Slashdot Mirror
Why Is Broadband More Expensive In the US Than Elsewhere?
mrspoonsi writes "The BBC reports "Home broadband in the US costs far more than elsewhere. At high speeds, it costs nearly three times as much as in the UK and France, and more than five times as much as in South Korea. Why?...'Americans pay so much because they don't have a choice,' says Susan Crawford, a former special assistant to President Barack Obama on science, technology and innovation policy. We deregulated high-speed internet access 10 years ago and since then we've seen enormous consolidation and monopolies, so left to their own devices, companies that supply internet access will charge high prices, because they face neither competition nor oversight."
The telco lobby writes the legislation.
Humans exploit market where there is no oversight. What a revelation.
America is the home of capitalism, which means competition, which drives down prices and raises standards. The rest of the world is a socialist hellhole.
It's similar to what the North Koreans believe, with a touch of stockholm syndrome.
âoeIf he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems to me he needs it 'cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and if he's poor in hisself, there ain't no million acres gonna make him feel rich, an' maybe he's disappointed that nothin' he can do 'll make him feel rich.â
â John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
People will pay whatever is charged up to the point that the market will bear. It's not that far off from an unregulated utility at this point. Television content delivery has similarly pulled their prices up through the roof, because people will pay it.
I haven't paid for either service (at least intentionally) since 2009. Under the right circumstances I might be persuaded to get the broadband again, but not cable or satellite television.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I live in downtown Bellevue, WA next door to a Microsoft building and within three blocks of two others. Comcast has been at capacity on the block for over six years so they have not offered new service for most of the past decade. CenturyLink offers 2Mbps DSL. It's so slow because of the universal SLiCs that are used in the area due to oversubscription. The city does not allow anyone else to sell on the block. You ever wonder why Microsoft people aren't very pro-Internet? It's because for most of them their Internet access is very slow.
1. Where I live we do have choice between carriers, and it is not even a big city. 2. When I was in a densely populated area, Northern VA, we had choice too. Deregulation to allow competition causes monopolies? No, does not compute. Regulation creates barriers to entry that leans to monopolies or few providers, those who can get the government to protect their territory with police power. ATT was a national monopoly only until the feds allowed competition. Your local utility is only a monopoly as long as your local government makes them one, same with your cable provider, etc.
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
When all of the internet is being filtered through five or six main providers, it is easier for the NSA to funnel all of the information into its data analysis machines. Can you image the headaches the NSA would have if all the little mom and pop companies (if they were still around to do internet), would not provide for a free backdoor to the operations...
So now there are just a few providers. They get to charge whatever they want and the government will let the monopoly continue so the executives and share holders can smile all the way to and from the bank.
Fuck 'em. I'm done paying for interne@#$@#!43,
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
to buy a congressman than to build a better business. To all those you think America is a free market, go fuck you ignorant self then read up on Mussolini's definition of fascism.
Much like healthcare, most Americans don't have a real choice. I would pay less and get better healthcare and faster internet service if I could.
Why is this? I would guess that it's probably due to monopolies taking advantage of regulations to make competition stay away. Also probably in part to people wanting to watch specific sports and shows, and only being able to get them though one of the major cable/satellite networks. Shows like that are going to be hard for a startup internet company to replicate. Things like piracy, netflix, and itunes alleviates some of these problems, but a lot of people still prefer to get their games live.
we pay like 80usd for 10mbps, and we get a piss poor service
It's always a bad idea to compare the US to Europe or Asia. These kinds of comparisons always end up being overly simplistic. The US is a VERY decentralized nation in terms of population, and we have a far lower population density than they do. Compare Houston to Tokyo, for example... Tokyo is tightly packed and Houston is sprawling everyone. It's much easier to bring cheap, high speed broadband to a bunch of tiny, densely packed apartments than it is to bring it to every country lane. Asian and European cities are much more like LANs, and US cities are like WANs, to put it another way. If you want LAN speeds in the much less densely populated US, it is going to be very costly.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
If competition is down, they make more on profit margin. They may benefit, but the consumer suffers the most since we have no choice but to choose a provider in one or two different companies, and many often times in especially rural areas it's just one provider for cable/internet. If we had more companies that sold cable and Internet, we wouldn't be seeing the problem of ridiculous prices for these services...
