8 ms·

Why Super-Fast Internet Is Coming Super Slowly

129 points by bocalogic 13y ago

memming 13y ago
"AT&T is slowing Google Fiber deployment in Austin by denying access to its utility poles": This is why I am not getting Google Fiber yet?
- edraferi 13y ago
  Yup. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/why-att-says-it-can-deny-google-fiber-access-to-its-poles-in-austin/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/why-att-says-it-c...
bsbechtel 13y ago
In theory, if Google Fiber was widely available, would this drastically dilute the effects of net neutrality problems? Or are these two issues completely unrelated?
- valas 13y ago
  "Net-neutrality" means different thing to different people. If by net-neutrality you mean the system where a paying broadband customer can consume any content, irrespective of that content owner ability to pony up to cash to broadband provider, then yes, these two issues are related. More competition in consumer broadband market would keep providers in check. In an ideal world (at least my ideal), broadband providers would strive to do everything they can to deliver content to me. In current world, it's well documented that Comcast is passively allowing interconnects to fill up, causing congestion, and forcing content providers to pay up for better interconnect.
- edraferi 13y ago
  It becomes much harder to violate net neutrality in the face of competition. Here's an example: Say you have two ISP options at your home. Firm A forces Netflix to pay $1/month for access to enough bandwidth to stream movies in HD to your house, because they want you to use janky-streams.com, which they own. Firm B keeps their peering infrastructure up-to-date without charging Netflix. Where does this leave you as a consumer? All else equal, you'll switch over to Firm B. Why? Because Netflix works there even without paying a ransom for their data. It costs Netflix more money to provide their service to you on Firm A. They could pass that cost along to you directly (increase Netflix bill $1/month) or reduce the stream quality and blame the ISP. The end result is that you're paying more or getting worse service because of the Net Neutrality violation. However, Firm A understands this logic. They know that charging Netflix would push consumers to Firm B. Thus they decide to play nice and pass along the data you already pay them for.
  - bsbechtel 13y ago
    That's what I was suspecting, just wanted to be sure I understood things correctly. 'Your margin is my opportunity' -Jeff Bezos I guess that only holds true when there aren't artificial barriers to entry into a market.
  - VLM 13y ago
    To complete the analogy, even more comically, to enforce the punishment by firm A against netflix, they probably had to make a capital investment in sabotage gear of perhaps 75 cents per month TCO. Thats kind of how it was in telecom before they gave up on detailed long distance billing. You'd spend 4 cents/min on billing infrastructure which was OK when a LD call from CHC to NYC was $4/minute, not so great when Sams Club was selling LD cards for 5 cents/min. Never forget that creating false scarcity of a non-scarce good takes a lot of time, effort, and money.
  - a_c_s 13y ago
    The problem is that instead, Firm B could just follow the lead and also charge $1/month for Netflix, leaving the consumer with no choice. Or they could charge $1/month for other streaming services and leave Netflix alone, so the consumer gets to choose between slow Netflix or slow Hulu & Amazon, with no chance to 'vote' with their wallets for fast everything. This is the danger of oligopolies - even when they don't collude, their interests are in not competing 'too hard' to gain customers. If there are two firms, and each has roughly half of the customers, then the most money Firm A could get with no competition is 2x what they already have, so getting into a price war could easily result in lower total profits. For example, if they have a 50% profit margin, then lowering consumer prices by 25% (and thus cutting profits to only 25% margin) only breaks even if they are able to sign up every customer of their competition. Free markets work best when there are many players and markets are easy to enter, as there is much more incentive to compete, which is not the structure of broadband markets.
- gress 13y ago
  If Google Fiber was widely available Google would be the one controlling traffic priority.
  - quokka 13y ago
    That is true, and why to the solution to the US's slow internet providers isn't "get Google fiber to everyone". It should be "make it easy for new companies to provide service, even if another fast service is already available".
    - venomsnake 13y ago
      Throw a couple of billions to create fibre last mile to every home in the USA that would be owned by the homeowners and it would go a long way to solving the problem. As a side effect it will also create that king of blue collar jobs that US needs right now.
jfasi 13y ago
