24 ms·

A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broadband providers

743 points by elsewhen 6y ago

donmcronald 6y ago
Canada has the same problem. I don’t have definitive data, but the promo pricing for internet plans has seemed pretty weak since COVID hit. We call our ISP every (fucking) year to ask them to give us the current promo pricing for the next year and this year everything is a solid $20-$40 per month higher than it’s been in the last 3-4 years. They’re totally price gouging IMO.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Canadians are unwilling to price shop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlRPLBLkZK0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlRPLBLkZK0
  - michael1999 6y ago
    I used to suggest joining a credit union to people who complained about bank fees, and the first response would be that there were fewer ATMs and the branches were farther away. Canadians want premium service for free, and will do exactly nothing besides complain to get it.
    - 908B64B197 6y ago
      Banking is another sector where they seem to make it hard for no reasons for international players to bring competition in the market place.
      - michael1999 6y ago
        Banking, insurance, and telecom are all protected from foreign competition. It makes them fat and often lazy, but I’d hardly say there is no reason. Universal service mandates, tax administration, prudence regulation, and criminal justice are all compelling interests in those businesses. The government meddles because the people complain when they don’t.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  They are pretty hostile to international players setting shops. In such a non-competitive environment, it's no wonder rent seeking is the norm. Edit: I see the downvotes but no explanations.
  - wstrange 6y ago
    The explanation is largely the same as in the US: It's very expensive to run cable / fibre to the house. It's a natural monopoly. Having a US incumbent enter the Canadian market isn't going to change that.
    - 908B64B197 6y ago
      I could see why lobbyists would push that narrative, but deregulation and an open market worked extremely well in Europe.
      - tpxl 6y ago
        In my country regulation is what works extremely well, and where there is none, you get price gouging. The government funds the majority of new lines, and in turn, the companies are legally mandated to rent the lines out for a small fee (100/20 lines cost about 30€).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
908B64B197 6y ago
I'm always surprised this isn't discussed more. Big tech is accused of being monopolistic, but there is a constant flow of new players in the field, all gaining market shares and building the Next Big Thing, while telecom providers are pretty stagnant. I'm curious why cities don't directly lay down the infrastructure work for broadband access. In some cases that might raise property value enough that the town could make it's money back in very little time.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  There may be a constant flow of new players, but much of the time when they start to show a certain amount of success then one of the big players simply buys them up.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    Correct except, Microsoft should have won search. They had all the tools to execute and were pretty much at the right place at the right time. Google should have won social networking and messaging. They had the userbase and the network. Yet it's Facebook that did. Same goes for Phones, and yet it's Apple that captured the market.
    - vagrantJin 6y ago
      > Same goes for Phones, and yet it's Apple that captured the market. Samsung and Huawei captured the market Apple created.
      - Armisael16 6y ago
        Samsung and Huawei each ship about 50% more phones than Apple. Apple makes more than 3x the profit on phones that either does.
      - adventured 6y ago
        Ask Samsung how they're doing in the world's largest smartphone market - China (they barely exist at all now, ~1% market share).
redisman 6y ago
It's true. I'll never stop being amazed at how in Helsinki 10 years ago I had a 500/500Mbps connection for $29/mo and in Seattle I have a 200/10Mbps connection for $59/mo. I won't even get to mobile plans since at least there it's somewhat plausible that I must subside the rural cellphone towers since it's a huge (in area) network.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  And for the most part, it doesn't matter how much money you have to spend on it. If I were inclined to offer twice as much for double the bandwidth, that's just not an option. (Not that I feel like I'm getting the bandwidth I pay for in the first place...)
  - MivLives 6y ago
    The worst is the highly one directional connections too. Sure I have a gig down. I have 25mbps up though. The upload is the same for every package from 300mbps down and above. I'd happily have less download for more upload.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      That's because they don't actually have capacity. The internet coming via coaxial cables is sharing the road with TV service. TV service earns Comcast/Spectrum/Cox/etc more money than internet service, so they don't necessarily want people to consume via internet yet (at least not until they own the media companies like Comcast). So they probably only have a tiny amount of bandwidth available for an entire neighborhood, and then they sell you 100s of Mb in download, except that if you read the fine print, it's only burst speeds, so it's not like you get 300Mbps sustained download bandwidth. It's just a temporary boost while they take it from others in the neighborhood. And the upload, who knows how little is allocated for that, they don't even bother advertising upload bandwidth.
      - inetknght 6y ago
        20 years ago maybe. Today Comcast has indeed migrated to IPTV and has bought out those media companies. You remember NBC and Universal are now owned by Comcast, right? Do you remember Comcast before it had Xfinity? I do.
crazygringo 6y ago
Seriously, I feel like I say it every time it comes up: WHY aren't people taking action against ISP monopolies? It seems like such a cut-and-dried political issue: they're utilities and they overcharge you whether you're a Republican or Democrat. And taking action doesn't require new antitrust concepts, because it's just your garden-variety utility. It's the same established principles as electric or natural gas. Yet bizarrely this doesn't show up as an issue on Republican or Democrat platforms. Going after Google and Amazon and Facebook's free products is the sexy new issue, but the fact that we're all overpaying hundreds of dollars a year for broadband is just massively ignored. And I'm not talking about politicians being bought. It baffles me why voters aren't writing letters to their city councils, their mayors, their state reps, their governors. If voters actually care, politicians do respond. It would seriously be so easy to change if the voting population actually did care about it. But, inexplicably, we just pay the fees and deal with the crappy customer service and complain, but it never seems to occur to anybody to actually organize local political action against it. It's utterly baffling.
- burlesona 6y ago
  It's a good question, but I think one of the issues is that physical networks are a natural monopoly in the same way as most public utilities, so it's not just about enabling more competition but about establishing a regulatory framework around that competition, much like exists with airports and railways. OR, alternatively, changing to a public sector provision model like plumbing or roads. What actually bothers me the most is the rules that (in most places) prohibit cities and towns from offering new municipal broadband service as a competitive offering. This used to be more common in smaller towns that had not been able to get good commercial service, and it adds valuable options and competition, but my understanding is that it's extremely hard for cities who don't already have municipal broadband to start offering it now.
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago
    Local Loop Unbundling works fine in the UK
    - 6y ago
