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If You Lived In Riga, You Wouldn't Bother To Cut the Cord
lpress writes "If you lived in Riga, Latvia, you would not have to 'cut the cord' to see video entertainment at a reasonable cost. You would simply get a triple play subscription with 20 Mbps up and 5 Mbps down from service provider Balti-Com for $25.43 USD. Balti-Com had the lowest triple pay price in a New America Foundation report, The Cost of Connectivity, which compares prices charged by 885 ISPs in 22 cities worldwide. The report found that five of the cheapest 15 triple-play offerings were in Paris — the fruit of competition between ISPs. With the Telecommunication Act of 1966, the U.S. Congress hoped to foster similar competition, but failed. As study co-author Benjamin Lennett says, U.S. telephone and cable companies have arranged a 'negotiated truce' in which cable incumbents enjoy a de facto monopoly on high-speed broadband service, while Verizon and AT&T focus primarily on their wireless platforms."
That's the Telecom Law of 1996, not 1966
that includes mobile phone service (since 20 channels of TV are public anyway) where we get some good deals.
For 24.99€/mo with no contract (can cancel immediately), we get 16/1 service (including a WLAN router), standard telephone (anywhere in Germany free to a land line) and the O2 mobile phones for free (we choose to pay an extra 5€/mo for 500 minutes to the EU/US long-distance because I call the US quite often), and 4 SIM cards with numbers and .15€/min and .15€/SMS.
If you agree to a 24-month contract the price is only 14.99€/mo
:D
The prices are weighted by the World Bank's Purchasing Power Parity metrics "which adjust for differences in costs of living, price levels, and other factors that affect a consumer’s purchasing power."
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
And to bring the comparison full circle, the Big Mac Index from January 2012 showed Latvia to be -30% parity. Meaning if you were to adjust the price to US Dollars it would cost an equivalent of about US$15-16 in the US.
The index can be found here:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/01/daily-chart-3
---- Fight to protect your right to keep and arm bears! ummmm... ya I think that's right....
I come from Latvia, lived in Riga until recently. It's true that it is one of the poorest countries in the EU, and income levels are low by the standards of more developed Western countries, but telecom is cheap there. 100 megabit connections are very common and I had one. About 40USD together with TV and a landline, and that's not the cheapest that was available, it's a particular service provider I like. The prices are consistently affordable even by local standards.
Availability and price of high-speed broadband in Riga is excellent, and Latvia is near the top of country rankings by Internet speed. This is not surprising for those who remember the situation in Riga just over a decade ago. Very limited availability of DSL/ISDN lines that give reasonable speeds, mostly 56k dialup instead, which was very expensive from the ISP bill plus the phone company charges. Real broadband came to the area later, but then it was good.
As a side-note, I have only on very, very rare occasions seen people with Macs in Latvia. Until iPods/iPhones I could go for months without seeing an Apple product, and that certainly has to do with pricing. The price difference between Macbooks and other laptops looks absolutely ridiculous in Latvia.
Doing illegal things as a corporation works kind of like raising in poker. In poker, if you raise you have two ways to win. You could have the strongest hand, of course. That one's pretty easy. But you could have a weaker hand than your opponent and he might still fold because he's not confident he can beat you.
It's a little different as a corporation, but if you do something illegal you could just get away with it and make a ton of money. Or you could get caught and fined. From what I've seen, the fines are always less (sometimes FAR less) than the illegal profit you made. Something to keep in mind when, as a CEO, you're faced with a choice between contaminating an entire town with asbestos and making ONE BILLION DOLLARS...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It's so obviously collusion. In my neck of the woods, no two cable companies compete. You can get one if you live HERE and the other if you live THERE. This is not capitalism and they should be forced through legislation to compete.
It's called "regulation" .. aka law and order for corporations. Sure, criminals don't like law and order.. so what's new in that? They'd much rather be left alone to play freely in a green field of their id's desires.
From financial deregulation, deregulation in other industries and a general lack of oversight and enforcement we have gotten the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl , the S&L melt down, the Long Term Capital Management melt down, the 2008 crash and global warming. The cumulative bill to the rest of us so some tiny minority can profit obscenely runs into the trillions, a bill the rest of us have to pay.. This is also known as a Grover Norquist Tax, the tax the rest of us pay for deregulatory policies and the destruction they cause. .