So, the conclusion is de-regulation is bad for consumers, but good for businesses.
Gee, I'm shocked. De-regulation basically is carte blanche to screw over your customers and not be accountable to anybody.
The whole mentality of "it's good as long someone is making profit" will be the death of us.
The 'free market' is a lie, and it always has been. Consumers don't have perfect information, and corporations will lie cheat and steal to improve their bottom line.
That de-regulation would ever improve anything for consumers has always been a big lie.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Once Upon a Time in America
Cheap communications has changed our society more than any other of our inventions and it has removed more tyrants from power than any weapon. Let’s take another step into the history books, back to May 1st, in 1844. Alfred Vail, working with Samuel Morse, was setting up the first telegraph line, and on that day sent the world’s first ever electronic message down the 24 miles of cable that were working, from Annapolis Junction to Washington D.C., to report the results of the Whig Party presidential nominations (Henry Clay won that nomination, and lost the subsequent election).
Just a decade later in 1855, the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company and the New York & Western Union Telegraph Company merged to create Western Union. One assumes new-york-and-mississippi-valley-and-western-union-printing-telegraph-company.com was already taken by domain name squatters.
By 1900, Western Union operated a million miles of telegraph lines, and by 1945 it had an effective monopoly over the US market. As the New Yorker wrote, monopolies make spying easier. It is an easy and obvious trade: the government allows, by inaction or by intervention, a powerful telecommunications company to become dominant in a market through mergers and acquisitions. In return that company provides the government with surveillance.
The New Yorker explains how Western Union used its monopoly to serve those in power:
It is quite visible how cost gravity drove communications down from an experiment for the wealthy to a mass market product so cheap even Western Union couldn’t make profits from it. By 1980 its telegraph business was dying, and the old Western Union business was finally closed in 2006, after 151 years of operation. The name was, as we know, reused for a financial services company which today enjoys a government-sanctioned monopoly.
Curiously, Western Union’s long telegraph monopoly seems to have had only a small impact on the size of communications networks. If cost gravity was operating fully, at 29% a year, and telegraph costs were in free-fall, there would have been 37M miles of telegraph by 1900. Instead, assuming Western Union had half the market, there were 2M miles. That is a factor of 16 over 55 years, which is not much, and a part of that can be accounted for by quality improvements.
I’m also not sure what to do with the random figure of 113 million kilometers of fiber optic cable produced in 2010. A cable is a bundle of fibers, and the traffic rates are rather higher than Western Union’s old stock. Has cost gravity been working?
One smoking gun pointing to a century and half of cost gravity being hijacked by telecoms monopolies back through AT&T and Western Union is the cost of the modern equivalent of a telegraph, the text message.
My blog
...'Americans pay so much because they don't have a choice,' says Susan Crawford...
Wrong! It's because of excessive taxes and regulations.
The picture you paint of Europe is a little simplistic too. France has a few large cities, but the tenth-biggest one has less than half a million inhabitants. It has tens of thousands of villages with 1000 or less inhabitants. And you get a choice of cheap ADSL provider in most of those small villages.
Virtually serving coffee
Population density of the above-listed nations as a multiple of the US:
UK: 7.5x more density
France: 3.4x more density
South Korea: 14.5x more density
So maybe it's more expensive because a lot of expensive technology has to be implemented and spread across wider areas to service the people in a country where the people are vastly more spread out?
My city has kindly allowed me to have TWO providers I can choose from for internet - my phone company or my cable company and both are granted a monopoly by... my city... which then tells me I have competition so the prices will be lower.
The same city that, for some reason, has no power to force the cable company to offer ala carte channels. Or to regulate the phone company from charging me nearly $10 a month to have an unlisted number in the phone book. (Really? It costs $120/year to NOT print my phone number?!)
And lest we forget, dear children, when we lived in the oh so golden age of "regulated industries" that this kind ex-Obama official wants us to return too, that The Phone Company didn't lay fiber because nobody needed data unless they were willing to pay the cost to LAY THE CABLE... that Long Distance Phone Calls were a LUXURY because of the awesomeness awesome resources required to do such a thing.