speeder 6y ago
Telecom is... too nasty to touch to be honest. Brazil tried it, we had a state company that had a monopoly of telecom, we broke it up intentionally in many tiny parts and sold them. Results were basically this: 1. A bunch ended eventually merging, often with help of blatant corruption (for example one such merger was first denied, then approved again after the son of the president "sold" to a telecom company, his game company for 30 million, a game company that never made any games, and the son of the president before that was a zoo caretaker and didn't knew how to code). 2. Some are going bankrupt, with parts they bought being unprofitable, and will eventually get merged into the others. 3. A LOT of international 007-style spy shit happened because of this... We had our version of CIA spying on our own president, owner of a bank spied upon (seemly with good reason), Italy and Brazil spying on each other, agents getting arrested, agents disappearing, people bending backwards to release criminals and suspected criminals to avoid diplomatic incidents, people that disappeared or died, etc... To be honest Telecom looks like the sort of thing that even touching with a mile-long pole you will still get shit splattered on you, and if you try a shorter pole it will be nuclear shit.
- andromeduck 6y ago
  I think telecom is like power, the only way it can be split is by creating horizontal markets, emphasis on plural, and preferably along some natural lines to the fictional overhead such as generation/distribution in the case of electrical markets. For communications I think the way to do it might be to create 3-4 levels of responsibilities and say that no single player can operate in more than a few levels at once and must offer their services via live public auction or standard public wholesale pricing. For wireless the way I'd split is is: 1. Location/site management, aka who owns/manages the poles. 2. Operating the actual Networking/Peering equipment, networking to the site with permission of #1. 3. Consumer/retail such as MVNO; direct-use in the case of large businesses, or value-add aggregation/resale for intermediates. For wired the way I'd split is is: 1. Global networking/peering. 2. Regional networking/peering. 2. Last-mile equipment/rights, servicing. 3. Consumer/retail, value-add etc. The goal here being to reduce the barrier to entry for small players via horizontalization which increases competition but not draw too many hard lines so that players have some flexibility in organization and so that players in one level have the opportunity of punching through to an adjacent or skip level if it is being overpriced.
mattferderer 6y ago
I am curious how Starlink will change this conversation one way or another. It adds another competitor to the mix. Could it become the monopoly if the tech were to make current ISP tech obsolete or to expensive for most areas? If it became the better method, does that mean our skies will soon be even more polluted with satellites by exponential factors?
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  I really hope Starlink lives up to the hype. But if it does, how do we stop it becoming a monopoly? We don't need and can't have multiple rival fleets of satellites up there. But if it's just Starlink then how do we stop it charging more and more for less and less because no-one else is threatening it? If it works, should the UN step in and take over the network as a service to all of humanity?
  - justinclift 6y ago
    > I really hope Starlink lives up to the hype. The technical aspects of it seem to be: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/11/spacex-starlink-beta-tester-takes-user-terminal-into-forest-gets-120mbps/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/11/space...
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    We do need and can have multiple fleets up there. OneWeb has already launched a bunch of satellites, and there is enough room up there for several more, particularly as operators get better at safely operating them.
    - marcus_holmes 6y ago
      I would agree, but I've seen the mess that e-scooter organisations have made of this. The city is littered with e-scooters whose name changes every few months. If the business plan doesn't work out, who cleans up the satellites?
marcus_holmes 6y ago
This is such a weird thing. After spending time in SE Asia, where bandwidth is cheap and plentiful (in the cities), it's painful coming back to Europe (and Australia). I'm in Berlin atm, and the wifi is shit, bandwidth is expensive and unreliable. And the phone plans suck. I was in Perth (Australia) before that, and access there is terrible. In Cambodia, 120Gb (per week) of download cost me US$1 (per week) over good-quality 4G connections anywhere in the city (but almost nothing outside the cities). In Berlin, it's 40 euros a month for 5Gb, and coverage is a bit patchy, and very patchy if I go a few Km's out of the city. In Bali, a $5 SIM card got me a month of effectively-unlimited download over decent connections. Nepal, Malaysia, all good. Phillipines was tricky to get decent coverage, but when it was there it was cheap. Cafes in SE Asia offer free wifi with a coffee. Berlin nope. I get the price differences are a function of relative GDP. But the performance differences should be the other way around. Tech should work better in developed countries, not worse.
- Plasmoid2000ad 6y ago
  I understand there are some specifics going on in Germany. While I've never quite understood, I've seen many German posters call out a national broadband backbone based on Copper as the root cause. I don't know if this is true, but I am in Ireland and know that also the UK did a rollout of a Fibre backbone network, and in both there's widespread availability of 1GB+ consumer connections. I think what's happened is in many or some European countries there was a rush to increase Broadband adoption and speeds, where being the first mover left them with now outdated backbone infrastructure. Those who moved later, more gradually, or chose a more future proof backbone network benefited. The sunk cost and possibly inflexibility of the network to upgrades holds back the push for better speeds. If the service is good enough, the push from consumers for more is lessened.
  - MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
    > I think what's happened is in many or some European countries there was a rush to increase Broadband adoption and speeds, where being the first mover left them with now outdated backbone infrastructure. If you are referring to the copper network built in the 80s under Kohl, that is not what happened. Some call it "conflict of interest", some blatant corruption.
carapace 6y ago
I was just talking to a person today, it turns out there are parts of Western San Francisco that can't get good connectivity (without shelling out ~$100K to dig a trench or some shit.)
- terinjokes 6y ago
  You don't event have to go very far west. I was quoted $87k to get anything better than 8Mbps/1Mbps in the middle of SoMa just a few years ago.
wombatmobile 6y ago
How can TFA and all these comments here be correct if this report from The Economist, "paid for by Facebook", is correct? > Comcast and Charter cited an Economist Intelligence Unit report paid for by Facebook that ranks the US first in the world for Internet affordability. https://theinclusiveinternet.eiu.com/explore/countries/US/?category=affordability https://theinclusiveinternet.eiu.com/explore/countries/US/?c...
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
Actually, everyone is talking about this: Big Tech has been beating this drum for years, and paying everyone else to talk about it. The source of this article, Conde Nast, has an incredibly close partnership with Google, and this whataboutism has no real place here. This entire article is tech companies' public policy teams screaming "please look somewhere else!" Meanwhile, Big Tech is vastly larger, vastly more profitable, has little regulation, and blanket immunity for what they do online (Section 230) while ISPs are heavily regulated, and report a fraction of the profits.
- magicalist 6y ago
