UK is smaller than Oregon. Oregon has a population of 3.9 million. UK has a population of 63.2 million. It is cheaper to get Internet to concentrations of people (more income per line).
Why are people in NYC and San Fransisco subsidising people in Oregon?
Shouldn't both of those cities have comparable prices to London, whereas Oregon should be $200+ per line to cover the cost of the long distances between homes?
Sure, but the density of, say, NYC, Chicago, or SF, is pretty high. If density were the only factor, parts of the US would rank much more highly than they do now, would they not?
American Fiber is a corperate venture and doing work in the large cities can be expensive (especially New York) so maybe that has something to do with it.
Yeah, Australians have it rough. ADSL2 here costs anywhere between $40-$100, those living a little further from the exchanges get speeds as low as 1.5mbps, and this is in Sydney. I can't imagine what it's like in country Australia. It's a real shame our government decided it's a good idea to CUT investment on broadband.
> UK is smaller than Oregon. Oregon has a population of 3.9 million. UK has a population of 63.2 million. It is cheaper to get Internet to concentrations of people (more income per line).
That's a bit misleading: 70% of Oregon's population is concentrated in the Willamette Valley, an area 1/5th the size of England and with a higher population density than Scotland. The US population is not evenly distributed: most of the population concentrates in very dense urban/suburban areas whereas most of the area (particularly in the west) is sparsely populated.[1]
The UK isn't the only country with cheap broadband. Most of the US has a population density[0] higher than Finland(16/km^2) or Sweden(20/km^2), yet they also have low cost, high speed broadband(faster than the UK). So I think this argument is misleading
I cannot possibly think of what actual relevance there is in that.
Not least of all because if I don't have IPv6, there's plenty of ways to do that, even from the end-user perspective, with no support from your ISP, no capital expenditure and no great ongoing cost, if any at all.
Now let me know how I can get let's say 100 Mbps upload speeds as easily as hooking into IPv6 assuming I have 1 Mbps at the moment.
The Internet is an IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack network. When the topic is Internet access, IPv6 is relevant by definition.
The fact that Korea has shown no interest in following the IETF standard suggests that they're willing to balkanize the network. High-speed broadband will become meaningless if you have to jump through hoops to reach the Internet.
IPv6 is relevant to technical aspects, but speed & price really doesn't have anything to do with which protocol you use. The pipes are laid, the companies are established. Some network hardware might need replacement, but they are way ahead in terms of fixed costs and organizational structure.
Personally, I expect the day IPv6 starts to actually matter, it will be adopted by holdouts like SK. But for now? At least for me, IPv6 is slower!
And it has a very domestically oriented Internet. If IPv6 really matters, and there's hardly going to be much one can access via IPv6 but not IPv4 for a while yet, I can tunnel through and get IPv6 somewhere and vice versa. I can't tunnel myself a 100 Mbps upload speed when I only have 1 Mbps.
And all that's assuming that South Korea isn't doing IPv6 at all. Maybe they just haven't got as much of an incentive compared to, let's say, China with 0.25 IPv4 addresses per capita.
IPv6 is irrelevant, but there is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_South_Ko.... And you can't play games hosted in SK without an SK SSN (so they can control and limit the amount of time kids play) -- IIRC from /r/starcraft. So they are paying for a less good internet, but its quality drop has nothing to do with the economics of the situation.
I pay $80/month for internet + basic TV from comcast. It's just BARELY worth it for me; I've been tempted more than once to cancel it but haven't. There's no other choice for me, other than satellite which is far more expensive.
Are you in a location where an antenna would work? I have one set up for watching locally aired TV shows and local sports now and then. Most of my viewing has shifted to Netflix / Hulu, so this works great for me.
If you aren't a huge sports fan, it's worth a shot, and OTA channels are 720p or 1080i, and uncompressed.
At least for the first few seconds while you're in "turbo boost" before the throttling starts. And of course if you actually use this bandwidth for any length of time, you'll run over your quota and they'll extort you or cancel your service anyway.
More than anything, I blame the poor ISP market in the US on this exact attitude that nothing besides cable is sufficient. Infrastructure is just not at the point where we have the class of connection you're trying to take for granted, and continually choosing only the absolute fastest provider while whining about their policies and prices is being willfully out of touch with the realities of current technology.
