Why is it so difficult for an ISP which actually cares about delivering a pro-consumer service to exist in the United States?
The common duopoly choice between AT&T and Comcast is a nasty one, akin to asking you to choose "would you rather receive herpes, monkeypox, genital warts, or all three?"
Their entire strategy boils down to manipulating and working against their customers best interests, greedily making more, more, always more money. At any cost, externalities be damned.
Probably because the morass of red tape and bureaucracy in the way of building a competitor has made such an endeavor difficult to accomplish and that this was the case from the very beginning of net infrastructure. Recall that Ma Bell was made national carrier in exchange for not competing against smaller carriers. When the government starts picking winners and losers rather than letting companies duke it out in the market place, you get long term consequences like incumbent carriers that are economically inclined to only do marginally better than its competitors, if anything at all.
And that's not considering the extreme bureaucratization and state instituted monopoly clauses that prevent profitable investment in infrastructure even from titans like Google.
Because installing fiber wires to every residence is not profitable when the local coaxial cable company can give everyone low quality 500Mbps down / 3Mbps up connections for $45 per month. It is why you usually only see fiber in brand new developments where there is no additional cost to bury it while everything is already excavated for all the other utilities, or in older neighborhoods with overhead wires where it is cheaper to install.
If you are in a relatively modern area with buried utilities, there is almost no chance a business will be willing to take the loss on running all the new fiber underground.
It has to be a taxpayer funded effort operation like a utility, otherwise it will make no business sense.
I'm seeing AT&T run new fiber, underground in new conduit within existing communities ranging from 0.2 acre lots to 2+ acre lots both in the city limits and outside the city limits. These are affluent areas, not considered rural or economically disadvantaged. AT&T is actively retiring their copper network and replacing it with fiber. They're making an investment for the decades to come and can afford it.
Shame, the service is marred by shit point of service equipment.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 35.9 ms ] threadThe common duopoly choice between AT&T and Comcast is a nasty one, akin to asking you to choose "would you rather receive herpes, monkeypox, genital warts, or all three?"
Their entire strategy boils down to manipulating and working against their customers best interests, greedily making more, more, always more money. At any cost, externalities be damned.
Disgusting.
And that's not considering the extreme bureaucratization and state instituted monopoly clauses that prevent profitable investment in infrastructure even from titans like Google.
If you are in a relatively modern area with buried utilities, there is almost no chance a business will be willing to take the loss on running all the new fiber underground.
It has to be a taxpayer funded effort operation like a utility, otherwise it will make no business sense.
Shame, the service is marred by shit point of service equipment.