In my small island community, I participated in a municipal committee whose mandate was to bring proper broadband to the island. Although two telecom duopolies already served the community, one of them had undersea fiber but zero fiber to the home (DSL remains the only option), whereas the other used a 670 Mbps wireless microwave link for backhaul and delivery via coaxial cable. And pricing? Insanely expensive for either terrible option.
Our little committee investigated all manner of options, including bringing municipal fiber across alongside a new undersea electricity cable that the power company was installing anyway. I spoke to the manager of that project and he said there was no real barrier to adding a few strands of fiber, since the undersea high voltage line already had space for it (for the power company’s own signaling).
Sadly, the municipality didn’t have any capital to invest a penny into that fiber, so one day, one of the municipal counselors just called up a friend who worked for a fiber laying company and asked them for a favor: put out a press release saying that they were “investigating” laying an undersea fiber to power a municipal fiber network on the little island.
A few weeks later, the cable monopoly engaged a cable ship and began laying their own fiber. Competition works, folks. Even if you have to fake it.
No it doesn't, and you just proved it. You managed it because you could fake you had leverage. But without that you were slaves of theses companies, and that's the general rule.
Sometimes I wonder if whoever writes these comments understands the words their using.
> No it doesn't, and you just proved it
What exactly did they prove? You didn't substantiate or explain this at all. Leverage would be relevant if they were negotiating a deal. They weren't. The company laid down fibre because of what they saw as a potential competitor (municipal fibre). The municipality didn't use the threat of fibre to come to terms with the monopolistic company. That would've been leverage. But they didn't, so it wasn't leverage. The municipality created the appearance of competition and the monopoly behaved accordingly as if there were a potential competitor.
Sometimes commenters all over the internet write like this because they just got incredibly jealous after reading the parent post. I've been thinking more and more about how most posts are jealous or depressed outtakes against the world, system, or other person. This fundamental human behavior won't change, and is as reflexive as a monopolistic company reacting to a press release, proving the parent correct despite their scathing response of the child.
It's worth noting that 4chan and Reddit also live here because both sites are insufferable.
> ...one day, one of the municipal counselors just called up a friend who worked for a fiber laying company and asked them for a favor: put out a press release saying that they were “investigating” laying an undersea fiber to power a municipal fiber network on the little island.
They called in a favor that put pressure on the company from public expectations.
Yes. What do you think happens in a competitive marketplace? Sony heard about Nintendo partnering up with Philips for the SNES CD expansion, so Sony made their own console. That's literally competition.
The details of how the "public pressure" came to be don't matter, because the monopoly didn't know about that. All they knew was there was a potential competitor, so they behaved according to that information. That's how it works.
Frankly, I think you're trying to poke holes in a straightforward concept. And now you've dug your heels in and you're trying to justify it. But... let's ignore opinions and interpretations...
> Sony heard about Nintendo partnering up with Philips for the SNES CD expansion, so Sony made their own console
This is completely inaccurate in every way possible. You even have the order of events backwards (Nintendo and Sony partnered first). There is in no way in which even the most charitable interpretation of this statement could bear out. Just about the only correct part is that you have some (but not all!) of the relevant parties involved.
If you're wrong about such a well documented, cut and dry matter of historical record, then what else are you wrong about? :)
This. Businesses aren't usually “competiting” in the way microeconomics think they do.
Every business owner knows that a race to the bottom with other businesses in their market is going to ruin each other's life and they don't usually engage in this kind of practice (with the notable exception of people with lots of capital to wipe the competition out of the market then do a rug pull after the fact).
The goal of a business is never to capture their competitors market share, it's to make a decent profit at the end of the year so that their shareholders (or themselves, depending on the size and ownership structure) get the revenue they expect.
This is a perfect example of competition in microeconomics. If you've only been exposed to an introductory economics, you've missed out on a lot.
This type of situation sounds like an amalgamation of a few exam questions from my first year of an econ PhD. "Cheap talk in a Bertrand market with entry costs and capacity constraints" or something. No I haven't worked it out but my intuition is that it would predict exactly what was observed: the threat of a new entrant with enough capacity risks loosing your entire business so you invest to expand your capacity to prevent that entry.
I'm glad you got your broadband but what happened sounds much more like American politics than ordinary market processes. And in this political environment, corporations can engage in a variety of other tactics than placating a squeaky wheel - they can outlaw competition, buy off officials, pay for shrill media hit pieces and so-forth.
It's clearly competition. The incumbent company saw a potential competitor and acted upon it. That's literally what happens when there's competition. It doesn't matter that the competitor didn't actually exist if the incumbent behaved as if it did exist.
I'm never sure what the point of comments like this is. "It seems incorrect". But it isn't. You just don't want to admit that competition is good and necessary.
No, it's called market manipulation. OP's action caused spending at the expense of the companies. Not going to "won't someone think of the shareholders", but calling competition is misleading
Local municipality power companies put fiber in the ground whenever they put power. The result is fiber almost everywhere at very low cost. Even along rail and major roads.
The issue isn’t the splitting. There is no fiber to even split in most places. A lot of places in America had their “network” infra built 50-100 years ago on copper and no one wants to pay to basically rebuild all of it.
I happen to live in an area where there are still above ground utilities.
We got >5 gig fiber fast. We have 700Mbps 5G. I literally watched them string the fiber on the poles.
It’s still not shared, but it’s fast because it’s new. Shared would be preferred, but you need destroy + “new” first, and most people are fine with what copper gives them. Shared may even be cheaper but most people don’t think we need to rebuild anything.
