Well that's a surp ... no, no it's not. I think the precedent got set when the government offered $3B to subsidize roll-out and they realized they could just pocket it without any real oversight.
Lets see at my house: AT&T, $60 a month for 45Mbit down, 3Mbit up with a 1TB cap. TW/Spectrum $39 a month, 100Mbit down, 10Mbit up, no cap. (and they have faster speeds I actually pay something like $60 for 200/20).
So 1/3 less, for twice as fast internet, or ~5x faster internet for the same price.
So, I don't really see why anyone with a choice would choose AT&T in my neighborhood.
So basically, the granting of local monopolies in the cable TV era, plus other historical circumstances in the USA have resulted in big companies overcharging for substandard service.
I live in Kansas City.
I pay $70/mo for google fiber. 1Gbit down, 1Gbit up.
So for twice what TWC is charging you I get 10x more bandwidth down, and 100 times more bandwidth up.
So can we agree transit in the US is completely and arbitrarily priced? There is no basis for their fees.
It costs no more for transit wherever you are in the US vs me. In fact I would argue wherever you are it's probably cheaper because KC is probably smaller than your market. And you have more physical infrastructure and capacity.
Pricing as a result of market conditions does not make the pricing arbitrary. The price could be affected by lack of competition, but it could also be because of a number of other economic reasons. Limited competition itself could result from any number of economic reasons (expensive build out costs, restrictive regulatory regimes, etc).
Understanding the various factors involved in building infrastructure, and how they differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, is huge because it plays a huge role in how companies invest, build out, and price. Comparing two different cities' prices, without any more information, is completely useless.
It's not random. It's based on what they can get for it given the likelihood of you and your neighbors going elsewhere. I figure this is pretty rational given the circumstances.
I lived in KC for a bit, but moved shortly before Google Fiber. When TWC came to install internet, the install guys (4 of them for some reason?) laughed at the modem they gave me- "We still have these?!".
When I cancelled and returned my modem, the customer service department was behind bulletproof glass.
I don't have much to contribute to the price discussion- just can't pass up the chance to tell a KC TWC story.
The prices look similar where I live. The only thing AT&T has in their favor here is that their ceiling is higher: You can get 1Gbps (at least in name) for around $90.
My family is is on AT&T Uverse, and pays $52/month for 24Mbps down/5Mbps up and $134/month for 2 HDTVs, 1 non HDTV, a DVR and their lower-mid tier 300 channel package (mainly because mom likes to watch HGTV, DIY and the Food network channels). Those numbers are from our last bill and include AT&T fees (including their HDTV receiver fees in 2016), government taxes, etc. We got an HDTV quite early (circa 2004) and at the time went from Dish Network to DirecTV. And for internet, we separately paid for AT&T DSL, which might have been at 3Mbps for a mid-tier package at the time. Around 2009/2010 an AT&T salesman came to our door to talk about this new Uverse offering in our neighborhood. They talked about it being fiber, just like Fios from Verizon (though I suspected it wasn't really the same since our streets never were dug up- which is in line with it being fiber to the main node outside of our housing tract.) They enticed my parents to get out of their expensive contract with DirecTV and pay less for the same TV package with an included DVR accessible to the entire home, and a faster internet speed without any contract, or equipment rental fees. The offer was hard to pass up and was a better deal than signing up for a contract with TWC, paying a lower price for year 1 and then getting ripped off for your second year of the contract. I vaguely remember it was something like $100 or $120 when we signed up for the TV and internet service. The internet speeds were always lower than advertised and occasionally the TV would drop out but it became more reliable over time. At some point were offered a lower rate to sign up for a 2 year contract, and though we did, I think it has since expired and may be back on a month-to-month device. The problem with their service has always been some box dying after a year or so, and calling their support number (which redirects to a call center in the Philippines typically) to have them dispatch a technician but other than that, the technicians are usually very well trained and get the problem fixed right the first time, and allow us to call them back for 30 days after the service call for help without contacting their main support line.
My parents have heard horror stories from TWC customers who have been overcharged, service that has been poor, and squabbles with home internet data caps (of which ATT has none- at least as shown on our bill). We could go with something like a DSLExtreme or Sonic.net, but then our TV bill would go up. I definitely wish for any bit more competition in our area, but it's doubtful to happen anytime soon.
At the risk of being dismissive: didn't Moody's also strongly suggest that banks and pension funds were underinvesting in junk-grade mortgage backed securities? Has anyone read the actual research note? Are there reasons to believe that Moody's is more credible here than they were in 2007?
Historically the big three agencies make money by charging a fee to the companies/entities they're rating. My understanding is that it's always been that way & things have not materially changed since 2007.
A good question to ask here is to what extent institutional debt buyers continue to rely on these ratings.
