[roenxi]

People worry about price dumping waaay out of proportion to how often it is a problem.

Usually when there is a deep-pocketed entity stomping out local competition they are using regulatory capture as their main tool (this is what Comcast seems to do) and the problem is competition has been made illegal.

In situations like this, my default assumption is that it is illegal to lay competing cables until proven otherwise. We had a similar situation of massive monopoly provider in Australia back in the early 2000s, the economics didn't stop new companies laying new cable to compete with the incumbents. That all died when the government launched a new national network though.

[justinclift]

That new national network ("the NBN") is so hit-or-miss that it's not funny.

My current connection in Brisbane is 1GbE download (incredibly fast for Australia), but only 50mbps upload. That 50mbps upload is the fastest commonly available speed in the whole country. Most ISP's don't offer anything faster than 20mbps. :(

Reliability isn't great either. Had an 8 hour (!) outage overnight about a month ago, then a ~2 hour outage last week. Both caused by NBN Co, rather than my ISP.

The concept of hosting anything actually useful or important from home infrastructure is just laughable when there are commonly multi-hour outages. It's just fucking stupid. :(

[rasz]

My favorite part of NBN was always data caps. Data caps on internal traffic thru fiberoptic backbone!

[justinclift]

Do data caps still exist with the NBN in recent years?

I somewhat remember them from years ago, before I moved overseas for a while.