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>Regulators may also have to consider whether fewer operators may be better for a country, with perhaps only a single underlying fixed and mobile network in man

>Regulators may also have to consider whether fewer operators may be better for a country, with perhaps only a single underlying fixed and mobile network in many places—just as utilities for electricity, water, gas, and the like are often structured around single (or a limited set of) operators. There are no words to describe how stupid this is.

fny 2y ago
Clearly you did not like playing Monopoly as child.
suddenlybananas 2y ago
I think that it should be run as a public service like utilities and should be as cheap as humanly possible. Why not?
- daedrdev 2y ago
  My public utility is bad at its job because it has literally zero incentive to be cheap, and thus my utilities are expensive
  - sweeter 2y ago
    A private electric grid is a nightmare. Look at Texas. People pay more, and they get less coverage. It's worse by every metric. The conversation should revolve around, how can we fix the government so that it isn't 5 corporations in a trench coat who systematically defund public utilities and social safety nets in hopes of breaking it so they can privatize it and make billions sucking up tax payer money while doing no work. See the billions in tax funding to ATT, Google, etc... to put in fiber internet that they just pocketed the cash and did nothing.
    - daedrdev 2y ago
      In Texas electricity is literally less than half the price than the price in my state on average. (14c/kwh vs 34c/kwh) (I live in California) If you want to say its worse, perhaps you should check if its actually worse first.
      - dragonwriter 2y ago
        A big part of the reason that California average electrical price per kWh is high is that a huge portion of the cost is fixed costs, and California's efficiency push has resulted in the lowest lowest per capita electricity usage (and fourth lowest per capita energy usage) in the USA, so the fixed costs are spread over fewer kWh. Conversely, Texas has significantly above average use per capita, spreading the fixed costs across more kWh, but still results in higher annual costs per capita, despite lower per kWh rates.
        cogman10 2y ago
        Let's also not forget the cost of the things like the campfire fire. That's a huge bill that needs to be paid and that cost is ultimately going to come out of the kwh rates. Further, the LA fires might have also been caused by a downed line so that's going to be a fairly big cost to the power company.
        dragonwriter 2y ago
        > Let's also not forget the cost of the things like the campfire fire. That's, I assume, a reference to the 2018 Camp Fire. > That's a huge bill that needs to be paid and that cost is ultimately going to come out of the kwh rates. The Trust established to pay PG&E liabilities for the 2015 Butte, 2017 North Bay, and 2018 Camp Fires, which discharged PG&E's responsibility for them, receives no additional ratepayer funds after its initial funding and is in the wind-down process expecting a single final top-off payment to already approved claimants. So, no, its not a huge bill that will be paid out of future rates.
  - cogman10 2y ago
    > it has literally zero incentive to be cheap Do private utilities have any incentive to be cheap? The reason we have utility regulations in the first place is because utilities are natural monopolies with literally zero incentive to be cheap. On the contrary, they are highly incentivized to push up prices as much as possible because they have their customers over a barrel.
    - ssl-3 2y ago
      Utilities do have incentive to be cheap as long as there are is the presence of competing offerings and the lack of collusion. ...which is unusual with many utilities, but is also pretty common with wireless carriers in much of the world.
  - natebc 2y ago
    I believe the idea is that you shouldn't have a corporation provide the utility if there's only going to be one. "public utility" implies it's owned by the public not a profit seeking group of shareholders.
- cogman10 2y ago
  I personally like the notion of a common public infrastructure that subleases access. We already sort of do that with mobile carriers where the big 3 provide all access and all the other "carriers" (like google fi) are simply leasing access. Make it easy for a new wireless company to spawn while maintaining the infrastructure everyone needs.
- fny 2y ago
  Because competition drives innovation. 5G exists as widely as it does because carriers were driven to meet the standard and provide faster service to their customers. This article is essentially arguing innovation is dead in this space and there is no need for bandwidth-related improvements. At the same time, there is no 5G provider without a high-speed cap or throttling for hot spots. What would happen if enough people switched to 5G boxes over cable? Maybe T-Mobile can compete with Comcast?
  - javier2 2y ago
    Well, 5G is unlikely to be built in my area for the next decade, meanwhile 3 operators are building networks in the slightly more populated areas.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - kalleboo 2y ago