$55/mo will get you 12M/1M ADSL2+ from an ISP like Sonic.net, which is owned by a real person who even makes crazy statements like "We delete user logs after two weeks. Your Internet provider should, too". You can double that by easily bonding two lines, and/or enable Annex M for increased upload bandwidth. And they aren't particularly concerned with how much traffic you generate, either.
While these nameplate speeds are a bit slower than what you're used to seeing in cable companies' large print, keep in mind that 12Mb/sec will let you download 100GB/day, and 5Mb/sec (dual Annex M) will let you upload 42GB/day. When you compare these numbers to the usage caps and expectations of cable companies, you can see they're mostly selling an illusion.
I live in central WA and pay $80 for 100mb symmetric. We have local public utility districts in the central counties of the state that are all interconnected by local fiber optic networks. It's pushed the price of internet access way, way down.
I came here to point and laugh at the Yanks crying about their Internet being expensive. They live in a capitalist country, and complain when they find out that Karl was right.
But VDSL2 is cheaper AND can be done sooner, is what the review near enough headed by the incumbent telco, Telstra, will say. And that's all that matters.
Even if it does cost more simply within ten years because of the difference in maintenance.
As a college student it's hilarious how big the discrepancy is between residential on-campus broadband and off-campus housing "broadband". While in the dorms, I measured around 600mbps down/200mbps up (this service didn't seem to add any considerable amount to housing cost). I now live the same distance from my classes/buildings, but technically off-campus and pay $53 a month for 5mbps down/768k up DSL. Usually I would have the slightly better (but still terrible option) of 20mbps down cable, but another cable provider has a monopoly on my apartment building. I stick to DSL because that's actually the better option, believe it or not.
This isn't even in some remote area of the US or something like that. (Westwood, Los Angeles, California.)
this service didn't seem to add any considerable amount to housing cost
It's rolled into tuition. The dorm access is basically a hangers-on to the typical University model, wherein the school acts as its own ISP with a direct tap into the infrastructure.
It's funny because fibre is near enough cheaper to maintain and run than copper is these days.
It's just that the copper is already there and the telco that'll say 'go capex blast-off' when you're not going to pay them thousands of dollars in some way or another is a rare telco indeed.
I didn't need to read this article to know why. I watched it happen.
My first company sold web caching proxy hardware and software support (all Open Source based on Squid). 95% of my customers for the first several years of operation were independent ISPs. I had maybe 200 of them as customers in the 7 years the company existed, many became friends. When "deregulation" took place in the telephone, cable, and broadband market...at the beginning of the DSL/cable Internet revolution, the last mile became impossible to bridge for ISPs without an agreement with either a telco or cable operator (before that modems could call across the country without any explicit involvement of the telco...though higher speed modems did require data center presence at the telco level). The government required telcos and cable operators to resell the last mile to independent service providers at a fair rate; they were supposed to charge the same thing it cost them to provide the service to their own broadband divisions.
So, independent ISPs were offered a DSL link to their customer for, say, $23.50 per month, which is what the telco says it costs them to build/maintain that DSL link and make a modest profit. Great, right? Problem is, whenever ISPs tried to setup a DSL link, the telco would drag their feet. They would take months to deploy service for an independent, or claim they didn't have the hardware in place for that customer, or screw up the installation several times. But, that was just the beginning. The telcos would also send out mailers to those very same customers, offering DSL internet at special introductory prices...$19.95/month, for instance. Yeah, cheaper than the base cost for the line they're charging independents (which doesn't include all the other stuff an ISP has to provide). And, despite having told those customers they couldn't get DSL or having experienced months of delays, the moment the customer called up the telco, DSL would be up and running within a couple of days.
I'd been hearing about it from my customers, and then I had it happen to me. I tried two different independents...they worked hard to get me service, and finally gave up, apologizing for the inability to deliver. After 6 months of delays, I received one of those mailers from the telco. I called the telco, and had DSL a few days later. Same circuit they'd refused to install service on as recently as a month before.
When I started my first company, there were thousands of independent ISPs. Some of them were really good. Some of them were really successful. Most of them died during the switch to broadband. It wasn't an accident. They were killed off by the old monopolies, and our regulators were complicit in the process.
I'm not arguing for more regulation, really, but when the only way to get to your customer is through a state-enforced monopoly, the state better do their damned job. Or, we end up with the mess we have today: Among the worst Internet service at the highest prices in the modern world. How is that allowed to happen in the nation that invented the Internet?