I view the broadband industry as a fascinating example of what happens when an infrastructure industry meets the technology industry. TWC and friends were established to enact a business plan that's been viable and profitable for centuries: laying down expensive infrastructure is economically feasible if most of the cost comes up front and you can charge rents on it for decades. Stability is crucial. This is the economic reasoning that built the cable TV network, and the phone network before that, and the power grid before that, and the railroad network before that, etc. Trouble is, this business model severely discourages new development (witness the "No one wants gigabit" rationale). Why interrupt your twenty year plan just to extend its life a year or two into the future? This isn't a bad thing if your industry is basically a utility industry, where technological changes move at a glacial pace. God help you if you enter into the technology industry armed only with the economic and managerial tools of a utility juggernaut. So we've got ourselves a conflict. On one side there are irritated customers wondering why their service is so poor and why their bills are so high. On the other there are communications utilities providers: while they have a legitimate business need to keep their networks profitable, they are paying the price for committing the gravest sin possible in the technology world: complacency.
- mahyarm 13y ago
  So why does broadband in other countries not have this problem, like Scandinavia, or Korea & Japan?
  - mbesto 13y ago
    For the same reasons those countries implement things like universal health care. The crux of the issue with the US however is that being powerful here can mean greater power elsewhere. For example, if I have 100% market share in Sweden, it doesn't necessarily give me the capital and muscle to become the biggest internet provider in all of Europe. Whereas if you become the superpower in the US, expansion (read -> growth) is much easier to obtain.
  - saosebastiao 13y ago
    Sprawl makes infrastructure investment orders of magnitude more expensive. For example, a small business [1] provides the fastest consumer access in the city of Seattle, but they refuse to do business outside of extremely high density buildings. There is no way a small business could do the same in McSuburbia. In the sprawly world outside of the US's dense cities, only municipal governments with a lot of political willpower have the resources to invest in the infrastructure needed for fast internet. [1] http://www.condointernet.net/ http://www.condointernet.net/
pseudometa 13y ago
This is going to be a mess to slog through over the next 15 years until wireless speeds (and costs) leapfrog hardlines completely.
- xcrunner529 13y ago
  I've seen articles that it is just not feasible or even possibly to put all of the burden the wired networks carry onto the wireless ones. Besides the ugly data caps we have to deal with there, there's not enough room in the frequencies. Wireless is used as an excuse to not put in effort with wired and it's going to screw us.
  - amirhirsch 13y ago
    There's plenty of room in the frequencies, even just using linear momentum encoding with directional transceivers. Add in MIMO/OAM and and suddenly there's even more bandwidth. the FCC / ownership of spectrum is a whole other chimera. Wireless today is like using a LED and a photodiode instead of a screen and a camera.
    - zw123456 13y ago
      I think you mean OFDMA/MIMO, which is what LTE uses.
    - zw123456 13y ago
      I should have Googled before I spoke, Orbital Angular Momentum, very interesting... http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=2062936&fileOId=2339120 http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordO...
      - amirhirsch 13y ago
        There's some debate about whether OAM demonstrations are just MIMO, and some suggestions that the eigenmodes are equivalent. Either way, there will be regulatory hurdles to more efficiently using the spectrum. I like the perspective put forward in this post: http://www.reed.com/blog-dpr/?page_id=117 http://www.reed.com/blog-dpr/?page_id=117
nextweek2 13y ago
I thought the USA was the model of capitalism. However it appears the opposite, monopolies run rampant. The free market is killed rather than encouraged.
- rhizome 13y ago
  Monopoly is the apotheosis of capitalist desire, competition is merely the measuring stick.
- bryanlarsen 13y ago
  Infrastructure is the quintessential example of a natural monopoly. Free markets encourage natural monopolies. A non-free market is required to avoid natural monopolies.
- Consultant32452 13y ago
  If you read the article it's plain to see that the monopolies are enforced and encouraged by the currently existing regulations. There is no free market in ISPs in the US.
  - res0nat0r 13y ago
    You mean natural monopolies?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- seventytwo 13y ago
  What are you talking about? Monopolies ARE capitalism run rampant.
  - praxeologist 13y ago
    Nonsense. Leftists conflate "state capitalism", cronyism or corporatism with real, free-market capitalism. Internet monopolies like Comcast or TWC enjoy are state-granted monopolies, not "natural monopolies" (which have never existed).
gcb0 13y ago
thats a borderline moronic article. starts by saying incumbents deny access even to city cabling and explaining the duopoly on most cities and ends by saying that allowing netflix to pass the fee to comcast subscribers is good because people will move companies and a free market is the answer. is this april 1st or something? also extra moronic points for not understanding the first thing about isp to isp agreements and peer pricing.
- quokka 13y ago
