Why There Are So Few ISP Start-Ups In the U.S. 223
An anonymous reader writes "Despite whispers of growing dissatisfaction among consumers, there are still very few ISP start-ups popping up in communities all over the U.S. There are two main reasons for this: up-front costs and legal obstacles. The first reason discourages anyone who doesn't have Google's investors or the local government financially supporting them from even getting a toe in the business. 'Financial analysts last year estimated that Google had to spend $84 million to build a fiber network that passed 149,000 homes in Kansas City, with the cost per home at $500 to $674.' The second reason will keep any new start-up defending itself in court against frivolous lawsuits incumbent ISP providers have been known to file to bleed the newcomers dry in legal fees. There are also ISP lobbyists working to pass laws that prevent local governments from either entering the ISP market themselves or partnering with private companies to provide ISP alternatives. Given these set-backs and growing dissatisfaction with the status quo, one has to wonder how long before the U.S. recognizes the internet as a utility and passes laws and regulations accordingly."
Ah, Crony-Capitalism! (Score:5, Interesting)
Where government creates regulations and laws to favor "connected" businesses and interests. That's how the established ISPs have come to have so much power.
."..one has to wonder how long before the U.S. recognizes the internet as a utility and passes laws and regulations accordingly."
Now the author of TFS thinks *more* laws & regulations from the *same* crooks that have intentionally worked long and hard to *create* this situation are suddenly going to help!?
If there's enough crap stirred up to occupy the news cycle for more than a day or two, they'll do what they always do. Put together some Bill with a great-sounding name and at a quick glance looks good, but there will be sub-clauses and sub-paragraphs buried deep in the weeds of the Bill that actually make things *worse*.
Hmm, on second thought, where did I put that property title to that bridge? I may have found a prospect!
Strat
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Nice in theory, but companies have a well-established playbook for getting around anti-monopoly rules. Vertical integration, so that any new business that isn't vertically integrated is immediately at a huge competitive disadvantage. Various forms of vendor lock-in making it inconvenient for people to switch to another provider. Multiple "competing" companies owned by the same parent company.
It is nice in both theory and practice, if enforced.
Just look at EU, it isn't like the large companies doesn't already try to work around the rules and regulations. The solution is to say "I don't give a shit about you trying to avoid the laws. Here, have another fine until you have fixed the problem."
This doesn't happen in the US because the government is working for the large companies and have no intention of fixing the problems.
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I live in the EU (UK) and I don't see things working any better here.
The UK energy market is dominated by a small number of highly vertically-integrated suppliers (the same company generates, wholesales, distributes, and retails), who pretty much have a license to print money - they don't really compete with each other, one of them raises prices, and a few months later the rest al follow suit. Apart from some vigorous hand-waving, the regulator can't do jack about it. Sure, governments keep threatening to d
Re:Ah, Crony-Capitalism! (Score:4, Informative)
" Virgin (the only cable provider in the UK)"
Because they acquired all their competitors. There used to be more, Virgin bought them all up.
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So the market works! (sarcasm)
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The energy solution is fairly straightforward: focus on diverse sources of energy at the local scale. Electricity, natural gas, solar, wind, and in a pinch diesel can all be used for the same purpose, and you can "load balance" between them.
Unfortunately, at the residential ISP level it is much more cost conscious. You can easily have a land-line solution and mobile, or even multiple mobile solutions, but it is much like using the diesel as a backup for home electricity-- good in a pinch, but expensive. H
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Nice in theory, but companies have a well-established playbook for getting around anti-monopoly rules. Vertical integration, so that any new business that isn't vertically integrated is immediately at a huge competitive disadvantage. Various forms of vendor lock-in making it inconvenient for people to switch to another provider. Multiple "competing" companies owned by the same parent company.
Wrong. They don't need all that, it's just for show. All they really need is the one tried-and-true technique known as "Campaign Contributions." Microsoft learned that lesson when they paid no attention to Washington politics at all. Now they spend more on lobbying than pretty much any other company, and the Washington bureaucrats let them do whatever they want.