All the arguments about distance and density are moot when talking about major cities; San Francisco is very dense. There's not reason for broadband to cost $99 for reasonable speeds, when it costs a third that for more bandwidth in a couple dozen other nations, including places that are less dense.
This process didn't kill my company directly (I was able to pivot successfully to serving enterprise, education, and government customers, and I had my best year the last year it was in operation), but it made it so un-fun that I didn't want to do it anymore. The kind of people I wanted to work with were no longer in the business. The smart ones sold out to bigger companies, the stubborn ones clung desperately to their dialup business or spent all their money trying to go to WiMax and bypass the telcos. Almost none of them survived as independent ISPs.
We see this happening every day in Canada, since the CRTC mandated providing access to telco/cable copper for Third-Party ISPs. I finally managed to switch off Rogers Cable in Southern Ontario but it took 5 phone calls, a forgotten disconnect, three offers of 15% off $132.99 as their "best offer" and a few callbacks, but I finally managed to switch to Start.ca for $94.99. With taxes, I'm saving $41 and getting the same speed, 150/10. (146/9.7 from speedtest.net but who's counting...) The best part? Rogers would lie on speed tests, using "SpeedBoost" tech they keep to themselves (a recent change) which would lie to me and show 300/10 speeds -- but instead, when downloading, 18MB/s or 150mbps, would be all I see. The best part though? Copper cable is capable of gigabit speeds and the big companies are simply lying if they say otherwise. They've plans to get things to 2gbps in a couple years and could fast track that if Google, or regulation, really kicks things off. But can you imagine how much they'd charge for such speeds? Rogers already wants $225.99 for a simple symmetric 250mbps. AT&T U-Verse will soon offer 300mbps for $199. And like Rogers, probably a modem rental fee on top of that. Oh -- see also http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/The-US-is-Creating-a-Mass...http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/First-DOCSIS-31-Modems-to...
Assuming you're not talking about HFC, POTS might be capable of shoving through signals into the dozens of Megahertz, yes. Maybe even into the low hundreds. That would give you a speed near enough 1 Gbps.
But over a distance of, over your typical barely twisted 0.40mm copper wrapped in nothing put some PVC and PE, maybe three or four dozen metres. And that's with G.Fast which is not even seeing any large deployments quite yet.
And if you're talking about HFC, that is a shared medium. So, sure it can do massive speeds. You can shove, over let's say the 800 Mhz you have, about 5 Gbps, sure, if there's no TV on it. But it's going to be contented across all the other users on the same circuit, which might be in the hundreds.
True. Let's call 5gbps over cable a last ditch attempt to offer fibre-expense plans to places cable companies have no intention of upgrading to fibre. They'll start by using fibre as a way of raising prices across the board, of course ... and that's what we really rebel against. It's not the bandwidth available as much as how there's a line in other countries (as shown in those graphs) of 100mbps speeds for under $40. We'll never see that for a good 10 years here... if ever. They do want to say that "today's speeds are good enough" -- read as: we're not dropping prices anytime soon for current speeds.
Yes you are. But something in the American psyche makes it very hard to admit this, so you end up with utterly useless regulations and very little desire to enforce the ones you have.
The problem, as I see it, may be that only one or two entities have a legal right to build and operate that last mile of connectivity. So, customers are "owned" by one telco and one cable company (maybe two cable companies in some places). Those companies are territorial, even when they are legally bound to share the line.
But, yes, more regulation would be one way to solve it. Another way to solve it may have been to not create massive monopolies on that last mile so many years ago, or not allowing those monopolies to simply print money at the expense of consumers and any competitors. I'm not sure about which is the better approach. But, the current approach of government picking one company to destroy all others is a truly awful middle ground.
It sounds like (at least in this case) the correct type of regulation is in place (I'd heard that the USA favoured building multiple competing networks a la CDMA vs GSM) but if they can flagrantly ignore the rules to put people out of business then clearly whoever is overseeing the regulation has no power to enforce it (or has suffered extreme regulatory capture and doesn't want to).
"I'm not arguing for more regulation" the way I see it this ideology is the sole reason for the creation of this problem. Having a level playing field is not optional and batter and more regulation is the only solution.
I'm not sure more regulation is always the only solution. But, I'm willing to concede that in the market regulation has built, more and better regulation may be the fastest way to a fairer and more consumer-friendly market.