  The writer is suggesting that the "FCC can mandate right-of-way rules similar to those granted Google Fiber to all credible competitors". He isn't saying that the "free market" will fix things by itself. He observes that there isn't a free market in providing internet access because the incumbents control things like telephone poles (to hang optical cable on) and municipalities are so addicted to the kickbacks they get from cable franchisees that they won't let anyone else in. The magic of the invisible hand only works if there is actual competition. Those supply and demand curve charts only describe reality if there aren't monopolists. His claim is that if the FCC mandated right of way to anyone wanting to hook homes up then a company like Google would already be serving many more homes as incumbents wouldn't be able to block them as AT&T is doing in Austin. This is true, but I'm not convinced that it is the right way to get proper competition here. Is the solution really to have 5 companies each run optical fiber down a street? Better would be for one company to run super-fast tubes, and then sell the bandwidth in bulk to ISPs. Maybe that is the business model that would emerge, but maybe not.
- mlangdon 13y ago
  Leave it to the WSJ to blame a problem that needs old school trust-busting on excess regulation. They've got libertarian rabies.
marknutter 13y ago
I have gigabit fiber internet and it doesn't feel all that much faster than my old Comcast 20Mbs connection because the bottleneck isn't my connection, it's the servers I'm asking for content from. For some things it's blazingly fast (downloading updates, torrenting, etc) but for general web surfing the benefit is barely noticeable. I think that's why fiber adoption is slower than broadband adoption was. There's not much that you can do over a gigabit connection that you can't do over a 20Mbs connection for the average subscriber. Until some killer app that requires a gigabit connection to work starts to become popular, people just aren't going to demand it and adoption will continue to limp along.
- kalleboo 13y ago
  Does that killer app exist in Europe or Asia? Otherwise, why would they have a faster adoption rate than the US?
- rictic 13y ago
  A bit of a chicken and egg there though. Who's going to build services that use >20mbps in bandwidth if almost no one has that much?
  - endeavor 13y ago
    I read some VC stories regarding Skype recently. At the time they were looking for series A (?), broadband penetration was still poor. Obviously they managed to get by until the broadband environment tipped to their advantage. The point is that you don't want to wait until it's obvious that gigabit is really coming. At that point you may already be way behind.
- insuffi 13y ago
  Agreed; the difference between downloading a movie in 10 minutes and 1 minute is rather miniscule. Additionally, I don't think even streaming sites would generally require more than 50 mbps to watch comfortably. Not even talking about regular apps/static content.
  - 13y ago
skywhopper 13y ago
One of the biggest missed opportunities of the 2009 government stimulus was a failure to heavily invest in new infrastructure that would pay dividends for the next 50-100 years. A government project to connect every household in America to gigabit Internet connection is more than doable, and would pay enormous benefits for individuals and corporations alike. It's not too late, although it would be much much harder today.
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  I agree, but the problem was that it would have run into a wall of local and state regulations, and the majority of such deployments would be getting fought over in court.
sehugg 13y ago
I've got to imagine the availability of cheap and fast broadband influences property values in a given area. I've seen numbers like $5k thrown around; I'm tempted to think it's more like $10k-$30k. When you multiply that amount by the number of homeowners in the country, that's a lot of potential influence. How could it be leveraged to improve broadband?
kokey 13y ago
It is quite refreshing to see an article clearly stating the problem and the right solution. The barriers to competition needs to be broken, then the neutrality issue sorts itself out. We don't need to see entrenched cartels and monopolies 'fixed' through additional regulation imposing certain quality standards. That makes it hard for new players to enter the market and distinguish themselves, and more importantly it makes it hard for the dominant players to do the stupid things that will make their customers leave them faster for the competition.
alisnic 13y ago
come to Moldova, we have 100 mbit for 10$ month
- RankingMember 13y ago
  Interesting...isn't boardband penetration somewhere around the 35% mark there?
  - alisnic 13y ago
    no, every home has cheap and fast internet now
logfromblammo 13y ago
In brief, faster network connections are rolling out slowly because practically everyone that wants to do it faster is prevented from doing so thanks to statutory or logistical roadblocks thrown up by the incumbents, who have zero incentive to do it themselves because they enjoy a territory-designated monopoly. The logical thing for most towns to do is to use their eminent domain powers to force the sale of easements and utility poles/tunnels to the municipality, and charge all utilities a flat rate based on pole capacity used. While two wires on a line of poles doesn't seem all that wasteful, two wires on two parallel lines of poles sounds pretty stupid. Digging up the street with two parallel trenches is even worse. As a consumer, I don't want a service provider in a position where it can keep its competitors from reaching by house via the best route possible. I want that access controlled by the cartel enforcer rather than any of the cartel members. As a bonus, the town could allow residents or HOAs to hire qualified contractors to run and maintain their own cables to anywhere the poles/tunnels go. That way, if an ISP won't come to you, you can go to anything else you can reach.
anigbrowl 13y ago
Read the WSJ comments and you'll see another reason for the delay :-/