Well, I've been taxed enough. I'm sick of paying the bill for dereguation and I WANT MY MONEY BACK from the small set of libertarian and conservative personalities and lawmakers that took it away and gave it to the coke snorting class.
I can save money by getting rid of a car and buying a bike, I can save money by getting rid of the bike and walking. But the quality decreases a lot as well. A BMW and an old beat up Ford Pinto will both get you from point A to point B but in general it will be a lot more enjoyable driving the BMW than the Pinto.
The problem I have observed with most Americans is that they don't know HOW to save money.
That is because, quite simply, it makes no economic sense to save cash. Even using the hilariously manipulated official statistic of inflation, the Consumer Price Index, the US dollar has an inflation rate of 1.66%. Using the CPI as it was originally designed without the manipulation gives you a real inflation rate of ~5%. Now, a savings account will pay you, what? .35% interest if you're lucky? A 1 year CD rate will pay you about 1% or so. A 1 year treasury bond will pay about .2%. This means to an American if they keep cash or any other traditionally "safe" investments of cash they are taking a guaranteed loss. Which means that their only other options are to invest it in stocks, foreign bonds, real estate, or commodities such as gold or silver in order to even keep the same purchasing power they have today.
We work hard to earn money..... we should also work hard to save it rather than waste it.
Ok, so where do you put cash that will at least keep up with inflation without scaring the masses off?
The fact is, most Americans don't save because there is no financial incentive to save. Cash is a "hot potato" that needs to be spent and invested in -something- or else you take a guaranteed loss.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The explanation for this is of course, not as nice as the article makes out:
This in fact called a Cartel.
And in fact it is a private/public Cartel. Private because we really know it's there for price fixing and splitting up the market which is, ostensibly illegal. But we know they do it right in front of the legislators' noses, who don't do anything about it. In my opinion because that would threaten cushy 6 figure swan jobs offered by the culprits when their terms end, as well as free education at top schools for their kids/grandkids via "scholarships" and whatever other shell games are devised, etc. etc. etc. A true cooperation of "public" and private concerns.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
The fact is, most Americans don't save because there is no financial incentive to save. Cash is a "hot potato" that needs to be spent and invested in -something- or else you take a guaranteed loss.
I have heard this a lot, but thinking about it now, I think low interest has little bearing on the average person's saving / spending habits. For people who are already saving, it probably changes the instruments they use to preserve their wealth, but I don't think the average person/family is living paycheck to paycheck because they are worried that the purchasing power of their money will not endure if they hang on to it. People get themselves into a position where they end up giving most of their pay to service debt, and I think this is very rarely if ever done because they are being smart and not holding onto the "hot potato" that is cash.
If your argument was correct, I think you would see fewer companies sitting on piles of cash. I also believe Japan has/had one of the worlds highest saving rates while interest rates there have been zero for decades.
I owned a regional ISP for a decade. The '96 telco act was great. It forced the legislated monopolies to interconnect with new local exchanges. Suddenly an ISP could easily do business with a non monopoly telco and gain access to all exchanges in an area code (or a state/region) at one set of equipment instead of paying high foreign exchange rates or having various rack space spread around the countryside. Then.. Bush got elected, Powel's Kid was put in charge of the FCC, and the FCC became very big business oriented. They rolled back the telco act - the baby bells did pay huge fines for not following the act by being competitive but the FCC got more and more lenient. After a few years under Powel the FCC said the free market would handle such things and the act went away..
You saw the near instant collapse of the small ISP and regional CLECs. The thousands of companies that got people online either folded or sold as there was no way to stay competitive against the monopolies. For example wholesale costs for bare DSL lines were often higher than the companies were selling retail. Etc. Of course this wasn't just the FCC. My local fed house rep was sitting chair of the telecommunications subcommitee and he was all for big monopolies. (Interesting correlation with his voting record and his donations record too). His pat response was the big monopolies were holding back from infrastructure improvements because why build out when they may just lose money? Of course once they got their monopoly back it never happened...
With 300 billion documented of broken promises and failed tax breaks given to the telcos it would seem like someone would look into it. But we still haven't seen a single person charged with a crime by outright lying on wallstreet and causing economic damages so what's some broken telco promises?