If there were actual competition in the telco market, we might have a better market without more regulation. But, the telcos were declared a "natural monopoly" and became enforced by law before any of us were born. There have been waves of "deregulation" since, and most stages have led to better treatment of consumers, but still the regulation in place obviously picks winners and makes it impossible to compete with them, thus insuring we remain with effective monopolies on the last mile.
I'm not an ideologue on this, or much of anything else, these days. I tend to like market solutions, if they can be made to work. But, sometimes we end up with the worst of all worlds, and only more regulation can provide some relief. Telcos are one example of this, in the US. Health care is another. Going to more regulated, more subsidized, health care was probably the only sane way forward, given how screwed up our health care and health insurance market is. It's not what I would want, if we were starting from scratch...but, we're pretty far down that rabbit hole. Going back up and starting over with a market solution would probably be even more disastrous than staying put and trying to build some reasonable services down here in the dark (that analogy isn' a very good one, I admit).
A level playing field could be achieved by not having the state elevate some players to an unattainable position above all others. Knocking them down after putting them up there is fine, too, I guess...but they've got a lot of power once they're up there. And, they're willing to lobby and fight tooth and nail to keep those advantages and that license to print money at the expense of everyone else. I'm arguing more for, "Hey, let's never let the state elevate some companies above others in the future." more than "Hey, let's let the most powerful companies set the rules forever, and not regulate their ability to 'compete'."
The problem isn't density, as some have mentioned. It's structure.
In the US, the pipes are owned by the providers. Those pipes were built out with subsidized funding or exclusive contract guarantees. In other words, it becomes very difficult for a competitor to come in and build pipes, because their competition already got the leg up.
A better structure would be where all the pipes are public property and the town hires outside firms to upgrade/maintain them. Much like roads. Providers pay a fee to the town for access to them and for usage. An unlimited number of providers can enter the market. Users pay the providers. Competition between providers reduces prices.
P.S. NYC is somewhat moving toward this with their WiFi project.
A friend and I once decided to look into how much it costs to lease the communications space on public utility poles. This is the space well below the power lines that the cable and telephone companies lease from your local government. Read more here: http://www.annsgarden.com/poles/poles.htm
Truth is, almost nobody at the local level has any idea how one could go about doing this. Even though they are publicly owned poles and communications companies pay rent to use them, the cities have no mechanism on how to actually rent pole space to any company other than the phone company and the cable company.
I think we could see a resurgence of local ISPs and even metropolitan area networks if city governments would take up this one issue -- open up the utility polls to more companies and publish the rental rates for the poles. As a bonus, they could even earn more tax proceeds.
The BS with the last mile happens in Germany and France as well. Maybe not as worse, but to get Telekom (the public company of Germany) to set up the last mile for some other company takes around 1 or 2 months.
Now let's evaluate what may be the issue with price/speeds:
- People outside of US/Canada use less bandwidth heavy services, because of piracy laws
- Bigger countries demand more infrastructure (and if you have countryside places with high cost/low speed this skews the average)
Now, pay 99 a month for broadband in SF? Ridiculous
Ah, you think Germany is bad? In Australia we have the choice of Telstra for phone.
Well, in Germany Deutsche Telekom used to run HFC as well, until they were forced to sell it off by the EU back when they were privatised.
That didn't happen in Australia. And so we have the choice of Telstra for HFC as well.
There's another HFC network that was built by Optus, with the anticipation of Telstra overbuilding about 22% of it. Telstra overbuilt to a level of 80% dual coverage.
So that's pretty much killed Optus' HFC network, which is about to shut down, NBN or no NBN, quite soon.
No wonder then, given all that, that last time we moved it took about 5 weeks just to get the phone line in. In fact, it's a shitfest everysingletimeanyonemovesinAustralia. And the newly elected Coalition's thing is not likely to be going to fix this, at all.
I live in Paris and have a basic bundle with Orange, the main telco in France. I pay over 60 euros a month (about $90). This is the same as the American average according to the article. I don't know where you can get a bundle in France for 35 euros (about $25).
I think the numbers are skewed by their use of a purchasing power multiplier. Everything costs more in Paris, so the price of broadband is relatively less compared to places with a lower cost of living. However, based on my experience, the broadband prices are the same, which is what you would expect to see.
Not really if you consider VAT and generally higher prices. If you compare a random US city with pretty much any place in the northern EU, $ and € are exactly equivalent.
I think the basic problem is the structure of the industry and the kind of people who are in it. In USA, by and large the telco business is a mafia business. That is what is fundamental is control of the territory. This is clear when a state is divided into two parts: one for Verizon and one for ATT. It is clear when one reason given is the costs of "right of way" that needs to be paid to the city: it is a deal between mafia groups.
