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The danger with government nationalizing telecommunications networks is that once it is done, innovation and quality go way down. We had nationalized telecommun

The danger with government nationalizing telecommunications networks is that once it is done, innovation and quality go way down. We had nationalized telecommunications for over 70 years and customers could only have one brand of phone, and we're limited in the number of phones available in their houses. In addition, long distance calling was cost-prohibitive. The monopoly only started cracking when MCI introduced microwave based long distance calling. Fortunately non-governmental is on the way for you. 4G/5G are decent options, many areas (rural and in major cities) have microwave based broadband, and it looks like Starlink will become a reality soon. Putting fiber lines in the ground is extremely expensive (especially in California) and frankly is not really needed by most of the population. Are you just using a cell phone? In your situation or may make sense to buy a repeater or other dedicated hardware solutions.

heymijo 7y ago
> We had nationalized telecommunications for over 70 years No. Until 1982 AT&T in the United States was a legal monopoly, not a nationalized telecom. The book, The Idea Factory about Bell Labs has most of the history including why the the defense work Bell Labs did during WWII and beyond helped them justify a nationwide monopoly on telecom.
- Aloha 7y ago
  And compared to virtually every nationalized telecom it provided better, cheaper service that was universally available. Internet access should be regulated like it was a utility however, and that's the great failing of public policy in that area.
  - greggman3 7y ago
    Cheaper!?!?! I had $1200 one month long distance bill in 1984. That today is effectively free. Only competition made that happen. If AT&T was still in charge we'd be paying by the call and by the byte.
    - fragmede 7y ago
      That seems overly simplistic, especially considering my phone bill today is still billed by the byte, for instance.
    - heymijo 7y ago
      You seem to have interpreted this as monopoly prices were less than today's prices. My read of the parent comment is that monopoly era phone service from AT&T was cheaper when compared to phone service in other parts of the world during that era. I can't speak to the veracity of this claim.
      - Aloha 7y ago
        I was making the argument that the price for a local loop was price competitive with nationalized telecoms, but with little to no wait to have service provisioned - in many cases though the nationalized services were cheaper, by far even - but you may be pressed with a months or years long wait to establish service, because of capacity limitations, similarly in some countries you often would have experienced a dial tone delay of minutes from the time you picked up the phone, and/or would have had to schedule your long distance call many hours or days in advance because of limited circuit capacity.
    - Aloha 7y ago
      The price of long distance has more to do with the changes in technology since then than the regulatory environment. Competitive long distance could have happened without lifting the overall regulatory framework that governed telecommunications for 60+ years. Sometime between 1975 and 2005, long haul bandwidth became effectively free - consider that in 1975 the widest bandwidth deployed carrier system was about 108,000 simultaneous calls, a fiber system deployed in 1999, is now carrying 320gb/s which if I did my math right works out to 500m simultaneous calls. To give you an idea, a residential phone bill from 1982 with unlimited local calling in Seattle was around 13.50 inclusive, in 2019, that same service cost 50 dollars - inflation alone would expect the cost of that service to only be 36 dollars or so - and technological advantages should make that service cheaper, not more expensive. AT&T was a different company, at one point before divestiture they were the single largest private employer (1973) in the US, providing union jobs with good benefits and stable (effectively) lifetime employment. Beyond this, they were also a leader in providing equal opportunity for minorities. The money generated by AT&T was paid back in technology dividends - dividends that underpin much of the technological innovation we've seen over the last 60 years. AT&T's disaster preparedness is a whole other topic that could be gone into as well.
- bluntfang 7y ago
  And I ask, what's the difference? Let's try not to be pedantic here, because if they are a legal monopoly, at the end of the day they have to do what the government says, because if they don't the government could just tear the monopoly down and prop up competitors.
