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There may be corruption involved, but the infrastructure costs are not imaginary. Modern cable infrastructure is not a big coaxial cable strung along telephone
by gnoway 12y ago
There may be corruption involved, but the infrastructure costs are not imaginary.
Modern cable infrastructure is not a big coaxial cable strung along telephone poles. It's often buried fiber with media conversion for a local loop. Either way it costs money to roll out, and where poles are involved there are ongoing leasing fees for those.
This is only part of the infrastructure anyway. You've still got all the routing, switching, media conversion, etc. to make that cable do something useful.
- pekk 12y agoHow many times can the same dollar of infrastructure costs be used to justify maintaining a monopoly where service is bad and never gets upgraded? It is in the company's interest to flog that dollar for all it is worth, forever, as a justification to never upgrade and maintain a monopoly so that nobody can force them to reinvest in infrastructure and they can just sit around in maintenance mode, collecting the checks with the minimum possible outlay. If the government owned the infrastructure outright, we could at least have the discussion about why service is shit, but with this reasoning, "it was expensive to build these cables" permanently shuts down any ability to get upgrades or break local monopolies.
- phkahler 12y ago>> This is only part of the infrastructure anyway. You've still got all the routing, switching, media conversion, etc. to make that cable do something useful. Media conversion? Like taking HD signals, converting them to "standard definition" and putting those on the line too? So you can then charge more for higher quality "HD" signals which are still transcoded to lower bitrates? Yeah, we can do without that stuff.
- jahewson 12y agoNo, he means transmission media conversion, such as converting from fiber optic cable to coaxial cable on the local loop.
- ReidZB 12y agoThat isn't what "media conversion" means at all. It is the conversion from one medium to another: for example, from fiber optic (light) to coaxial (electric). This is standard terminology: https://www.google.com/search?q=fiber+media+converter https://www.google.com/search?q=fiber+media+converter To be frank, your post is a little ridiculous, IMO.
- fnordfnordfnord 12y agoPoster seems to have misunderstood, but: >Like taking HD signals, converting them to "standard definition" and putting those on the line too? So you can then charge more for higher quality "HD" signals which are still transcoded to lower bitrates? Yeah, we can do without that stuff. The cable company in my town does this. Ostensibly it was to maintain compatibility with CRT/low def. televisions as a convenience to people with obsolete equipment but the scheme persists. It seems to now serve the purpose of allowing them to advertise low prices for this subpar service and then upsell customers to much higher price tiers. Sure, that's a legal tactic, but it probably wouldn't work in a competitive market.
- phkahler 12y agoOK, so I got it wrong. Still, the cable in my neighborhood was laid before I got there 12 years ago. My bill has gone from $50 to over $100 and nobody has done anything locally - no digging. Sure they bumped me from 150kbps to 2meg many years ago, and I'm sure that was upgraded equipment somewhere. But even with 3 cables running down my street (yeah rare, wow, yippie) we still have relatively low data rates and high prices.
- kenrikm 12y agoYeah but the right to use land they are building on was a granted Monopoly by the local governments. If you buy all the land, install all the poles and run all the cable, sure you should be able to do whatever you want with what you build. However, their system is built on billions of dollars of public infrastructure granted to them as a monopoly "in most cases".