In Canada our internet became much faster for cheaper with better customer support when the government allowed competition from smaller players. Telecom also got better when they allowed a foreign competitor to compete against the government mandated oligopoly. But the market is still heavily regulated in a way that benefits the existing monopolies.
I think Canada is a great example of how not to do it, despite some price decreases in recent years. We seem to have (near) the worst of all worlds: huge geography, little competition, and government regulation that props up the oligopoly without driving prices down like Europe. Mobile data is even worse.
I have a gentle rule, which is when discussing (geo)politics with friends, we should try not to use Switzerland as an example. It's just too good, too rational, too sensible, too well run, in myriad ways that other countries should be able to emulate, but consistently and constantly don't.
And yet, living in Switzerland after the UK involved one after another discovery of how well-ordered and -run a country could be. And then moving to Germany was like stepping back even further behind my memories of the UK.
I'm sure you could find examples of countries that do specific things as well as Switzerland; but I'm not aware of many places that do almost everything so excellently. (Maybe Japan, in many respects, but I lack sufficient direct experience to adequately judge.)
Well and a little bit of research, tells me it’s far from universal across Switzerland. This article is so provable false in many of its premises it’s worthless - see my other comment.
I mean if anyone wants to use the USA as an example there's lots of cases where municipalities have utilities provided.
I used to live in Palo Alto municipality (socialist paradise where power, internet, gas were all municipality provided) and moved 1 mile away into San Mateo county where power was provided by PG&E (monopoly hell).
What is this supposed to imply? us states are also a poor representation of humanity. This matters a great deal: switzerland is notoriously ethnically homogenous and unable to get along with anyone. Life on easy mode!
Because it isn't a free market in the USA. And those that regulate it don't seem to care. Or maybe it is those that have been granted a monopoly do everything they can to retain said monopoly.
Things would be different if we actually had a free market
Most markets inherently turn non-free when left unsupervised. That's the insight that folks like Keynes came to (as does any honest, informed observer with two or more functioning brain cells). That's why anti-trust and competition-preserving regulators and laws are essential. Without them, a very few powerful players form [0] cartels and/or tri/du/monopolies and enrich themselves vastly out of proportion with the value that they provide to their customers.
There won’t be anti-trust as long as elections can be bought and there’s a revolving door between regulators and industry. We need a firewall to separate capital and state.
Free market enthusiasts' reasoning is literary the same as Communists': when their grand theory fails to deliver its grandiose promises, it's nver because their believes where nonsensical, but because “it isn't real Communism/free market”.
Communist regimes, especially the USSR, had nearly unlimited power to impose exactly the policies that supposedly would help.
Open societies, in contrast, must balance many competing interests and voting factions, meaning that free market supporters have limited power to enact their preferred policies, meaning they rarely can be implemented in a “pure” form.
That’s a nice story. In reality the “open society” is open to takeover by international finance capital. It’s like running a server with “admin”:”password” SSH credentials — a security vulnerability that cedes control to outsiders. Imagine China and Iran allowing Larry Ellison to own their media, or allowing Larry Fink to control a big chunk of their markets, or allowing George Soros to manipulate their currency and operate NGOs within their borders. That would be plainly idiotic and suicidal.
“Open society!” coos the fox to the henhouse. LOL, no thanks!
I wish this kind of perspective (international comparison) could be applied to several areas of the USA economy: tax compliance, campaign finance, and banking regulation. Good work, OP.
In Charlotte NC, I have 3 choices of internet providers, two of them fiber.
As you are doing with this post, "broaden the base." The vast majority of voters do not understand the issues here. That is your biggest obstacle.
My POV would call this regulatory failure vs free market lie. That way, the enemy is a smaller target.
Path to progress is to get a friendly state (WY, RI, TX) to pass the legislation. Then shop that around among activists in other states.
If people knew they were only getting 1/25 of a shared product, that would get political hackles up.
Thanks for taking the time to think this through and make your argument.
Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 in the US which demanded network unbundling, splitting up the fiber/connections versus the internet service, demanding wholesale rate access to infrastructure. It was good.
Verizon also sued, and said, sure, there's laws for unbundling. But, we really don't like them. We aren't going to deploy fiber if we have to share. And the court once again said, oh, yeah, well, that's fine, we'll grant that: we'll strike down congress's law because "innovation" sounds better.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/1...
It's just so so so much corruption, so much meddling from the court to undo everything good congress worked so hard to make happen, that was such an essential baseline to allow competition. I remain very very angry about this all. This was such a sad decade of losing so much goodness, such competition. These damn cartels! The courts that keep giving them everything they want! Bah!!
I'm in Zurich and I have 1Gb. My provider is offering higher for no additional cost - I'd have to put in a new modem/fiber-to-Ethernet adapter. However my home network is cat-5e and my switch is also 1Gb so I don't bother - it's pointless.
This article is technically incorrect on so many levels I didn’t even bother to finish it.
1. There may be a territorial monopoly on cable. But there is nothing stopping other companies from laying fiber. There are areas - including where I use to live that had cable and the phone company laying fiber
2. All internet is using “shared” connection. The difference is whether it is shared at the last mile or upstream.
3. Fiber is rarely shared at the last mile.
4. Just a little research says 25Gbps is not universal across Switzerland
5. When I did have AT&T Fiber that advertised at 1GB u/d, it didn’t slow down no matter what time of day.
Please don’t suffer from the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.