      Coverage requirements could be part of the spectrum auction, like when Google managed to get "no SIM locking" part of the spectrum requirements for the 700 MHz band, opening up Verizon phones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_United_States_wireless_spectrum_auction#Google_involvement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_United_States_wireless_sp...
  - dgacmu 2y ago
    Competition drives innovation, but also, we've generally seen that things like municipal broadband are _more_ innovative than an incumbent monopoly carrier. Large chunks of the US don't have much competition at all in wired services, and if we approach that in wireless, we are likely to see the same effects starting where the local monopoly tries to extract maximum dollars out of an aging infrastructure. Lookin' at you, Comcast, lookin' at you.
    - fny 2y ago
      As you say, "incumbent monopoly carrier" is not competition, so a municipal provider which competes with broadband is a great idea. This article, however, is arguing we don't need more bandwidth, and we need more consolidation of major providers: I'm not convinced.
- immibis 2y ago
  Three things are necessary then: 1. It must be well-run. 2. It must be guaranteed to continue to be well-run. 3. If someone can do it better, they must be allowed to do so - and then their improvements have to be folded into the network somehow if there is to be only one network.
- oytis 2y ago
  Internet is treated this way in Germany, and it's slow and expensive. Eastern European countries that put their bets on competition instead of regulation have more bang for the buck in their network infrastructure
  - Sabinus 2y ago
    How come it's failed to provide cost effective internet in the US then?
HnUser12 2y ago
They should study Canada. We’re already running that experiment.
Marsymars 2y ago
I dunno, it makes conceptual sense. Networks infrastructure is largely commodity utilities where duplication is effectively a waste of resources. e.g. you wouldn't expect your home to have multiple natural gas connections from competing companies. Regulators have other ways to incentivize quality/pricing and can mandate competition at levels of the stack other than the underlying infrastructure. I wouldn't expect that "only a single network" is the right model for all locations, but it will be for some locations, so you need a regulatory framework that ensures quality/cost in the case of a single network anyway.
- newsreaderguy 2y ago
  IMO this can be neatly solved with a peer-to-peer market based system similar to Helium https://www.helium.com/mobile https://www.helium.com/mobile. (I know that helium's original IoT network mostly failed due to lack of pmf, but idk about their 5G stuff) Network providers get paid for the bandwidth that flows over their nodes, but the protocol also allows for economically incentivizing network expansion and punishing congestion with subsidization / taxing. You can unify everyone under the same "network", but the infrastructure providers running it are diverse and in competition.
javier2 2y ago
Maybe it is. Building multiple networks for smaller populations comes at enormous cost though. In my country there have been a tradition for this kind of network sharing, where operators are required to allow alternative operators on their physical network for a fee set by government.
cft 2y ago
Who are these "regulators"? Did we vote for them? Were they selected in the process of market competition and attrition?
grahar64 2y ago
In New Zealand we have a single company that owns all the telecommunications wires. It was broken up in the 90's from a service provider because they were a monopoly and abusing their position in the market. Now we have a ton of options of ISPs, but only one company to deal with if there are line faults. BTW the line company is the best to deal with, the ISPs are shit. Same for mobile infrastructure would be great as well.
- kiwijamo 2y ago
  In NZ we also have the Rural Connectivity Group (RCG) which operates over 400 cellular/mobile sites in rural areas for the three mobile carriers, capital funded jointly by the NZ Government and the three mobile carriers (with operational costs shared between the three carriers I believe). For context the individual carriers operate around 2,000 of their own sites in urban areas and most towns in direct competition with each other. It has worked really well for the more rural parts of the country, filling in gaps in state highway coverage as well as providing coverage to smaller towns that would be uneconomical for the individual carriers to cover otherwise. I'm talking towns of a handful of households getting high speed 4G coverage. Really proud of NZ as this sort of thing is unheard of in most other countries.
  - wingworks 2y ago
    Ironically, often you get way faster speeds out on a RCG tower too. (probably due to few users), vs when in the city, where I often get pretty average speeds be it 4g or 5g.
    - kiwijamo 2y ago