There are 1000's (Score:2)
There are 1000's of ISP's in the United States. WISPA [batchgeo.com] alone has a huge number of members, and those are only ISP's offering wireless.
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Re:There are 1000's (Score:4, Insightful)
My small city of around 200K just had one big wireless player (who also happened to be the cable company) announce they are leaving the market (and selling the spectrum licenses to one of the big guys) and the other three I know of buy their bandwidth from.. well, that same cable company and/or the local telephone company. There's no other place to ultimately buy bandwidth: there are three companies that transport and transit: the big regional telephone company, the local cable company, and Facebook. Everybody else is buying and selling Internet from the big guys.
I can't talk about the health of the small wireless ISPs here, but if you sit down and do the math, they are likely just barely making a profit. This may be why the local cable company has exited the wireless ISP market. (I live in an area with a small urban center surrounded by miles of farms and ranches, the cable company's strategy was to use the wireless to extend their range to these rural subscribers and infill in the few areas their cable network didn't cover). And this small cable company had the first LTE network on in the state, so they had a hell of a head start.
That's pretty much the picture in most places: the little guys are very little and increasingly getting smaller, and the big guys are only getting bigger.
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Address exhaustion (Score:5, Interesting)
Address exhaustion means all new entrants are locked out anyway. To become a major US ISP you would need to control several /8s worth of IPv4 address space. There is no longer enough unallocated space to grant that to a new company. So the only way, regardless of other considerations, to become a big ISP is to buy an existing big ISP.
The same is true in Europe. You cannot build a new European ISP, because you would need a sizeable network allocation and they're all gone. As a new entrant you would receive roughly the address space needed to run your data centre, leaving nothing for customers. And that's it, forever. Could you buy what you need on the "open" market? Sure, buy from your competitors at a price they specify, that sounds like it would definitely work...
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Address exhaustion means all new entrants are locked out anyway. To become a major US ISP you would need to control several /8s worth of IPv4 address space. There is no longer enough unallocated space to grant that to a new company. So the only way, regardless of other considerations, to become a big ISP is to buy an existing big ISP.
As long as you don't hide it from your customers I don't see a problem with providing IPv6 addresses to your customers and perform NAT for accessing IPv4 hosts.
When you are open about it you give the customer a choice. Either to go with your service with its limitations or with the crappy service of one of the other players.
Customers who wants to run an IPv4 capable server at home might not be able to enjoy your alternative but if the other services sucks then might opt for renting some server space elsewhe
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> Address exhaustion
I stopped reading after that part
Different views on a free market (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Different views on a free market (Score:5, Insightful)
Free Market != unregulated market. In fact an unregulated market often becomes a captured market, e.g. monopolies. Too bad most people confuse that.
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The internet is full of standards... and really, while some companies like to create this lock in situation, if there are enough companies it is not in the collective corporate interest to have such differing standards.
Look at the computer industry. Are those standards mandated by the government? Nope. And yet they are maintained... why? Because it creates a mutual habitate for everyone to design and build upon.
Will you get the occasional troll like apple or sony etc that will come up with their own standar
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My concern is that the standards stifle innovation.
How do you solve that problem?
If you can find a way to manage that issue short of "oh the politicians will update the standards as needed" then I might get behind it. But so far that's how most standards work.
And no better is "the unelected bureaucrats will manage it". Actually, its a lot worse. Remember how teh FAA recently said it was okay to have electronics on an airplane? Standards.
Those the sorts of standards I want to avoid.
Come up with a way for the
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No. Having standards is actually a precondition for competition. Your product can only compete with another product if there is any base for comparision. And that base is called a standard. There are governmentally mandated standards, and there are industry standards, but they are standards nonetheless. If you want to know how horrible a
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Cellular providers aren't in the equipment and RF technology business. All you'll end up with are incompatible variations on the same standard which leads to lock-in and more expensive handset prices. Any opportunity to "innovate" on technology confronts the need to have equipment supporting this innovation and cheap handsets from popular makers to support it.