I'll try to read this research note. Maybe I'm biased. I used to work at Moody's and then 2 or so jobs later structured some pretty substantial bond issuances that they rated (and my manager at that gig came from S&P, and one of my colleagues quit to become an analyst at Fitch).
They have some very good analysts, not usually given to making policy type statements like this except where it impacts the issuer's revenue and capital structure that determines how well they're able to pay P&I on bonds. So without reading the note I would say it's pretty significant
It's actually sort of the opposite here. Telecom's let cable companies beat them to the broadband market. So cable internet companies are the market leaders. And telecoms are ceding the market to them and just taking whatever they can get without investing too much.
Verizon Fios is a good example, they built it to compete with cable, but they still can't get more marketshare (in overlapping markets). It's barely profitable.
Telecoms don't think it's worth investing to challenge the cable monopoly.
If consolidation had anything to do with it, wouldn't you expect exactly the opposite result? Companies to see higher margins in the monopoly wired market instead of the wireless market where they have more competition?
Cable companies and telecoms aren't consolidated. The problem is telecoms don't want to spend oodles of money only to make very little profit because the cable companies are already entrenched.
I think this speaks more to interconnection, like water and power and sewer, and even human (car, sidewalk, etc) transport, being natural monopoly networks for the "last mile".
Competition would still be possible on top of this network, just like you can have different delivery companies.
We need some more Telecom competition here in the US to improve their services. I live in San Francisco and I've been waiting for a good while now for webpass to become an option in my building. Comcast service is really subpar. Meanwhile all my friends in northern europe have crazy gigabit connections.
> We need some more Telecom competition here in the US to improve their services
The US tried that and it didn't work. Specifically, The US Justice Dept broke up AT&T into a bunch of "Baby Bells", which spent hundreds of billions of dollars on takeovers to reassemble themselves into AT&T.
In brief: Southwestern Bell Corp (SBC) merged with Pacific Telesis, then SBC bought Ameritech, then it bought AT&T and renamed itself... AT&T. Then the new AT&T bought Cingular. Consumers paid heavily for this, and got no real benefits.
The obvious answer is to make broadband a "social good" like highways, schools, the judicial system and (in rational countries) healthcare, and build it out in the same way as Al Gore's dad built the US interstate highway system after WW2.
Unfortunately, that can't happen in the US, because politics.
Under the US healthcare system, Americans pay 2x to 3x more than the OECD average, suffer much higher rates of infant mortality, have far more sickness in the over 65s, and die younger.
Without the concept of a "social good", you'd expect the US telecoms/broadband industry to produce similar results.
Crappy broadband causes a massive loss in productivity and makes the US less competitive with many small countries, but I don't expect those costs are factored into anybody's calculations.
I never understood the point of splitting up AT&T geographically. Were they expecting turf wars to explode on the borders between them?
In some European countries, when the former telco monopolies were split, they were split vertically - so there was one "copper company", then the phone service company, etc. The copper company would generally be heavily regulation with local loop unbundling, requirements to be fair to anyone who wants to sell service over the network, etc.
The big deal was the vertical split between local (baby bells) an long distance (at&t). It then became possible to easily switch your long distance carrier, which lead to intense competition and lower prices. Local exchange service remained a monopoly, but most jurisdictions had fairly strict tariffs for rates. Later, the telecom act of 1996 opened up to competitive exchange carriers using the existing lines and buildings; would have been nice if the FCC had enforced that for internet too :(
We're talking about 3 different technologies here:
1. Fiber optics - this is growing, and companies which have a lot of it are continuing to lay it out (albeit slowly). Also see, Altice's recent announcement. My hope is that post-election Google Fiber will ramp back up, simply for the legal defense of saying that they too are a cable company and the same laws should apply. In any case, consumers want it. High-end consumers will pay a premium, and the cost for urban footprint fill-out is not exorbitant.
2. Cable coaxial wire - this is a big thick wire that continues to upgrade nicely. DOCSIS 3.0 is basically the same old 1980s/1990s cable with better comms protocols. It's getting to the point to where they can compete on a reasonable basis with single strand fiber, at a lower speed and price point. So cable companies build out the back-end with fiber, but don't have to replant single homes.
3. Crappy copper telephone wire - this stuff is thin, it's painful to maintain and upgrade and always lags copper. Companies with a lot of this (Windstream, Verizon, AT&T, Frontier) are trying to run it for cash flow rather than spend a lot on upgrades. The telcos push fiber to the node, but it's a slow grind and involves very careful cost benefit analysis.
3 different technologies. 3 very different strategies. The election has further complicated things. Should VZ save up it's ammo and make a play for Sprint, Charter, Dish, or T-Mobile or invest in more broadband plants? I'd save the ammo given that Tom Wheeler is out on January 20th..
Point three makes me weep. In Australia the government started building a nationwide fibre to the home network. Wholesale only, so any ISP could provide services on it.