      It depends. Some RCG towers have a single channel (sometimes small 10 MHz bandwidth or large 20 MHz bandwidth) which all carriers share which will not perform as well as some native towers where up five channels are operated using CA (Carrier Aggregation) providing up to 100 MHz of total bandwidth. You'll see most of these in smaller towns. However I've seen RCG towers operate with multiple channels across which they load balance all customers (regardless of their native carrier) which are indeed pretty good (but AFAIK, RCG doesn't do CA but I could be wrong on that front). Those higher capacity towns are often in areas like beach towns where they expect lots of traffic during weekends and holidays.
micromacrofoot 2y ago
It's not that stupid IMO, they could handle it like some places handle electricity — there's a single distributor managing infra but you can select from a number of providers offering different generation rates Having 5 competing infrastructures trying to blanket the country means that you end up with a ton of waste and the most populated places get priority as they constantly fight each other for the most valuable markets while neglecting the less profitable fringe
SSLy 2y ago
It works very well in at least two very rich European countries, and one bit less affluent but still not exactly poor.
hedora 2y ago
It actually works well in most places. Look up the term “common carrier”. The trick is that the entity that owns the wires has to provide/upgrade the network at cost, and anyone has the right to run a telco on top of the network. This creates competition for things like pricing plans, and financial incentives for the companies operating in the space to compete on their ability to build out / upgrade the network (or to not do that, but provide cheaper service).
- Gigachad 2y ago
  Feels a lot like whitelabeling. Where you have 200 companies selling exactly the same product at slightly different price points but where there isn't really any difference in the product.
- therein 2y ago
  It also makes it more vulnerable to legal, bureaucratic and technical threats. Doesn't make much sense to me to abstract away most of the parts where an entity could build up its competitive advantage and then to pretend like healthy competition could be build on top. Imagine if one entity did all the t-shirt manufacturing globally but then you congratulated yourself for creating a market based on altered colors and what is printed on top of these t-shirts.
  - SSLy 2y ago
    the in world practice seems to have this worked out. I am working for such provider right now and it is neither cash starved not suffocating under undue bureaucracy
  - computerthings 2y ago
    And private companies don't even have to be vulnerable, they can just do nasty things nilly willy, because it might be profitable and they might get away with it. Yeah, there could be ones that don't suck, and then customers could pick those, but when there aren't, when they all collude to be equally shitty and raise prices whenever they can -- which they do -- people have no recourse. They do have recourse when it comes to the government. And for some things it's just too much duplicated effort and wasted resources, T-shirts are one thing, because we don't really need those, but train lines and utilities etc. are another. I can't tell you where the "boundary" is, but if every electric company had to lay their own cables, there would only be one or two. And in the opinion of many including mine, for example the Deutsche Bundesbahn got worse when it got privatized. They kinda exploited the fact that after reunification, there were two state railroad systems obviously, and instead of merging them into one state railroad system, it was privatized, but because it made more money for some, but not because it benefits the public, the customers. Of course the reasoning was the usual neoliberal spiel, "saving money" and "smaller government" but then that money just ends up not really making things better to the degree privatization made them worse. Obviously not everything should be state run, far from it. But privatizing everything is a cure actually even worse than the disease, since state-run sinks and swims with how much say the people have, whereas a 100% privatized world just sinks into the abyss.
jay_kyburz 2y ago
Having a single provider of utilities is great when owned by the gov and run "at cost". Problem is, dickheads get voted in and they sell the utility to their mates who get an instant monopoly and start running the utility for profit.
Spooky23 2y ago
You’re thinking legacy. In our new Italian Fascist/Peronist governance model, maximizing return on assets for our cronies is the priority. The regulatory infrastructure that fostered both good and bad aspects of the last 75 years is being destroyed and will not return. Nationalizing telecom is a great way to reward the tech oligarchs by making the capital investments in giant data centers more valuable. If 10 gig can be delivered cheaply over the air, those hyperscale data centers will end up obsolete if technology continues to advance at the current pace. Why would the companies that represent 30% of the stock markets value want that?
recursive 2y ago
How confusing. Now I can't tell whether it's very stupid, not stupid, or medium stupid. Too bad there were no words.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
odo1242 2y ago
If regulators do this, it would have to be municipal carriers, like the one in that city in Tennessee.