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This immediatly spurred innovation and we now have much better 4G coverage, with some other providers opting for WiMax.
Were these technologies legally forbidden from being deployed? If so, the old regulations certainly were holding back the new technologies, but it doesn't mean that enforcing standards is always a bad idea. Rather, it means you should keep your laws up to date.
maybe the internet should be put in space (Score:2)
that would make ALL ISPs obsolete
Re:maybe the internet should be put in space (Score:4, Insightful)
with dozens of satellites in orbit and then no ISP subscription needed, FREE internets for everybody with an internet capable device, smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop, etc...
that would make ALL ISPs obsolete
Who pays for the launches, the satellites and the constant adjustments needed to keep them in proper orbits, the ground stations, and the staff needed to run everything? Those are hardly free.
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Yeah, if the FCC let us we do have the technology to build a terrestrial mesh network using various wireless tech like point-to-point microwave, short-wave, across a deregulated (license free) sections of spectrum in UHF, FM, 5GHz to 2GHz, and use info-hashes as resource names so that the store and forward system automatically deduplicates data so that your resources will pull from one or two low latency hops away at your neighbor's place instead of coming all the way from the source each time. Essentially
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At $2Billion or so per launch for the satellite and the launch it gets real expensive real quick. And if you put them in geostationary orbit you can count on ping times counted in the seconds. We're not going to be getting reliable internet from satellites any time soon.
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You people are so ignorant... (Score:5, Interesting)
All these idiot posts about how its the market that is constraining ISP development.
Never mind that it is a heavily regulated industry that is very hard to launch on a small scale despite logistically being very easy.
What drives the costs up are the pole fees. They're way too high.
Sell the poles to a co-op. And then let that co-op spread the cost of maintaining the poles around its members.
This should not be under the control of the cities. They just see it as a revenue making opportunity. And that attitude keeps the cost of using the poles high.
Sell it to a co-op. Then we can all use the poles/pipeline for anything.
You could have tiny mom and pop ISPs. That would be in everyone's interest except for the big telecoms.
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You will never convince local governments to give up such a lucrative revenue source.
Re:You people are so ignorant... (Score:5, Interesting)
And that's fine. But at least recognize what the problem is instead of hairing off in a dozen retarded directions that have NOTHING to do with the problem.
Then if people ACTUALLY care they can have an ACTUAL discussion about the ACTUAL problem.
It doesn't stop at ISPs. Its a big deal with power companies as well. Take your monthly power bill. Do you know that a big chunk of that is a connection fee? Same deal as with the ISPs. Lets say you've got a big solar array on the top your house and you actually don't use any net power. Guess what... Local utility still wants a connection fee. And that connection fee is set by the cities and counties. Not by what it actually costs but by what they change YOU.
All of this needs to get sold to a series of non-profit co-ops. They need to not turn into huge organizations or they'll get corrupt. Keep them small and problems will be local problems and corrupt leadership will be replacable.
Let it get huge and you'll get some national political cartel in charge of it all and they'll just rape it like its already being raped.
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All of this needs to get sold to a series of non-profit co-ops. They need to not turn into huge organizations or they'll get corrupt. Keep them small and problems will be local problems and corrupt leadership will be replacable.
Let it get huge and you'll get some national political cartel in charge of it all and they'll just rape it like its already being raped.
The same can be said of cities. Cut off water, power, food, roads to a big city and it can not sustain itself. Smaller decentralized developments are harder to force under your thumb, that's why off the grid communities and over productive farmers are frequently harassed by the feds.
Re:Meanwhile in other countries (Score:5, Informative)
Being regulated doesn't mean being efficient or not being corrupt.
Look at the mexican telephone company.
Its a state monopoly... ever seen a mexican telephone bill?
Sorry, sport... its a zero cost operation. Its a tax/revenue scheme for local governments to get a little extra tax money through a service fee.