So give me a freakin' break - The real reason we pay more for bandwidth here in the US is because the United States Federal Government lays hidden charges inside the phone bill as required costs. The laws of which explicitly state that the phone company may not itemize those charges because those might be misconstrued as a tax.
Yes, yes - it's a "natural monopoly", we get it, you studied economics in college.
This whole thing could be fixed by changing the model from "pay to access" to "pay to use".
The US considers the infrastructure a fixed resource - fixed radio bandwidth allocated to certain players, fixed easements given to certain players, and so on. When you have a fixed resource, you have high access fees and discouraged use: multi-year contracts, high monthly bills, data caps, throttled access, poor/no connectivity with no guarantee, and so on.
In a "pay to use" model, the government would mandate a fixed maximum charge per gigabyte of usage. Companies with a fixed resource could increase profits only by encouraging more usage: deploy newer and faster technology, connecting more people, encouraging high data-transfer activities (netflix, et al.), and so on.
Such a change wouldn't even affect the existing players: take the total cost of internet access and divide by total internet usage to come up with a fee per-gigabyte that would give the same income next year as they get with the current system.
The difference being, now they have an incentive for service, instead of an incentive for rent-seeking.
All that extra hardware to spy on US citizens, that cost has to be passed on to consumers. Probably why it's hard to get fast speeds too, you have to wait till the gov upgrades their backend to handle the extra workload of everyone on faster links; when they get their new spy gear in, you get another 5mb.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
The 32-year-old editor of a design magazine pays $37 a month to Comcast for a cable broadband package. She doesn't have a TV or a landline phone.
"It's fine in the majority of the apartment but if I'm on my bed, I have to hold my laptop three feet away towards the open doorway of the bedroom because the signal is so weak.
"It's a pain when you're in a 2am coma and trying to watch The West Wing and you don't really want to move. But if you're in the living room in the vicinity of the router then the speed is fine. I don't think it's good value because I pay the same for unlimited data on my phone and I expect more from a service at home on my laptop."
What does crappy wifi have to do with cable broadband packages??
If you're looking at the US as a whole, your argument is sound. Yet why don't we see these extremely fast, cheap options in places like NYC?
The big problem is that we deregulated the cable and phone companies, but we didn't remove their monopoly agreements and we didn't enforce any regulations barring them from entering into non-compete agreements. So you end up with a situation like where I live, where Cox Cable isn't subject to regulation regarding rates, services and quality, etc. but at the same time no competing cable company's allowed in (because Cox still has an agreement with the city making them the only cable company allowed to run cable on the public right-of-way), the city attorney routinely enforces that agreement (taking legal action when one of the two cable companies in the area tries to provide service in an area assigned to the other, even when that other company isn't actually providing service in the affected area), and there's an agreement between Cox and Time-Warner (the other company in the area) not to offer service where the other's already providing it. End result: all the downsides of a monopoly combined with all the downsides of completely-unregulated services. They can do whatever they want with rates, there's no legal basis for challenging them, and there's no competitor you can switch to. To fix the problem we have to remove this pseudo-deregulation: either they're fully deregulated and not allowed to bar competition from entering the area, or they've got a monopoly on service and are subject to regulation as a public utility.
Cost/person in each country is the simpleton's approach to making the broadband-is-overpriced-in-america argument. Population density should also be factored in. Americans, in relation to the countries listed, are much more spread out which warrants a higher cost for infrastructure.
There you go.
There's your tax-subsidized patent-owned-by-public answer.
Capitalism drives down costs.
Mercantalism, which Adam Smith, the father of Capitalism railed against, provides large players with greater rewards for inefficiencies propped up by people who claim to be Capitalists, but depend on the lack of competition to win them billions.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It is worse in the US than in Korea. But Canada also has bad Internet. South Africa has some slow speeds and usage caps. Also Australia and other countries.
We're neither the slowest nor the most expensive.