  - heymijo 7y ago
    1) Ownership Nationalized companies are owned by the state. AT&T had/has private shareholders. 2) Control With ownership comes control. The U.S. government granted AT&T a conditional monopoly. In the early 20th century it was in exchange for extending service across the nation. Mid-20th century for defense work. Aside from these conditions the U.S. government did not exert control on AT&T's operations.
    - bluntfang 7y ago
      >Nationalized companies are owned by the state. AT&T had/has private shareholders. I feel like this is being pedantic. While there are shareholders, taxpayers have funded the infrastructure and are paying for it in the form of tax breaks.
tinus_hn 7y ago
As opposed to the monopolies which have contributed innovations such as quotas, pay for play internet and snooping.
nixass 7y ago
Some utilities should be heavily regulated, or even owned by the state. Internet access is one of them. Everything else is just "deregulate everything 'Murica" propaganda
briandear 7y ago
See Telmex for how bad it gets..
zbrozek 7y ago
I'm currently using a Netgear LB1121 with external antennas connected to AT&T's 4G network. It's maybe a smidge better than DSL, but not definitively so. Both throughput and latency are all over the map (2-sigma 1 to 70 mbps, 30-60 ms). I don't get a publicly-routable IP. So instead I have to buy another service and expend a bunch of IT-administration mental energy to use a VPS just so I can SSH home. The basic rules of radio propagation should make it obvious to anyone that something like satellite (or even terrestrial) RF links will never achieve the density of fiber. And like power lines, they'll be something we run once and then occasionally fix for many decades. That may be too expensive in some parts of the country, but around here the argument rings hollow. But you're right. It may be good enough for now. I just don't think it'll be good enough for decades.
- dylz 7y ago
  I'm curious, do you get non-screwed-with service? Try curling any IP on port 80; they seem to proxy everything, from web to TLS handshakes.
  - zbrozek 7y ago
    It lives behind NAT, so I can't host anything. But it seemed to be unmolested. That said, I couldn't handle the NAT and decided to bounce all of my traffic off of a Vultr VPS. That comes with its own problems, like lots of websites (e.g. Vimeo) thinking I'm a bot and blocking me.
jt2190 7y ago
> ... government nationalizing telecommunications networks... Is that extreme the only other option we can imagine? In Texas, for example, the power transmission lines are managed by the Electric Reliability Council [1], and treated as kind of a "electricity market". [1] http://www.ercot.com/ http://www.ercot.com/
jcrawfordor 7y ago
AT&T also provided an extremely high quality of service, not really seen since that time, and operated a corporate R&D arm that I think could fairly be called the global center of innovation for decades, designing as an almost side-effect of telephone switches a large portion of the computer technology we use today from silicon to operating system. One wonders where the state of the industry would be today had Bell Labs and Western Electric been able to continue with the lavish funding and long-term vision that their monopolistic parents afforded them. And the reverse, would T-Mobile invent the transistor? It's hard to argue that innovation and quality of the telephone system went down under AT&T's monopoly when, during that time period, AT&T played a fundamental role in the invention of the computer and famously took measures as extreme as moving buildings while telephone operators work inside in order to avoid service disruption. It seems that other factors must have been in play as well in the eventual decline of "ma bell". The story of AT&T's monopoly on telephone service and its subsequent breakup at the hands of both court and MCI/Sprint is a complex one that cannot be so simply used as an argument for or against the arrangement. It was a very particular situation in a very particular time, perhaps most significantly because AT&T created an entire market sector which the government had no coherent strategy to manage. So-called competition has also been quite insufficient to revolutionize the landline telephone market, it remains perhaps as consumer-hostile as it has ever been, something forgotten largely only because the cellular industry has replaced it (which, facing stiff competition but the regulatory wild west of the internet, is consumer-hostile in a whole new way).
- TheColorYellow 7y ago
  This is awesome content. Any chance you have a book you could recommend on this subject?