You see it in phone bills as well.
Ever tried to take your phone bill as low as you could go? Ever seen what portion of the bill that is left is taxes?
I set up a phone not long ago that was I shit you not 80 percent taxes. The phone company operated on 20 percent of what I was paying. 80 percent went to the government.
The government just needs to be taken out of these things. They want money? Remove the crap service taxes and have the stones to raise the actual taxes.
The point of all these little nickle and dime taxes is to hide the real tax rate. You have one big tax that is about as big as you can get away with... and then you have a thousand little taxes that eat away at the edges. And then you have taxes at different levels of the supply chain so that by the time someone goes to buy something they don't realize that half the price of whatever they're buying is just people up the supply chain passing the taxes down.
That's the game.
Its all predicated on the assumption that the people are stupid, unaware, incurious, gullible, and moronically trusting. Is that redundant? Only in the way that three exclamation marks are redundant and yet emphasize the point just that much more.
Internet as a utility (including poles) (Score:3)
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The government shouldn't run any utility.
Beyond anything else its a threat to our very freedoms.
I don't want the government in control of water, power, food, or the internet.
All of that is just leverage. Something they can put over you to make you comply.
You have rights? Where does it say they have to give you water or road access or electrical power etc? It doesn't... which means if you don't play ball they can cut those things off and you have no legal redress.
Its how the federal government keeps getting
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Relax, they're talking about letting someone run it and policing their behaviour. Just like Ontario Hydro, which misbehaved a few years back and got broken up into parts, with more oversight applied. We're about to have a provincial election where the main question is around the government's involvement in Hydro planning, which demonstrates that the electors (us!) are providing proper oversight.
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That isn't the situation we have here... here the government owns the poles. And the government sets the rates to use those poles.
So if we were in control we wouldn't be in the situation we are... and yet this is the situation we're in... so we can't be in control.
The issue is that the poles are related fees are an obscure part of city and county policy that no one has the patience to pay attention to for more then two seconds. And as a result, they can put any fee they like on it for any reason they like a
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"Never mind that it is a heavily regulated industry that is very hard to launch on a small scale despite logistically being very easy."
This is not because of "regulations" it's because of anti competitive measures like "franchise fees" that are nothing more than mob style kick backs to local governments. Comcast loves them because it makes it near impossible for a new company to come in and compete with them in a market.
Get rid of the fraking kickback corruption at the city and county (and state) levels
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This is not because of "regulations" it's because of anti competitive measures like "franchise fees"
So, it's not because of "regulations", just government . . . I guess we'll call them "rules" . . . that require payment of fees in order to be allowed to compete?
If the government, at any level, has the regulatory power to say no to new competitors entering a business, the incumbents in that business will spend money at that level to convince them to say "no" to new competitors. It has happened every single time, with every single industry than any country every has ever allowed its government to regulate what businesses may enter a market. From medieval guilds to Elizabethan patents to taxi medallions to the FCC, it always happens.
And it happens every single time because regulation causes corruption. Public choice economics can no more be repealed by the ignorant but well-meaning than pi can be made to equal exactly 3.
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The franchise fees are regulation... so... we agree.
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Don't forget the US has a low population density. (And telling people to move to the City will only lead to a shotgun pointed at your head.)
We had a good run with the Dial-up ISP market. Because we worked over the Telephone line infrastructure that already existed. However to get the speeds we demand we need to go via Cable that is controlled by one company per area, or fiber which is owned by a particular company and isn't widely setup yet.
Part of the problem as you stated there is too much cost to spread
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Actually the places most likely to have multiple ISPs are rural areas... that is places where you'll find multiple cable companies laying their cable wire side by side to the same homes.
If logistically that works in a suburban area then it must in an urban area.
The logic on that is inescapable.
Which means it isn't logistics or economics that is holding it back.
And what is left when we remove logistics and economics?
Politics and law.
