5 ms·

One thing I wonder is why couldn’t private companies be formed to accomplish the same thing? Honest question.

acdha 5y ago
ISPs have a high cost to entry: you have to run fiber everywhere to offer service and you don’t get revenue until you do that and people sign up. Major players can slash prices below cost until you fold and then jack the rates up (I live in an area with 3 gigabit options: service here is cheaper and better than only a few blocks away where it’s just Comcast - and everyone you call on the phone knows whether you have competition at your address). The model I’d like would be having fiber either be owned by the city or a highly regulated utility, with a market for ISPs to provide service on that infrastructure. It’d be much easier to enter the market if you just need to peer at a few locations rather than each house, and it’d be nice if there was a no-frills option for people who only want reliable IP without all of the add-on services.
- naveen99 5y ago
  That high cost of entry is paid to the municipality isn’t it ? Why build and run a business when you can just collect rent / taxes instead.
  - acdha 5y ago
    The idea is that it’s a long-term investment which everyone can share, similar to how most places build roads or water pipes rather than expecting businesses to build those with duplication and gaps.
- eecc 5y ago
  > The model I’d like would be having fiber either be owned by the city or a highly regulated utility, with a market for ISPs to provide service on that infrastructure. That's how telecoms are organized in NL, although through loosening of regulations, mergers and acquisitions the service geography is reducing to separate islands of non-competing monopolies. Yet, it still works decently well. Also energy is the same (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_the_Netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_the_Neth...) As a counterexample, the creation of the "energy free market" by spinning off the local infra from the energy brokers and producers has turned into a convenient excuse to screw customers over billing and passing the buck back-and-forth to keep the money.
- _djo_ 5y ago
  Agreed. One interesting approach that took place in Johannesburg was that a suburb took matters into their own hands to get an open access fibre network installed. They formed a ratepayers association, got a critical mass of the households to sign up for an installation fee and a promise to join, and appointed a company (Vumatel) to install and run the network. It was transformational: Within a few years average internet speeds in every neighbourhood that adopted the approach went from 5-10Mbps to 100Mbps-200Mbps, with some areas getting 1Gbps. And being open access, it means that you still get competition between commercial ISPs offering their services over the shared infrastructure with a small amount of their fee going back to maintain the network. What's more because the barrier to entry for ISPs was lowered there were a bunch of new and extremely competitive options. I thought it was a really smart way to overcome the chicken and egg problem of high speed internet infrastructure.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    That’s the same thing as municipal broadband.
    - _djo_ 5y ago
      Not quite. What makes this interesting is that the municipality (and other government structures) had no involvement beyond approving the permits for trenching. There's also no ongoing contract with the municipality, nor is it funded through taxes.
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jeffbee 5y ago
If you think that access to information networks is critical to a functioning modern society, then you can't leave the provision of that service up to the private sector, because the private sector can always just decide to close shop. If we had a powerful bureaucracy, robust oversight, and a lot of subsidies then I'd see it differently. We have all that for food, which obviously is critical. We almost have it for electric power, also critical. We don't have any of those things for networks.
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annoyingnoob 5y ago
Ask Google Fiber. Its because getting access, permits, and everything you need takes a very long time and has very high costs. The incumbents won't just let you just run cables next to theirs, they might need to make changes to allow room for you, etc. Incumbents and their influence make it nearly impossible to compete. Government has an advantage here since its permits itself for example. Edit, link: https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-a-failed-experi-1833244198 https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-...
yxhuvud 5y ago
Because drawing cables is hard. Politicians doesn't want their cities to look like https://www.alamy.com/bucharest-romania-september-20-2020-many-internet-and-communications-cables-hang-out-on-pillars-in-bucharest-image382712345.html https://www.alamy.com/bucharest-romania-september-20-2020-ma... so they regulate it to death. The image is from Romania, and they have among the best internet in Europe.
randcraw 5y ago
I think most ISPs are looking for a rate of return on their investment that's hard to get, given the cost per mile of stringing high-speed cable. When I first moved to suburban Philly (2006), Verizon FIOS had promised to grow into the many neighborhoods and towns in my county of 900,000 people. But apparently the cost of installing 2-way fiber proved higher than expected. So a few years later, they later announced that only the towns in the county with high population density might get FIOS in the foreseeable future. Neighborhoods with larger lots would have to be satisfied with only Comcast.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