They got about 10% of the way in, then a new conservative government got in power and stomped on the plan. Instead they're doing fibre to the node for everyone.
Why have gigabit fibre when you can have slower, less reliable, more expensive copper connections that go a whopping 12Mbit!? Faster even, if the node happens to be sitting in your front lawn.
We started the same thing here in New Zealand. I was a bit outraged when $1.2 billion of taxpayers money was handed out to build a national fibre network, but it's turning out not too bad.
Not perfect, but not bad either.
It helps that the opposition bought in, despite disagreeing on details.
Why were you outraged that your government invested $1.2 billion in a significant upgrade of an important piece of infrastructure, beneficial for citizens and companies, now and in the future? Was it because you've jumped on the anti-government train that's so popular right now, like the overused term "taxpayers money" suggests, or did you really believe that building a national fibre network was the dumbest idea ever?
I would happily pay a one time cost of $255 to run fiber to my house. I'd even be willing to pay $500 to run fiber to my house. Sadly around here if I want fiber to my house, even assuming I could find an ISP willing to run it, it would probably cost me upwards of $2000 to have it run, and probably significantly more than that. That's also not counting the cost of actually getting service, that's just the "installation fee" to have it run.
He said per person, not per household - not the same unless you're living alone. Also this doesn't make your internet free you have to pay for the service on top of that.
And believe it or not a lot of people don't care about having fiber internet available.
Once installed, fiber optic lines become long term infrastructure, and will be used for decades. With those time scales in mind, the line installation cost is reasonable even after accounting for market penetration and occupancy rates.
But only a quarter of the people who have access are using the service so far.
> with fibre available to 1,006,741 users, of which 240,525 have signed up
And the goal is to cover 75% of the population (1,340,000 households).
So it's around $1000/household. And of those households the majority will not be using the service but they'll be paying for it assuming the household pays taxes.
It wasn't doomed from the start. The original plan was a good one. If we'd stuck to the fibre plan, nearly half the country would have fibre by now.
The CVC prices are unreasonable but they can and will come down. Once the fibre is in place you can argue about the business details later. You can't, however, lay fibre overnight. That takes years of planning.
The POI decision was dumb too but it can be worked around.
As for the data caps, you can already buy an unlimited 100Mbps service right now. So it's just a matter of cost.
There is new technology like g.fast for 100+mbit speeds over a copper pair. Yes it is not as fast as either fiber or co-ax, and it is short sighted, but 100mbit is a huge improvement over legacy DSL speeds.
It already goes 100Mbit IF you're very lucky and happen to have the node right near your house (and then some poor sap at the other end gets 12).
And no, they cannot upgrade FttN to G.fast, no matter what they tell you. That requires shorter copper lengths than all but the closest handful of houses to the node have. Plus you need everyone on the same technology so that the vectoring (like active noise cancellation) can work.
Gfast drops off a cliff after a few hundred metres, and they have houses connected to nodes a kilometre away. Gfast and Xgfast are only appropriate for Fibre-to-the-curb.
You can get 80 meg broadband from BT Infinity with fibre to the street cabinet, so you might need to offer more than 100+.
G.fast extends the fibre closer to the house but I suspect it's not very cost-effective unless the take-up is high, so perhaps it will mainly cater to rich people in suburbia.
We've know that fibre (FTTH) was the answer since the 1980s but all British governments have been too short-sighted and stupid to finance it.
Of course, they dug up the streets to install new pipes for the short-term benefits of North Sea gas, and they can find £50 billion for HS2, when they could have FTTH for less.
By your argument all homes and house should have a 56kv 3 phase electricity supply
What reasonable use has a consumer sub for more than 10-20 Mbs? if your running a business from home get a business line and stop expecting Pensioners to subsidize your business
>What reasonable use has a consumer sub for more than 10-20 Mbs? if your running a business from home get a business line and stop expecting Pensioners to subsidize your business
2 different people watching high definition video at a high bit rate.
Having multiple users certainly increases the need. However, my experience is that speed increases bring diminishing returns.
Going from dial-up to 2Mbps ADSL was a huge jump, and ADSL2 also made a big difference. However, for a single user, there's not really that much difference between 20Mbps, 40Mpbs and 80Mbps. You have a faster connection to the exchange, but you're still limited by the speed of the net and the speed of the servers you connect to.
> DOCSIS 3.0 is basically the same old 1980s/1990s cable with better comms protocols. It's getting to the point to where they can compete on a reasonable basis with single strand fiber, at a lower speed and price point.
It's not just that the communications protocols got better. I think that kind of implies that the medium is at it's end, and that the difference between DOCSIS 2 @ 38Mb/27Mb and DOCSIS 3.1 @ 10Gb/1Gb is some engineers squeezing more out of copper through ingenious protocol-level optimizations. And that's mostly not the case. The big difference is that 3.1 came out a decade later and can take advantage of amazing progress made with ADCs/DACs.