What you'll find is that the actual block is local ordinances that jack up c
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I am sure they are... but who do I blame for corruption?
The man that walks into the room with the suitcase full of money or the corrupt oath breaking son of a bitch that takes it?
I'm not stupid. I know that there is always going to be that guy walking in the room with a briefcase full of money. That guy is everywhere. The whole world over. Always has been and always will be.
You can't get rid of that guy. He's a force of nature.
But the guy that takes the money? That is controllable. Proven by the fact that t
Loser Pay Legislation (Score:3, Informative)
Loser-Pay Legislation would take care of the second one. Been saying it for years.
Eventually, those folks who oppose it simply because it seems too "conservative" for their politics are going to get their minds right.
The United States is the only major Western Democracy that doesn't follow the "british rule," where the winning party in a lawsuit is generally allowed to recover the costs of bringing or defending a suit.
Re:Loser Pay Legislation (Score:4, Interesting)
Except it makes it even easier to bully people in court.
I crash my car into your house, I then show up with 500 lawyers and sue you for 22.2 million dollars for building your house in my way. you are looking at $10 million if you lose, How about we settle out of court for $150,000 instead? you cave in because your lawyer states that I can bleed you dry in legal fees and you really should take the settlement.
It already happens today, but now I can financially MURDER you easier. What is needed is a LIMIT or CAP on legal fees that can be spent in a court case to 10% of the lowest income persons total income, so if AT&T sues you, they cant spend more than 10% of your income, thus keeping them from bleeding you dry.
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I can financially MURDER you easier. What is needed is a LIMIT or CAP on legal
I agree with this part. Yep, we need to kill all the lawyers.
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We already have a legal system where the person with the best-paid lawyers almost always wins, regardless of the merits, and now you want them to be able to recover the cost of those high-paid lawyers?
What you're saying makes sense if the courts provided some objective measure of justice, but that's not the case here - you're suggesting we double down on the corruption.
Stop dreaming. (Score:3)
As long as politicians are involved and their little brown unmarked envelopes are passed from the actual players to them and industrials can contribute whatever they like to their campaigns , as long as money buys the politicians freely you think that politicians will actually do something ?
Wake up. Politicians in the USA are owned by industry and rich contributors. The interest of the People ? they couldnt care less.
In the USA , it's a governemnt of the people by the corporations for the corporations.
Why? (Score:2)
Why are there no oil company start ups? .... why is that question on /. ?
Why are there no new generation nuclear power plant start ups?
Why why why
It is mainly the stupids question I have seen since ages.
What is a start up? A small company of 5 to 10 or if you have the money 20 people. How should 20 people manage to be an ISP ... with what backbone, what grid, what wires?
To become an ISP you need multiple of billions of money ... or new laws with access to existing wire infrastructure.
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Why are there no oil company start ups?
What makes you say this? Is it just because you don't notice them?
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To become an ISP in an area that requires underground utilities you need a good stash of money, as it will take at least two years from start of negotiations with the city to providing service to your first customer. Call this about $2,000/customer passed for bridge funding. You also need to be able to spread your investment out over ~10 years to make good use of resources.
That comes to about $2MM cash in order to serve your first 500 customers with 50% penetration, plus access to about $4-6MM in financin
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There may be a way (Score:4, Interesting)
Anti Competitive Regulation (Score:3)
US telco regulation does the opposite of what such regulation is supposed to do: promote competition, preserve consumer choice, reduce prices, and increase the quality of service. Monopolies granted by municipalities to cable operators, and the deregulation of the Baby Bells, do exactly the opposite-- they protect incumbents with entrenched positions and raise barriers to entry. It's a classic case of regulatory capture on multiple levels.
The idea of municipalities now wanting to run their own ISPs, because it's so clearly a job they should be and can be doing better than the private sector-- is now resulting in lobbying groups sponsoring legislation to make it illegal to do so in order to preserve the monopolies-- is surreal to the point of absurdity.