M
What does one achieve with 25 GB internet? Are speeds actually usefully faster, or is there some other bottleneck that makes the practical speed the same as in the US?
Also any workload I have that is bandwidth heavy would be on clouds machines between data centres and generally very fast. Are there reasons why someone at home would benefit from 25GB internet beyond whatever is available?
Is this a case of over engineered central planning instead of a blow against the free market?
I think you misunderstood the article, or perhaps didn't read it?
So the way the system works is each house has 4 physical fibers into it, that go into a central office without being aggregated up. Inside the central office any ISP can offer any speed vs price option they want, because they just patch you in at layer 1.
So of course, most people wouldn't necessarily need to get 26Gbit. But if you want to offer it as an ISP you can, and it's up to customers to decide if it's worth the price.
One obvious use case would be folks that work with high resolution video. Uncompressed 8K is about 8TiB per hour of footage. Compressed raw like RED cinema et all are more like 1TiB per hour at the high quality settings.
25Gbit vs 1Gbit for moving 1TiB is 5 minutes vs 2 hours.
A quick google says the 25Gbit service from Init7 is $80 bucks a month.
Sounds like an astoundingly good deal vs what's available in the US to me.
Workloads emerge with higher capacity not other way around. Lossless media, to virtual reality applications all scale better with more available bandwidth.
An average AAA game is 100-200GB today. That is not by accident, The best residential internet of 1Gbps dedicated it is still 30 minutes of download, for the average buyer it is still few hours easily.
A 2TB today game is a 5 hour download on 1 Gbps connection and days for median buyer. Game developers can not think of a 2TB game if storage capacity, I/O performance, and bandwidth all do not support it.
Hypothetically If I could ship a 200TB game I would probably pre-render most of the graphics at much higher resolutions/frame-rates than compute it poorly on the GPU on the fly.
More fundamentally, we would lean towards less compute on client and more computed assets driven approach for applications. A good example of that in tech world in the last decade is how we have switched to using docker/container layers from just distributing source files or built packages. the typical docker images in the corporate world exceed 1GB, the source files being actually shipped are probably less than 10Mb of that. We are trading size for better control, Pre built packages instead of source was the same trade-off different in 90s.
Depending on what is more scarce you optimize for it. Single threaded and even multi-threaded compute growth has been slowing down. Consumer internet bandwidth has no such physics limit that processors do so it is not not bad idea to optimize for pre computed assets delivery rather than rely on client side compute.
> I'd need to upgrade my entire lan just to make use of it.
If the concern is cost (rather than recabling the house) Mikrotik sells solid, inexpensive gear. Its management UIs take a bit of getting used to, but are fine once you've figured them out. You can also find two-port Intel 10gbit NICs on the Newegg "Marketplace" for ~40USD [0], and -while most already come with modules (and you will be informed if they don't)- if the X520s you're sold don't permit non-Intel transcievers, the NIC's firmware can usually be easily modified to change that. [1]
I routinely max out my 1Gbps connection downloading large files for work. 25Gbps would cut my waiting substantially. I'm not sure how likely it is that the server would be able to fill that pipe, but if such connections were common, they'd probably make it happen.
If people don't actually use the extra speed then it's effectively free to provide, anyway. If providers could advertise 25Gbps while only needing the same capacity they do for 1Gbps, I imagine they'd do it just to bring in a few more customers. The fact that they don't suggests it would result in more usage suggests it would be useful.
This factoring of a market to enable competition by centralizing minimal infrastructure seems the bedrock of best governmental practice. Are there other examples to lean on? How do we turn this into common knowledge?
While Switzerland has higher median HHI than the US as a whole, the Bay Area in California does have comparable median household income.
In the Bay Area, Sonic does offer 10Gbps fiber internet in some places on new buildouts.
I struggled to find a use case for it, except as a WAN between a homelab and a remote datacenter where I could do crazy things like run an NFS server over the internet or stream training data to a GPU, etc.
All connections to the Internet are at some level "shared", except perhaps if you get a direct connection to one of the core routers. As others have mentioned, this is in a dense area and much closer to being in a LAN environment.
The other point that I'd like to bring up is how useful is a 25G connection to your local demarcation point if your speeds to most sites will be far lower in practice because the Internet isn't circuit-switched.
Currently also have copper and Sunrise cable. Just got the cables to the house two weeks ago. I’m now waiting for the local electricity company to get in-house installation. Everything at no costs. So yes, it’s progressing fast.
Australia and the UK both have a similar business environment to the Swiss model (but without the superior bandwidth) due to the way that their government-owned telephone monopolies were privatised: Telecom Australia (now called Telstra) and British Telecom (now called BT) were required to allow their newly-formed competitors to sell services over their networks (for appropriate maintenance fees, of course).
The US and German models are consequences of just yelling 'Free market!' without stopping to think about what's actually being sold in that market, and how to encourage genuine competition.
Australia is still pretty messy, Telstra was privatised and pretty much stopped upgrading their network for years around the 24 mb ADSL level
Eventually we had a forward thinking prime Minister create a new company that started running fibre to homes and wholesaling it to non government businesses but they lost power and fibre to the home became fibre to the neighbourhood running the last bit over existing phone lines
Eventually it was returned to fibre to the home as upgrading existing lines to run shitty 100mb connections was actually much more expensive than just running fibre
We're only now starting to get to the point where fibre is fairly available when it could have been ten years ago
They stopped upgrading their network because government was publicly implying they'd do something nationally on broadband.
Before then, they were rolling out fast internet. Telstra's cable network (aka. BigPond Ultimate at the time) could do 100Mbps fifteen years ago!