  Conde Nast's parent company is a part-owner of Charter Communications, which bought Time Warner Cable to become the second biggest US ISP. That fact is listed in a disclaimer on all the articles Ars Technica writes about what a scummy monopolist Charter is[1] [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=charter+communications+site%3Aarstechnica.com https://duckduckgo.com/?q=charter+communications+site%3Aarst...
- kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
  > (Section 230) https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    TechDirt (via the "Copia Institute") is paid by Google's Public Policy team, as disclosed at Google's Public Policy Transparency page: https://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency/ https://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency/ in https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/4b9e2caa400b9cd51977ade1c5b070be4706802afdab79a8b502bc15e0e7c9ff4a9e388fb41d4ae510e1bf0823593dd4f1f588340a95ce2c432ffaf14a44b850 https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/4b9e2caa400b9cd5... (pdf) Mike Masnick is, as disclosed, a Google shill on payroll. If you didn't realize this, Google's public policy team is doing their job well.
comeonseriously 6y ago
Because traditional media is owned/owns the ISPs. This means MSM will never talk about it and therefore it will never be an issue politicians or voters will care about.
jrochkind1 6y ago
I live in a medium-large city, and have only ONE choice for broadband. Comcast. They don't make their pricing super public, but you can enter a zipcode and say you're a new customer to see it. Their prices are significantly higher here than they are in regions with competition from FiOS etc.
gberger 6y ago
What is the X axis representing in the chart in the article? https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/broadband-pandemic.png https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/broad... Edit: second quarter of 2019, third quarter of 2019, etc. I read the Q as a 0...
x87678r 6y ago
I'm not convinced Comcast is ripping off everyone as much as everyone says. USA is a big country and its expensive to wire everyone up. Lots of companies around have tried including Google who basically decided its easier to do make money from ads and self driving cars rather than wiring up neighborhoods and dealing with local regulations. The ISPs and cell networks actually do the hard and expensive work of installing hardware, while FANG companies make most of the profits on the back of it. Would you rather own shares in Google/FB/Amazon or Comcast/Verizon/ATT?
- bob1029 6y ago
  I know its a rhetorical question but I very much prefer having shares of CMCSA/VZ/T over the alternatives. I've always viewed Google, Facebook, Twitter, et. al. as very "soft" companies in terms of their competitive advantage. AT&T literally owns parts of the electromagnetic spectrum for their exclusive use. This is a completely different dimension of advantage.
  - treis 6y ago
    The market disagrees with you. Any one of the GAFAMs is worth more than all the ISPs in the US put together. And that's with those ISPs largely being conglomerates that own other businesses outside of being an ISP.
- kinjba11 6y ago
  It is expensive to wire rural areas up. That is why the [government is paying for it](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/att-grudgingly-accepts-428-million-in-annual-government-funding/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/att-g...). Why isn't this a utility again? Comcast and Charter essentially have a [duopoly](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/comcast-or-charter-is-the-only-25mbps-choice-for-68-million-americans/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/comca...) over much of the United States. Where is the competition? The actual competition is in lobbying local governments to make ISP-as-utility illegal. See the [case of Wilson, North Carolina](https://www.npr.org/2020/05/29/865908114/small-america-vs-big-internet https://www.npr.org/2020/05/29/865908114/small-america-vs-bi...). People seem to easily forget that every major corporation is evil by default. If it is profitable, it gets done. Laws and public image are the only thing holding them back.
ogre_codes 6y ago
> Comcast has spent more than $10 million on lobbying in Washington this year One of the remarkable things about our political system is how little money (relatively) it takes to lock in a multi-billion dollar advantage. In terms of benefits per dollar spent, lobbying is one of the most profitable investments an established company can make. Want to shut out new competition? $100k Prevent municipal broadband? $10m Get affordable access to a low-cost corridor for your facilities/ network? $20m etc etc.
marketingPro 6y ago
I live in an area where we have at least 3 providers, I pay 20$/mo and never have to call to lower my rate. If government didn't create regulations or horrible contracts this is a solvable issue. This reminds me of another complaint about regulation in healthcare... Does any party support deregulation? Or is that a sure way to lose donors?
afrojack123 6y ago
Infrastructure is naturally monopoly. Every so often the companies will have a bunch of customer facing shill companies that customers buy. The shill companies then send purchase the infrastructure from the main provider. Examples are MVNO's, natural gas, etc. The real antitrust problem is DuckDuckGo.
klyrs 6y ago
Title is clickbait. "Broadband monopolies are an unaddressed tech antitrust problem" might be better?
quibbler 6y ago
So how much does broadband cost in the US? I'd like to compare. Also, what about 5g?
woeirua 6y ago
I was all in favor of breaking up the ISPs a few years ago, but Starlink is coming on like a freight train, and it alone may break up the current monopoly structure. Tack on 5G from the major wireless providers in urban areas, and we might have a situation where the price of broadband plummets before an antitrust action from the DOJ would even get to trial. Not sure it's worth the effort at this point.
- walterbell 6y ago
  Plus we broke them up already and know what happened next.
dekhn 6y ago
I'm a bit of a weirdo but at the current time, my gigabit is provided by a company whose name histortically was associated with a monopolistic company (AT&T) but really was cobbled out of the bones of several large dead telecom companies and is now a monopoly again. It costs $100/month, is delivered by fiber straight to my house from a pole, works as described (in terms of latency and speed tests), and I don't want it to change at all for the next decade. I don't feel overcharged and the service is excellent compared to every broadband I've had before. The counterargument is that I happen to live in an area where it makes economic sense for AT&T to do this (high density homes, high level of internet use).
- anamexis 6y ago
  I have the exact same arrangement as you (CenturyLink gigabit FTTP that I am very happy with), but it costs $60/month.
- sib 6y ago
  That's great for you (no sarcasm!) Where I live - in the city of Los Angeles, hardly distant, rural America - AT&T is happy to provide me "broadband" internet at speeds of up to 10mbps for the low, low price of $45 / month (with a 12-month contract!) Ironically, I get faster speeds on my AT&T-powered iPhone.
  - dekhn 6y ago
    Are you sure? It looks like many cities in LA have AT&T Gigabit fiber. My guess is they deployed in San Mateo pretty early, and are filling out the major cities now. It's also possible that they don't put the service in cities where the expected subscription rate is too low.
    - sib 6y ago
      Yup, positive. I went and checked immediately before posting, to confirm that the situation had not changed since I last checked about 3 months ago. And I'm not in an outlying city in LA county; I'm right in the west side of the City of LA, less than 2 miles from UCLA, very close to Century City.
maxerickson 6y ago
Spectrum charges me 2x what they charge people in areas with more competition.
pb77 6y ago
In some of the newer neighborhood around my place, the telecom providers pay a fee to the neighborhood developer to make them the only sole provider. So in these new neighborhoods there is only one option. I don't know if DOJ can do anything about it or how they can fix it.
- xxpor 6y ago
