[Just1689]

I live in South Africa. Myself and all my friends are sitting on around 100 Mbps up/down uncapped unshaped, no fair use policy each at around $100 USD monthly. A few of my friends are on Gigabit down, 200 up.

How is America behind on this? Everything is hosted there and cached there. Is it big business lobbying politicians to prevent them from having to compete? In South Africa we have dozens on ISPs and as an economy we're probably not far off from one US state. The competition has been great for consumers.

[justapassenger]

USA built out its internet infrastructure earlier than most of the developing nations, who now, almost universally, have better connectivity.

That caused two things:

1. Coming later to the game, you don’t need to deal with legacy infra, that’s there, costed huge amount of money, and replacing it will cost even more (like cable connections to the houses)

2. USA has a general approach of building out infra in sprints, and then neglecting it until next sprint. Few examples - credit cards and their security, roads, space program, internet infra. And while it’s more complicated, politics are large reason for it. It’s much less catchy to say “I’ll spend $500B to maintain X”, then “I’ll spend $1000B to build Y”.

[908B64B197]

I wonder if there is maybe less red tape in SA to roll out fiber?

Or a desire of the country to strengthen it's tech sector.

[ip26]

USA built out its internet infrastructure earlier...

It's a story that repeats itself. See the Type A electrical outlet, imperial measurement, measuring cups, etc

[fl0wenol]

While the sentiment is generally understood, you should really mention that the type B didn't fix the main issue of Type A, in that it didn't recess the face and/or extend the prongs with a protective sleeve.

[rayiner]

> How is America behind on this?

There is no single situation in "America" with respect to broadband. We're a federation of 50 different states that's almost the size of the entire EU. Broadband is mainly a state level issue and it varies by state. Here in Maryland, over 60% of people have access to fiber. I have two different fiber providers to my house, more than an hour outside a major city. Symmetrical gigabit here is under $80.

[formercoder]

Yep, big city here, 1G/1G fiber to my apartment for $80. It’s supply and demand.

[paxys]

It's less about supply and demand, more about how shitty a deal your local government signed with cable providers.

[rayiner]

It doesn’t matter how shitty the deal is because exclusivity arrangements are illegal. But that doesn’t mean anyone actually wants to serve an area.

Baltimore has a non-exclusive arrangement with Comcast. But, as of 2016 when they were trying to get Google Fiber, literally no company had ever asked to come in and compete. It’s not worth it. Baltimore requires wiring up the whole city. A third of the city lives at or under the poverty line—it simply makes no business sense to build a fiber network that covers all of Baltimore.

That’s the basic constraint. Municipal politics makes it impossible to build a network just in the neighborhoods where people would sign up. There is a reason Google Fiber took its “fiber hoods” approach to cities in red states like Missouri and Kansas. At the same time, it makes no business sense for providers to foot the bill to wire up those poor areas, and the municipality doesn’t want to spend the money to do it.

[curryst]

> At the same time, it makes no business sense for providers to foot the bill to wire up those poor areas, and the municipality doesn’t want to spend the money to do it.

On the other hand, college neighborhoods are largely not wealthy and was one of the first places in my city to get fiber. I think it's because they tend to have a much higher density (e.g. a 2 story house likely houses 2 households) and I would guess are more likely to pay for faster and/or more stable internet.

[llampx]

Based on how telcos have been acting, I think they just wish everyone would pay $100 for 512k down and 64k up forever, while they get and keep government subsidies for broadband initiatives that never get rolled out.

[rayiner]

I'm not even in a big city, just a solidly middle class red exurban county that makes it cheap to build infrastructure. We didn't even have public sewer and water in my neighborhood until 2015.

[bearjaws]

Living in a downtown area is pretty much guaranteed 1gbps fiber, outside of that is almost certainly garbage (cable/dsl/satellite) unless your neighborhood was built recently.

[BitwiseFool]

My congressional district has a Comcast call center located in it. So my representative bends over backwards to support Comcast because they 'provide so many jobs' in the area. It's pitiful.

[soulofmischief]

"They provide jobs" is often a euphemism for "they give me money".

[rayiner]

No, it really means "they provide jobs." I encountered this dealing with environmental issues (on the public interest side). Exelon (the power company) doesn't need to donate money to candidates (which is illegal anyway). Having a big source of jobs in a particular district is plenty of leverage.