  - jdsnape 7y ago
    It’s mentioned below, but ‘The Idea Factory‘ covers Bell labs and is an excellent read.
  - kick 7y ago
    The title is bad enough that I won't mention it, but the alternative title is good (and will find you the book): 'The Criminal Wrecking of the Best Telephone System in the World' by Kraus and Duerig.
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> The danger with government nationalizing telecommunications networks is that once it is done, innovation and quality go way down. Who needs nationalization? The market for transit is reasonably competitive. Local municipalities could install fiber along the roads they already maintain at a modest incremental cost, then offer the service to residents for a monthly fee to pay off the bonds without even spending any taxpayer money. All you really need from the federal government is to have them do something about incumbent ISPs actively interfering with municipalities that want to do that. > 4G/5G are decent options No they're not. The nature of wireless is that it's cheaper if you have a low population density, because one tower for hundreds of people is much cheaper than installing hundreds of miles of fiber for hundreds of people. It flips completely the other way in anything resembling a city. To get a fraction of the bandwidth available from fiber, you'd need a tower on every street corner, which isn't dramatically less expensive than installing fiber (especially when you count all the spectrum you have to pay for) and is still slower even then. And cellular is even less attractive when you have Starlink -- then you don't even need the towers. It's great for rural areas. But it's hardly going to have enough aggregate bandwidth to let all of New York City watch Netflix in 4K.
- est31 7y ago
  Starlink does require towers because the data has to be beamed back to the ground. The more bandwidth you serve in an area, the more towers you need. However, in areas with low bandwidth demands where cellular towers are currently as dense as they are in order to reach every part of the area, Starlink does make sense. Starlink, Cellular and ground based internet serve different points on the density /mobility curve.
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    > Starlink does require towers because the data has to be beamed back to the ground. The more bandwidth you serve in an area, the more towers you need. That's a ground station, not towers. The "towers" are the satellites. And the number of grounds stations you need doesn't really have much to do with how much bandwidth you use, because they can use directional wireless or laser communications at higher power levels than ordinary devices, so they're not the bottleneck. The reason to have a large number of ground stations is so that there is one within range no matter where a satellite is. But they have plans to build an inter-satellite mesh that would remove that requirement as well: https://hackaday.com/2019/05/20/everything-we-know-about-spacexs-starlink-network/ https://hackaday.com/2019/05/20/everything-we-know-about-spa... In principle if they wanted to serve a higher density area they would need more satellites so they could each cover less area, but that's not really its purpose. Dense areas can more than justify a fiber network. What the satellites get you is world-wide coverage from one network, particularly including the places that don't have existing coverage because their density is too low. And the combination of that doesn't leave much left for cellular to do. You have a very high bandwidth fiber connection at home, at work, backing the wifi in any kind of a hotel or coffee house, and then Starlink for when you're in a rural area or in a car and you want to look at a map but aren't near any of those. What's left for cellular?
tarde 7y ago
It's a very wide guess to pick technological advances and attribute to one segment. It's not like the non-telecom segments were flying cars in the 50s.
bananabreakfast 7y ago
Not true at all. There has never been nationalized telecommunications in America, ever. Gets your facts straight.
- bgorman 7y ago
  You are correct, I misremembered. However I don't think there is really much of a difference in this case since the federal government chose one company.
asdff 7y ago
We have a private system, and already the quality is low. I live in the second largest city in the U.S. and I can only get spectrum "100mbps" in my building. Nothing I can do, the building is wired for spectrum. 4G reception is even worse, constantly drops.
schwartzworld 7y ago
> customers could only have one brand of phone. Don't most areas of the US only have one cable / internet company? I live in a major city and we have 2 choices.