  The FCC declared those unenforcable in 2007. https://www.fcc.gov/document/exclusive-service-contracts-provision-video-services-multiple-1 https://www.fcc.gov/document/exclusive-service-contracts-pro...
- donor20 6y ago
  Not uncommon - rental buildings are almost all like this (building owner get's a cut / provides one option). Commercial buildings similar but usually one preferred and pre-wired, but if you are negotiating for a floor etc you can get what you want. HOA's etc generally don't like new holes in walls especially common walls. So generally one preferred.
exabrial 6y ago
The problem is the proposed solutions really just entrench existing providers, specifically net neutrality policies: They legalize monopolies as long as they're "following the rules!" _You_ _cannot_ _legislate_ _good_ _behavior_ _into_ _monopolies_. So while I appreciate the spirit of Net Neutrality rules, the solution is fundamentally flawed. Let's say you want to open an ISP in your neighborhood. Based on their history (When Google Fiber moved into my area), Comcast will call their existing customer base and offer them services below cost but at the price of a 3year contract. This delays profitability for you as a new player into the space. Comcast can take money from one market (another state) and move the profits into subsidizing a loss to prevent players from entering the space in another market. By breaking this cash flow, you end the stagnation of consumer choice, driving innovation forward.
- bosswipe 6y ago
  > _You_ _cannot_ _legislate_ _good_ _behavior_ _into_ _monopolies_ Why not? Yes, breaking up monopolies is good but that doesn't mean we can't regulate industries before the point where things get so bad that there is enough political will to break them up.
  - exabrial 6y ago
    I mean, feel free to provide an example where we successfully regulated a monopoly to encourage competition and consumer choice...
    - jmm5 6y ago
      Obviously you can't have a competition with a monopoly in place. Regulation could help to keep prices down and to expand access in areas covered by only a single broadband provider.
    - mortehu 6y ago
      Cellular carriers and electric power providers, and the success has been repeated in many countries.
    - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
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vonwoodson 6y ago
It’s not a monopoly if it’s a well regulated utility.
m0zg 6y ago
Solving this problem is not worth the effort at this point. They will all have competition by the end of 2021 in the form of Starlink, which itself will have competition within a couple of years from whatever Bezos is launching. Then there will be still more competition from 5G everywhere. We will be drowning in bandwidth within a couple of years, planet-wide. Capitalism is pretty great like that.
mastazi 6y ago
As a non-American, the first time I heard about the situation with broadband monopolies in the US, it was hard for me to believe! Apparently in huge parts of the country you can only choose one single provider? Is that true just in "regional areas" or in suburbs and urban areas too? Are there stats about how much of the population has no choice? Edit: the article gives numbers in terms of how many people have access to broadband (and how many haven't) - but what I'm asking is different - what percentage of the population can connect to one and only one broadband provider, based on their location?
- pkaye 6y ago
  This the FCC statistics on broadband availability. https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/#/area-comparison?version=jun2019&tech=acfosw&speed=25_3&searchtype=county https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/#/area-comparison?version=jun20...
  - mastazi 6y ago
    Thank you! this is what I was looking for!
    - aidenn0 6y ago
      Don't forget to click the little "gear" icon and uncheck "Satelite" from the options; you see 90%+ with two or more 25/3 options because there are two satelite providers that meet this bar.
      - mastazi 6y ago
        thanks that's a very important difference
- aidenn0 6y ago
  If DSL counts as broadband, then it's about 1/4 the population, if DSL does not count as broadband then it's about 80% of the population. Note that the FCC numbers linked elsewhere are optimistic because of their coarse granularity; if there is a single household with two options in a census region, then all of the population is counted as having it. There's obviously the issues with suburban and rural housing, where density is insufficient for two last-mile solutions (and all local-loop unbundling regulations were so successful in the late 90s that the telecom companies lobbied them out of existence). Something less talked about are the urban apartments where you can only get broadband from the company that contracts with your landlord. If someone that doesn't use the broadband can pick which broadband you use from several options, does that count as competition?
austincheney 6y ago
When ever ISPs come up people are so quick to ignore the obvious to entertain some absurd entrenched political opinion. The reality is that service is generally pretty good when the cost of advancing infrastructure is lowest and horrid where it is most expensive. That generally means that suburbs have it best due to high population densities and physically segmented real estate. Rural areas have it worst where the most material is required between the population and the service provider. An additional factor is that service providers are more willing to provide new infrastructure at their own expense when the path to profit is shortest, which also appears to preference the suburbs. While a lack of competition might be a problem it is insignificant compared to the more obvious problem: a lack of incentive. In some areas service providers are eager to compete while in other areas they aren’t, which isn’t a monopoly problem.
thayne 6y ago
Plenty of people talk about it. Just mostly not the people with the power to do something about it.
ergwwrt 6y ago
Musk's Starlink is going to destroy broadband monopolies
ksec 6y ago
5G could change that equation. We are actually not far off from having a totally Wireless Broadband Network. At least in 2010 using something like 3G /4G for broadband was nearly unthinkable. Now it is only a matter of time in terms of technical feasibility. And in lower population density area like in Europe. This has already happened. It forces ISP to provide faster Wired Connection at a much lower price in other to compete. The problem in the US is that Broadband and Mobile Companies are one and the same.
spacemanmatt 6y ago
My ISP is literally not allowed to do business in some parts of my town. This is because a cable monopoly bought local laws that prevent other companies from deploying new service (specifically, prevents pole/underground conduit access) and it's absolutely abusive.
DrStartup 6y ago
IMO the government (the people) should own the transmission & delivery infrastructure - water, sewer, gas, electric, fiber - and companies provide the service within constraints.
cashsterling 6y ago
I pay 50 USD a month for 1 Gb/s symmetric internet service run by the city of Longmont, CO. It is great... by far the best internet service I have had. I had comcast in many different cities, Cablevision, AT&T, etc. Hopefully more cities will consider municipal broadband.
ianmf 6y ago
I am about to move and where I am moving to, only has a sole Residential ISP... Comcast. I seriously considered not moving to that place because of that fact. I have had very bad experiences with Comcast. Parting from Verizon FIOS will be hard.
z3ncyberpunk 6y ago
No one is talking about it? No one has been talking about it?! Wow go back to your rock dude, what kind of BS crap is this?
twirlock 6y ago
Yeah it's been like a whole 18 months since /r/politics all screeched about this non-stop for weeks even as literal lobbyists were telling Facebook, YouTube, spotify, iTunes, and twitter which content users should be allowed to view.
alexfromapex 6y ago
The crazy thing is that our society could be so much more innovative if we made room for innovation in the network infrastructure industry but thus far the giants have priced out and lobbied against all of the competition