fny 2y ago

Clearly you did not like playing Monopoly as child.

suddenlybananas 2y ago

I think that it should be run as a public service like utilities and should be as cheap as humanly possible. Why not?

daedrdev 2y ago
My public utility is bad at its job because it has literally zero incentive to be cheap, and thus my utilities are expensive
- sweeter 2y ago
  A private electric grid is a nightmare. Look at Texas. People pay more, and they get less coverage. It's worse by every metric. The conversation should revolve around, how can we fix the government so that it isn't 5 corporations in a trench coat who systematically defund public utilities and social safety nets in hopes of breaking it so they can privatize it and make billions sucking up tax payer money while doing no work. See the billions in tax funding to ATT, Google, etc... to put in fiber internet that they just pocketed the cash and did nothing.
  - daedrdev 2y ago
    In Texas electricity is literally less than half the price than the price in my state on average. (14c/kwh vs 34c/kwh) (I live in California) If you want to say its worse, perhaps you should check if its actually worse first.
    - dragonwriter 2y ago
      A big part of the reason that California average electrical price per kWh is high is that a huge portion of the cost is fixed costs, and California's efficiency push has resulted in the lowest lowest per capita electricity usage (and fourth lowest per capita energy usage) in the USA, so the fixed costs are spread over fewer kWh. Conversely, Texas has significantly above average use per capita, spreading the fixed costs across more kWh, but still results in higher annual costs per capita, despite lower per kWh rates.
      - cogman10 2y ago
        Let's also not forget the cost of the things like the campfire fire. That's a huge bill that needs to be paid and that cost is ultimately going to come out of the kwh rates. Further, the LA fires might have also been caused by a downed line so that's going to be a fairly big cost to the power company.
        dragonwriter 2y ago
        > Let's also not forget the cost of the things like the campfire fire. That's, I assume, a reference to the 2018 Camp Fire. > That's a huge bill that needs to be paid and that cost is ultimately going to come out of the kwh rates. The Trust established to pay PG&E liabilities for the 2015 Butte, 2017 North Bay, and 2018 Camp Fires, which discharged PG&E's responsibility for them, receives no additional ratepayer funds after its initial funding and is in the wind-down process expecting a single final top-off payment to already approved claimants. So, no, its not a huge bill that will be paid out of future rates.
- cogman10 2y ago
  > it has literally zero incentive to be cheap Do private utilities have any incentive to be cheap? The reason we have utility regulations in the first place is because utilities are natural monopolies with literally zero incentive to be cheap. On the contrary, they are highly incentivized to push up prices as much as possible because they have their customers over a barrel.
  - ssl-3 2y ago
    Utilities do have incentive to be cheap as long as there are is the presence of competing offerings and the lack of collusion. ...which is unusual with many utilities, but is also pretty common with wireless carriers in much of the world.
- natebc 2y ago
  I believe the idea is that you shouldn't have a corporation provide the utility if there's only going to be one. "public utility" implies it's owned by the public not a profit seeking group of shareholders.
cogman10 2y ago
I personally like the notion of a common public infrastructure that subleases access. We already sort of do that with mobile carriers where the big 3 provide all access and all the other "carriers" (like google fi) are simply leasing access. Make it easy for a new wireless company to spawn while maintaining the infrastructure everyone needs.
fny 2y ago
Because competition drives innovation. 5G exists as widely as it does because carriers were driven to meet the standard and provide faster service to their customers. This article is essentially arguing innovation is dead in this space and there is no need for bandwidth-related improvements. At the same time, there is no 5G provider without a high-speed cap or throttling for hot spots. What would happen if enough people switched to 5G boxes over cable? Maybe T-Mobile can compete with Comcast?
- javier2 2y ago
  Well, 5G is unlikely to be built in my area for the next decade, meanwhile 3 operators are building networks in the slightly more populated areas.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - kalleboo 2y ago
    Coverage requirements could be part of the spectrum auction, like when Google managed to get "no SIM locking" part of the spectrum requirements for the 700 MHz band, opening up Verizon phones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_United_States_wireless_spectrum_auction#Google_involvement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_United_States_wireless_sp...
- dgacmu 2y ago
  Competition drives innovation, but also, we've generally seen that things like municipal broadband are _more_ innovative than an incumbent monopoly carrier. Large chunks of the US don't have much competition at all in wired services, and if we approach that in wireless, we are likely to see the same effects starting where the local monopoly tries to extract maximum dollars out of an aging infrastructure. Lookin' at you, Comcast, lookin' at you.
  - fny 2y ago
    As you say, "incumbent monopoly carrier" is not competition, so a municipal provider which competes with broadband is a great idea. This article, however, is arguing we don't need more bandwidth, and we need more consolidation of major providers: I'm not convinced.
immibis 2y ago
Three things are necessary then: 1. It must be well-run. 2. It must be guaranteed to continue to be well-run. 3. If someone can do it better, they must be allowed to do so - and then their improvements have to be folded into the network somehow if there is to be only one network.
oytis 2y ago
Internet is treated this way in Germany, and it's slow and expensive. Eastern European countries that put their bets on competition instead of regulation have more bang for the buck in their network infrastructure
- Sabinus 2y ago
  How come it's failed to provide cost effective internet in the US then?