What about cable company saturation? (Score:2)
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Regulate last mile (Score:2)
The free market will yield low competition because providing the service is a strong technical monopoly, similar to electricity, gas and water. The author proposes we treat Internet like a basic utility but this is a bad idea: the municipal internet pipe will soon become outdated, the city council will reject any improvements because "it works good enough for most citizens", a private alternative will emerge and we are back at square one.
Instead of treating internet like a utility, the preferred solution in
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We also have utilities owed by members. Rural phone and electric providers, who serve areas for profit companies cannot due to lack of profitability.
Re:Regulate last mile (Score:4, Insightful)
But companies often float bonds insured by the taxpayer, massively reducing upgrade costs. Besides profitability is no guarantee of service.
Re:Regulate last mile (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a stupid comment.
They wont spend money because their profits are regulated? are you that stupid? Please explain the huge number of Windmills going up all over the place at $100,000 each. Plus all the backbone upgrades going in. Hell they recently upgraded the local COAL power plant to be a dual fuel Gas/Coal so they can run Natural gas but easily revert to coal if they need to.
Did you even do ANY googling before you made your horribly uninformed comment? Utilities are spending money on upgrades at a higher rate now than every before in history.
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But utilities are upgraded at a very slow pace because the govt regulates how much profit a utility company can make, putting brakes on innovation. With the internet, we want to replace/upgrade everything every 10 to 15 years and that is not possible if the internet is classified as a utility.
Utilities are fine for phone and electricity because they are mature technologies that don't change much year-to-year.
Not sure I agree with that. Lets look at the last 15 years of internet in the USA for a moment. That'd push us back to about 1999, yes? DSL and Cable are the emerging internet connection tech of this era, with 56k dialup being the norm.
Ok, so 56k modems are very sad in the present, but they still work. DSL and Cable are the dominate connections and fiber is emerging.
In 15 years. Now wait, you said we have to replace everything every 10-15 years, but we're not doing that. We're using the same crap that
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upgrading network would be stupid, rocking the boa (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no need to imagine what might happen, we've had regulated industries and we know how they work. An example you probably remember is long distance phone service. The government set the cost recovery rate at $0.40/minute USD1980 ($2 / minute in 2014 dollars).
If you want to ponder about similarly situated ISPs and their upgrade plans, imagine you are on the board. You have two choices:
a) Issue more stock to raise $80 million and risk your reputation attempting a difficult upgrade, the split get the
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Not arguing your point, but you must be using a wonky inflation index to get you from $0.40 to $2.
http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cp... [bls.gov]
Wrong year. $1.23 - $5.08 per minute (Score:2)
Indeed it was 1973-1974 that it was .40 ($2 / minute).
In 1980, the rate was $2.17 ($6.18 in today's money) for a five-minute call, or $1.23 / minute.
http://transition.fcc.gov/Bure... [fcc.gov]
In 1950, it was was just over $5 / minute, inflation adjusted.
Not really, again see the phone companies (Score:5, Insightful)
The simplest case is that they aren't required to upgrade. The slightly less simple case is that, like with phone service prior to 1984, regulators set upgrade targets based on information provided by the companies. In the first step, the second case is exactly like the first: a rational actor will blow smoke at regulators trying very hard to avoid significant upgrades (because further investment in upgrades by definition reduces their ROI in a defined-profit model).
When it becomes clear that some upgrade will be needed, the same calculations apply to the marginal cost of different upgrade options. The difference between a $10 million upgrade to the copper vs. a $80 million switch to fiber is $70 million, and far more risk. As above, the extra $70 million and extra risk is a bad thing for the company, so they should fight to only do the $10 million upgrade. In other words, choosing between a $10 million upgrade and a $80 million upgrade is exactly the same as choosing between no upgrade and a $70 million upgrade: a non-stupid company will spend as little as possible, and risk as little as possible, because either way the get the government-mandated profit. Look at the history of (minimal) AT&T service upgrades during the decades they were fully regulated.
