[riskable]

Can someone explain to me what innovation cable companies provide that they deserve their anti-competitive monopolies? If we were to replace them all with municipal broadband what would the short and long term consequences be?

I'd wager that the short term (~10 years) consequences would be vastly superior service for every day citizens. In the long term, not certain but I suspect it would be much of the same as long as the municipal provider had ever-increasing speeds as one of their primary purposes/guiding principals.

I'm not a communist but I think evidence shows that municipal broadband outperforms both telecom and cable operators in all terms of performance from costs to speeds to reliability.

[kyebosh]

Obviously the situation has it's differences, but the original form of the National Broadband Network[0] here in Australia was, in part, to help nip these kinds of problems in the bud. It was close to a nationwide glass utility, but still allowed for a competitive commercial market. There was a lot of excitement for both short-term technological gains & long-term economics. I'm still dirty it got so mangled.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network

As an off-topic aide: was "I'm not a communist" tongue in cheek? Or would such an infrastructure project be actually seen as "communist" &/or undesirable just for it's oversight?

Edit: terminology, link

[ytpete]

My understanding was it's seen as an incentive for the massive upfront infrastructure costs needed to run cable to every house. Much like power or other utilities. But of course cable companies don't want to accept the regulation that is the flip side of being treated like a utility (e.g. net neutrality).

[cortesoft]

I think it is mostly because having multiple companies laying physical wires is problematic. It is very capital intensive, and disruptive to infrastructure (digging up lots of ground). In the end, it might not be better for customers; for example, imagine 4 different cable companies spend all the capital to lay 4 sets of cables to every house in a town of 100,000. Since there are 4 choices of cable company to choose from, then you can imagine each company will only get around 25% of the subscribers. The infrastructure costs to cover running cable to 100% of the houses now has to be supported by only 25% of the subscriber base.

In other words, the same number of subscribers now have to pay for 4x the infrastructure costs.

[dv_dt]

This is why I think the makes the most sense for cities to own their own broadband infrastructure (just like they often own their road & water/sewer infrastructure). Maybe let out a contract for management of it comercially that gets periodically reviewed - maybe even split the basic infrastructure maintenance with companies competing to deliver data from common data centers across the last mile wiring/fiber so multiple have a market to compete within.

[kyebosh]

This is, in general, close to what the Australian NBN model was aiming for; the fibre capacity was to be "leased" wholesale to the commercial entities, with the leases used for maintenance & upgrades. In theory it avoids special interests & provides a baseline platform.

[ryao]

> I think it is mostly because having multiple companies laying physical wires is problematic. It is very capital intensive, and disruptive to infrastructure (digging up lots of ground). In the end, it might not be better for customers; for example, imagine 4 different cable companies spend all the capital to lay 4 sets of cables to every house in a town of 100,000. Since there are 4 choices of cable company to choose from, then you can imagine each company will only get around 25% of the subscribers. The infrastructure costs to cover running cable to 100% of the houses now has to be supported by only 25% of the subscriber base.

> In other words, the same number of subscribers now have to pay for 4x the infrastructure costs.

In other words, building into each others' territories raises the cost of serving customers while putting downward pressure on pricing. The executives recognize that and try to avoid it.

If the cable companies and telecommunications companies had competing services when they were building their networks in the 20th century, I imagine that they likely would have avoided overlapping service areas too.

[cortesoft]

The downward pressure of pricing can't press prices below the cost of the infrastructure and maintenance cost (otherwise, the company will either go out of business or stop offering the service)

[zanny]

I live in a town that got municipal broadband at the turn of the millennia. Since about 1999 they have offered 10/2 up to 10/10 speeds for $25-$50 a month over coax.

Except... that is all they have. All they have ever had. And as the population has risen, they have no budget to deploy more servers to meet demand, so every night the speeds crash and you have intermittent outages. Especially on weekends. They are running 20 year old switches that have to handle Netflix loads on a nightly basis.

So you go to town council meetings to find out whats up and it turns out that over 15 years later they still owe some ~3 million on the original bill of 22 million, and the whole town is 10 million in the red (with a population of 3 thousand) so it cannot spend money on practically anything.