Simply think about it: if you are interested in high tech, where do you go in the USA? Certainly not to the telco. Now ask the same question in France, where do you go? Maybe in telco. The reason is that some countries like France, South Korea, Germany, etc. did not have a big tech sector. Also very little start up culture. But they understood the importance of the tech sector and they did what they could to unblock it by breaking the local mafia. So, the end result is low cost internet. It did only marginally help the creation of a tech sector, but that is what they could do.
Because, in general, this supposed consumer's paradise is actually a corporate paradise. "Consumers" aren't the driver, corporations are, and consumers are only "protected" in the sense that cattle are protected.
Why else would drugs be prohibitively expensive in the US, and the exact same drug be an almost insignificant cost to patients right next door in Canada? You might say that pharmaceutical companies need to recoup their development cost. That might even be true. But they're doing it by charging the US consumers more than other countries.
Why else would SIM cards and healthy competition not be the norm in the US cell phone market? I'd love to take the phones out of my sock drawer and use them, instead of buying a new phone when I switch carriers.
As for broadband, fundamentally they charge so much because they can. Very little competition, usually the only game in town (Comcast has the cable option in my area, with DSL available here and there.) And Congress never met a bribe they didn't like.
58 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadShouldn't both of those cities have comparable prices to London, whereas Oregon should be $200+ per line to cover the cost of the long distances between homes?
That's a bit misleading: 70% of Oregon's population is concentrated in the Willamette Valley, an area 1/5th the size of England and with a higher population density than Scotland. The US population is not evenly distributed: most of the population concentrates in very dense urban/suburban areas whereas most of the area (particularly in the west) is sparsely populated.[1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USA-2000-population-densi...
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_populati...
http://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-c...
Not least of all because if I don't have IPv6, there's plenty of ways to do that, even from the end-user perspective, with no support from your ISP, no capital expenditure and no great ongoing cost, if any at all.
Now let me know how I can get let's say 100 Mbps upload speeds as easily as hooking into IPv6 assuming I have 1 Mbps at the moment.
The fact that Korea has shown no interest in following the IETF standard suggests that they're willing to balkanize the network. High-speed broadband will become meaningless if you have to jump through hoops to reach the Internet.
Personally, I expect the day IPv6 starts to actually matter, it will be adopted by holdouts like SK. But for now? At least for me, IPv6 is slower!
And it has a very domestically oriented Internet. If IPv6 really matters, and there's hardly going to be much one can access via IPv6 but not IPv4 for a while yet, I can tunnel through and get IPv6 somewhere and vice versa. I can't tunnel myself a 100 Mbps upload speed when I only have 1 Mbps.
And all that's assuming that South Korea isn't doing IPv6 at all. Maybe they just haven't got as much of an incentive compared to, let's say, China with 0.25 IPv4 addresses per capita.
If you aren't a huge sports fan, it's worth a shot, and OTA channels are 720p or 1080i, and uncompressed.
More than anything, I blame the poor ISP market in the US on this exact attitude that nothing besides cable is sufficient. Infrastructure is just not at the point where we have the class of connection you're trying to take for granted, and continually choosing only the absolute fastest provider while whining about their policies and prices is being willfully out of touch with the realities of current technology.
$55/mo will get you 12M/1M ADSL2+ from an ISP like Sonic.net, which is owned by a real person who even makes crazy statements like "We delete user logs after two weeks. Your Internet provider should, too". You can double that by easily bonding two lines, and/or enable Annex M for increased upload bandwidth. And they aren't particularly concerned with how much traffic you generate, either.
While these nameplate speeds are a bit slower than what you're used to seeing in cable companies' large print, keep in mind that 12Mb/sec will let you download 100GB/day, and 5Mb/sec (dual Annex M) will let you upload 42GB/day. When you compare these numbers to the usage caps and expectations of cable companies, you can see they're mostly selling an illusion.
I came here to point and laugh at the Yanks crying about their Internet being expensive. They live in a capitalist country, and complain when they find out that Karl was right.
Even if it does cost more simply within ten years because of the difference in maintenance.
This isn't even in some remote area of the US or something like that. (Westwood, Los Angeles, California.)
It's rolled into tuition. The dorm access is basically a hangers-on to the typical University model, wherein the school acts as its own ISP with a direct tap into the infrastructure.