I think it's reasonable to claim that the driving force in internet bandwidth gains have not been because of better mediums, like fiber instead of co-ax. The easiest place to look is wireless, where the medium hasn't changed and won't change, but the speeds have exploded. 802.11ax might push 10Gbit. LTE is an order of magnitude faster than EDGE.
It's easier to push more data when there's less noise on the line. But if we can work around the noise instead, it makes little sense to spend millions laying new cables.
From the infrastructure-investment perspective, only changing the medium is a big-ticket item (digging up cables, installing new ones, etc.). Swapping out newer transceivers on the ends is a tiny investment.
> My hope is that post-election Google Fiber will ramp back up, simply for the legal defense of saying that they too are a cable company and the same laws should apply. In any case, consumers want it. High-end consumers will pay a premium, and the cost for urban footprint fill-out is not exorbitant.
I'm not sure I see why the election will make things more favorable for Google Fiber. Nor do I necessarily agree with the statement that "consumers want it." FiOS is awesome in the D.C. metro area. I get 150 mbps symmetric all times of day with 8 ms pings to my hosted server. In rural Maryland. Yet, Verizon has struggled to hit even 33% market penetration. It's incomprehensible to me, but most people seem to care more about television viewing options than broadband. My parents wanted to ditch FiOS because of all the Indian channels Cox Cable had!!
> 2. Cable coaxial wire - this is a big thick wire that continues to upgrade nicely. DOCSIS 3.0 is basically the same old 1980s/1990s cable with better comms protocols. It's getting to the point to where they can compete on a reasonable basis with single strand fiber, at a lower speed and price point. So cable companies build out the back-end with fiber, but don't have to replant single homes.
Modern HFC networks are nothing like the 1980s/1990s networks even when you're talking about the wires in the ground. The only thing that hasn't been upgraded is the coaxial cable into the house.
I live in Kansas City, and people here are pretty bonkers for it. Prior to Google Fiber we had AT&T and Time Warner Cable. I can't even begin to list all of the amazing features Google Fiber provides, and the service experience is far superior to the typical ISP. We recently house-hunted and Google Fiber is one of the must-have items.
I would guess that Google Fiber would give Alphabet wiggle room when it comes to net neutrality etc. They will have to buy content from Comcast and AT&T. They could end up competing on search and advertising against Verizon. I could see advantages to being able to argue legally that they also are an ISP as well as a media company and search provider. Just my opinion/hope though.
> It's incomprehensible to me, but most people seem to care more about television viewing options than broadband.
I'm also in DC area and live in a house where the previous owners had Fios. We have Comcast and we are happy with it. I get over 200 megabits down, only about 12 megabits up. I know Fios can get us faster uplink speed. But I don't care. This uplink is fast enough. I seldom upload much of anything. I remember when my uplink was 1.5 megabits years ago, and I was happy with that, so I'm not going to get Fios just to get more speed I don't need.
The Comcast X1 box is excellent and it's the first time I've had a cable box that is even decent. The voice command is great. One night I hit the mic button and said "Saturday Night Fever" and seconds later we were watching the movie. Maybe Fios has a box that is as good. I have no idea. But their marketing gives me no reason to believe they have a box that is as good, so I have no reason to switch. When both have Internet that is more than good enough for me, things like a box are going to make all the difference.
The simple fact is that cable Internet is more than good enough for most people, so they are not going to switch to get some uplink speed or some faster ping.
My neighbor has Fios and asked me about how happy I am with Comcast and said he is considering getting Comcast. Clearly Fios is not offering something so amazing that people would not consider leaving.
> We're talking about 3 different technologies here
I'd be interested to know why we aren't talking about four different technologies, with the fourth one being wireless.
You can roll out fast broadband to large areas just by building a few towers to broadcast WiMAX. There's no "backhoe time" and you avoid the cost of digging up the streets.
IEEE 802.16m will now give you a gigabit to a fixed point
You could do the same with LTE but you need a lot more towers and I don't know about spectrum availability.
However, WiMAX seems to have failed in the US, with Clearwire shutting down in March...
Everything I've read about wireless is that we're hitting a wall when it comes to wireless ranges. 5GHz for example is much faster, but also a much shorter range (and bad wall/tree penetration) vs 2.4GHz.
Easier said than done. It might be workable in dense urban areas where there are already lots of tall buildings, but getting approval to build towers in many residential areas is like pulling teeth. To support peak usage hours when everyone is at home HD streaming hulu and netflix, even with WiMax, you will need way more (i.e. smaller) cells than wireless carriers have today, which means lots more towers. Plus you'll need fiber going to all of these small cell towers, which means you're half way to FTTN anyway.