Today, the Australian government continues to stomp on the neck of the free market. Numerous initiatives for faster and better privately operated fiber wholesale networks have been sunk by the government, including TPG and others.
TPG wanted to roll out faster AND cheaper fiber in the inner city. Government said no thanks, we'll keep NBN with abysmal upload speeds to protect our investment.
> Telstra's cable network (aka. BigPond Ultimate at the time) could do 100Mbps fifteen years ago!
Mhmm, it was great. But at what cost, you had on most plans a 1GB monthly cap.
And then when I went to an ISDN connection they wanted 9c per megabyte. To be fair, they would let you do things like join their squid proxy caching hierarchy, but bleh.
We've had the same issue in the Netherlands as the UK (telecom getting free infrastructure), and the end result is them blocking every fiber connection for years and then buying up all of the ones trying when it suited them. And the cable companies had a freebie for decades because they got most of their infra for free without the "share space" requirement (because only a major part, and not all, was funded by municipalities and it took a while to get them all in one company), and the cable companies decided not to invest in anything. And now we have the fiber-to-the-bottom where they are installing as fast as they can, but only with a governmental monopoly in place with dubious sharing agreements.
Due to "competition" and "fare ride" my soon to be (it's taken over 4 years and likely will take forever..) fiber will cost me 22 euro/month more than if I would have gotten the cable from across the road ... but the companies have "exclusive" rights since they would not have "financed" it otherwise (the quotes are all marketing bs).
In the UK, they split the infra provider (Openreach) from the consumer company (BT). So it's no longer BT giving access to the other providers.
In theory, BT has no special access to the infra at all, and they're on a level playing field with other providers.
That may not be perfectly true in practice, but my impression is there are no large differences between providers on the same infra. Choosing between providers mostly comes down to packaging and customer service in the end.
> The US and German models are consequences of just yelling 'Free market!' without stopping to think about what's actually being sold in that market, and how to encourage genuine competition.
The point of a system is what it does. In America, it fosters centralization of wealth on a massive scale. That’s the point, not some unexpected side effect of the theory nobody saw coming.
First, the "free market", as always, is a myth. There's no such thing.
Second, we know why. It's pretty simple. It costs $X to provide a service like Internet. We charge $Y for that service. $Y can be less than $X if it's government subsidized. Typically it's more. As soon as you intermediate that service between the municipality (who owns the land) and the people (who live there), you then have to extract profits for that national ISP.
There's a word for this intermediation and rent-seeking: capitalism.
We've known for years that all the best Internet in the US is municipal broadband like Chattanooga. It's why national ISPs spend a lot of money to lobby for legislation to make such things effectively or actually illegal. By "effectively" I mean things like granting exclusive franchise agreements.
It baffles me how hard people work to refuse to understand this. It's not that difficult.
We don't need AT&T, Verizon, Spectrum, etc. They provide no value. They simply make things more expensive because profit. So every time your town or city chooses not to do this they're choosing the profits of shareholders who don't live in that area over the interests of residents who do.
Regulation won't solve that fundamental problem (we still need regulation, to be clear). Neither will competition. A network overbuild isn't the solution. We don't need multiple national ISPs. We need one municipal ISP (per municipality).
By the way, this goes for every utility. Gas, electricity, water, sewerage. All of them are simply made more expensive by privatization or the so-called "public-private partnerships" (which simply privatize profits and socialize losses).
Municipal and co-op broadband in the US needs subsidies, loans, replication, and expansion. Where I live has a farmer co-op for electricity and internet in a mostly sparse, rural area with various residential housing developments scattered around. What was GFiber in the regionally-nearby metropolitan area had beta 20 Gbps internet for $250 USD/mo. 1 Gbps symmetric fiber co-op is $100 USD/mo. Prices are high compared to Europe. Possibly not high prices compared to Australia.
Looks like a good article explaining some key concepts like natural monopoly.
And yeah, the US model is to tout free enterprise to the skies but then have the state give control of a given market to a single or a couple of monopolists.
The problem is the US has created a constituency of state-dependent small and large business people whose livelihood depends this contradictory free-enterprise ideology.
You could just not generate extra images that aren't relevant to the article. I like the charts and diagrams even when they're AI, because they serve a purpose. But the extra images for flair or whatever are completely pointless and even annoying.
I would go a little further (and apologies for being rather blunt): but I find the over-use of irrelevant images to be rather insulting, as if I am unable to maintain focus on an article, without the frequent shiny object.
I wouldn't necessarily call that further. The images I like are relevant because they visually explain things that are helpful. The images I don't like are irrelevant because they serve no purpose other than to Be Images for no good reason.
i agree, i do like the article content itself, but the AI-generated images (clearly nano banana btw) really kill the credibility. even just using stock images with the watermarks clearly visible would be better
makes me very much consider moving to Switzerland. I'd be happy with symmetric 5Gbit internet. Anything more would be overkill imo.
I hated working with ISPs in the states. Ever try cancelling Comcast? You literally get routed to a department whose sole reason for being is to talk you out of it.
I really like the idea, share the lines compete on execution.
One thing the article doesn't mention is in Germany the electricity and gas lines are more or less this approach. I can switch electricity providers like the article author can switch ISPs. It's a common practice to do so about 1x a year to take advantage of customer acquisition incentives.
tl;dr: The lie here is the assumption that the US has, or has ever had, a free market for wired internet service providers.