This old chestnut again? When are people going to stop comparing the US -- a vast geographic area with large areas of low population density -- with Europe? Or Korea for that matter? It costs more because larger areas need coverage compared to European counterparts. It costs more because rural areas get artificially-low costs because they're subsidized by urban areas with artificially-high costs.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
US broadband is more expensive than a few countries.
Also the available speeds vary widely as well. The US has a decent speed overall. Given that a significant amount of content is available in the US. The real world speed in the US is significantly better than other locations around the world. See: http://www.netindex.com/
Lets also factor in region locking of content. The US generally does not suffer from the issue. Other regions around the world are simple blocked from content due to the region they are in. Again the US is at a significant advantage here.
There are a lot of other countries that are a hell of a lot more expensive than the US. Case in point a first world country Australia.
Overall the Internet experience in my humble opinion in the US is vastly superior to most other locations around the planet.
Now lets also factor in penetration of broadband and average household income. The US fairs very well indeed when you start to think about these factors. However the US is still behind some notables. Korea for some time still be the bench mark that other countries try to achieve on all fronts. Other countries are embarking on plans to significantly improve speed, bandwidth, and costs.
This article should have been about. If the US doesn't do anything to upgrade it's aging internet infrastructure it will soon be one the the most expensive and poorest performing broadband countries in the world.
Another transatlantic pissing contest yay!
Which is the same probable cause as for all other American problems.
Internet should be free, everywhere. So should education, food, water, housing.
I have my choice of Verizon FiOS and Comcast and there's no attempt to undercut the other.
The only marketing is the continuous barrage of junk mail trying to sell me their 3-in-1 – phone, internet, TV – service; of which I only need internet.
Would it be any different if RCN had rolled out, as they contracted with the town to do? (They defaulted on the contract, but there were no penalty clauses, so the town declined to force them to execute as there seemed to be little point in doing so.) Anyway, it seems unlikely that there'd be any more competition, just one more piece of junk mail every month trying to sell me another 3-in-one package.
It's to pay for the massive NSA inquiry, we pay, they spy. Novel concept...
Is ANYTHING in NYC cheap? Just about everything runs at huge mark up in NYC for some reason or another. Internet access is no exception.
Outside of urban areas, the infrastructure costs for internet access is much higher, but INSIDE urban areas, the costs of labor, taxes, licenses, access fees all drive up the prices.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
and we pay far less for other things. welcome to "it's not the same place!"
i mean... duh?
but hey, circle jerk about this like being able to download your modern family torrents quickly is the most important thing.
Duh!!
Some settling may occur during posting.
The two most common explanations are:
1) The US is more corrupt and less free-market than those other countries, so we have greater barriers to competition.
2) The US' population is less geographically dense than those other countries, so we have more wire per person. Even if you don't live in a farm house in he middle of nowhere, it's thought that your bills subsidize the people who do live in such places.
Since the 90s most of the deregulation that has occurred has not benefited the public interest or the consumer, but instead benefited the shareholder by decreasing competition through mergers and acquisitions. Even in the recent financial collapse, we found out that there were certain businesses that were too big to fail and had to be bailed out by the government. By definition, any business that is so big that it's failure would be catastrophic to the economy and needs bailed out by the government means that there also isn't enough competition in that market.
So, sure, high speed internet costs more in the US than anywhere else, but so do most other things. After all, capitalism is for the benefit of the capitalist, not the public. That's why, previously, there were all of those regulations -- to protect the public. People forget that all of those regulations were put in place to protect against the robber barons. Well, they haven't gone away.
I will remind folks that the US has much longer telephone local loop length than other countries.
Part of this is due to more rural and spread out suburbs, earlier deployment of telephone than other countries, but part of that may be also be due to CO consolidation during the firming up of ESS.
Switzerland, where I reside, is similar in many ways (though at a somewhat smaller scale): the Zurich metro area has about 1.1 million people. Geneva and Basel metro areas are each around 500,000 people. The Bern metro area is about 350,000 people and yet the small suburb where I live (pop ~30,000 people) has a relatively large amount of competition: Swisscom (20 Mbps max) and Sunrise (30 Mbps max) each have DSL offerings, UPC Cablecom offers fiber-to-the-node with a EuroDOCSIS 3.0 coax last mile (currently the top plan is 150 Mbps max but this can increase in the future up to 400 Mbps), the electric company is running fiber to every property (it's at most homes now, with 90% availability in 5 years and 100% availability by 2020) and there's a variety of private companies that offer service over the municipal fiber. There's also several 3G and 4G mobile phone providers who offer service with varying speeds (up to 42 Mbps) and bandwidth caps with essentially total coverage.
