| > You are by far in the minority by having access to FIOS as well as another cable provider. Most consumers only have a single broadband provider (and if they have only one, it's almost certainly not FiOS). The point of the anecdote is to look at how far we've come in 20 years. We're in a very connected area, but we've still come a long way in 20 years. There's lot's of places that don't have FIOS now, but those folks also didn't have DSL in the late 1990's. The average U.S. connection, according to Akamai, is 10 mbps. That's a huge increase over what it was even 10 years ago. > The question isn't what people use today, given the resources they have available to them - it's what they would choose to pay for if they had access to a faster, more reliable network. The prevailing trend is a massive growth in demand for wireless broadband, with limited growth on the wired side. Unsurprisingly, that's where companies are investing their capital. > There is no way that you can convince me that consumers have more choice nowadays for cable than they did 15 years ago, or for mobile phone plans than they did 15 years ago. Competition has dramatically decreased in both markets. Consumers don't have more choices for cable or more choices for wireless, but I think they definitely have more choices for internet accounting for all the different ways of accessing the internet. In 2000, in the northern VA area, we had 256 kbps DSL run over Bell Atlantic's wires. There were multiple ISP's, but it was the same wires and same basic service. Today, we've got FIOS, four different LTE providers, DSL, and Cox cable, not to mention satellite. Not everyone has so many choices, but I think the folks that don't have many choices today had even fewer choices back in the day. > [2] I can't imagine Con Edison operating in NYC without the heavy regulation that is is subject to; I see no reason that ISPs should be any different. Con Edison is in a totally different sort of business. In the last 20 years, telecom and cable companies have gone from dial-up and analog cable to DSL, digital HFC cable networks, and in some cases fiber. What's happened to Con Edison's infrastructure? Nothing besides basic maintenance. People say that telecoms should be regulated like power or water companies, but totally ignore the fact that power and water companies are using the same infrastructure they were using 50 and sometimes 100 years ago. Growth in electricity demand has been stable if not decreasing for decades. Growth in internet bandwidth demand has been exponential. Heavy regulation of the sort that's appropriate for a power company is not appropriate for an industry where we expect private companies to invest billions a year in keeping up with new technologies. |
That's not true at all! Most people who had cable and/or DSL in the late 1990s/early 2000s don't have FIOS today!
> The average U.S. connection, according to Akamai, is 10 mbps. That's a huge increase over what it was even 10 years ago.
Yes, Comcast has spent lots of money in expanding access to new regions, since that's the only way they can acquire new customers. They don't care about customer retention (their customers have no other choices), so they don't need to do much (if anything) to improve service to existing customers. The stagnation you're talking about has already happened.
> Not everyone has so many choices, but I think the folks that don't have many choices today had even fewer choices back in the day.
In almost all of the towns near where I grew up, the choices available today are a strict subset of the choices available in the 2000s, except at massively increased prices[0].
> Heavy regulation of the sort that's appropriate for a power company is not appropriate for an industry where we expect private companies to invest billions a year in keeping up with new technologies.
All that says is that the exact mandates of the regulation would need to differ, which I would agree is true. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't be regulated as a utility at all.
As I said before, the stagnation you're talking about has already happened.
[0] Again, I'm not counting LTE as an option, because that's not viable as a primary means to access the Internet in 2014, and is unlikely to be so anytime soon.