I think wireless internet might fit some niche situations well, but I'm skeptical there is significant capital or long terms savings in the general case. Not to mention that it will never be able to compete with fiber on latency or bandwidth.
The bearer is contended. There are 100s of users sharing the cell throughput, which works for the normal burst mobile cases but when you get to streaming cases like updates and video not so much.
> However, WiMAX seems to have failed in the US, with Clearwire shutting down in March...
I played the WiMAX game in the US as a consumer. If you didn't have clear line of site with the tower, you got terrible speeds if you still had a connection.
Driving + WiMAX was a no go unless it was through an empty field (never got to try this one). Using WiMAX near a window and getting up for some coffee was a no go. Hell, being outside that pane of glass made a huge difference.
It was really bad for mobile.
> You can roll out fast broadband to large areas just by building a few towers to broadcast WiMAX.
I can see this working if customers had outdoor antennas installed.
This sounds a lot like Hungary, where Digi will sell 1000 down, 200 up for 5000 HUF/month [1] (4000 with 2-year loyalty plan), which works out to between $14-$17/mo.
Not quite as impressive but Singapore has gigabit fiber for 26 USD per month equivalent. The long latency to US servers can be a bit troublesome but that's physics (for now!).
Well, if you'd like to know why IRL, go to TIA 2016 [1] and sit in some of the small room "break out" sessions. It's absolutely unbelievable to see very small groups of very senior people in the US teclo industry deciding how the US teclo industry will run. I've done this for a few years and I'm not kidding when I say it's mind blowing how blatant the conversation is.
[1]: http://www.tia2016.org/
It isn't really about one specific thing, nor do I particularly want to name brands. One very senior policy person from a major hardware vendor asked at a small session how that working group could move to "regulate WebRTC" (2013) - Basically, there are high level reps from all the vendors through the whole telco stack, and then politicians, lobbyists, regulators etc. and if you sit and listen, you can see where the interests sit, and who is taking note of what interests.
Of course they are. They're incentivized to do so.
Bandwidth is a scarce resource, and they're often the only seller for a given market. The more demand, the more the market will bear for that resource. The more contentious and oversubscribed their infrastructure, the more likely they are to make seemingly-convincing arguments for rent-seeking (Internet "fast-lanes"), deregulation (because competition lowers prices), and consolidation (more efficiency drives down prices), all of which they can leverage to increase profit while holding prices steady -- or raising them -- due to further-increasing demand.
Building and maintaining increased capacity increases their expenses and lowers the value of their product.
Why in the world would they invest? It would be the stupidest possible thing for a telco to do.
edit: it's worth my noting that my basis for asserting ever-increasing demand is that of induced demand for network services
Instead, they're spending what seems like a lot of money on advertisement and marketing. For over a week, I couldn't seem to get rid of those At&t Uverse ads on my mobile browser, no matter how much I dislike their service. Without competition, I fear, this sort of mindless incompetence will only continue.
and I get (at least) weekly mail-in ads from the providers in my area... and when you subscribe, they replace the wire that goes from your house to the pole, but they use the same old copper (and some techs even tell you that it is fiber...)
I get a card in the mail every week offering me "High Speed Internet" from Centurylink, no speed specified anywhere on the mailer (it is actually 12 down 768k up).
Meanwhile I have a 100/7 connection via HFC from the CableCo.
Mind you, they send me a mailer every week too, asking me to subscribe to TV and Phone services...
Depending on where you live. Germany is anything but a shining example when it comes to broadband and internet access. In fact it's rather mediocre compared to the rest of europe.
It is interesting how in some rural areas, the update to infrastructure is happening via co-ops or small local firms. Volcano, CA and surrounding has it's own small telecom. Plumas County has a coop that is both installing fiber as well as buying up old cable resources to deliver broadband that way. Rock Island Internet in the San Juan Islands (WA state) is installing Fiber on Lopez Island. Cruzio in Santa Cruz, CA is doing both point to point wifi and working with the city on installing Fiber. This is just a few examples that I happen to personally know about.
The same is happening even in relatively highly populated areas in The Netherlands. The telco's can't be motivated to invest in fiber optics, probably because they can charge more for 4 and 5G networks, with datacaps.
Once you have great FTTH internet you don't want to give it up. It's like a drug. But it creates a kind of scarcity in that I could never live somewhere without it and there are yet too few places with it.
Because Google isn't good at dealing with people, and running fiber to homes in the bay area means dealing with lots of cities, counties, the california public utilities commission, and probably more. See public spats between Google and pole owners in other states about drawings not to spec etc, and consider recent CPUC reports on improper pole loading leading to a major fire in Malibu in 2007, and major power outages in a 2011 windstorm: the pole owners are going to be very picky.