743 points by elsewhen 6y ago

Canada has the same problem. I don’t have definitive data, but the promo pricing for internet plans has seemed pretty weak since COVID hit. We call our ISP every (fucking) year to ask them to give us the current promo pricing for the next year and this year everything is a solid $20-$40 per month higher than it’s been in the last 3-4 years. They’re totally price gouging IMO.

MattGaiser 6y ago
Canadians are unwilling to price shop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlRPLBLkZK0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlRPLBLkZK0
- michael1999 6y ago
  I used to suggest joining a credit union to people who complained about bank fees, and the first response would be that there were fewer ATMs and the branches were farther away. Canadians want premium service for free, and will do exactly nothing besides complain to get it.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    Banking is another sector where they seem to make it hard for no reasons for international players to bring competition in the market place.
    - michael1999 6y ago
      Banking, insurance, and telecom are all protected from foreign competition. It makes them fat and often lazy, but I’d hardly say there is no reason. Universal service mandates, tax administration, prudence regulation, and criminal justice are all compelling interests in those businesses. The government meddles because the people complain when they don’t.
908B64B197 6y ago
They are pretty hostile to international players setting shops. In such a non-competitive environment, it's no wonder rent seeking is the norm. Edit: I see the downvotes but no explanations.
- wstrange 6y ago
  The explanation is largely the same as in the US: It's very expensive to run cable / fibre to the house. It's a natural monopoly. Having a US incumbent enter the Canadian market isn't going to change that.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    I could see why lobbyists would push that narrative, but deregulation and an open market worked extremely well in Europe.
    - tpxl 6y ago
      In my country regulation is what works extremely well, and where there is none, you get price gouging. The government funds the majority of new lines, and in turn, the companies are legally mandated to rent the lines out for a small fee (100/20 lines cost about 30€).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

908B64B197 6y ago

I'm always surprised this isn't discussed more. Big tech is accused of being monopolistic, but there is a constant flow of new players in the field, all gaining market shares and building the Next Big Thing, while telecom providers are pretty stagnant. I'm curious why cities don't directly lay down the infrastructure work for broadband access. In some cases that might raise property value enough that the town could make it's money back in very little time.

ineedasername 6y ago
There may be a constant flow of new players, but much of the time when they start to show a certain amount of success then one of the big players simply buys them up.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  Correct except, Microsoft should have won search. They had all the tools to execute and were pretty much at the right place at the right time. Google should have won social networking and messaging. They had the userbase and the network. Yet it's Facebook that did. Same goes for Phones, and yet it's Apple that captured the market.
  - vagrantJin 6y ago
    > Same goes for Phones, and yet it's Apple that captured the market. Samsung and Huawei captured the market Apple created.
    - Armisael16 6y ago
      Samsung and Huawei each ship about 50% more phones than Apple. Apple makes more than 3x the profit on phones that either does.
    - adventured 6y ago
      Ask Samsung how they're doing in the world's largest smartphone market - China (they barely exist at all now, ~1% market share).

redisman 6y ago

It's true. I'll never stop being amazed at how in Helsinki 10 years ago I had a 500/500Mbps connection for $29/mo and in Seattle I have a 200/10Mbps connection for $59/mo. I won't even get to mobile plans since at least there it's somewhat plausible that I must subside the rural cellphone towers since it's a huge (in area) network.

commandlinefan 6y ago
And for the most part, it doesn't matter how much money you have to spend on it. If I were inclined to offer twice as much for double the bandwidth, that's just not an option. (Not that I feel like I'm getting the bandwidth I pay for in the first place...)
- MivLives 6y ago
  The worst is the highly one directional connections too. Sure I have a gig down. I have 25mbps up though. The upload is the same for every package from 300mbps down and above. I'd happily have less download for more upload.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    That's because they don't actually have capacity. The internet coming via coaxial cables is sharing the road with TV service. TV service earns Comcast/Spectrum/Cox/etc more money than internet service, so they don't necessarily want people to consume via internet yet (at least not until they own the media companies like Comcast). So they probably only have a tiny amount of bandwidth available for an entire neighborhood, and then they sell you 100s of Mb in download, except that if you read the fine print, it's only burst speeds, so it's not like you get 300Mbps sustained download bandwidth. It's just a temporary boost while they take it from others in the neighborhood. And the upload, who knows how little is allocated for that, they don't even bother advertising upload bandwidth.
    - inetknght 6y ago
      20 years ago maybe. Today Comcast has indeed migrated to IPTV and has bought out those media companies. You remember NBC and Universal are now owned by Comcast, right? Do you remember Comcast before it had Xfinity? I do.

crazygringo 6y ago

Seriously, I feel like I say it every time it comes up: WHY aren't people taking action against ISP monopolies? It seems like such a cut-and-dried political issue: they're utilities and they overcharge you whether you're a Republican or Democrat. And taking action doesn't require new antitrust concepts, because it's just your garden-variety utility. It's the same established principles as electric or natural gas. Yet bizarrely this doesn't show up as an issue on Republican or Democrat platforms. Going after Google and Amazon and Facebook's free products is the sexy new issue, but the fact that we're all overpaying hundreds of dollars a year for broadband is just massively ignored. And I'm not talking about politicians being bought. It baffles me why voters aren't writing letters to their city councils, their mayors, their state reps, their governors. If voters actually care, politicians do respond. It would seriously be so easy to change if the voting population actually did care about it. But, inexplicably, we just pay the fees and deal with the crappy customer service and complain, but it never seems to occur to anybody to actually organize local political action against it. It's utterly baffling.

burlesona 6y ago
It's a good question, but I think one of the issues is that physical networks are a natural monopoly in the same way as most public utilities, so it's not just about enabling more competition but about establishing a regulatory framework around that competition, much like exists with airports and railways. OR, alternatively, changing to a public sector provision model like plumbing or roads. What actually bothers me the most is the rules that (in most places) prohibit cities and towns from offering new municipal broadband service as a competitive offering. This used to be more common in smaller towns that had not been able to get good commercial service, and it adds valuable options and competition, but my understanding is that it's extremely hard for cities who don't already have municipal broadband to start offering it now.
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  Local Loop Unbundling works fine in the UK
  - 6y ago

speeder 6y ago

Telecom is... too nasty to touch to be honest. Brazil tried it, we had a state company that had a monopoly of telecom, we broke it up intentionally in many tiny parts and sold them. Results were basically this: 1. A bunch ended eventually merging, often with help of blatant corruption (for example one such merger was first denied, then approved again after the son of the president "sold" to a telecom company, his game company for 30 million, a game company that never made any games, and the son of the president before that was a zoo caretaker and didn't knew how to code). 2. Some are going bankrupt, with parts they bought being unprofitable, and will eventually get merged into the others. 3. A LOT of international 007-style spy shit happened because of this... We had our version of CIA spying on our own president, owner of a bank spied upon (seemly with good reason), Italy and Brazil spying on each other, agents getting arrested, agents disappearing, people bending backwards to release criminals and suspected criminals to avoid diplomatic incidents, people that disappeared or died, etc... To be honest Telecom looks like the sort of thing that even touching with a mile-long pole you will still get shit splattered on you, and if you try a shorter pole it will be nuclear shit.