It's just that the copper is already there and the telco that'll say 'go capex blast-off' when you're not going to pay them thousands of dollars in some way or another is a rare telco indeed.
My first company sold web caching proxy hardware and software support (all Open Source based on Squid). 95% of my customers for the first several years of operation were independent ISPs. I had maybe 200 of them as customers in the 7 years the company existed, many became friends. When "deregulation" took place in the telephone, cable, and broadband market...at the beginning of the DSL/cable Internet revolution, the last mile became impossible to bridge for ISPs without an agreement with either a telco or cable operator (before that modems could call across the country without any explicit involvement of the telco...though higher speed modems did require data center presence at the telco level). The government required telcos and cable operators to resell the last mile to independent service providers at a fair rate; they were supposed to charge the same thing it cost them to provide the service to their own broadband divisions.
So, independent ISPs were offered a DSL link to their customer for, say, $23.50 per month, which is what the telco says it costs them to build/maintain that DSL link and make a modest profit. Great, right? Problem is, whenever ISPs tried to setup a DSL link, the telco would drag their feet. They would take months to deploy service for an independent, or claim they didn't have the hardware in place for that customer, or screw up the installation several times. But, that was just the beginning. The telcos would also send out mailers to those very same customers, offering DSL internet at special introductory prices...$19.95/month, for instance. Yeah, cheaper than the base cost for the line they're charging independents (which doesn't include all the other stuff an ISP has to provide). And, despite having told those customers they couldn't get DSL or having experienced months of delays, the moment the customer called up the telco, DSL would be up and running within a couple of days.
I'd been hearing about it from my customers, and then I had it happen to me. I tried two different independents...they worked hard to get me service, and finally gave up, apologizing for the inability to deliver. After 6 months of delays, I received one of those mailers from the telco. I called the telco, and had DSL a few days later. Same circuit they'd refused to install service on as recently as a month before.
When I started my first company, there were thousands of independent ISPs. Some of them were really good. Some of them were really successful. Most of them died during the switch to broadband. It wasn't an accident. They were killed off by the old monopolies, and our regulators were complicit in the process.
I'm not arguing for more regulation, really, but when the only way to get to your customer is through a state-enforced monopoly, the state better do their damned job. Or, we end up with the mess we have today: Among the worst Internet service at the highest prices in the modern world. How is that allowed to happen in the nation that invented the Internet?
All the arguments about distance and density are moot when talking about major cities; San Francisco is very dense. There's not reason for broadband to cost $99 for reasonable speeds, when it costs a third that for more bandwidth in a couple dozen other nations, including places that are less dense.
This process didn't kill my company directly (I was able to pivot successfully to serving enterprise, education, and government customers, and I had my best year the last year it was in operation), but it made it so un-fun that I didn't want to do it anymore. The kind of people I wanted to work with were no longer in the business. The smart ones sold out to bigger companies, the stubborn ones clung desperately to their dialup business or spent all their money trying to go to WiMax and bypass the telcos. Almost none of them survived as independent ISPs.
Some of the bigger ...
Assuming you're not talking about HFC, POTS might be capable of shoving through signals into the dozens of Megahertz, yes. Maybe even into the low hundreds. That would give you a speed near enough 1 Gbps.
But over a distance of, over your typical barely twisted 0.40mm copper wrapped in nothing put some PVC and PE, maybe three or four dozen metres. And that's with G.Fast which is not even seeing any large deployments quite yet.
And if you're talking about HFC, that is a shared medium. So, sure it can do massive speeds. You can shove, over let's say the 800 Mhz you have, about 5 Gbps, sure, if there's no TV on it. But it's going to be contented across all the other users on the same circuit, which might be in the hundreds.
Yes you are. But something in the American psyche makes it very hard to admit this, so you end up with utterly useless regulations and very little desire to enforce the ones you have.
But, yes, more regulation would be one way to solve it. Another way to solve it may have been to not create massive monopolies on that last mile so many years ago, or not allowing those monopolies to simply print money at the expense of consumers and any competitors. I'm not sure about which is the better approach. But, the current approach of government picking one company to destroy all others is a truly awful middle ground.
It's incredibly frustrating but I don't see it changing anytime soon. =(
If there were actual competition in the telco market, we might have a better market without more regulation. But, the telcos were declared a "natural monopoly" and became enforced by law before any of us were born. There have been waves of "deregulation" since, and most stages have led to better treatment of consumers, but still the regulation in place obviously picks winners and makes it impossible to compete with them, thus insuring we remain with effective monopolies on the last mile.
