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> Also your meter is two-way. It's just sending your usage data back, not power. This is actually a pretty good illustration of what I'm talking about - sendin

> Also your meter is two-way. It's just sending your usage data back, not power. This is actually a pretty good illustration of what I'm talking about - sending a few bytes a month for power usage data is much different than maintaining a constant bit rate of >0mbps from each customer. It's the difference between broadcasting 40 channels to everyone and reserving 1 channel for a bit of upload (fairly easy with old technology) and giving everyone their own channel for upload (much more difficult). You're not wrong that a huge portion of the costs is putting things in the ground, though. The advantage that power companies have is that a lot of that work has already been done, and they don't have to upgrade as often because power usage requirements aren't changing as rapidly as bandwidth requirements. They also have the (arguable) advantage of usually being a government granted monopoly, so they don't have to worry about building something out and then being undercut by a competitor. There is a lot to dig in to here, but consider this from a different perspective - there is actually quite a bit of competition among mobile providers, and yet prices aren't dropping very quickly. You could argue that that's because of corruption and collusion (in some cases it probably is) but also consider that any one of those companies would absolutely love to take market share from the cable companies. If Verizon could undercut Comcast and give you Internet and TV at home over their wireless network they would do that in a heartbeat. The only reason they're not doing it is because it would be too expensive. Or, more precisely, they are trying to do it, that's what 5G is, and it's costing them a fortune. EDIT: Also consider another perspective - the power companies themselves would love to provide Internet service! On paper they are in a great position to be able to do that. They already have infrastructure, technicians, billing platforms, captive customers, etc. The reason they're not doing it is because their infrastructure doesn't support it, and couldn't really be made to do it without spending so much money on it that they could not be cost-competitive with existing products.

zbrozek 6y ago
Personally I think mobile is tolerably (but not ideally) competitive. I think the costs are driven by the high costs of spectrum and marketing/customer acquisition. And the product is reasonably high-value, so prices _can_ be high. A useful comparison is the cost of fixed wireless internet service vs mobile service. The price/GB of the former is usually far lower than the latter despite running on exactly the same infrastructure. I merely point out that I struggle to believe that the physical infrastructure costs are large components of the cost of service. Unlike power delivery, where the physical distribution infrastructure seems to be the majority share. Or at least it is if my bill breakdown is to be believed.
- grahamburger 6y ago
  > A useful comparison is the cost of fixed wireless internet service vs mobile service. The price/GB of the former is usually far lower than the latter despite running on exactly the same infrastructure. Glad you brought this up, fixed wireless is my career so this is something I've thought about a lot over the last 15 years or so. I would argue that the difference in pricing between fixed wireless and mobile is actually almost entirely driven by the 'fixed' qualifier - it's just much easier and cheaper to deliver Internet service to a fixed point where you can put a high gain antenna (like a rooftop) than it is to deliver to a cell phone in someone's pocket inside a building. Of course the next question is why don't the mobile operators do home service with a fixed antenna on the rooftop like fixed wireless operators do, but using their massive spectrum and tower footprint advantages? I don't really know the answer to that. There have been a lot of efforts to do this, actually - the earliest one I know of was Sprint putting up these diamond shape antennas on rooftops back in the late 90s / early 00s. I think at least part of it is that it's hard to have high-gain antennas on rooftops coexist with low-gain antennas in cell phone on the same medium, and another part is that it's hard to hire and train and manage folks to do the home installs. I do believe that part of the push to 5G is to enable this type of service, though.

zbrozek 6y ago

Personally I think mobile is tolerably (but not ideally) competitive. I think the costs are driven by the high costs of spectrum and marketing/customer acquisition. And the product is reasonably high-value, so prices _can_ be high. A useful comparison is the cost of fixed wireless internet service vs mobile service. The price/GB of the former is usually far lower than the latter despite running on exactly the same infrastructure. I merely point out that I struggle to believe that the physical infrastructure costs are large components of the cost of service. Unlike power delivery, where the physical distribution infrastructure seems to be the majority share. Or at least it is if my bill breakdown is to be believed.

grahamburger 6y ago
> A useful comparison is the cost of fixed wireless internet service vs mobile service. The price/GB of the former is usually far lower than the latter despite running on exactly the same infrastructure. Glad you brought this up, fixed wireless is my career so this is something I've thought about a lot over the last 15 years or so. I would argue that the difference in pricing between fixed wireless and mobile is actually almost entirely driven by the 'fixed' qualifier - it's just much easier and cheaper to deliver Internet service to a fixed point where you can put a high gain antenna (like a rooftop) than it is to deliver to a cell phone in someone's pocket inside a building. Of course the next question is why don't the mobile operators do home service with a fixed antenna on the rooftop like fixed wireless operators do, but using their massive spectrum and tower footprint advantages? I don't really know the answer to that. There have been a lot of efforts to do this, actually - the earliest one I know of was Sprint putting up these diamond shape antennas on rooftops back in the late 90s / early 00s. I think at least part of it is that it's hard to have high-gain antennas on rooftops coexist with low-gain antennas in cell phone on the same medium, and another part is that it's hard to hire and train and manage folks to do the home installs. I do believe that part of the push to 5G is to enable this type of service, though.