129 points by bocalogic 13y ago

"AT&T is slowing Google Fiber deployment in Austin by denying access to its utility poles": This is why I am not getting Google Fiber yet?

edraferi 13y ago
Yup. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/why-att-says-it-can-deny-google-fiber-access-to-its-poles-in-austin/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/why-att-says-it-c...

bsbechtel 13y ago

In theory, if Google Fiber was widely available, would this drastically dilute the effects of net neutrality problems? Or are these two issues completely unrelated?

valas 13y ago
"Net-neutrality" means different thing to different people. If by net-neutrality you mean the system where a paying broadband customer can consume any content, irrespective of that content owner ability to pony up to cash to broadband provider, then yes, these two issues are related. More competition in consumer broadband market would keep providers in check. In an ideal world (at least my ideal), broadband providers would strive to do everything they can to deliver content to me. In current world, it's well documented that Comcast is passively allowing interconnects to fill up, causing congestion, and forcing content providers to pay up for better interconnect.
edraferi 13y ago
It becomes much harder to violate net neutrality in the face of competition. Here's an example: Say you have two ISP options at your home. Firm A forces Netflix to pay $1/month for access to enough bandwidth to stream movies in HD to your house, because they want you to use janky-streams.com, which they own. Firm B keeps their peering infrastructure up-to-date without charging Netflix. Where does this leave you as a consumer? All else equal, you'll switch over to Firm B. Why? Because Netflix works there even without paying a ransom for their data. It costs Netflix more money to provide their service to you on Firm A. They could pass that cost along to you directly (increase Netflix bill $1/month) or reduce the stream quality and blame the ISP. The end result is that you're paying more or getting worse service because of the Net Neutrality violation. However, Firm A understands this logic. They know that charging Netflix would push consumers to Firm B. Thus they decide to play nice and pass along the data you already pay them for.
- bsbechtel 13y ago
  That's what I was suspecting, just wanted to be sure I understood things correctly. 'Your margin is my opportunity' -Jeff Bezos I guess that only holds true when there aren't artificial barriers to entry into a market.
- VLM 13y ago
  To complete the analogy, even more comically, to enforce the punishment by firm A against netflix, they probably had to make a capital investment in sabotage gear of perhaps 75 cents per month TCO. Thats kind of how it was in telecom before they gave up on detailed long distance billing. You'd spend 4 cents/min on billing infrastructure which was OK when a LD call from CHC to NYC was $4/minute, not so great when Sams Club was selling LD cards for 5 cents/min. Never forget that creating false scarcity of a non-scarce good takes a lot of time, effort, and money.
- a_c_s 13y ago
  The problem is that instead, Firm B could just follow the lead and also charge $1/month for Netflix, leaving the consumer with no choice. Or they could charge $1/month for other streaming services and leave Netflix alone, so the consumer gets to choose between slow Netflix or slow Hulu & Amazon, with no chance to 'vote' with their wallets for fast everything. This is the danger of oligopolies - even when they don't collude, their interests are in not competing 'too hard' to gain customers. If there are two firms, and each has roughly half of the customers, then the most money Firm A could get with no competition is 2x what they already have, so getting into a price war could easily result in lower total profits. For example, if they have a 50% profit margin, then lowering consumer prices by 25% (and thus cutting profits to only 25% margin) only breaks even if they are able to sign up every customer of their competition. Free markets work best when there are many players and markets are easy to enter, as there is much more incentive to compete, which is not the structure of broadband markets.