heymijo 7y ago

> We had nationalized telecommunications for over 70 years No. Until 1982 AT&T in the United States was a legal monopoly, not a nationalized telecom. The book, The Idea Factory about Bell Labs has most of the history including why the the defense work Bell Labs did during WWII and beyond helped them justify a nationwide monopoly on telecom.

Aloha 7y ago
And compared to virtually every nationalized telecom it provided better, cheaper service that was universally available. Internet access should be regulated like it was a utility however, and that's the great failing of public policy in that area.
- greggman3 7y ago
  Cheaper!?!?! I had $1200 one month long distance bill in 1984. That today is effectively free. Only competition made that happen. If AT&T was still in charge we'd be paying by the call and by the byte.
  - fragmede 7y ago
    That seems overly simplistic, especially considering my phone bill today is still billed by the byte, for instance.
  - heymijo 7y ago
    You seem to have interpreted this as monopoly prices were less than today's prices. My read of the parent comment is that monopoly era phone service from AT&T was cheaper when compared to phone service in other parts of the world during that era. I can't speak to the veracity of this claim.
    - Aloha 7y ago
      I was making the argument that the price for a local loop was price competitive with nationalized telecoms, but with little to no wait to have service provisioned - in many cases though the nationalized services were cheaper, by far even - but you may be pressed with a months or years long wait to establish service, because of capacity limitations, similarly in some countries you often would have experienced a dial tone delay of minutes from the time you picked up the phone, and/or would have had to schedule your long distance call many hours or days in advance because of limited circuit capacity.
  - Aloha 7y ago
    The price of long distance has more to do with the changes in technology since then than the regulatory environment. Competitive long distance could have happened without lifting the overall regulatory framework that governed telecommunications for 60+ years. Sometime between 1975 and 2005, long haul bandwidth became effectively free - consider that in 1975 the widest bandwidth deployed carrier system was about 108,000 simultaneous calls, a fiber system deployed in 1999, is now carrying 320gb/s which if I did my math right works out to 500m simultaneous calls. To give you an idea, a residential phone bill from 1982 with unlimited local calling in Seattle was around 13.50 inclusive, in 2019, that same service cost 50 dollars - inflation alone would expect the cost of that service to only be 36 dollars or so - and technological advantages should make that service cheaper, not more expensive. AT&T was a different company, at one point before divestiture they were the single largest private employer (1973) in the US, providing union jobs with good benefits and stable (effectively) lifetime employment. Beyond this, they were also a leader in providing equal opportunity for minorities. The money generated by AT&T was paid back in technology dividends - dividends that underpin much of the technological innovation we've seen over the last 60 years. AT&T's disaster preparedness is a whole other topic that could be gone into as well.
bluntfang 7y ago
And I ask, what's the difference? Let's try not to be pedantic here, because if they are a legal monopoly, at the end of the day they have to do what the government says, because if they don't the government could just tear the monopoly down and prop up competitors.
- heymijo 7y ago
  1) Ownership Nationalized companies are owned by the state. AT&T had/has private shareholders. 2) Control With ownership comes control. The U.S. government granted AT&T a conditional monopoly. In the early 20th century it was in exchange for extending service across the nation. Mid-20th century for defense work. Aside from these conditions the U.S. government did not exert control on AT&T's operations.
  - bluntfang 7y ago
    >Nationalized companies are owned by the state. AT&T had/has private shareholders. I feel like this is being pedantic. While there are shareholders, taxpayers have funded the infrastructure and are paying for it in the form of tax breaks.

tinus_hn 7y ago

As opposed to the monopolies which have contributed innovations such as quotas, pay for play internet and snooping.

nixass 7y ago

Some utilities should be heavily regulated, or even owned by the state. Internet access is one of them. Everything else is just "deregulate everything 'Murica" propaganda

briandear 7y ago

See Telmex for how bad it gets..

zbrozek 7y ago

I'm currently using a Netgear LB1121 with external antennas connected to AT&T's 4G network. It's maybe a smidge better than DSL, but not definitively so. Both throughput and latency are all over the map (2-sigma 1 to 70 mbps, 30-60 ms). I don't get a publicly-routable IP. So instead I have to buy another service and expend a bunch of IT-administration mental energy to use a VPS just so I can SSH home. The basic rules of radio propagation should make it obvious to anyone that something like satellite (or even terrestrial) RF links will never achieve the density of fiber. And like power lines, they'll be something we run once and then occasionally fix for many decades. That may be too expensive in some parts of the country, but around here the argument rings hollow. But you're right. It may be good enough for now. I just don't think it'll be good enough for decades.

dylz 7y ago
I'm curious, do you get non-screwed-with service? Try curling any IP on port 80; they seem to proxy everything, from web to TLS handshakes.
- zbrozek 7y ago
  It lives behind NAT, so I can't host anything. But it seemed to be unmolested. That said, I couldn't handle the NAT and decided to bounce all of my traffic off of a Vultr VPS. That comes with its own problems, like lots of websites (e.g. Vimeo) thinking I'm a bot and blocking me.

jt2190 7y ago

> ... government nationalizing telecommunications networks... Is that extreme the only other option we can imagine? In Texas, for example, the power transmission lines are managed by the Electric Reliability Council [1], and treated as kind of a "electricity market". [1] http://www.ercot.com/ http://www.ercot.com/

jcrawfordor 7y ago

AT&T also provided an extremely high quality of service, not really seen since that time, and operated a corporate R&D arm that I think could fairly be called the global center of innovation for decades, designing as an almost side-effect of telephone switches a large portion of the computer technology we use today from silicon to operating system. One wonders where the state of the industry would be today had Bell Labs and Western Electric been able to continue with the lavish funding and long-term vision that their monopolistic parents afforded them. And the reverse, would T-Mobile invent the transistor? It's hard to argue that innovation and quality of the telephone system went down under AT&T's monopoly when, during that time period, AT&T played a fundamental role in the invention of the computer and famously took measures as extreme as moving buildings while telephone operators work inside in order to avoid service disruption. It seems that other factors must have been in play as well in the eventual decline of "ma bell". The story of AT&T's monopoly on telephone service and its subsequent breakup at the hands of both court and MCI/Sprint is a complex one that cannot be so simply used as an argument for or against the arrangement. It was a very particular situation in a very particular time, perhaps most significantly because AT&T created an entire market sector which the government had no coherent strategy to manage. So-called competition has also been quite insufficient to revolutionize the landline telephone market, it remains perhaps as consumer-hostile as it has ever been, something forgotten largely only because the cellular industry has replaced it (which, facing stiff competition but the regulatory wild west of the internet, is consumer-hostile in a whole new way).

