
      Let's not sugar coat the language by referring to them as franchise rights, they're state-sanctioned monopolies.
      - pmorici 9y ago
        Well, sure if they decide to only grant a single franchise which is what happens in a lot of cases. There is no reason they can't allow several competing operators in a given city though.
mcherm 9y ago
> When reading about Comcast I was always wondering why they have no competition when everyone who comments is complaining. Suppose you were a major company with big dollars to spend on offering internet service... someone like Google, for example. Then suppose you wanted to provide service in Louisville, Kentucky. How many years do you think it would take to get permission to attach your lines to the existing telephone poles (owned by the city) if the local telephone and cable providers try to tie you up in lawsuits? What if the city's mayor was enthusiastically supportive, and willing to pass new laws and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of the city's money going to court to permit Google to start offering service. It would still take years to get permission. Fortunately, this isn't one of the many cases where state or local laws prohibit other companies from competing with the one local cable company, or it couldn't happen at all. Now imagine it is anyone OTHER than Google with their huge warchest, legal department, public support, and local government support. It wouldn't get anywhere at all. If it did, the cable company would drop rates for a few years until the competitor went out of business, then raise them afterward. The United States pays lip service to the idea of competition, but most of our politicians have gotten "competition" confused with "supporting big corporations". This is why internet service providing is a monopoly or oligopoly in nearly all US locations.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  I think this is really a critical thing to get integrated into the American public dialogue. Pro-business and pro-competition does not mean zero governmental oversight or regulation. My opinion is that if there isn't substantial churn or upheaval in the market at least a couple of times per decade, there is something broken in the market, and we should be looking at what kind of actions would be useful to allow fresh, new entrants to make an impact (without explicitly picking winners or issuing subsidies). Example: the online marketplace for social, search, and email is stagnant for obscure legal reasons. We should identify these (copyright and the CFAA) and remove the barriers. Megacorps have exploited core conservative values to guilt people into believing that they're commies if they refuse to write a blank check for any big company that wants one. We can make real progress, and it's important progress, by highlighting to Republican/conservative-leaning voters that selling their country to corporate raiders is not a pre-requisite for being pro-business or pro-small-government.

Chriky 9y ago

In a natural monopoly regulation /increases/ competition and freedom for the consumer. The BBC had an article about this a few years ago [0]. Basically the highly regulated countries had cheaper and faster internet. > Rick Karr, who made a PBS documentary in which he travelled to the UK to find out why prices were lower, says that the critical moment came when the British regulator Ofcom forced British Telecom to allow other companies to use its copper telephone wires going to and from homes. > But US regulators took a different approach. Rather than encouraging competition between operators using the same network, the US encouraged competition between different infrastructure owners - big companies that could afford to build their own networks. > Some believe that UK-style regulation is bad for competition and innovation, however, and suggest that the US is already one of the world leaders in broadband. [0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24528383 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24528383

tankenmate 9y ago
This UK model is closely related to how roads are funded, as mostly govt funded monopoly on infrastructure (with occasional public private financing, which comes with its own issues, toll roads etc) and common access paid for by users (fuel tax, road tax, etc). The US model is closer to US railroads model, although not entirely accurate, analogy; largely privately owned with some govt owned, funded by large infrastructure companies that charge customers for usage and also due to infrastructure costs are rarely duplicated in close proximity. It's had issues with off and on regulation, profitability, localised monopolies that have a tendency to over charge when they can get away with it.
trappist 9y ago
It might be easier to convince me ISPs were a natural monopoly if they weren't also a legally protected monopoly where they are, and generally have plenty of competition where they aren't.
- brians 9y ago
  I’m not sure that’s evidence against their natural monopoly position. It might be that we’re in a world where in some places, it’s plausible to have two ISPs, and in many it’s not—but if two try, they’ll both fail to get enough people to be profitable. Then any sane provider wants to demand exclusivity as the cost of pulling fiber through a community, and unhappily acknowledges that they’ll have to cover all of their exclusive territory. If we’re in that world, and the service is nearly essential, we’ll see legal monopolies in lots of places, and some places with no legal monopoly and no service—they can’t agree on a price. I’m prone to suspicion of their business practices too, but every one of the Comcast technical staff I’ve met, from Jason down, has been an excellent person deeply committed to the best mission of a telecoms company, enabling human communication. Is that a marketing campaign? Yes, but as far as I can tell it’s an honest campaign of showing the world who they are and what they care about.
  - Bud 9y ago
    This is laughable in light of Comcast warring against net neutrality and lying about it to customers and everyone else. Laughable.
- sethrin 9y ago
  Do you personally have the ability to create large-scale broadband networks, using only the financial means available to the average citizen? An estimate by Goldman Sachs put the cost of nationwide Google Fiber at $140 billion. Personally, I'm not sure if I could come up with that kind of money, in a pinch.

kls 9y ago

In the US, two infrastructures evolved into internet infrastructure, one was the phone service (pretty much AT&T's long distance network and Ma Bell's local infrastructure). The other was the local Cable Companies, Cox, Bright house, Comcast et. al. So in most locations you have one of two choices, go with DSL and the phone company or Cable which in many areas is Comcast. AT&T just installed fiber here in the Florida Key's so alternatives are starting to pop up in more remote locations in the US, but it's still pretty much a go with the local phone company or local cable company monopoly decision.