gress 13y ago
If Google Fiber was widely available Google would be the one controlling traffic priority.
- quokka 13y ago
  That is true, and why to the solution to the US's slow internet providers isn't "get Google fiber to everyone". It should be "make it easy for new companies to provide service, even if another fast service is already available".
  - venomsnake 13y ago
    Throw a couple of billions to create fibre last mile to every home in the USA that would be owned by the homeowners and it would go a long way to solving the problem. As a side effect it will also create that king of blue collar jobs that US needs right now.

jfasi 13y ago

I view the broadband industry as a fascinating example of what happens when an infrastructure industry meets the technology industry. TWC and friends were established to enact a business plan that's been viable and profitable for centuries: laying down expensive infrastructure is economically feasible if most of the cost comes up front and you can charge rents on it for decades. Stability is crucial. This is the economic reasoning that built the cable TV network, and the phone network before that, and the power grid before that, and the railroad network before that, etc. Trouble is, this business model severely discourages new development (witness the "No one wants gigabit" rationale). Why interrupt your twenty year plan just to extend its life a year or two into the future? This isn't a bad thing if your industry is basically a utility industry, where technological changes move at a glacial pace. God help you if you enter into the technology industry armed only with the economic and managerial tools of a utility juggernaut. So we've got ourselves a conflict. On one side there are irritated customers wondering why their service is so poor and why their bills are so high. On the other there are communications utilities providers: while they have a legitimate business need to keep their networks profitable, they are paying the price for committing the gravest sin possible in the technology world: complacency.

mahyarm 13y ago
So why does broadband in other countries not have this problem, like Scandinavia, or Korea & Japan?
- mbesto 13y ago
  For the same reasons those countries implement things like universal health care. The crux of the issue with the US however is that being powerful here can mean greater power elsewhere. For example, if I have 100% market share in Sweden, it doesn't necessarily give me the capital and muscle to become the biggest internet provider in all of Europe. Whereas if you become the superpower in the US, expansion (read -> growth) is much easier to obtain.
- saosebastiao 13y ago
  Sprawl makes infrastructure investment orders of magnitude more expensive. For example, a small business [1] provides the fastest consumer access in the city of Seattle, but they refuse to do business outside of extremely high density buildings. There is no way a small business could do the same in McSuburbia. In the sprawly world outside of the US's dense cities, only municipal governments with a lot of political willpower have the resources to invest in the infrastructure needed for fast internet. [1] http://www.condointernet.net/ http://www.condointernet.net/

pseudometa 13y ago

This is going to be a mess to slog through over the next 15 years until wireless speeds (and costs) leapfrog hardlines completely.