TheColorYellow 7y ago
This is awesome content. Any chance you have a book you could recommend on this subject?
- jdsnape 7y ago
  It’s mentioned below, but ‘The Idea Factory‘ covers Bell labs and is an excellent read.
- kick 7y ago
  The title is bad enough that I won't mention it, but the alternative title is good (and will find you the book): 'The Criminal Wrecking of the Best Telephone System in the World' by Kraus and Duerig.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

> The danger with government nationalizing telecommunications networks is that once it is done, innovation and quality go way down. Who needs nationalization? The market for transit is reasonably competitive. Local municipalities could install fiber along the roads they already maintain at a modest incremental cost, then offer the service to residents for a monthly fee to pay off the bonds without even spending any taxpayer money. All you really need from the federal government is to have them do something about incumbent ISPs actively interfering with municipalities that want to do that. > 4G/5G are decent options No they're not. The nature of wireless is that it's cheaper if you have a low population density, because one tower for hundreds of people is much cheaper than installing hundreds of miles of fiber for hundreds of people. It flips completely the other way in anything resembling a city. To get a fraction of the bandwidth available from fiber, you'd need a tower on every street corner, which isn't dramatically less expensive than installing fiber (especially when you count all the spectrum you have to pay for) and is still slower even then. And cellular is even less attractive when you have Starlink -- then you don't even need the towers. It's great for rural areas. But it's hardly going to have enough aggregate bandwidth to let all of New York City watch Netflix in 4K.

est31 7y ago
Starlink does require towers because the data has to be beamed back to the ground. The more bandwidth you serve in an area, the more towers you need. However, in areas with low bandwidth demands where cellular towers are currently as dense as they are in order to reach every part of the area, Starlink does make sense. Starlink, Cellular and ground based internet serve different points on the density /mobility curve.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  > Starlink does require towers because the data has to be beamed back to the ground. The more bandwidth you serve in an area, the more towers you need. That's a ground station, not towers. The "towers" are the satellites. And the number of grounds stations you need doesn't really have much to do with how much bandwidth you use, because they can use directional wireless or laser communications at higher power levels than ordinary devices, so they're not the bottleneck. The reason to have a large number of ground stations is so that there is one within range no matter where a satellite is. But they have plans to build an inter-satellite mesh that would remove that requirement as well: https://hackaday.com/2019/05/20/everything-we-know-about-spacexs-starlink-network/ https://hackaday.com/2019/05/20/everything-we-know-about-spa... In principle if they wanted to serve a higher density area they would need more satellites so they could each cover less area, but that's not really its purpose. Dense areas can more than justify a fiber network. What the satellites get you is world-wide coverage from one network, particularly including the places that don't have existing coverage because their density is too low. And the combination of that doesn't leave much left for cellular to do. You have a very high bandwidth fiber connection at home, at work, backing the wifi in any kind of a hotel or coffee house, and then Starlink for when you're in a rural area or in a car and you want to look at a map but aren't near any of those. What's left for cellular?

tarde 7y ago

It's a very wide guess to pick technological advances and attribute to one segment. It's not like the non-telecom segments were flying cars in the 50s.

bananabreakfast 7y ago

Not true at all. There has never been nationalized telecommunications in America, ever. Gets your facts straight.

bgorman 7y ago
You are correct, I misremembered. However I don't think there is really much of a difference in this case since the federal government chose one company.

asdff 7y ago

We have a private system, and already the quality is low. I live in the second largest city in the U.S. and I can only get spectrum "100mbps" in my building. Nothing I can do, the building is wired for spectrum. 4G reception is even worse, constantly drops.

schwartzworld 7y ago

> customers could only have one brand of phone. Don't most areas of the US only have one cable / internet company? I live in a major city and we have 2 choices.