The article initially does a good job of describing the situation, but gets a bit confused when it gets to the history of the US, especially this line "This is what happens when you let natural monopolies operate without oversight." What it's discussing is not natural monopolies; it's discussing public utilities which are granted monopolies expressly through regulation, not despite it. Also, the US has a lot of oversite on wired ISPs. The prices are almost always approved by regulators.
A good example of a natural monopoly is Google search. It's pretty common for people to get frustrated by it, and look for other search engines. There's also multiple companies trying to compete with it. Normally this would mean that users would migrate to the competitors, but Google's search algorithms have been so good that practically every user has stayed with Google.
Natural monopolies are still easily disrupted, if the naturally-occurring barrier changes. For example, Internet Explorer had a natural monopoly, due to Microsoft's "embrace and extend" strategy giving it many capabilities that other web browser didn't have. When the internet market quickly migrated from a feature-first market to a security-first market, Internet explorer was quickly overtaken by Chrome and Firefox. There's a reasonable chance the same thing will happen with Google Search, as the market for it's search algorithm is overtaken for the marked for LLM based web searches, which Google is pretty bad at.
Anyway, the reason Comcast or Charter is the only one that provides cable internet in your area isn't because it's too expensive for anyone else to deploy cables. At the margins they operate, it would be well worthwhile to invest in a parallel infrastructure, but it's downright prohibited almost everywhere in the US. In fact, they may own the rights to lay cable, despite having never laid any. This is the case where I live, for the phone company, which plays by similar rules.
Fixed-wireless internet providers are starting to provide some competition, as backhauls have improve enough that cellular providers can compete with wired internet providers. T-Mobile is currently offering $20/mo fixed wireless add-on plans, with a five-year price guarantee. To complete with the fixed-wireless market, Comcast has launched a service called NOW Internet, which starts at $30/mo with a similar price guarantee and no no add-on requirement.
Speaking of "starting at", a large source of high prices is the common use of FUD to pressure users into paying for more than they need, or can even use. Very few households peak at more than even 40 Mbps (https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-worth-it/) and the starting price of almost every provider is above that, but must customers have been talked into higher-tier plans.
The only web hosts that regularly provide data faster than that are video game distributors, so if you are in the type of household that would like to download game updates in minutes, instead of tens of minutes, while also watching multiple 4K video streams, then comparing other plans may be worthwhile, otherwise stick with the absolute cheapest plan available from all providers that serve your area. (And, if you are big on multi-player gaming, selecting the ISP with the lowest latency will be beneficial, but all plans from a given service will be the same latency.)
> The only web hosts that regularly provide data faster than [40Mbps] are video game distributors
No? I've been trying to download my MyMiniFactory library[0] and I'm currently getting 25MBps over 5 downloads. A single download will easily do 15MBps.
[0] Which sucks, even at high speed - they have no API, no bulk download, and you're limited to 6 items at a time. I have to click through 1000+ items with easily 5000+ sub-items and individually download each one.
[edit] Since people really hate the AI images, I have removed all of the ones not relevant to the article. As soon as the github action is through it will be deployed.
The article was well written, really enjoyed it and I learned something as a Swiss citizen using this outlet every day! But I agree with the other commenters, I would replace the AI generated images with something else, they drag drown the articles credibility IMO
Would you prefer a large wall of text? If that is what people rather have I would leave them out next time. I find it easier to read with images in between the text but I agree, it would be better if the images where not AI.
Again like I said, I don't mind the charts and diagrams but I don't like the random extras.
First image: extra. "The Paradox" section header: extra. "The Natural Monopoly" section header: sort of helpful. "The German Model" and "The American Model" headers: also sort of helpful. Also, the chart of monopoly territories is definitely helpful. But then after that, the "monopoly power" image is complete slop. "The Swiss Model" header is sort of helpful. The following couple of photos are also helpful! Speedtest result is helpful. But then the image after that is kind of pointless. "The Oversight" header is kind of pointless. The photo after that is kind of helpful. "The Answer" header I can't really make sense of and I'd lean more towards not helpful.
Our little committee investigated all manner of options, including bringing municipal fiber across alongside a new undersea electricity cable that the power company was installing anyway. I spoke to the manager of that project and he said there was no real barrier to adding a few strands of fiber, since the undersea high voltage line already had space for it (for the power company’s own signaling).
Sadly, the municipality didn’t have any capital to invest a penny into that fiber, so one day, one of the municipal counselors just called up a friend who worked for a fiber laying company and asked them for a favor: put out a press release saying that they were “investigating” laying an undersea fiber to power a municipal fiber network on the little island.
A few weeks later, the cable monopoly engaged a cable ship and began laying their own fiber. Competition works, folks. Even if you have to fake it.
> No it doesn't, and you just proved it
What exactly did they prove? You didn't substantiate or explain this at all. Leverage would be relevant if they were negotiating a deal. They weren't. The company laid down fibre because of what they saw as a potential competitor (municipal fibre). The municipality didn't use the threat of fibre to come to terms with the monopolistic company. That would've been leverage. But they didn't, so it wasn't leverage. The municipality created the appearance of competition and the monopoly behaved accordingly as if there were a potential competitor.
It's worth noting that 4chan and Reddit also live here because both sites are insufferable.
They called in a favor that put pressure on the company from public expectations.
The details of how the "public pressure" came to be don't matter, because the monopoly didn't know about that. All they knew was there was a potential competitor, so they behaved according to that information. That's how it works.