[MereInterest]

> doesn't need to donate money to candidates (which is illegal anyway)

While it is true that the direct donation of money is illegal, the running of political ads for or against a candidate is legal in the US, no matter how much is spent. I don't see any moral difference between "I will give you $100k to stop this regulation." and "If you stop this regulation, I will donate $100k to a PAC that supports your reelection." Both are, in my opinion, complete bribery and abuse of an office, but the latter is completely legal.

[Dirlewanger]

Yup. A bit offtopic, but these kinds of legislative plays are why something like the military-industrial complex is so hard to break.

Yeah, it'd be great to shut down that UTC plant that subsists entirely on defense contracts, but it's been in the community for 50 years and provides thousands of jobs. Good luck running for that district on a platform of wanting to kill local jobs.

[polygotdomain]

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

[missedthecue]

More like, "If I do anything that hurts them, the thousands of employees in my district vote against me next November"

[suchire]

Geographic monopolies. Most households have only one broadband provider they can choose, with satellite or DSL as the only other fallback

[pirate787]

They are political monopolies, not geographic. Congress created a telephony and cable video regulatory regime based on monopolies to subsidize the buildout of those technologies. Congress has only halfheartedly moved away from this system because cable and telecom are the largest political donor groups. Some states have made progress moving to more competitive models but for the most part the system is a rats nest of federal, state, and local regulations designed to block competition.

[rayiner]

This is an area where the cynical conventional wisdom just doesn't hold up to actual facts. Congress made it illegal for localities to grant monopolies back in 1992. Many municipalities are trying to get more competition, not block it. But they insist on imposing public interest obligations that make it unfeasible to build competing systems.

Baltimore, for example, tried to get Google Fiber several years ago, and actively solicited competitors to Comcast: https://www.wypr.org/post/why-comcast-one-and-only-cable-and...

> “We’ve, in fact, asked other cable operators if they’re interested in coming into the city and, so far, nobody else is,” says Minda Goldberg, a chief solicitor in the city’s Law Department.

> She was explaining things to Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke during a hearing on Sept. 22 on the renewal of Comcast’s 12-year-old franchise agreement. Clarke had asked if the agreement was an exclusive one with Comcast.

> Franchise agreements between a local government and cable operator are non-exclusive. That means anyone with the money can operate in Baltimore. And under federal regulations, the agreements apply only to cable television service.

The reason Comcast is a monopoly in Baltimore isn't "political donations." It's because the city insists that any competitor must build out to the whole city--which means running fiber to vast swaths of the city where people are too poor to pay what it would cost to recoup the investment. That, in turn, would force the company to recoup that investment from paying customers, which would drive up prices compared to the cable that's already in the ground.

[bilegeek]

> which means running fiber to vast swaths of the city where people are too poor

Imagine the sad state of affairs if they didn't have government programs for these same problems with electricity and phone lines in the 30's through the 60's. Not just in relatively dense city areas, but even rural areas.

There were plenty of things wrong with Ma Bell, but having short-term profit rule all else is just one more systemic issue that keeps poor areas poor.

Sadly, I doubt this will ever get better; the system is too entrenched, and can protect it's interests better than any other human system in the past, making it nigh-impossible to topple.

[rayiner]

Reminiscing back to electrification in the 1930s overlooks a larger problem: cost disease. The US couldn’t afford to build any of the infrastructure we built back then. NYC can barely afford maintain its subway. Just extending the existing 120-mile long network by less than 10% will take longer than it took to build the whole to work in the first place.

People perceive it as a political problem, and in a sense it is, but they’re viewing it too narrowly. The US has enormous trouble building all sorts of infrastructure that other developed countries build relatively cheaply.

[bilegeek]

I would argue that in itself is also a political problem. Either you play with monopolies that drag things out and milk you for all your worth, or you play with local municipalities that have a byzantine rule set and politicians who love lobster dinners, or deal with a federal government that is influenced by the individuals and companies who want their pound of flesh, or...

And even without corruption, in a fair world: you have to not damage property, have safe practices, and pay your workers well. While I'm in favor, doing any of that balloons costs.

The solution - to have an efficient, fair, non-corrupt system - is simply not possible today, and likely never will be. Unless you are already a monopoly that can do whatever you please and abuse whoever you want, building infrastructure will forever be very expensive.

[lotsofpulp]

>This is an area where the cynical conventional wisdom just doesn't hold up to actual facts. Congress made it illegal for localities to grant monopolies back in 1992.

Apparently, it did not stop states from granting monopolies:

https://ilsr.org/preemption-detente-municipal-broadband-netw...