I'm not an ideologue on this, or much of anything else, these days. I tend to like market solutions, if they can be made to work. But, sometimes we end up with the worst of all worlds, and only more regulation can provide some relief. Telcos are one example of this, in the US. Health care is another. Going to more regulated, more subsidized, health care was probably the only sane way forward, given how screwed up our health care and health insurance market is. It's not what I would want, if we were starting from scratch...but, we're pretty far down that rabbit hole. Going back up and starting over with a market solution would probably be even more disastrous than staying put and trying to build some reasonable services down here in the dark (that analogy isn' a very good one, I admit).
A level playing field could be achieved by not having the state elevate some players to an unattainable position above all others. Knocking them down after putting them up there is fine, too, I guess...but they've got a lot of power once they're up there. And, they're willing to lobby and fight tooth and nail to keep those advantages and that license to print money at the expense of everyone else. I'm arguing more for, "Hey, let's never let the state elevate some companies above others in the future." more than "Hey, let's let the most powerful companies set the rules forever, and not regulate their ability to 'compete'."
In the US, the pipes are owned by the providers. Those pipes were built out with subsidized funding or exclusive contract guarantees. In other words, it becomes very difficult for a competitor to come in and build pipes, because their competition already got the leg up.
A better structure would be where all the pipes are public property and the town hires outside firms to upgrade/maintain them. Much like roads. Providers pay a fee to the town for access to them and for usage. An unlimited number of providers can enter the market. Users pay the providers. Competition between providers reduces prices.
P.S. NYC is somewhat moving toward this with their WiFi project.
Truth is, almost nobody at the local level has any idea how one could go about doing this. Even though they are publicly owned poles and communications companies pay rent to use them, the cities have no mechanism on how to actually rent pole space to any company other than the phone company and the cable company.
I think we could see a resurgence of local ISPs and even metropolitan area networks if city governments would take up this one issue -- open up the utility polls to more companies and publish the rental rates for the poles. As a bonus, they could even earn more tax proceeds.
The BS with the last mile happens in Germany and France as well. Maybe not as worse, but to get Telekom (the public company of Germany) to set up the last mile for some other company takes around 1 or 2 months.
Now let's evaluate what may be the issue with price/speeds:
- People outside of US/Canada use less bandwidth heavy services, because of piracy laws
- Bigger countries demand more infrastructure (and if you have countryside places with high cost/low speed this skews the average)
Now, pay 99 a month for broadband in SF? Ridiculous
Well, in Germany Deutsche Telekom used to run HFC as well, until they were forced to sell it off by the EU back when they were privatised.
That didn't happen in Australia. And so we have the choice of Telstra for HFC as well.
There's another HFC network that was built by Optus, with the anticipation of Telstra overbuilding about 22% of it. Telstra overbuilt to a level of 80% dual coverage.
So that's pretty much killed Optus' HFC network, which is about to shut down, NBN or no NBN, quite soon.
No wonder then, given all that, that last time we moved it took about 5 weeks just to get the phone line in. In fact, it's a shitfest every single time anyone moves in Australia. And the newly elected Coalition's thing is not likely to be going to fix this, at all.
I think the numbers are skewed by their use of a purchasing power multiplier. Everything costs more in Paris, so the price of broadband is relatively less compared to places with a lower cost of living. However, based on my experience, the broadband prices are the same, which is what you would expect to see.
http://www.free.fr/adsl/freebox-revolution.html 30 euros a month bundle.
Not really if you consider VAT and generally higher prices. If you compare a random US city with pretty much any place in the northern EU, $ and € are exactly equivalent.
I think these are the best rates in the world, right?
Why else would drugs be prohibitively expensive in the US, and the exact same drug be an almost insignificant cost to patients right next door in Canada? You might say that pharmaceutical companies need to recoup their development cost. That might even be true. But they're doing it by charging the US consumers more than other countries.
Why else would SIM cards and healthy competition not be the norm in the US cell phone market? I'd love to take the phones out of my sock drawer and use them, instead of buying a new phone when I switch carriers.
As for broadband, fundamentally they charge so much because they can. Very little competition, usually the only game in town (Comcast has the cable option in my area, with DSL available here and there.) And Congress never met a bribe they didn't like.
"US consumers are our most important resource."