> Sony heard about Nintendo partnering up with Philips for the SNES CD expansion, so Sony made their own console
This is completely inaccurate in every way possible. You even have the order of events backwards (Nintendo and Sony partnered first). There is in no way in which even the most charitable interpretation of this statement could bear out. Just about the only correct part is that you have some (but not all!) of the relevant parties involved.
If you're wrong about such a well documented, cut and dry matter of historical record, then what else are you wrong about? :)
Every business owner knows that a race to the bottom with other businesses in their market is going to ruin each other's life and they don't usually engage in this kind of practice (with the notable exception of people with lots of capital to wipe the competition out of the market then do a rug pull after the fact).
The goal of a business is never to capture their competitors market share, it's to make a decent profit at the end of the year so that their shareholders (or themselves, depending on the size and ownership structure) get the revenue they expect.
They used to be called robber barons.
This type of situation sounds like an amalgamation of a few exam questions from my first year of an econ PhD. "Cheap talk in a Bertrand market with entry costs and capacity constraints" or something. No I haven't worked it out but my intuition is that it would predict exactly what was observed: the threat of a new entrant with enough capacity risks loosing your entire business so you invest to expand your capacity to prevent that entry.
I'm glad you got your broadband but what happened sounds much more like American politics than ordinary market processes. And in this political environment, corporations can engage in a variety of other tactics than placating a squeaky wheel - they can outlaw competition, buy off officials, pay for shrill media hit pieces and so-forth.
I'm never sure what the point of comments like this is. "It seems incorrect". But it isn't. You just don't want to admit that competition is good and necessary.
If you just say "competition", you can point at the efforts of ten people to gain a seat on the politbureau as a clear case of this.
The issue isn’t the splitting. There is no fiber to even split in most places. A lot of places in America had their “network” infra built 50-100 years ago on copper and no one wants to pay to basically rebuild all of it.
I happen to live in an area where there are still above ground utilities.
We got >5 gig fiber fast. We have 700Mbps 5G. I literally watched them string the fiber on the poles.
It’s still not shared, but it’s fast because it’s new. Shared would be preferred, but you need destroy + “new” first, and most people are fine with what copper gives them. Shared may even be cheaper but most people don’t think we need to rebuild anything.
And yet, living in Switzerland after the UK involved one after another discovery of how well-ordered and -run a country could be. And then moving to Germany was like stepping back even further behind my memories of the UK.
I'm sure you could find examples of countries that do specific things as well as Switzerland; but I'm not aware of many places that do almost everything so excellently. (Maybe Japan, in many respects, but I lack sufficient direct experience to adequately judge.)
I doubt they're insurmountable. Again, because the Swiss aren't some genetically superior subspecies. Culture can be changed.
I see Americans talk about how impossible universal healthcare is as if the rest of the developed world hasn't largely figured it out.
I used to live in Palo Alto municipality (socialist paradise where power, internet, gas were all municipality provided) and moved 1 mile away into San Mateo county where power was provided by PG&E (monopoly hell).
Palo Alto Mulicipality power price: $0.10373/Kwh
https://www.paloalto.gov/files/assets/public/v/6/utilities/r...
PG&E power price: currently $0.44/Kwh
https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/resid...
Very blatantly giving clear links for the socialist vs capitalist outcomes here.
I get so angry when i see posts along the lines of "herp derp government sooo inefficient".
[0] ...often legally protected...
Open societies, in contrast, must balance many competing interests and voting factions, meaning that free market supporters have limited power to enact their preferred policies, meaning they rarely can be implemented in a “pure” form.
“Open society!” coos the fox to the henhouse. LOL, no thanks!
In Charlotte NC, I have 3 choices of internet providers, two of them fiber.
As you are doing with this post, "broaden the base." The vast majority of voters do not understand the issues here. That is your biggest obstacle.
My POV would call this regulatory failure vs free market lie. That way, the enemy is a smaller target.
Path to progress is to get a friendly state (WY, RI, TX) to pass the legislation. Then shop that around among activists in other states.
If people knew they were only getting 1/25 of a shared product, that would get political hackles up.
Thanks for taking the time to think this through and make your argument.
Then the courts decided, meh, we just don't like it. We are going to tell the FCC otherwise. It all went away. The incumbent local carriers have now had monopoly power over huge swarths of the infrastructure. No access to dark fiber. https://www.dwt.com/insights/2004/03/federal-court-eviscerat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Telecom_Associat...
Verizon also sued, and said, sure, there's laws for unbundling. But, we really don't like them. We aren't going to deploy fiber if we have to share. And the court once again said, oh, yeah, well, that's fine, we'll grant that: we'll strike down congress's law because "innovation" sounds better. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/1...
It's just so so so much corruption, so much meddling from the court to undo everything good congress worked so hard to make happen, that was such an essential baseline to allow competition. I remain very very angry about this all. This was such a sad decade of losing so much goodness, such competition. These damn cartels! The courts that keep giving them everything they want! Bah!!
I think it was a other case,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcv0600V5q4
We were bamboozled on a massive scale.
1. There may be a territorial monopoly on cable. But there is nothing stopping other companies from laying fiber. There are areas - including where I use to live that had cable and the phone company laying fiber
2. All internet is using “shared” connection. The difference is whether it is shared at the last mile or upstream.
3. Fiber is rarely shared at the last mile.
4. Just a little research says 25Gbps is not universal across Switzerland
5. When I did have AT&T Fiber that advertised at 1GB u/d, it didn’t slow down no matter what time of day.
Please don’t suffer from the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. M
Also any workload I have that is bandwidth heavy would be on clouds machines between data centres and generally very fast. Are there reasons why someone at home would benefit from 25GB internet beyond whatever is available?
