[mrwizrd]

The practice of public companies appealing every single court ruling out of duty to their shareholders seems to have been taken to another level. Now they actively try to avoid paying to invest in their own infrastructure.

ISP's as common carriers and infrastructure providers willingly put themselves in a position that demands a level of altruism beyond your average private corporation - and that's really not asking for much. For many their primary goal is to enrich themselves to the detriment of building the best network for end users. This sort of wailing and thrashing from broadband providers really needs regulation, but competition and financials mean that it's always going to be in the interests of less scrupulous companies to make every attempt possible to enrich themselves or push costs elsewhere, even if that screws up what is quite a delicate balance of legislature, technology and public and private interests.

"So you're saying, governments want fast internet access for a productive, modern economy, but our anticompetitive practices and lack of investment have come back to bite us? Can't let shareholder dividends be affected by that, it's clearly Netflix/YouTube/whoever's fault for providing content consumers want!"

Make that statement enough times in front of enough uninformed/bought legislatures and sooner or later you'll start pushing slowly towards your goal.

Not to mention that this conveniently ignoring the fact that Netflix/YouTube and the likes provide caches colocated inside of ISP data centres as well as upstream [1] in an attempt to avoid the costs of peering. But nothing will ever be enough.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/why-y...

[gsatic]

You sound uninformed about how much a 5G rollout costs.

[armada651]

Then charge the customers more for a 5G subscription and if they don't want to pay that and are quite happy with their "slow" 4G connection, then that begs the question whether 5G is worth the investment at all.

Making content providers pay the ISPs doesn't help consumers at all. Because content providers will simply increase their prices to cover the extra fees, so consumers are either going to pay their ISP more directly through their internet subscription or indirectly through their content subscription.

This whole idea is just a way for ISPs to raise prices without actually sending their customers a higher bill. They'll simply let the content providers take the fall for it instead.

[lillecarl]

What's so incredibly expensive about the 5G rollout that wasn't the case for "3G/4G"? You replace/mount more radios, make sure you have backhaul to carry the traffic.

I have no idea what the radios cost, but one thing that's for sure is that networking gear isn't that expensive. I know a guy that runs a teeny IX where everyone gets a 100GB port, because it's not that expensive.

Once you start doing stateful packet introspection, that's when price goes through the roof.

[tennis_80]

5G masts cover a significantly smaller area than 4G, so you need a lot more to provide the same coverage.

[BenjiWiebe]

Not exactly. 5G also can use the same frequencies as 4G with a slightly better range.

You only need lots of towers if you want blazing fast speeds everywhere. Out in the country they won't be putting up towers every mile.

[lillecarl]

Once the 3G network is dead we can reuse that low-freq bands for 5G with similar range. You only use the high-freq high-bandwidth radios in populated areas.

https://youtu.be/0faCad2kKeg this is Wendover Productions explanation of cell service, there's an error regarding ultra high-freq when he means ultra low-freq, other than that it's a good explanation of how RF works.

An important bit here is that 3G is 16 combinations and 5G is 1000+, this is why it's important to deprecate old tech, we need to reuse frequencies.