ISPs have a high cost to entry: you have to run fiber everywhere to offer service and you don’t get revenue until you do that and people sign up. Major players can slash prices below cost until you fold and then jack the rates up (I live in an area with 3 gigabit options: service here is cheaper and better than only a few blocks away where it’s just Comcast - and everyone you call on the phone knows whether you have competition at your address). The model I’d like would be having fiber either be owned by the city or a highly regulated utility, with a market for ISPs to provide service on that infrastructure. It’d be much easier to enter the market if you just need to peer at a few locations rather than each house, and it’d be nice if there was a no-frills option for people who only want reliable IP without all of the add-on services.

naveen99 5y ago
That high cost of entry is paid to the municipality isn’t it ? Why build and run a business when you can just collect rent / taxes instead.
- acdha 5y ago
  The idea is that it’s a long-term investment which everyone can share, similar to how most places build roads or water pipes rather than expecting businesses to build those with duplication and gaps.
eecc 5y ago
> The model I’d like would be having fiber either be owned by the city or a highly regulated utility, with a market for ISPs to provide service on that infrastructure. That's how telecoms are organized in NL, although through loosening of regulations, mergers and acquisitions the service geography is reducing to separate islands of non-competing monopolies. Yet, it still works decently well. Also energy is the same (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_the_Netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_the_Neth...) As a counterexample, the creation of the "energy free market" by spinning off the local infra from the energy brokers and producers has turned into a convenient excuse to screw customers over billing and passing the buck back-and-forth to keep the money.
_djo_ 5y ago
Agreed. One interesting approach that took place in Johannesburg was that a suburb took matters into their own hands to get an open access fibre network installed. They formed a ratepayers association, got a critical mass of the households to sign up for an installation fee and a promise to join, and appointed a company (Vumatel) to install and run the network. It was transformational: Within a few years average internet speeds in every neighbourhood that adopted the approach went from 5-10Mbps to 100Mbps-200Mbps, with some areas getting 1Gbps. And being open access, it means that you still get competition between commercial ISPs offering their services over the shared infrastructure with a small amount of their fee going back to maintain the network. What's more because the barrier to entry for ISPs was lowered there were a bunch of new and extremely competitive options. I thought it was a really smart way to overcome the chicken and egg problem of high speed internet infrastructure.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  That’s the same thing as municipal broadband.
  - _djo_ 5y ago
    Not quite. What makes this interesting is that the municipality (and other government structures) had no involvement beyond approving the permits for trenching. There's also no ongoing contract with the municipality, nor is it funded through taxes.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jeffbee 5y ago

If you think that access to information networks is critical to a functioning modern society, then you can't leave the provision of that service up to the private sector, because the private sector can always just decide to close shop. If we had a powerful bureaucracy, robust oversight, and a lot of subsidies then I'd see it differently. We have all that for food, which obviously is critical. We almost have it for electric power, also critical. We don't have any of those things for networks.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

annoyingnoob 5y ago

Ask Google Fiber. Its because getting access, permits, and everything you need takes a very long time and has very high costs. The incumbents won't just let you just run cables next to theirs, they might need to make changes to allow room for you, etc. Incumbents and their influence make it nearly impossible to compete. Government has an advantage here since its permits itself for example. Edit, link: https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-a-failed-experi-1833244198 https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-...

yxhuvud 5y ago

Because drawing cables is hard. Politicians doesn't want their cities to look like https://www.alamy.com/bucharest-romania-september-20-2020-many-internet-and-communications-cables-hang-out-on-pillars-in-bucharest-image382712345.html https://www.alamy.com/bucharest-romania-september-20-2020-ma... so they regulate it to death. The image is from Romania, and they have among the best internet in Europe.

randcraw 5y ago

I think most ISPs are looking for a rate of return on their investment that's hard to get, given the cost per mile of stringing high-speed cable. When I first moved to suburban Philly (2006), Verizon FIOS had promised to grow into the many neighborhoods and towns in my county of 900,000 people. But apparently the cost of installing 2-way fiber proved higher than expected. So a few years later, they later announced that only the towns in the county with high population density might get FIOS in the foreseeable future. Neighborhoods with larger lots would have to be satisfied with only Comcast.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]