[JumpCrisscross]

> Congress has only halfheartedly moved away from this system because cable and telecom are the largest political donor groups

The benefit telcos provide Congress are in letting them target employment and benefits. There are few other industries where a Congressperson can reliably create X jobs and headline benefits for their district, specifically and tangibly. That, much more than campaign contributions, explains their clout.

(People tend to vastly over-estimate the value of campaign contributions. They're lifeblood to challengers. But for incumbents, they largely have value in not going to challengers than as a direct benefit.)

[lotsofpulp]

What employment? It takes the same number of people to operate wired infrastructure regardless of who owns it. No cable company or telco company has moved jobs or retained jobs in an area as a bargaining chip.

[JumpCrisscross]

> What employment?

Building out new capacity as well as upgrading and maintaining existing capacity involves hiring and buying locally. By practical requirement. Often, too, by contractual obligation.

[lotsofpulp]

The incumbents are not building out new capacity or upgrading, which is why the whole conversation is happening. They're going to maintain regardless of what the politician does.

[toast0]

Electrical, telephone, and cable tv wiring actually have a huge first mover advantage.

Whoever wired the thing first gets most of the customers and can pay for the build out. If you overbuild a roughly equivalent network, you're unlikely to get a lot of customers and you're unlikely to be able to pay for your buildout.

It doesn't matter if you have an exclusive franchise agreement once your network is built; the business realities provide exclusivity.

[topspin]

> Is it big business lobbying politicians to prevent them from having to compete?

Correct. The politicians that US citizens habitually elect are in the pocket of telecom companies. These politicians have not elevated Internet service in the US to the level of, for example, telephone service which, as a result of government policy established by now long dead politicians, is available almost anywhere someone would care to live in the US. This allows telecom companies to cherry pick lucrative areas for Internet service and ignore everything else. The result is that both rural and poor urban areas have poor or no Internet service while suburbs and dense metropolitan areas have high performance network services.

One might assume that US citizens are fabulously stupid for continuing to elect such politicians. That's the easy answer, frequently offered, and like most easy answers it misses a great deal. There are political undercurrents in the US that create the alignments of power that explain our outcomes. Unfortunately it isn't possible to candidly discuss these currents in forums such as this without igniting flame wars, so I'll end here.

[theandrewbailey]

> How is America behind on this? Everything is hosted there and cached there.

The ISPs and networks that serve datacenters do not serve apartments and houses.

[hanniabu]

> How is America behind on this?

We don't invest in the future, only immediate profits. Look at any other infrastructure....subways, roads, water, electrical, government systems, education, recycling, etc. They're all crumbling.

[missedthecue]

Subways, roads, water, electrical, government systems, education, and recycling are generally government run. "Immediate profits" isn't the excuse, because that isn't part of the equation. It's the fundamental inefficiency of government.

If your description was accurate, Ford would still be trying to sell their Model T rather than continuously investing in the future at a cost of today's profit. Obviously, this hasn't happened.

[hanniabu]

They're "government run" in the sense that the government hires out contractors and there's horrible oversight and incentive to create conditions where you receive more work.

For example, with education we keep expanding funding for private schools (for profit) over public schools. With subways in NYC we give out absurd amounts of cash to MTA to run it and just hope they're being honest, but costs keep increasing and there's very little to be shown for it. With government systems we could invest in great infrastructure, but why invest in a long term solution that decreases maintenance when you can be charged ridiculous amounts by the only contractor that knows the frankenstein codebase that they purposely developed to be unmanageable.

[betterunix2]

I am an American with symmetric gigabit service (actually ~900mbps down, ~880 mbps up) with no caps and I pay less than $100/month. Of course, that is because I live in a huge urban area where ISPs actually compete with each other and do not have any local monopolies on service. The problem in America is that there are vast geographic areas where millions of people have no real choice in broadband service, and ISPs let their networks languish in those areas.

[guenthert]

Funny that the rich only ever have rich friends. Who can really afford $1200/a for ..., well, what exactly? One can make the case today, that access to the Internet is essential (although I'm not quite convinced that this needs to be from home. An account at school or a public library would suffice methinks), but broadband? with bitrates even exceeding those needed for high definition video streams? C'mon.

[kube-system]

I am also in the US and my connection is 10x faster than yours and 30% cheaper.

Half of the senators listed in this article represent states with population densities lower than any South African province other than Northern Cape. Colorado's density is 19.9/km2. Maine is 16.9/km2

Many of the servers which you connect to in the US are in the Northeast megalopolis, which is an area with a density of 359.6/km2

[mlcruz]

Here in Brazil i pay something around 30usd(170 BRL) for 200/200 + cellphone with no caps.

Local ISPs are great for competition.