HnUser12 2y ago

They should study Canada. We’re already running that experiment.

Marsymars 2y ago

I dunno, it makes conceptual sense. Networks infrastructure is largely commodity utilities where duplication is effectively a waste of resources. e.g. you wouldn't expect your home to have multiple natural gas connections from competing companies. Regulators have other ways to incentivize quality/pricing and can mandate competition at levels of the stack other than the underlying infrastructure. I wouldn't expect that "only a single network" is the right model for all locations, but it will be for some locations, so you need a regulatory framework that ensures quality/cost in the case of a single network anyway.

newsreaderguy 2y ago
IMO this can be neatly solved with a peer-to-peer market based system similar to Helium https://www.helium.com/mobile https://www.helium.com/mobile. (I know that helium's original IoT network mostly failed due to lack of pmf, but idk about their 5G stuff) Network providers get paid for the bandwidth that flows over their nodes, but the protocol also allows for economically incentivizing network expansion and punishing congestion with subsidization / taxing. You can unify everyone under the same "network", but the infrastructure providers running it are diverse and in competition.

javier2 2y ago

Maybe it is. Building multiple networks for smaller populations comes at enormous cost though. In my country there have been a tradition for this kind of network sharing, where operators are required to allow alternative operators on their physical network for a fee set by government.

cft 2y ago

Who are these "regulators"? Did we vote for them? Were they selected in the process of market competition and attrition?

grahar64 2y ago

In New Zealand we have a single company that owns all the telecommunications wires. It was broken up in the 90's from a service provider because they were a monopoly and abusing their position in the market. Now we have a ton of options of ISPs, but only one company to deal with if there are line faults. BTW the line company is the best to deal with, the ISPs are shit. Same for mobile infrastructure would be great as well.

kiwijamo 2y ago
In NZ we also have the Rural Connectivity Group (RCG) which operates over 400 cellular/mobile sites in rural areas for the three mobile carriers, capital funded jointly by the NZ Government and the three mobile carriers (with operational costs shared between the three carriers I believe). For context the individual carriers operate around 2,000 of their own sites in urban areas and most towns in direct competition with each other. It has worked really well for the more rural parts of the country, filling in gaps in state highway coverage as well as providing coverage to smaller towns that would be uneconomical for the individual carriers to cover otherwise. I'm talking towns of a handful of households getting high speed 4G coverage. Really proud of NZ as this sort of thing is unheard of in most other countries.
- wingworks 2y ago
  Ironically, often you get way faster speeds out on a RCG tower too. (probably due to few users), vs when in the city, where I often get pretty average speeds be it 4g or 5g.
  - kiwijamo 2y ago
    It depends. Some RCG towers have a single channel (sometimes small 10 MHz bandwidth or large 20 MHz bandwidth) which all carriers share which will not perform as well as some native towers where up five channels are operated using CA (Carrier Aggregation) providing up to 100 MHz of total bandwidth. You'll see most of these in smaller towns. However I've seen RCG towers operate with multiple channels across which they load balance all customers (regardless of their native carrier) which are indeed pretty good (but AFAIK, RCG doesn't do CA but I could be wrong on that front). Those higher capacity towns are often in areas like beach towns where they expect lots of traffic during weekends and holidays.