xcrunner529 13y ago
I've seen articles that it is just not feasible or even possibly to put all of the burden the wired networks carry onto the wireless ones. Besides the ugly data caps we have to deal with there, there's not enough room in the frequencies. Wireless is used as an excuse to not put in effort with wired and it's going to screw us.
- amirhirsch 13y ago
  There's plenty of room in the frequencies, even just using linear momentum encoding with directional transceivers. Add in MIMO/OAM and and suddenly there's even more bandwidth. the FCC / ownership of spectrum is a whole other chimera. Wireless today is like using a LED and a photodiode instead of a screen and a camera.
  - zw123456 13y ago
    I think you mean OFDMA/MIMO, which is what LTE uses.
  - zw123456 13y ago
    I should have Googled before I spoke, Orbital Angular Momentum, very interesting... http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=2062936&fileOId=2339120 http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordO...
    - amirhirsch 13y ago
      There's some debate about whether OAM demonstrations are just MIMO, and some suggestions that the eigenmodes are equivalent. Either way, there will be regulatory hurdles to more efficiently using the spectrum. I like the perspective put forward in this post: http://www.reed.com/blog-dpr/?page_id=117 http://www.reed.com/blog-dpr/?page_id=117

nextweek2 13y ago

I thought the USA was the model of capitalism. However it appears the opposite, monopolies run rampant. The free market is killed rather than encouraged.

rhizome 13y ago
Monopoly is the apotheosis of capitalist desire, competition is merely the measuring stick.
bryanlarsen 13y ago
Infrastructure is the quintessential example of a natural monopoly. Free markets encourage natural monopolies. A non-free market is required to avoid natural monopolies.
Consultant32452 13y ago
If you read the article it's plain to see that the monopolies are enforced and encouraged by the currently existing regulations. There is no free market in ISPs in the US.
- res0nat0r 13y ago
  You mean natural monopolies?
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
seventytwo 13y ago
What are you talking about? Monopolies ARE capitalism run rampant.
- praxeologist 13y ago
  Nonsense. Leftists conflate "state capitalism", cronyism or corporatism with real, free-market capitalism. Internet monopolies like Comcast or TWC enjoy are state-granted monopolies, not "natural monopolies" (which have never existed).

gcb0 13y ago

thats a borderline moronic article. starts by saying incumbents deny access even to city cabling and explaining the duopoly on most cities and ends by saying that allowing netflix to pass the fee to comcast subscribers is good because people will move companies and a free market is the answer. is this april 1st or something? also extra moronic points for not understanding the first thing about isp to isp agreements and peer pricing.

quokka 13y ago
The writer is suggesting that the "FCC can mandate right-of-way rules similar to those granted Google Fiber to all credible competitors". He isn't saying that the "free market" will fix things by itself. He observes that there isn't a free market in providing internet access because the incumbents control things like telephone poles (to hang optical cable on) and municipalities are so addicted to the kickbacks they get from cable franchisees that they won't let anyone else in. The magic of the invisible hand only works if there is actual competition. Those supply and demand curve charts only describe reality if there aren't monopolists. His claim is that if the FCC mandated right of way to anyone wanting to hook homes up then a company like Google would already be serving many more homes as incumbents wouldn't be able to block them as AT&T is doing in Austin. This is true, but I'm not convinced that it is the right way to get proper competition here. Is the solution really to have 5 companies each run optical fiber down a street? Better would be for one company to run super-fast tubes, and then sell the bandwidth in bulk to ISPs. Maybe that is the business model that would emerge, but maybe not.
mlangdon 13y ago
Leave it to the WSJ to blame a problem that needs old school trust-busting on excess regulation. They've got libertarian rabies.