Is this a case of over engineered central planning instead of a blow against the free market?
So the way the system works is each house has 4 physical fibers into it, that go into a central office without being aggregated up. Inside the central office any ISP can offer any speed vs price option they want, because they just patch you in at layer 1.
So of course, most people wouldn't necessarily need to get 26Gbit. But if you want to offer it as an ISP you can, and it's up to customers to decide if it's worth the price.
One obvious use case would be folks that work with high resolution video. Uncompressed 8K is about 8TiB per hour of footage. Compressed raw like RED cinema et all are more like 1TiB per hour at the high quality settings.
25Gbit vs 1Gbit for moving 1TiB is 5 minutes vs 2 hours.
A quick google says the 25Gbit service from Init7 is $80 bucks a month.
Sounds like an astoundingly good deal vs what's available in the US to me.
An average AAA game is 100-200GB today. That is not by accident, The best residential internet of 1Gbps dedicated it is still 30 minutes of download, for the average buyer it is still few hours easily.
A 2TB today game is a 5 hour download on 1 Gbps connection and days for median buyer. Game developers can not think of a 2TB game if storage capacity, I/O performance, and bandwidth all do not support it.
Hypothetically If I could ship a 200TB game I would probably pre-render most of the graphics at much higher resolutions/frame-rates than compute it poorly on the GPU on the fly.
More fundamentally, we would lean towards less compute on client and more computed assets driven approach for applications. A good example of that in tech world in the last decade is how we have switched to using docker/container layers from just distributing source files or built packages. the typical docker images in the corporate world exceed 1GB, the source files being actually shipped are probably less than 10Mb of that. We are trading size for better control, Pre built packages instead of source was the same trade-off different in 90s.
Depending on what is more scarce you optimize for it. Single threaded and even multi-threaded compute growth has been slowing down. Consumer internet bandwidth has no such physics limit that processors do so it is not not bad idea to optimize for pre computed assets delivery rather than rely on client side compute.
If the concern is cost (rather than recabling the house) Mikrotik sells solid, inexpensive gear. Its management UIs take a bit of getting used to, but are fine once you've figured them out. You can also find two-port Intel 10gbit NICs on the Newegg "Marketplace" for ~40USD [0], and -while most already come with modules (and you will be informed if they don't)- if the X520s you're sold don't permit non-Intel transcievers, the NIC's firmware can usually be easily modified to change that. [1]
[0] <https://www.newegg.com/intel-e10g42bfsr/p/N82E16833106041>
[1] <https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads%2Fpatching...>
If people don't actually use the extra speed then it's effectively free to provide, anyway. If providers could advertise 25Gbps while only needing the same capacity they do for 1Gbps, I imagine they'd do it just to bring in a few more customers. The fact that they don't suggests it would result in more usage suggests it would be useful.
In the Bay Area, Sonic does offer 10Gbps fiber internet in some places on new buildouts.
I struggled to find a use case for it, except as a WAN between a homelab and a remote datacenter where I could do crazy things like run an NFS server over the internet or stream training data to a GPU, etc.
The other point that I'd like to bring up is how useful is a 25G connection to your local demarcation point if your speeds to most sites will be far lower in practice because the Internet isn't circuit-switched.
Care to give a rebuttal?
But yes, Swisscom (owners if the old crap copper) do have to let the competitors use it.
https://www.swisscom.ch/en/about/news/2024/02/08-weniger-kup...
The US and German models are consequences of just yelling 'Free market!' without stopping to think about what's actually being sold in that market, and how to encourage genuine competition.
Eventually we had a forward thinking prime Minister create a new company that started running fibre to homes and wholesaling it to non government businesses but they lost power and fibre to the home became fibre to the neighbourhood running the last bit over existing phone lines
Eventually it was returned to fibre to the home as upgrading existing lines to run shitty 100mb connections was actually much more expensive than just running fibre
We're only now starting to get to the point where fibre is fairly available when it could have been ten years ago
Before then, they were rolling out fast internet. Telstra's cable network (aka. BigPond Ultimate at the time) could do 100Mbps fifteen years ago!
Today, the Australian government continues to stomp on the neck of the free market. Numerous initiatives for faster and better privately operated fiber wholesale networks have been sunk by the government, including TPG and others.
TPG wanted to roll out faster AND cheaper fiber in the inner city. Government said no thanks, we'll keep NBN with abysmal upload speeds to protect our investment.
Mhmm, it was great. But at what cost, you had on most plans a 1GB monthly cap.
And then when I went to an ISDN connection they wanted 9c per megabyte. To be fair, they would let you do things like join their squid proxy caching hierarchy, but bleh.
Due to "competition" and "fare ride" my soon to be (it's taken over 4 years and likely will take forever..) fiber will cost me 22 euro/month more than if I would have gotten the cable from across the road ... but the companies have "exclusive" rights since they would not have "financed" it otherwise (the quotes are all marketing bs).
In theory, BT has no special access to the infra at all, and they're on a level playing field with other providers.
That may not be perfectly true in practice, but my impression is there are no large differences between providers on the same infra. Choosing between providers mostly comes down to packaging and customer service in the end.
The point of a system is what it does. In America, it fosters centralization of wealth on a massive scale. That’s the point, not some unexpected side effect of the theory nobody saw coming.