andromeduck 6y ago
I think telecom is like power, the only way it can be split is by creating horizontal markets, emphasis on plural, and preferably along some natural lines to the fictional overhead such as generation/distribution in the case of electrical markets. For communications I think the way to do it might be to create 3-4 levels of responsibilities and say that no single player can operate in more than a few levels at once and must offer their services via live public auction or standard public wholesale pricing. For wireless the way I'd split is is: 1. Location/site management, aka who owns/manages the poles. 2. Operating the actual Networking/Peering equipment, networking to the site with permission of #1. 3. Consumer/retail such as MVNO; direct-use in the case of large businesses, or value-add aggregation/resale for intermediates. For wired the way I'd split is is: 1. Global networking/peering. 2. Regional networking/peering. 2. Last-mile equipment/rights, servicing. 3. Consumer/retail, value-add etc. The goal here being to reduce the barrier to entry for small players via horizontalization which increases competition but not draw too many hard lines so that players have some flexibility in organization and so that players in one level have the opportunity of punching through to an adjacent or skip level if it is being overpriced.

mattferderer 6y ago

I am curious how Starlink will change this conversation one way or another. It adds another competitor to the mix. Could it become the monopoly if the tech were to make current ISP tech obsolete or to expensive for most areas? If it became the better method, does that mean our skies will soon be even more polluted with satellites by exponential factors?

marcus_holmes 6y ago
I really hope Starlink lives up to the hype. But if it does, how do we stop it becoming a monopoly? We don't need and can't have multiple rival fleets of satellites up there. But if it's just Starlink then how do we stop it charging more and more for less and less because no-one else is threatening it? If it works, should the UN step in and take over the network as a service to all of humanity?
- justinclift 6y ago
  > I really hope Starlink lives up to the hype. The technical aspects of it seem to be: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/11/spacex-starlink-beta-tester-takes-user-terminal-into-forest-gets-120mbps/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/11/space...
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  We do need and can have multiple fleets up there. OneWeb has already launched a bunch of satellites, and there is enough room up there for several more, particularly as operators get better at safely operating them.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    I would agree, but I've seen the mess that e-scooter organisations have made of this. The city is littered with e-scooters whose name changes every few months. If the business plan doesn't work out, who cleans up the satellites?

marcus_holmes 6y ago

This is such a weird thing. After spending time in SE Asia, where bandwidth is cheap and plentiful (in the cities), it's painful coming back to Europe (and Australia). I'm in Berlin atm, and the wifi is shit, bandwidth is expensive and unreliable. And the phone plans suck. I was in Perth (Australia) before that, and access there is terrible. In Cambodia, 120Gb (per week) of download cost me US$1 (per week) over good-quality 4G connections anywhere in the city (but almost nothing outside the cities). In Berlin, it's 40 euros a month for 5Gb, and coverage is a bit patchy, and very patchy if I go a few Km's out of the city. In Bali, a $5 SIM card got me a month of effectively-unlimited download over decent connections. Nepal, Malaysia, all good. Phillipines was tricky to get decent coverage, but when it was there it was cheap. Cafes in SE Asia offer free wifi with a coffee. Berlin nope. I get the price differences are a function of relative GDP. But the performance differences should be the other way around. Tech should work better in developed countries, not worse.

Plasmoid2000ad 6y ago
I understand there are some specifics going on in Germany. While I've never quite understood, I've seen many German posters call out a national broadband backbone based on Copper as the root cause. I don't know if this is true, but I am in Ireland and know that also the UK did a rollout of a Fibre backbone network, and in both there's widespread availability of 1GB+ consumer connections. I think what's happened is in many or some European countries there was a rush to increase Broadband adoption and speeds, where being the first mover left them with now outdated backbone infrastructure. Those who moved later, more gradually, or chose a more future proof backbone network benefited. The sunk cost and possibly inflexibility of the network to upgrades holds back the push for better speeds. If the service is good enough, the push from consumers for more is lessened.
- MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
  > I think what's happened is in many or some European countries there was a rush to increase Broadband adoption and speeds, where being the first mover left them with now outdated backbone infrastructure. If you are referring to the copper network built in the 80s under Kohl, that is not what happened. Some call it "conflict of interest", some blatant corruption.

carapace 6y ago

I was just talking to a person today, it turns out there are parts of Western San Francisco that can't get good connectivity (without shelling out ~$100K to dig a trench or some shit.)

terinjokes 6y ago
You don't event have to go very far west. I was quoted $87k to get anything better than 8Mbps/1Mbps in the middle of SoMa just a few years ago.

wombatmobile 6y ago

How can TFA and all these comments here be correct if this report from The Economist, "paid for by Facebook", is correct? > Comcast and Charter cited an Economist Intelligence Unit report paid for by Facebook that ranks the US first in the world for Internet affordability. https://theinclusiveinternet.eiu.com/explore/countries/US/?category=affordability https://theinclusiveinternet.eiu.com/explore/countries/US/?c...

ocdtrekkie 6y ago

Actually, everyone is talking about this: Big Tech has been beating this drum for years, and paying everyone else to talk about it. The source of this article, Conde Nast, has an incredibly close partnership with Google, and this whataboutism has no real place here. This entire article is tech companies' public policy teams screaming "please look somewhere else!" Meanwhile, Big Tech is vastly larger, vastly more profitable, has little regulation, and blanket immunity for what they do online (Section 230) while ISPs are heavily regulated, and report a fraction of the profits.