Contrast this with removing the government mandated monopoly, in which case a $80 million upgrade will allow the ISP to offer service with 10 times the speed of their competition, resulting profits increasing by $180 million.
Further, consider these two sets of choices:
Compete.net has $80 million to spend on upgrades. They can either spend $80 million on fiber, or $65 million on fresh copper.
If they buy fresh copper, outages will be reduced, increasing profit by 2%. If they buy fiber, service will be WAY better, increasing profit by 50%. Acme should of course spend the money on fiber.
Regulated.net must spend $80 million on upgrades. They can either spend that $80 million buying fresh copper or spend it on fiber.If they buy fresh copper, profits are unaffected. If they buy fiber, profits are unaffected. If they buy $65M worth of copper from the CEO's bother-in-law for $80M, there's an extra $15M profit to the company run by the brother-in-law, to be shared with the family.
Regulated.net doesn't CARE that they've wasted millions of dollars by essentially giving it away to friends and relatives - their profit is the same either way. In Compete.net tried the same thing, shareholders would be in an uproar and their CEO would soon be sharing a jail cell with Bernie.
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We still need a mixed public/private solution - regulation to keep the playing field open, and then com
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There never was such a thing to begin with. It was a fiction created by plutocrats to give moral cover for avarice. "It's not me, it's just the market!"
Attempting to create a moral framework for greed is one of mankind's oldest hobbies.
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2nd world? stop coloring it so nice. It's a freaking 3rd world as far as internet goes. these companies in the US need to be forced to do what they were paid to do with the tax dollars they were given.
Comcast, Verizon, Time warner all were given BILLIONS in tax payer dollars to build out the last mile infrastructure to people homes and they did not do it. Congress needs to demand all the money back or force them at gunpoint (Give homeland security a honest job) to do what they were paid to do.
Already paid for (Score:4, Insightful)
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Parts of Eurasia have their act together. The US is largely a 2nd world country in terms of internet access and rates.
TFTFY. On behalf of those of us who live in "Asia" west of the Urals.
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[PedantMode=On]
The various "worlds" are political, not an economic delimitation.
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Come to think of it, that is a pretty apt analogy. The Government is the father, the corporations the son (for obvious reasons), and the Fed is the unholy ghost, because hardly anyone knows what it is or what it does.
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Come to think of it, that is a pretty apt analogy. The Government is the father, the corporations the son (for obvious reasons), and the Fed is the unholy ghost, because hardly anyone knows what it is or what it does.
So that makes Apple Corporation the Anti-Christ. I like it!
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Zhou's definition was predated by the GP's which developed in the 1950s. While Zhou's is the one that more closely resembles the modern world, it is not the one that people usually reference.
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I thought it was: 1st world = the West-- the US and its allies, 2nd world = USSR and its allies, 3rd world = non aligned-- all the nations that weren't interested and didn't want to take sides in the Cold War, and even resisted pressure to choose a side. Most of them also happened to be very poor, which reduced the interest of the 2 sides in them.
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No, all the NATO countries count as being "aligned" with the US and are therefore first-world too. Even a whole bunch of former-Warsaw Pact countries that joined in 1999/2004/2009 are now "first-world" instead of "second-world."
Re:For God's Sake, Internet is a LUXURY not a UTIL (Score:5, Insightful)
You could have said the same thing about telephone 100 years ago, too, and the same thing about electricity at around the same time.
It is increasingly the case where you are excluded from participating in some parts of modern society if you don't have a decent internet connection. For instance, you're not going to be doing any MOOC courses if you don't have an internet connection that's good enough for video. You're not going to be able to find things out as easier as other people if you don't have a decent internet connection, and you can find yourself denied of many opportunities. It's not all about looking at cat photos. The internet has become embedded enough in modern society that you are now often at a disadvantage if you live in the US and don't have it, so just like the telephone became a utility, internet should also become available on a similar basis.