So main street is like driving on a cobble trail with potholes that go unfilled for years, and school taxes are the highest in five surrounding boroughs and its still not enough for them.

Sure, you can be certain they got ripped off with whomever they bought the original deployment from back then, given its just coax and not even fiber, and the municipal ISP is only a small piece of general budget mismanagement, but it is a reflection on how bad in general politicians are at budgeting, and nobody should ever be surprised when someone cannot make a reasonable budget when they are doing it with other peoples money and they have no consequences to themselves besides possible reelection issues.

IMO, it is just a more fundamental reflection that politics and political office as it is arranged in the states is both systemically intentional and attracts people who are not technical, not actuarial, and often lawyers and other "people" persons who can talk big to get elected and then go into an echo-chamber of self-reinforcing superiority with all the other elected officials such that they never attract the kind of critical thinking or knowledge to approach anything close to municipal... anything, really, with any degree of competence. They just defer to their friends friend at a teleco wiring company or a water treatment operator or a civil engineering corps and get turned into a money faucet for terrible results. I'm not saying every government has to behave that way, but at least from my observations all the ones I have been under have, at best, been incompetent, and have often been of malicious intent towards its own citizens at their expense for corporate donors and insiders to their social circle. But it is certainly systemically intentional.

[mahyarm]

So why do you still get enough clean water and electricity? Not have brown/black outs and so on?

[zanny]

The water actually has a lead warning in east PA, and we do have near weekly evening power outages. But the septic is county based and the electric is at the state level, and in PA you can buy from any electric provider in the state and the lines are maintained near us by Harrisburg.

[mahyarm]

So it sounds like your area fails in the infrastructure department pretty fundamentally. There are many other cities where it never blacks out, the water and sanitation has been great for decades and the roads are maintained. Those places would do municipal internet better too.

[harryh]

My internet speeds today are an order of magnitude faster than they were even a few years ago. Does that not count as innovation? It certainly required a fairly massive capital investment.

[noobermin]

...and 200x slower than those in Korea.

[harryh]

Actually, my speeds are about the same as those in Korea as I live in NYC. Which makes sense because South Korea is almost entirely urban much like NYC. It's not really fair to make cross country comparisons between countries with vastly different geographies.

[justin66]

> It's not really fair to make cross country comparisons between countries with vastly different geographies.

It's fairer than you'd think. There were some articles in the last few years (summarized at Ars Technica, I think) about how the US is really, really average at delivering residential network bandwidth at a decent cost, compared against a wide variety of countries.

The thing that struck me about it was that the countries in the comparisons varied a lot politically (highly regulated vs. largely free market, etc.) and in terms of varying population density. I think the main conclusion I drew was that there isn't really one simple explanation for why we're pretty mediocre at this. We just have a crappy system.

[ionforce]

> South Korea is almost entirely urban much like NYC

Is this even true?

[warfangle]

Nope.

[harryh]

Not counting city states and small islands, South Korea has the 2nd highest population density in the world.

[csydas]

Out of curiosity, what provider and what advertised speeds and what speeds during actual use?

I'm not doubting your statement so much as just honestly curious, since getting access to the Internet in the US, from my experience, has been significantly worse than other places in the world where I've lived. In most of the EU, Asia, and in Russia, getting Internet was a breeze for my partner and I whenever we moved, and the speeds were usually, if not always, exactly as advertised.

For example, my partner and I live in Russia, and for some time, she did contract work as a chemist in Pereslavl, around 100 km north of Moscow. It was a remote and small town by any definition, but it had I believe 4 different internet providers and the options were all clearly laid out with simple pricing, and the pricing on the sites was the same as the pricing on our monthly bills.

Comparing this to when I've attempted to help friends prepare to move within the US and looking at ISPs, getting Internet in the US is a complete nightmare. The major ISPs often aren't able to give you an accurate pricing offer without first inputting an actual address onto their website, and very often the tool is broken or for whatever reason returns that the property is in the service area, even if the property already has a current connection from said ISP. (checking to ensure my parent's were getting a fair price from their ISP, for example, had both Charter's website and their sales representative inform me that Charter was not available in their neighborhood and address, despite them having used Charter's service for ~7 years.)