Also, consider that AT&T started rolling out their fiber to the home not too long after Google announced cities in the bay area, and AT&T is actually servicing homes, but Google isn't. I don't know what uptake Google was expecting to get in San Jose, but they're probably not going to get it if customers are already passed by AT&T Fiber and may already be serviced by AT&T. (Incidentally, inducing the market to offer 1G probably fulfills Google's goals for deploying fiber anyway)
In Brazil: some 15-20 years ago one power company (Copel [1]) began to spread fiber optics with the power cables. They began in the backbone, then inside cities, and so on, as they were expanding or maintaining their business.
Time passes and few months ago there was a spin-off using that infrastructure for telecom (Copel Telecom [2]).
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[ 30.0 ms ] story [ 2228 ms ] threadSo 1/3 less, for twice as fast internet, or ~5x faster internet for the same price.
So, I don't really see why anyone with a choice would choose AT&T in my neighborhood.
I live in Kansas City. I pay $70/mo for google fiber. 1Gbit down, 1Gbit up.
So for twice what TWC is charging you I get 10x more bandwidth down, and 100 times more bandwidth up.
So can we agree transit in the US is completely and arbitrarily priced? There is no basis for their fees.
It costs no more for transit wherever you are in the US vs me. In fact I would argue wherever you are it's probably cheaper because KC is probably smaller than your market. And you have more physical infrastructure and capacity.
Understanding the various factors involved in building infrastructure, and how they differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, is huge because it plays a huge role in how companies invest, build out, and price. Comparing two different cities' prices, without any more information, is completely useless.
When I cancelled and returned my modem, the customer service department was behind bulletproof glass.
I don't have much to contribute to the price discussion- just can't pass up the chance to tell a KC TWC story.
AT&T: 768kbps - $40
Comcast: i hate myself no matter the price
no other options
My parents have heard horror stories from TWC customers who have been overcharged, service that has been poor, and squabbles with home internet data caps (of which ATT has none- at least as shown on our bill). We could go with something like a DSLExtreme or Sonic.net, but then our TV bill would go up. I definitely wish for any bit more competition in our area, but it's doubtful to happen anytime soon.
A good question to ask here is to what extent institutional debt buyers continue to rely on these ratings.
More background: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2014/10/09/impact-of-the-dod...
They have some very good analysts, not usually given to making policy type statements like this except where it impacts the issuer's revenue and capital structure that determines how well they're able to pay P&I on bonds. So without reading the note I would say it's pretty significant
Verizon Fios is a good example, they built it to compete with cable, but they still can't get more marketshare (in overlapping markets). It's barely profitable.
Telecoms don't think it's worth investing to challenge the cable monopoly.
They were successful in lobbying state utility commissions to push out maintenance on the wired network and provide more cash flow to buy spectrum.
None of this stuff was an accident. The only way fiver will expand is if the government pays for it.
Competition would still be possible on top of this network, just like you can have different delivery companies.
The US tried that and it didn't work. Specifically, The US Justice Dept broke up AT&T into a bunch of "Baby Bells", which spent hundreds of billions of dollars on takeovers to reassemble themselves into AT&T.
In brief: Southwestern Bell Corp (SBC) merged with Pacific Telesis, then SBC bought Ameritech, then it bought AT&T and renamed itself... AT&T. Then the new AT&T bought Cingular. Consumers paid heavily for this, and got no real benefits.
The obvious answer is to make broadband a "social good" like highways, schools, the judicial system and (in rational countries) healthcare, and build it out in the same way as Al Gore's dad built the US interstate highway system after WW2.
Unfortunately, that can't happen in the US, because politics.
Under the US healthcare system, Americans pay 2x to 3x more than the OECD average, suffer much higher rates of infant mortality, have far more sickness in the over 65s, and die younger.
Without the concept of a "social good", you'd expect the US telecoms/broadband industry to produce similar results.
Crappy broadband causes a massive loss in productivity and makes the US less competitive with many small countries, but I don't expect those costs are factored into anybody's calculations.
In some European countries, when the former telco monopolies were split, they were split vertically - so there was one "copper company", then the phone service company, etc. The copper company would generally be heavily regulation with local loop unbundling, requirements to be fair to anyone who wants to sell service over the network, etc.
1. Fiber optics - this is growing, and companies which have a lot of it are continuing to lay it out (albeit slowly). Also see, Altice's recent announcement. My hope is that post-election Google Fiber will ramp back up, simply for the legal defense of saying that they too are a cable company and the same laws should apply. In any case, consumers want it. High-end consumers will pay a premium, and the cost for urban footprint fill-out is not exorbitant.
2. Cable coaxial wire - this is a big thick wire that continues to upgrade nicely. DOCSIS 3.0 is basically the same old 1980s/1990s cable with better comms protocols. It's getting to the point to where they can compete on a reasonable basis with single strand fiber, at a lower speed and price point. So cable companies build out the back-end with fiber, but don't have to replant single homes.