magicalist 6y ago
Conde Nast's parent company is a part-owner of Charter Communications, which bought Time Warner Cable to become the second biggest US ISP. That fact is listed in a disclaimer on all the articles Ars Technica writes about what a scummy monopolist Charter is[1] [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=charter+communications+site%3Aarstechnica.com https://duckduckgo.com/?q=charter+communications+site%3Aarst...
kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
> (Section 230) https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  TechDirt (via the "Copia Institute") is paid by Google's Public Policy team, as disclosed at Google's Public Policy Transparency page: https://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency/ https://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency/ in https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/4b9e2caa400b9cd51977ade1c5b070be4706802afdab79a8b502bc15e0e7c9ff4a9e388fb41d4ae510e1bf0823593dd4f1f588340a95ce2c432ffaf14a44b850 https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/4b9e2caa400b9cd5... (pdf) Mike Masnick is, as disclosed, a Google shill on payroll. If you didn't realize this, Google's public policy team is doing their job well.

comeonseriously 6y ago

Because traditional media is owned/owns the ISPs. This means MSM will never talk about it and therefore it will never be an issue politicians or voters will care about.

jrochkind1 6y ago

I live in a medium-large city, and have only ONE choice for broadband. Comcast. They don't make their pricing super public, but you can enter a zipcode and say you're a new customer to see it. Their prices are significantly higher here than they are in regions with competition from FiOS etc.

gberger 6y ago

What is the X axis representing in the chart in the article? https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/broadband-pandemic.png https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/broad... Edit: second quarter of 2019, third quarter of 2019, etc. I read the Q as a 0...

x87678r 6y ago

I'm not convinced Comcast is ripping off everyone as much as everyone says. USA is a big country and its expensive to wire everyone up. Lots of companies around have tried including Google who basically decided its easier to do make money from ads and self driving cars rather than wiring up neighborhoods and dealing with local regulations. The ISPs and cell networks actually do the hard and expensive work of installing hardware, while FANG companies make most of the profits on the back of it. Would you rather own shares in Google/FB/Amazon or Comcast/Verizon/ATT?

bob1029 6y ago
I know its a rhetorical question but I very much prefer having shares of CMCSA/VZ/T over the alternatives. I've always viewed Google, Facebook, Twitter, et. al. as very "soft" companies in terms of their competitive advantage. AT&T literally owns parts of the electromagnetic spectrum for their exclusive use. This is a completely different dimension of advantage.
- treis 6y ago
  The market disagrees with you. Any one of the GAFAMs is worth more than all the ISPs in the US put together. And that's with those ISPs largely being conglomerates that own other businesses outside of being an ISP.
kinjba11 6y ago
It is expensive to wire rural areas up. That is why the [government is paying for it](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/att-grudgingly-accepts-428-million-in-annual-government-funding/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/att-g...). Why isn't this a utility again? Comcast and Charter essentially have a [duopoly](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/comcast-or-charter-is-the-only-25mbps-choice-for-68-million-americans/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/comca...) over much of the United States. Where is the competition? The actual competition is in lobbying local governments to make ISP-as-utility illegal. See the [case of Wilson, North Carolina](https://www.npr.org/2020/05/29/865908114/small-america-vs-big-internet https://www.npr.org/2020/05/29/865908114/small-america-vs-bi...). People seem to easily forget that every major corporation is evil by default. If it is profitable, it gets done. Laws and public image are the only thing holding them back.

ogre_codes 6y ago

> Comcast has spent more than $10 million on lobbying in Washington this year One of the remarkable things about our political system is how little money (relatively) it takes to lock in a multi-billion dollar advantage. In terms of benefits per dollar spent, lobbying is one of the most profitable investments an established company can make. Want to shut out new competition? $100k Prevent municipal broadband? $10m Get affordable access to a low-cost corridor for your facilities/ network? $20m etc etc.

marketingPro 6y ago

I live in an area where we have at least 3 providers, I pay 20$/mo and never have to call to lower my rate. If government didn't create regulations or horrible contracts this is a solvable issue. This reminds me of another complaint about regulation in healthcare... Does any party support deregulation? Or is that a sure way to lose donors?

afrojack123 6y ago

Infrastructure is naturally monopoly. Every so often the companies will have a bunch of customer facing shill companies that customers buy. The shill companies then send purchase the infrastructure from the main provider. Examples are MVNO's, natural gas, etc. The real antitrust problem is DuckDuckGo.

klyrs 6y ago

Title is clickbait. "Broadband monopolies are an unaddressed tech antitrust problem" might be better?

quibbler 6y ago

So how much does broadband cost in the US? I'd like to compare. Also, what about 5g?

woeirua 6y ago

I was all in favor of breaking up the ISPs a few years ago, but Starlink is coming on like a freight train, and it alone may break up the current monopoly structure. Tack on 5G from the major wireless providers in urban areas, and we might have a situation where the price of broadband plummets before an antitrust action from the DOJ would even get to trial. Not sure it's worth the effort at this point.

walterbell 6y ago
Plus we broke them up already and know what happened next.

dekhn 6y ago

I'm a bit of a weirdo but at the current time, my gigabit is provided by a company whose name histortically was associated with a monopolistic company (AT&T) but really was cobbled out of the bones of several large dead telecom companies and is now a monopoly again. It costs $100/month, is delivered by fiber straight to my house from a pole, works as described (in terms of latency and speed tests), and I don't want it to change at all for the next decade. I don't feel overcharged and the service is excellent compared to every broadband I've had before. The counterargument is that I happen to live in an area where it makes economic sense for AT&T to do this (high density homes, high level of internet use).

anamexis 6y ago
I have the exact same arrangement as you (CenturyLink gigabit FTTP that I am very happy with), but it costs $60/month.
sib 6y ago
That's great for you (no sarcasm!) Where I live - in the city of Los Angeles, hardly distant, rural America - AT&T is happy to provide me "broadband" internet at speeds of up to 10mbps for the low, low price of $45 / month (with a 12-month contract!) Ironically, I get faster speeds on my AT&T-powered iPhone.
- dekhn 6y ago
  Are you sure? It looks like many cities in LA have AT&T Gigabit fiber. My guess is they deployed in San Mateo pretty early, and are filling out the major cities now. It's also possible that they don't put the service in cities where the expected subscription rate is too low.
  - sib 6y ago
    Yup, positive. I went and checked immediately before posting, to confirm that the situation had not changed since I last checked about 3 months ago. And I'm not in an outlying city in LA county; I'm right in the west side of the City of LA, less than 2 miles from UCLA, very close to Century City.

maxerickson 6y ago

Spectrum charges me 2x what they charge people in areas with more competition.

pb77 6y ago

In some of the newer neighborhood around my place, the telecom providers pay a fee to the neighborhood developer to make them the only sole provider. So in these new neighborhoods there is only one option. I don't know if DOJ can do anything about it or how they can fix it.