Second, we know why. It's pretty simple. It costs $X to provide a service like Internet. We charge $Y for that service. $Y can be less than $X if it's government subsidized. Typically it's more. As soon as you intermediate that service between the municipality (who owns the land) and the people (who live there), you then have to extract profits for that national ISP.
There's a word for this intermediation and rent-seeking: capitalism.
We've known for years that all the best Internet in the US is municipal broadband like Chattanooga. It's why national ISPs spend a lot of money to lobby for legislation to make such things effectively or actually illegal. By "effectively" I mean things like granting exclusive franchise agreements.
It baffles me how hard people work to refuse to understand this. It's not that difficult.
We don't need AT&T, Verizon, Spectrum, etc. They provide no value. They simply make things more expensive because profit. So every time your town or city chooses not to do this they're choosing the profits of shareholders who don't live in that area over the interests of residents who do.
Regulation won't solve that fundamental problem (we still need regulation, to be clear). Neither will competition. A network overbuild isn't the solution. We don't need multiple national ISPs. We need one municipal ISP (per municipality).
By the way, this goes for every utility. Gas, electricity, water, sewerage. All of them are simply made more expensive by privatization or the so-called "public-private partnerships" (which simply privatize profits and socialize losses).
And yeah, the US model is to tout free enterprise to the skies but then have the state give control of a given market to a single or a couple of monopolists.
The problem is the US has created a constituency of state-dependent small and large business people whose livelihood depends this contradictory free-enterprise ideology.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47654841
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47652734
makes me very much consider moving to Switzerland. I'd be happy with symmetric 5Gbit internet. Anything more would be overkill imo.
I hated working with ISPs in the states. Ever try cancelling Comcast? You literally get routed to a department whose sole reason for being is to talk you out of it.
I really like the idea, share the lines compete on execution.
One thing the article doesn't mention is in Germany the electricity and gas lines are more or less this approach. I can switch electricity providers like the article author can switch ISPs. It's a common practice to do so about 1x a year to take advantage of customer acquisition incentives.
The article initially does a good job of describing the situation, but gets a bit confused when it gets to the history of the US, especially this line "This is what happens when you let natural monopolies operate without oversight." What it's discussing is not natural monopolies; it's discussing public utilities which are granted monopolies expressly through regulation, not despite it. Also, the US has a lot of oversite on wired ISPs. The prices are almost always approved by regulators.
A good example of a natural monopoly is Google search. It's pretty common for people to get frustrated by it, and look for other search engines. There's also multiple companies trying to compete with it. Normally this would mean that users would migrate to the competitors, but Google's search algorithms have been so good that practically every user has stayed with Google.
Natural monopolies are still easily disrupted, if the naturally-occurring barrier changes. For example, Internet Explorer had a natural monopoly, due to Microsoft's "embrace and extend" strategy giving it many capabilities that other web browser didn't have. When the internet market quickly migrated from a feature-first market to a security-first market, Internet explorer was quickly overtaken by Chrome and Firefox. There's a reasonable chance the same thing will happen with Google Search, as the market for it's search algorithm is overtaken for the marked for LLM based web searches, which Google is pretty bad at.
Anyway, the reason Comcast or Charter is the only one that provides cable internet in your area isn't because it's too expensive for anyone else to deploy cables. At the margins they operate, it would be well worthwhile to invest in a parallel infrastructure, but it's downright prohibited almost everywhere in the US. In fact, they may own the rights to lay cable, despite having never laid any. This is the case where I live, for the phone company, which plays by similar rules.
Fixed-wireless internet providers are starting to provide some competition, as backhauls have improve enough that cellular providers can compete with wired internet providers. T-Mobile is currently offering $20/mo fixed wireless add-on plans, with a five-year price guarantee. To complete with the fixed-wireless market, Comcast has launched a service called NOW Internet, which starts at $30/mo with a similar price guarantee and no no add-on requirement.
Speaking of "starting at", a large source of high prices is the common use of FUD to pressure users into paying for more than they need, or can even use. Very few households peak at more than even 40 Mbps (https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-worth-it/) and the starting price of almost every provider is above that, but must customers have been talked into higher-tier plans.
The only web hosts that regularly provide data faster than that are video game distributors, so if you are in the type of household that would like to download game updates in minutes, instead of tens of minutes, while also watching multiple 4K video streams, then comparing other plans may be worthwhile, otherwise stick with the absolute cheapest plan available from all providers that serve your area. (And, if you are big on multi-player gaming, selecting the ISP with the lowest latency will be beneficial, but all plans from a given service will be the same latency.)
No? I've been trying to download my MyMiniFactory library[0] and I'm currently getting 25MBps over 5 downloads. A single download will easily do 15MBps.
[0] Which sucks, even at high speed - they have no API, no bulk download, and you're limited to 6 items at a time. I have to click through 1000+ items with easily 5000+ sub-items and individually download each one.
The point is that "free market" is a lie, not that the US ever had one.
[edit] Since people really hate the AI images, I have removed all of the ones not relevant to the article. As soon as the github action is through it will be deployed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47654841
First image: extra. "The Paradox" section header: extra. "The Natural Monopoly" section header: sort of helpful. "The German Model" and "The American Model" headers: also sort of helpful. Also, the chart of monopoly territories is definitely helpful. But then after that, the "monopoly power" image is complete slop. "The Swiss Model" header is sort of helpful. The following couple of photos are also helpful! Speedtest result is helpful. But then the image after that is kind of pointless. "The Oversight" header is kind of pointless. The photo after that is kind of helpful. "The Answer" header I can't really make sense of and I'd lean more towards not helpful.