Broadband Infrastructure Debate

That is how it should be infrastructure is government funded people compete to provide services on it. Just like most roads/highways are. Asking 4-5 different isp to do the infrastructure independently would increase costs by 4-5 times then they would be competing for customers so payback period for infrastructure investment is up in the air. This is the main reason USA has problems with monopolistic isp as who the fuck invest in infrastructure when another isp is already there. So they all

These companies are doing their job perfectly. Extracting as much money out of their assets as possible.It would be ridiculous for them to waste any money by investing into their infrastructure unless it enables them to compete better, increasing revenue and profits.They are acting in exactly the way you'd expect given how the economy is designed. The problem are the rules politicians have setup which are designed for a free market not for monopoly/duopoly situations. The only op

Note: Read with caution; digitalsociety.org is a libertarian soap box.Telecommunications infrastructure has capital costs that prohibit disruptive newcomers. The established players have the power to charge (and profit) at whatever rate they choose. Unless there is regulatory pressure, they will never focus on service over profits. Relative to the rest of the developed world, our throughput rate to consumers is far from excellent[1]. We need better service for citizens. It is true that the US

In many locations, essentially once you get outside of major cities, it is not economical to run more than one line to each property - telecoms often ends up a monopoly, similar to power distribution or water supply. You can lessen the effects by having the physical infrastructure owned by a different entity to the service provided - like in the U.K. with BT Openreach for example, and in that case maybe the service is a commodity - but I don’t think the infrastructure ever really is.

I think the free market proponents are harming US infrastructure and in the future competitiveness. Like roads and bridges etc are built with taxes. The internet infrastructure needs to be built or at least controled by the government federal, state or city. I like what Singapore did got bids and fixed prices for fiber deployment. Now all the isp's have to compete for providing services and the fiber deployer is paid the same by all of them. That is probably the best and cheapest way to bui

I'm not so much striking down the "regulated" part, as I'm striking down the competitive one. In most places around the US coax and twisted pair lines (that were funded by the public purse in the first place) were sold to private companies at hilariously low rates to then milk the market in perpetuity while you are required to get permits to tear up roads and run your own network cable. And of course in most places that could happen, the cable company lobbies to prevent it.<p

I think this makes perfect sense. Competition fundamentally doesn't work when it comes to infrastructure like this. I don't hear anyone saying that we need more privatized competition in our sewer systems. Why? Because it's incredibly costly to build and having private companies build two, three, or more sewer systems in one city/town would be insane. The costs per user of each one of those systems would rise dramatically because you would have far fewer people paying into ea

I don't get why anyone thinks any company should control infrastructure. We don't have private electric lines, or private roads that are corporate funded. We don't expect train tracks to be privately laid. Our entire phone and cable infrastructure were built by private companies (mainly AT&T) by getting tremendous government subsidies and being effectively publicly funded for private enterprise.There is absolutely no reason that any local government in the US worth its weight in salt c

Absolutely.ISPs should remain privately owned and operated. But the so called "last mile" should be a shared utility like a road. Government should build it, maintain it, and support it. But once that last mile hits the exchanges then different competing private ISPs should pay a licence fee from the exchange onto the final mile to people's homes.The last mile is the most expensive element in internat deployments, and also the one most encumbered by regulation (e.g. digging

You picked a very specific segment (infrastructure-based services), but in that segment, the "public roads" model needs to be applied: just like roads are public, and used by private cars and private trucking companies for a fee (usually taxes or tolls). Same should apply to cable/fiber networks - the municipality owns the infrastructure, and there is only one cable = no need to dig up the town three times over.