xxpor 6y ago
The FCC declared those unenforcable in 2007. https://www.fcc.gov/document/exclusive-service-contracts-provision-video-services-multiple-1 https://www.fcc.gov/document/exclusive-service-contracts-pro...
donor20 6y ago
Not uncommon - rental buildings are almost all like this (building owner get's a cut / provides one option). Commercial buildings similar but usually one preferred and pre-wired, but if you are negotiating for a floor etc you can get what you want. HOA's etc generally don't like new holes in walls especially common walls. So generally one preferred.

exabrial 6y ago

The problem is the proposed solutions really just entrench existing providers, specifically net neutrality policies: They legalize monopolies as long as they're "following the rules!" _You_ _cannot_ _legislate_ _good_ _behavior_ _into_ _monopolies_. So while I appreciate the spirit of Net Neutrality rules, the solution is fundamentally flawed. Let's say you want to open an ISP in your neighborhood. Based on their history (When Google Fiber moved into my area), Comcast will call their existing customer base and offer them services below cost but at the price of a 3year contract. This delays profitability for you as a new player into the space. Comcast can take money from one market (another state) and move the profits into subsidizing a loss to prevent players from entering the space in another market. By breaking this cash flow, you end the stagnation of consumer choice, driving innovation forward.

bosswipe 6y ago
> _You_ _cannot_ _legislate_ _good_ _behavior_ _into_ _monopolies_ Why not? Yes, breaking up monopolies is good but that doesn't mean we can't regulate industries before the point where things get so bad that there is enough political will to break them up.
- exabrial 6y ago
  I mean, feel free to provide an example where we successfully regulated a monopoly to encourage competition and consumer choice...
  - jmm5 6y ago
    Obviously you can't have a competition with a monopoly in place. Regulation could help to keep prices down and to expand access in areas covered by only a single broadband provider.
  - mortehu 6y ago
    Cellular carriers and electric power providers, and the success has been repeated in many countries.
  - 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

vonwoodson 6y ago

It’s not a monopoly if it’s a well regulated utility.

m0zg 6y ago

Solving this problem is not worth the effort at this point. They will all have competition by the end of 2021 in the form of Starlink, which itself will have competition within a couple of years from whatever Bezos is launching. Then there will be still more competition from 5G everywhere. We will be drowning in bandwidth within a couple of years, planet-wide. Capitalism is pretty great like that.

mastazi 6y ago

As a non-American, the first time I heard about the situation with broadband monopolies in the US, it was hard for me to believe! Apparently in huge parts of the country you can only choose one single provider? Is that true just in "regional areas" or in suburbs and urban areas too? Are there stats about how much of the population has no choice? Edit: the article gives numbers in terms of how many people have access to broadband (and how many haven't) - but what I'm asking is different - what percentage of the population can connect to one and only one broadband provider, based on their location?

pkaye 6y ago
This the FCC statistics on broadband availability. https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/#/area-comparison?version=jun2019&tech=acfosw&speed=25_3&searchtype=county https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/#/area-comparison?version=jun20...
- mastazi 6y ago
  Thank you! this is what I was looking for!
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    Don't forget to click the little "gear" icon and uncheck "Satelite" from the options; you see 90%+ with two or more 25/3 options because there are two satelite providers that meet this bar.
    - mastazi 6y ago
      thanks that's a very important difference
aidenn0 6y ago
If DSL counts as broadband, then it's about 1/4 the population, if DSL does not count as broadband then it's about 80% of the population. Note that the FCC numbers linked elsewhere are optimistic because of their coarse granularity; if there is a single household with two options in a census region, then all of the population is counted as having it. There's obviously the issues with suburban and rural housing, where density is insufficient for two last-mile solutions (and all local-loop unbundling regulations were so successful in the late 90s that the telecom companies lobbied them out of existence). Something less talked about are the urban apartments where you can only get broadband from the company that contracts with your landlord. If someone that doesn't use the broadband can pick which broadband you use from several options, does that count as competition?

austincheney 6y ago

When ever ISPs come up people are so quick to ignore the obvious to entertain some absurd entrenched political opinion. The reality is that service is generally pretty good when the cost of advancing infrastructure is lowest and horrid where it is most expensive. That generally means that suburbs have it best due to high population densities and physically segmented real estate. Rural areas have it worst where the most material is required between the population and the service provider. An additional factor is that service providers are more willing to provide new infrastructure at their own expense when the path to profit is shortest, which also appears to preference the suburbs. While a lack of competition might be a problem it is insignificant compared to the more obvious problem: a lack of incentive. In some areas service providers are eager to compete while in other areas they aren’t, which isn’t a monopoly problem.

thayne 6y ago

Plenty of people talk about it. Just mostly not the people with the power to do something about it.

ergwwrt 6y ago

Musk's Starlink is going to destroy broadband monopolies

ksec 6y ago

5G could change that equation. We are actually not far off from having a totally Wireless Broadband Network. At least in 2010 using something like 3G /4G for broadband was nearly unthinkable. Now it is only a matter of time in terms of technical feasibility. And in lower population density area like in Europe. This has already happened. It forces ISP to provide faster Wired Connection at a much lower price in other to compete. The problem in the US is that Broadband and Mobile Companies are one and the same.

spacemanmatt 6y ago

My ISP is literally not allowed to do business in some parts of my town. This is because a cable monopoly bought local laws that prevent other companies from deploying new service (specifically, prevents pole/underground conduit access) and it's absolutely abusive.

DrStartup 6y ago

IMO the government (the people) should own the transmission & delivery infrastructure - water, sewer, gas, electric, fiber - and companies provide the service within constraints.

cashsterling 6y ago

I pay 50 USD a month for 1 Gb/s symmetric internet service run by the city of Longmont, CO. It is great... by far the best internet service I have had. I had comcast in many different cities, Cablevision, AT&T, etc. Hopefully more cities will consider municipal broadband.

ianmf 6y ago

I am about to move and where I am moving to, only has a sole Residential ISP... Comcast. I seriously considered not moving to that place because of that fact. I have had very bad experiences with Comcast. Parting from Verizon FIOS will be hard.

z3ncyberpunk 6y ago

No one is talking about it? No one has been talking about it?! Wow go back to your rock dude, what kind of BS crap is this?

twirlock 6y ago

Yeah it's been like a whole 18 months since /r/politics all screeched about this non-stop for weeks even as literal lobbyists were telling Facebook, YouTube, spotify, iTunes, and twitter which content users should be allowed to view.

alexfromapex 6y ago

The crazy thing is that our society could be so much more innovative if we made room for innovation in the network infrastructure industry but thus far the giants have priced out and lobbied against all of the competition