micromacrofoot 2y ago

It's not that stupid IMO, they could handle it like some places handle electricity — there's a single distributor managing infra but you can select from a number of providers offering different generation rates Having 5 competing infrastructures trying to blanket the country means that you end up with a ton of waste and the most populated places get priority as they constantly fight each other for the most valuable markets while neglecting the less profitable fringe

SSLy 2y ago

It works very well in at least two very rich European countries, and one bit less affluent but still not exactly poor.

hedora 2y ago

It actually works well in most places. Look up the term “common carrier”. The trick is that the entity that owns the wires has to provide/upgrade the network at cost, and anyone has the right to run a telco on top of the network. This creates competition for things like pricing plans, and financial incentives for the companies operating in the space to compete on their ability to build out / upgrade the network (or to not do that, but provide cheaper service).

Gigachad 2y ago
Feels a lot like whitelabeling. Where you have 200 companies selling exactly the same product at slightly different price points but where there isn't really any difference in the product.
therein 2y ago
It also makes it more vulnerable to legal, bureaucratic and technical threats. Doesn't make much sense to me to abstract away most of the parts where an entity could build up its competitive advantage and then to pretend like healthy competition could be build on top. Imagine if one entity did all the t-shirt manufacturing globally but then you congratulated yourself for creating a market based on altered colors and what is printed on top of these t-shirts.
- SSLy 2y ago
  the in world practice seems to have this worked out. I am working for such provider right now and it is neither cash starved not suffocating under undue bureaucracy
- computerthings 2y ago
  And private companies don't even have to be vulnerable, they can just do nasty things nilly willy, because it might be profitable and they might get away with it. Yeah, there could be ones that don't suck, and then customers could pick those, but when there aren't, when they all collude to be equally shitty and raise prices whenever they can -- which they do -- people have no recourse. They do have recourse when it comes to the government. And for some things it's just too much duplicated effort and wasted resources, T-shirts are one thing, because we don't really need those, but train lines and utilities etc. are another. I can't tell you where the "boundary" is, but if every electric company had to lay their own cables, there would only be one or two. And in the opinion of many including mine, for example the Deutsche Bundesbahn got worse when it got privatized. They kinda exploited the fact that after reunification, there were two state railroad systems obviously, and instead of merging them into one state railroad system, it was privatized, but because it made more money for some, but not because it benefits the public, the customers. Of course the reasoning was the usual neoliberal spiel, "saving money" and "smaller government" but then that money just ends up not really making things better to the degree privatization made them worse. Obviously not everything should be state run, far from it. But privatizing everything is a cure actually even worse than the disease, since state-run sinks and swims with how much say the people have, whereas a 100% privatized world just sinks into the abyss.

jay_kyburz 2y ago

Having a single provider of utilities is great when owned by the gov and run "at cost". Problem is, dickheads get voted in and they sell the utility to their mates who get an instant monopoly and start running the utility for profit.

Spooky23 2y ago

You’re thinking legacy. In our new Italian Fascist/Peronist governance model, maximizing return on assets for our cronies is the priority. The regulatory infrastructure that fostered both good and bad aspects of the last 75 years is being destroyed and will not return. Nationalizing telecom is a great way to reward the tech oligarchs by making the capital investments in giant data centers more valuable. If 10 gig can be delivered cheaply over the air, those hyperscale data centers will end up obsolete if technology continues to advance at the current pace. Why would the companies that represent 30% of the stock markets value want that?

recursive 2y ago

How confusing. Now I can't tell whether it's very stupid, not stupid, or medium stupid. Too bad there were no words.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

odo1242 2y ago

If regulators do this, it would have to be municipal carriers, like the one in that city in Tennessee.