After that, it's introductory deals with the actual pricing buried in fine print on another page. Constant push to try to bundle land-line and media services, representatives insisting you need to rent a modem/router combo from the company when their own website has information on providing your own modem/router. While I do realize not all modems are created equal, that was not the pitch given to people I know or to family while I was present and helping them set up Internet.

I don't know, it just seems like virtually everywhere else, even if the speeds in major US cities are comparable, the entire "experience" of shopping around and getting Internet access is just better. The only place in the US where I've lived and it wasn't a pain to get service was when I lived in Tacoma, WA and used one of their municipal services. Aside from some occasionally goofy DNS issues, the service was lovely, competitively priced with Comcast, and their reps were also really fantastic. They also were very good at quickly getting information customers on known outages; their automated support line would switch to a special greeting informing the caller of a known outage, which saved a heck of a lot of time when storm damage or another random event disrupted service.

[harryh]

Time Warner. 100MBPs both advertised and actual.

For another $10 I could go to 200. For another $20 I could go to 300.

[hrrsn]

My home broadband speeds are, apparently, 15x the 2013 South Korean average of 13.3 Mbps.

[nickpsecurity]

Averages are meaningless except when measuring trends. What you said has no bearing on whether you or they are getting a better deal. You'd instead have to look at what work went into proding what speeds at what rates in whatever geography. That would be more fair comparison.

Note: I can't get unrestricted Gigabit for around $30 almost anywhere in States because companies don't want it to exist.

[mrep]

They also have 1/6 the population density as the United States.

[sib]

I think S Korea has about 14x the population density of the US. See, for example, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.POP.DNST

[mrep]

Wow, I don't remember what site I used but wikipedia also seems to agree with you [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territor...

[nickpsecurity]

I also recall they do combined public/private investments that require private companies to do something other than give money to shareholders. ;)

[ams6110]

What evidence is that. The evidence in my town is that the city can't walk and chew gum at the same time. I have zero confidence they could operate a broadband utility with anything approaching competence.

Municipal broadband just replaces one monopoly with another -- one that doesn't even have profit as a requirement, since it is also a taxing authority.

[wtbob]

> I'd wager that the short term (~10 years) consequences would be vastly superior service for every day citizens. In the long term, not certain

I think that you'd see the same phenomenon as in any country which socialised an industry: at first things are — as you guess — much the same, because the same people keep coming to work in the same buildings, operating the same machines according to the same processes &c. But the rate of innovation lowers, and eventually you get the equivalent of a Soviet grocery store (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOBFMMbUFI8): something much better than what you had before, but nowhere near as good as you could have had.

So after a decade or two of municipal broadband, you can expect that you'll have better broadband than when you started, but far, far, far worse broadband than where there is competition.

Now, if the debate is between a public and a private monopoly, I honestly don't know which is worse. Possibly the public monopoly, because its employees are unfireable, but — I don't know.

[xenadu02]

Nonsense; we're talking about natural monopolies here. Of course the government can't make a better grocery store. There is relatively little barrier to entry for that market.

Infrastructure has massive capital costs. If roads were owned by car dealerships and only permitted cars of their associated brands to drive on them that would be somewhat analogous to having multiple communication providers lay duplicate fiber (and just as wasteful).

Cable and ILECs are acting perfectly rationally by not competing with each other; there is little to gain when you can just squeeze your captive customer base for more money.

Fiber is fiber. The government could setup a public benefit corporation tasked with delivering fiber broadband last-mile infrastructure and keeping up with the latest innovations. If they fail to follow through, the courts can force them to follow the PBC charter.

If you want to leave maximum room for innovation (with resulting higher costs) the PBC could only be responsible for terminating fiber on both ends and any ISP who wants to compete would have to install an ONT on the customer site and light the fiber at the exchange. Then the ISP can replace equipment to wring faster and faster speeds out of the fiber if they want.

You can go the other way and task the PBC with lighting the fiber and delivering packets. It makes the process of starting an ISP much easier but you're reliant on the PBC to keep up with potential 10GB upgrades in the future. That sure would be a nice problem to have though...

[jimmaswell]

The comments on that video are pointing out that the title is misleading, and the video description isn't reassuring.