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Why American Internet Service Is Slow and Expensive
An anonymous reader writes "Reporter David Cay Johnston was interviewed recently for his new book, which touches on why America's Internet access is slow, expensive, and retarding economic growth. The main reason? Regulatory capture. It seems the telecommunication companies have rewritten the regulatory rules in their favor. In regards to the fees that were meant to build a fast Internet, Johnston speculates those fees went to build out cellular networks. 'The companies essentially have a business model that is antithetical to economic growth,' he says. 'Profits go up if they can provide slow Internet at super high prices.'"
Screwing over people for profit the the American way???
There was an interesting NY Times article on the cost per customer for Verizon to deploy their FiOS product. Essentially it was $4k per subscriber. That's an awfully long payback when you are only getting less than a few hundred bucks a month and you also need to have money to operate the network, provide sales and technical support, etc http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/19/technology/19fios.html Perhaps continued development in technologies like LTE will provide less expensive methods to get customers in the future
Then what about Japan? Yen is stronger, wages are higher yet fibre optic Internet access at 100 Mbps can be had for less money about anywhere in the country.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
Communications is a basic service provided by government. It's defined in the US constitution as well, as the Postal service.
There's no reason for private internet providers to exist.
Get rid of them, implement a government-designed system, like the roads. It would be far cheaper than building the highway system.
The best part of government ISP is that it has to follow constitutional freedom-of-speech rights, whereas a private ISP can shut down any message critical of the company, since private organizations don't have to follow the constitution.
South Korea has a special circumstance: (According to a marketing guy at a router company where I worked) About 95% of their population lives in giant apartment buildings - large enough that they have telephone central offices in their basements.
You don't have to dig up the neighborhood to get the service to them. You can just put an edge router in the basement, run indoor cat5-or-better up the existing communication conduits (if it wasn't there already), and feed them 100M (maybe 1G by now) Ethernet, which gets from building to building and to the backbone via fibers in the bundle that was already there (in old construction) for the telephone service. This makes installation VERY cheap and wiring distances short enough that high speeds are easy.
With that speed available the biggest bandwidth user (according to this guy) was live 1-to-1 naked video "phone calls" between youngsters of opposite sexes still living with their parents. It let them do their courtship form their bedrooms without being in each other's presence unsupervised, or making physical contact (either of which would cause much consternation with their elders in their strongly regimented society). It's much like the way affordable automobiles and drive-in movies changed the courtship habits in the US, especially after WW II.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This Catbeller has been banging this drum for over eleven years, may I just say?
The "free market" ain't, and never can be, free, when you are dealing with players who understand the markets better than you do, and, furthermore, will cheat like motherfuckers. Conspiracy isn't necessary. The unwritten rules are always clear. Manufacture scarcity.
The new forestry corporations did it in the late 80s, buying up forests and rights, until in 1992 they tripled wood prices overnight, blaming Clinton and his evil environmental regulations, which didn't exist yet, being as he just was elected, for the cause. They cornered the market and fixed prices. The on;y congresscitter to object was fabulously ejected by them funding his shiny new opponent. No one else dared say a word.
Enron INfamously pretended that evil regulations made them incapable of restraining costs as they shut down power plants on mathematicians say-so to jack prices. California's entire budget mess for the last ten years can be traced back to that robbery. Free market is only free for those who control the market.
Enron not-so-famously was hell-bent on cornering the world's water supplies in drought areas - guess why... but don't worry, in their absence other bastards have bought up water rights, and soon "scarcity" will quintuple water prices across the world.
Kucinich in Cleveland was right, when he said the new private power companies would raise rates after they took over power grids. Cleveland to this day still has lower electrical bills than all the surrounding cities with free-market electric companies gouging them for decades.
And internet and radio internet... ah, so damned obviously they have refused to build infrastructure and have been "forced" to raise prices while the rest of the world simply licenses companies to build infrastructure at a decent price. Eleven YEARS ago, here, I posted a quick calculation: how much have people paid, in total, for DSL, cable, and modem charges combined - and how much had the telcos actually spent. It's eleven years later. We've pumped a good chunk of a trillion into their pockets, and they've spent a tiny fraction of that on actual buildout. They are taking us like a lost tourist.
Most of the rest of the world does it correctly. Scale has nothing to do with it. We don't have a limited amount of cash and a limited workforce; our companies can scale up any buildout. THEY DON'T WANT TO.
Copy whatever country did it right. Let local muni governments build out the systems for a fraction of the cost that these lying sacks of excrement quote. Let this end. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Market. Not when the "free" market companies can buy each other or merge, thus eliminating the market, or simply cooperate by obeying unwritten rules to jackup prices.
Well, I live in the sticks ( >70 miles outside of a major metro area), and in spite of a county population density of around 22 per sq. mile, I get 30mbps at $30/mo. (more often than not it drifts above 40, especially in winter when the tourists all stay home).
I could probably count on one hand, with all 5 fingers to spare, the number of "one percenters" who live out here.
It isn't fiber-to-the-doorstep, but given the low population and the alternatives in most other rural areas, it ain't half bad. *shrug*
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Speaking as a Finn I find this ridiculous. We have a population density of 16/km2 or 41/sq mi for you who go by the imperial system, that is 201st in the world. The United states has 33.7/km2 or 87.4/sq mi.
In Finland we, in contrary to Sweden, have the industry building out the networks for their own money. Very little is subsidized unlike in Sweden. Still we are able to have really good internet connections. Currently we pay around 30-50euro/month for 24 / 2mbit ADSL (depending on where you live and ISP) in most places where fiber isn't avaliable but fibre is in general being expanded in most population centers and then some local areas such as small municipalities build their own fiber networks.
Where you can get access to fiber you pay the same for a significantly faster connection. I know for example that in my appartment building I would get 250mbit for 50/euro month.
As a matter of fact we are aiming at being able to provide 100mbit to everyone by 2015 source from the finnish broadcasting company
It doesn't matter how you reason, there's absolutely no reason what so ever that the major population centers in the US wouldn't have high speed internet access for affordable prices except the telco cartels.