Re:For God's Sake, Internet is a LUXURY not a UTIL (Score:5, Informative)
Except for banking. And filing some legal papers. Education. Weather reporting. Checking commodity reports, which is very important to farmers. Rapid shipping of design documents to job sites. Those are just a few I can think of.
Re:For God's Sake, Internet is a LUXURY not a UTIL (Score:4, Informative)
And compared to using the internet, every one of those alternatives is either more expensive, more time consuming, or both. As time goes on, the brick and mortar method will become 'depricated' as anyone still catering to that group will be less cost effective than their online-only counterparts. Obligatory car analogy: Once upon a time, people could get anywhere they needed to go via public transportation or by simply walking. Automobile travel enabled the 'big box retailers' model, and local businesses in small towns evaporated.
Same thing with cell phones: People once used a combination of pagers and pay phones. Now there's very few pay phones, so that model is no longer viable.
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Not sure why I am feeding a troll here, but your arguments are akin to "let them eat cake." Things that consume time for no real value are a tax; Internet service helps you avoid that tax so you can spend your time doing things that are economically, socially, or emotionally productive.
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Sounds great! Have fun!
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That's like saying the US didn't need railroads either. Before the Ttranscontinental, there were 3 basic ways to travel between the east and west coasts. 1) Overland. Time: almost 6 months at first, then down to 4 months as the trails improved. Might not make it if attacked by Indians, or you became ill with cholera, or you took a wrong turn and ended up lost and dying of thirst in a desert, or trapped and starving and frozen in a snowed shut mountain pass. 2) Take ship around the southern tip of Sout
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Corporate profits and GDP growth have a pretty strong dependency on productivity numbers. Over the last 20 years a majority of the rise in productivity was due to the massive network buildout for telecom and internet.
So nowadays the internet is inextricably linked to the economy as a whole. Akin to other vital components such as electricity...things that qualify as "utilities" because of their economic importance to our society. Try removing the internet and see what the effect is on your 401-k.
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Nobody NEEDS indoor plumbing; there is nothing happening in there that can't be accomplished elsewhere.
Re:yea no (Score:5, Informative)
Oh stuff a sock in it.
The cost for the infrastructural build out of basic telephone service, which is what the incumbent telcos are required to provide, was paid for decades ago and with significant taxpayer subsidies. None of the incumbents are required to provide universal internet service at all, let alone reasonably useful universal internet service, so your complaint is bull crap. Also, Comcast/Time Warner/Charter etc are not required to provide any level of universal service.
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Why would an ISP be required to provide any sort of phone service ?
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People should be more precise and say what they mean. An ISP and a telco aren't the same thing.
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The problem in the USA is vertical integration.
The cable to get your broadband Internet comes from the same company as the one that provides you with Internet which is also the same as the one that provides you with television.
Imagine if you could take Comcast and split it up into physical cable provider, television content provider and internet provider. No common ownership structure allowed upwards or downwards. Now the ISP company needs to buy access from the cable provider at a wholesale level that should be offered to all ISPs at the same rate.
If there aren't enough IPv4 addresses then just become an IPv6 ISP with an appropriate IPv4 - IPv6 gateway.
I kind of agree with this but there is a problem: The biggest competitive advantage most providers have is their physical network. If you remove that, we end up with a "race to the bottom" situation. That ends up with consolidation of players (since no one can gain a pricing advantage since they would all have essentially the same costs) and pretty much bring us back around to where we are now. At least for internet access. For content, it's who can get the best deals, which will go to the bigger companie
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"Force you through their own sites/devices" counts as vertical integration.
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There were thousands of independent ISPs once, they extincted themselves because they lacked the vision to work together and instead died one by one. I had a ringside seat.
They went extinct because the cost of building the infrastructure to provide the broadband internet access that consumers now demanded. It fell on king telecom to build that out. Even with the number of ISPs that you pull out of the air, I doubt they could collectively come up with the 100s of millions necessary to make this happen. Government helped the big boys make it happen and also created regulatory nightmares to ensure that the telecom industry is an oligarchy.