3. Crappy copper telephone wire - this stuff is thin, it's painful to maintain and upgrade and always lags copper. Companies with a lot of this (Windstream, Verizon, AT&T, Frontier) are trying to run it for cash flow rather than spend a lot on upgrades. The telcos push fiber to the node, but it's a slow grind and involves very careful cost benefit analysis.
3 different technologies. 3 very different strategies. The election has further complicated things. Should VZ save up it's ammo and make a play for Sprint, Charter, Dish, or T-Mobile or invest in more broadband plants? I'd save the ammo given that Tom Wheeler is out on January 20th..
They got about 10% of the way in, then a new conservative government got in power and stomped on the plan. Instead they're doing fibre to the node for everyone.
Why have gigabit fibre when you can have slower, less reliable, more expensive copper connections that go a whopping 12Mbit!? Faster even, if the node happens to be sitting in your front lawn.
This is why, for example, last month people who qualified for 200MB can now get gigabit plans.
And believe it or not a lot of people don't care about having fiber internet available.
> with fibre available to 1,006,741 users, of which 240,525 have signed up
And the goal is to cover 75% of the population (1,340,000 households).
So it's around $1000/household. And of those households the majority will not be using the service but they'll be paying for it assuming the household pays taxes.
Whats the point of nation wide fiber network when you force data caps on it like it was some kind of undersea cable to mars?
The CVC prices are unreasonable but they can and will come down. Once the fibre is in place you can argue about the business details later. You can't, however, lay fibre overnight. That takes years of planning.
The POI decision was dumb too but it can be worked around.
As for the data caps, you can already buy an unlimited 100Mbps service right now. So it's just a matter of cost.
And no, they cannot upgrade FttN to G.fast, no matter what they tell you. That requires shorter copper lengths than all but the closest handful of houses to the node have. Plus you need everyone on the same technology so that the vectoring (like active noise cancellation) can work.
Gfast drops off a cliff after a few hundred metres, and they have houses connected to nodes a kilometre away. Gfast and Xgfast are only appropriate for Fibre-to-the-curb.
FttN can never be meaningfully upgraded.
G.fast extends the fibre closer to the house but I suspect it's not very cost-effective unless the take-up is high, so perhaps it will mainly cater to rich people in suburbia.
We've know that fibre (FTTH) was the answer since the 1980s but all British governments have been too short-sighted and stupid to finance it.
Of course, they dug up the streets to install new pipes for the short-term benefits of North Sea gas, and they can find £50 billion for HS2, when they could have FTTH for less.
Yet.
640K ought to be enough for anybody.
What reasonable use has a consumer sub for more than 10-20 Mbs? if your running a business from home get a business line and stop expecting Pensioners to subsidize your business
2 different people watching high definition video at a high bit rate.
Going from dial-up to 2Mbps ADSL was a huge jump, and ADSL2 also made a big difference. However, for a single user, there's not really that much difference between 20Mbps, 40Mpbs and 80Mbps. You have a faster connection to the exchange, but you're still limited by the speed of the net and the speed of the servers you connect to.
It's not just that the communications protocols got better. I think that kind of implies that the medium is at it's end, and that the difference between DOCSIS 2 @ 38Mb/27Mb and DOCSIS 3.1 @ 10Gb/1Gb is some engineers squeezing more out of copper through ingenious protocol-level optimizations. And that's mostly not the case. The big difference is that 3.1 came out a decade later and can take advantage of amazing progress made with ADCs/DACs.
I think it's reasonable to claim that the driving force in internet bandwidth gains have not been because of better mediums, like fiber instead of co-ax. The easiest place to look is wireless, where the medium hasn't changed and won't change, but the speeds have exploded. 802.11ax might push 10Gbit. LTE is an order of magnitude faster than EDGE.
It's easier to push more data when there's less noise on the line. But if we can work around the noise instead, it makes little sense to spend millions laying new cables.
I'm not sure I see why the election will make things more favorable for Google Fiber. Nor do I necessarily agree with the statement that "consumers want it." FiOS is awesome in the D.C. metro area. I get 150 mbps symmetric all times of day with 8 ms pings to my hosted server. In rural Maryland. Yet, Verizon has struggled to hit even 33% market penetration. It's incomprehensible to me, but most people seem to care more about television viewing options than broadband. My parents wanted to ditch FiOS because of all the Indian channels Cox Cable had!!
> 2. Cable coaxial wire - this is a big thick wire that continues to upgrade nicely. DOCSIS 3.0 is basically the same old 1980s/1990s cable with better comms protocols. It's getting to the point to where they can compete on a reasonable basis with single strand fiber, at a lower speed and price point. So cable companies build out the back-end with fiber, but don't have to replant single homes.
Modern HFC networks are nothing like the 1980s/1990s networks even when you're talking about the wires in the ground. The only thing that hasn't been upgraded is the coaxial cable into the house.