marknutter 13y ago

I have gigabit fiber internet and it doesn't feel all that much faster than my old Comcast 20Mbs connection because the bottleneck isn't my connection, it's the servers I'm asking for content from. For some things it's blazingly fast (downloading updates, torrenting, etc) but for general web surfing the benefit is barely noticeable. I think that's why fiber adoption is slower than broadband adoption was. There's not much that you can do over a gigabit connection that you can't do over a 20Mbs connection for the average subscriber. Until some killer app that requires a gigabit connection to work starts to become popular, people just aren't going to demand it and adoption will continue to limp along.

kalleboo 13y ago
Does that killer app exist in Europe or Asia? Otherwise, why would they have a faster adoption rate than the US?
rictic 13y ago
A bit of a chicken and egg there though. Who's going to build services that use >20mbps in bandwidth if almost no one has that much?
- endeavor 13y ago
  I read some VC stories regarding Skype recently. At the time they were looking for series A (?), broadband penetration was still poor. Obviously they managed to get by until the broadband environment tipped to their advantage. The point is that you don't want to wait until it's obvious that gigabit is really coming. At that point you may already be way behind.
insuffi 13y ago
Agreed; the difference between downloading a movie in 10 minutes and 1 minute is rather miniscule. Additionally, I don't think even streaming sites would generally require more than 50 mbps to watch comfortably. Not even talking about regular apps/static content.
- 13y ago

skywhopper 13y ago

One of the biggest missed opportunities of the 2009 government stimulus was a failure to heavily invest in new infrastructure that would pay dividends for the next 50-100 years. A government project to connect every household in America to gigabit Internet connection is more than doable, and would pay enormous benefits for individuals and corporations alike. It's not too late, although it would be much much harder today.

anigbrowl 13y ago
I agree, but the problem was that it would have run into a wall of local and state regulations, and the majority of such deployments would be getting fought over in court.

sehugg 13y ago

I've got to imagine the availability of cheap and fast broadband influences property values in a given area. I've seen numbers like $5k thrown around; I'm tempted to think it's more like $10k-$30k. When you multiply that amount by the number of homeowners in the country, that's a lot of potential influence. How could it be leveraged to improve broadband?

kokey 13y ago

It is quite refreshing to see an article clearly stating the problem and the right solution. The barriers to competition needs to be broken, then the neutrality issue sorts itself out. We don't need to see entrenched cartels and monopolies 'fixed' through additional regulation imposing certain quality standards. That makes it hard for new players to enter the market and distinguish themselves, and more importantly it makes it hard for the dominant players to do the stupid things that will make their customers leave them faster for the competition.

alisnic 13y ago

come to Moldova, we have 100 mbit for 10$ month

RankingMember 13y ago
Interesting...isn't boardband penetration somewhere around the 35% mark there?
- alisnic 13y ago
  no, every home has cheap and fast internet now

logfromblammo 13y ago

In brief, faster network connections are rolling out slowly because practically everyone that wants to do it faster is prevented from doing so thanks to statutory or logistical roadblocks thrown up by the incumbents, who have zero incentive to do it themselves because they enjoy a territory-designated monopoly. The logical thing for most towns to do is to use their eminent domain powers to force the sale of easements and utility poles/tunnels to the municipality, and charge all utilities a flat rate based on pole capacity used. While two wires on a line of poles doesn't seem all that wasteful, two wires on two parallel lines of poles sounds pretty stupid. Digging up the street with two parallel trenches is even worse. As a consumer, I don't want a service provider in a position where it can keep its competitors from reaching by house via the best route possible. I want that access controlled by the cartel enforcer rather than any of the cartel members. As a bonus, the town could allow residents or HOAs to hire qualified contractors to run and maintain their own cables to anywhere the poles/tunnels go. That way, if an ISP won't come to you, you can go to anything else you can reach.

anigbrowl 13y ago

Read the WSJ comments and you'll see another reason for the delay :-/