criddell 9y ago

A lot of cities grant exclusive agreements to these companies. Lately they are more competitive but historically one cable company would be granted the right to serve an entire city. For an example, here's the page for Portland's agreements: https://www.portlandoregon.gov/revenue/58882 https://www.portlandoregon.gov/revenue/58882

stephengillie 9y ago
Regulations can limit new entries in other ways as well. A former coworker was telling me the difficulty of getting a DSLAM installed in a high-rental area, like a Seattle neighborhood. The DSLAM install requires approval from 40% of the property owners, so you might write each landlord a letter, but the landlords aren't opening letters unless there is rent money inside. So installing a DSLAM becomes a political game of convincing the several hundred "rental-transient"[0] people in the neighborhood to talk to their landlord. One of the reasons behind the "Ask your Landlord about Wave Internet" signs you see around. [0] Renters often only plan to stay in a location through their current lease, and thus have less long-term concern over the area. In this way, transience destroys community.

dboreham 9y ago

You were able to switch in 5 minutes because nothing actually changed except who sent you the bill. In the US this isn't possible because whoever owns the physical wire/fiber into your place gets to bill you, exclusively.

BrandoElFollito 9y ago
Yes, there is one cable and everyone has to share it, by law. I thought that AT&T was split once in the past to differentiate backbone and service providers - why not in the case of fiber?
- ninkendo 9y ago
  Probably because the fox is guarding the henhouse now.
- rhino369 9y ago
  >I thought that AT&T was split once in the past to differentiate backbone and service providers - why not in the case of fiber? So called unbundling was done, but in exchange, the backbone provider got a legal monopoly. Almost everywhere AT&T or Verizon lies fiber has competition, usually with a local cable company.

sokoloff 9y ago

> everyone who comments is complaining "Those who comment" are far from a random sampling of the user base. It's entirely possible that 95% of users are satisfied "enough" with the service and yet nearly 100% of comments to be strongly negative.

BrandoElFollito 9y ago
I know, this is the reason I added "who comment". This is not good enough, I know too, but in no comment have I seen praise of Comcast.

falcolas 9y ago

Not to disagree with any of the other points, but it's always worth remembering that any physical utility in the US has approximately 16x more land to cover than France. Not to mention the greater variety in climates (which do impact utilities). Some cities only have one existing fiber line even coming into them, usually owned by one of the local duopolies (typically phone, since they originally were required to offer phone service to everybody). This gives incumbents an immediate advantage in terms of reaching customers with physical infrastructure, before counting any of the (admittedly fucked) politics involved.

AndyMcConachie 9y ago
Then why do Americans in large urban centers not have greater choice of ISPs? If it's all about physical distance, why is there still no competition in dense areas? I live in Washington DC, in the city, and I only really have one choice where I live, Comcast.
- pmorici 9y ago
  Cities grant franchise rights and determine rates charged for access to city poles and cable vaults.
  - parenthephobia 9y ago
    Incumbent ISPs lobby local govermment and sue would-be competitors to ensure the competition are only offered access on less favourable terms.
  - philjohn 9y ago
    Let's not sugar coat the language by referring to them as franchise rights, they're state-sanctioned monopolies.
    - pmorici 9y ago
      Well, sure if they decide to only grant a single franchise which is what happens in a lot of cases. There is no reason they can't allow several competing operators in a given city though.

mcherm 9y ago

> When reading about Comcast I was always wondering why they have no competition when everyone who comments is complaining. Suppose you were a major company with big dollars to spend on offering internet service... someone like Google, for example. Then suppose you wanted to provide service in Louisville, Kentucky. How many years do you think it would take to get permission to attach your lines to the existing telephone poles (owned by the city) if the local telephone and cable providers try to tie you up in lawsuits? What if the city's mayor was enthusiastically supportive, and willing to pass new laws and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of the city's money going to court to permit Google to start offering service. It would still take years to get permission. Fortunately, this isn't one of the many cases where state or local laws prohibit other companies from competing with the one local cable company, or it couldn't happen at all. Now imagine it is anyone OTHER than Google with their huge warchest, legal department, public support, and local government support. It wouldn't get anywhere at all. If it did, the cable company would drop rates for a few years until the competitor went out of business, then raise them afterward. The United States pays lip service to the idea of competition, but most of our politicians have gotten "competition" confused with "supporting big corporations". This is why internet service providing is a monopoly or oligopoly in nearly all US locations.

cookiecaper 9y ago
I think this is really a critical thing to get integrated into the American public dialogue. Pro-business and pro-competition does not mean zero governmental oversight or regulation. My opinion is that if there isn't substantial churn or upheaval in the market at least a couple of times per decade, there is something broken in the market, and we should be looking at what kind of actions would be useful to allow fresh, new entrants to make an impact (without explicitly picking winners or issuing subsidies). Example: the online marketplace for social, search, and email is stagnant for obscure legal reasons. We should identify these (copyright and the CFAA) and remove the barriers. Megacorps have exploited core conservative values to guilt people into believing that they're commies if they refuse to write a blank check for any big company that wants one. We can make real progress, and it's important progress, by highlighting to Republican/conservative-leaning voters that selling their country to corporate raiders is not a pre-requisite for being pro-business or pro-small-government.