I would guess that Google Fiber would give Alphabet wiggle room when it comes to net neutrality etc. They will have to buy content from Comcast and AT&T. They could end up competing on search and advertising against Verizon. I could see advantages to being able to argue legally that they also are an ISP as well as a media company and search provider. Just my opinion/hope though.
I'm also in DC area and live in a house where the previous owners had Fios. We have Comcast and we are happy with it. I get over 200 megabits down, only about 12 megabits up. I know Fios can get us faster uplink speed. But I don't care. This uplink is fast enough. I seldom upload much of anything. I remember when my uplink was 1.5 megabits years ago, and I was happy with that, so I'm not going to get Fios just to get more speed I don't need.
The Comcast X1 box is excellent and it's the first time I've had a cable box that is even decent. The voice command is great. One night I hit the mic button and said "Saturday Night Fever" and seconds later we were watching the movie. Maybe Fios has a box that is as good. I have no idea. But their marketing gives me no reason to believe they have a box that is as good, so I have no reason to switch. When both have Internet that is more than good enough for me, things like a box are going to make all the difference.
The simple fact is that cable Internet is more than good enough for most people, so they are not going to switch to get some uplink speed or some faster ping.
My neighbor has Fios and asked me about how happy I am with Comcast and said he is considering getting Comcast. Clearly Fios is not offering something so amazing that people would not consider leaving.
I'd be interested to know why we aren't talking about four different technologies, with the fourth one being wireless.
You can roll out fast broadband to large areas just by building a few towers to broadcast WiMAX. There's no "backhoe time" and you avoid the cost of digging up the streets.
IEEE 802.16m will now give you a gigabit to a fixed point
You could do the same with LTE but you need a lot more towers and I don't know about spectrum availability.
However, WiMAX seems to have failed in the US, with Clearwire shutting down in March...
Maybe I'm wrong though?
Easier said than done. It might be workable in dense urban areas where there are already lots of tall buildings, but getting approval to build towers in many residential areas is like pulling teeth. To support peak usage hours when everyone is at home HD streaming hulu and netflix, even with WiMax, you will need way more (i.e. smaller) cells than wireless carriers have today, which means lots more towers. Plus you'll need fiber going to all of these small cell towers, which means you're half way to FTTN anyway.
I think wireless internet might fit some niche situations well, but I'm skeptical there is significant capital or long terms savings in the general case. Not to mention that it will never be able to compete with fiber on latency or bandwidth.
I played the WiMAX game in the US as a consumer. If you didn't have clear line of site with the tower, you got terrible speeds if you still had a connection.
Driving + WiMAX was a no go unless it was through an empty field (never got to try this one). Using WiMAX near a window and getting up for some coffee was a no go. Hell, being outside that pane of glass made a huge difference.
It was really bad for mobile.
> You can roll out fast broadband to large areas just by building a few towers to broadcast WiMAX.
I can see this working if customers had outdoor antennas installed.
[1] http://digi.hu/ajanlat/internet/lan
Bandwidth is a scarce resource, and they're often the only seller for a given market. The more demand, the more the market will bear for that resource. The more contentious and oversubscribed their infrastructure, the more likely they are to make seemingly-convincing arguments for rent-seeking (Internet "fast-lanes"), deregulation (because competition lowers prices), and consolidation (more efficiency drives down prices), all of which they can leverage to increase profit while holding prices steady -- or raising them -- due to further-increasing demand.
Building and maintaining increased capacity increases their expenses and lowers the value of their product.
Why in the world would they invest? It would be the stupidest possible thing for a telco to do.
edit: it's worth my noting that my basis for asserting ever-increasing demand is that of induced demand for network services
Meanwhile I have a 100/7 connection via HFC from the CableCo.
Mind you, they send me a mailer every week too, asking me to subscribe to TV and Phone services...
I really like the approach that places like Longmont, CO are taking [http://www.longmontcolorado.gov/departments/departments-e-m/...] or Greenlight in Rochester, NY. Love their pricing page:https://greenlightnetworks.com/pricing
I'm in Pittsburgh and have FIOS and that's set the price-performance bar at which I am not willing to drop below.
Also, consider that AT&T started rolling out their fiber to the home not too long after Google announced cities in the bay area, and AT&T is actually servicing homes, but Google isn't. I don't know what uptake Google was expecting to get in San Jose, but they're probably not going to get it if customers are already passed by AT&T Fiber and may already be serviced by AT&T. (Incidentally, inducing the market to offer 1G probably fulfills Google's goals for deploying fiber anyway)
Time passes and few months ago there was a spin-off using that infrastructure for telecom (Copel Telecom [2]).
[1] http://www.copel.com/hpcopel/root/index.jsp
[2] http://www.copeltelecom.com/site/
Great speed and reliability with a average price.