In short: even with a relatively low-density city composed mostly of private homes and low-rise (under 4 floors) apartment buildings it's economically viable to have many competing firms providing high-speed connectivity. There's really no excuse why US cities like Houston, Phoenix, etc. shouldn't have a good amount of competition in regards to connectivity.
If anything, I'd posit that super dense cities like NYC and the like would be more difficult to run high-speed connections particularly due to the huge amount of legacy lines and equipment (e.g. gobs of twisted copper pairs in cable ducts where a modern fiber line would use much less space but replacing the copper would be disruptive and expensive) and the inability to just plop down equipment as needed due to limited aboveground space. In a lower-density city there's probably more room in cable ducts, places to put above or below-ground equipment boxes, less legacy cruft, etc. that should make it easier to build out high-speed networks and provide competition to customers. Ideally, things could be simplified by having a municipal fiber network that's owned and managed by the city (or, if they must, a contractor) but has service provided by competing private companies over that fiber.
No, In a truly unregulated market the barriers of entry would be higher for new entries into the cable market. It is one of the justifications used for regulating cable.
Look up the term “Natural Monopoly”. In any industry with high fixed costs and low marginal costs market structure will favor only one provider. If a challenger faces an incumbent, the incumbent will just drop prices until they drive out the challenger. They don’t need to pay for the high upfront capital costs – they have already done so.
And while it is a valid reason to regulate I am not saying the cable companies haven’t captured the regulators to entrench their position – they have.
That way, just like the letter I just got from my health insurance company, I can enjoy "more choice" and see my rates triple. ObamaCare is enough. I don't want ObamaISP, too.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
"The BBC reports "Home broadband in the US costs far more than elsewhere. At high speeds, it costs nearly three times as much as in the UK and France, and more than five times as much as in South Korea. Why?...'Americans pay so much because they don't have a choice,' says Susan Crawford, a former special assistant to President Barack Obama on science, technology and innovation policy. We deregulated high-speed internet access 10 years ago and since then we've seen enormous consolidation and monopolies, so left to their own devices, companies that supply internet access will charge high prices, because they face neither competition nor oversight."
SHOCK!! OTHER COUNTRIES DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY AND THEREFORE HAVE DIFFERENT BENEFITS AND DIFFERENT DISADVANTAGES!!! OMG!
You know there is no such thing as a perfect system. It's a matter of choosing which imperfections you wish to live with.
Somewhere in Manchester someone could open up Dotslash.co.uk and read the following post:
"CBS reports "Taxation and the percentage of taxation that goes to bureaucrats in the UK and France costs far more than elsewhere. At high rates of entrenched control, just making a living costs nearly three times as much as in the USA. Why?...'Europeans pay so much because they don't have a choice,' says Susan Crawford, a former special assistant to President Angela Sarkozy on science, technology and innovation policy. We began regulating the hell out of high-speed internet access and low speed access and every other kind of access decades ago and since then we've seen enormous consolidation of power and taxation in the hands of London career politicians, so left to their own devices, governments that supply regulations will charge high prices to the citizens, because they face neither competition nor oversight."
In the UK broadband is worse in rural areas. The reason is that DSL has a limited reach and in rural areas there aren't enough users in that radius to allow the telco to make a profit at the same price they charge in urban areas.
Now compare the population densities:
UK 661.9/mile^2
US 88.6/mile^2
So the UK density is 7.5x higher. Or to put it another way you have on average 7.5x the number of users in a given area to subscribe to broadband. Even comparing urban areas where the densities are highest American houses are much larger than UK houses so the density is higher.
So in the US the telecoms companies have fewer subscribers on their hardware but the same costs. The solution to make a profit is to rise their prices. That is why broadband in the US is so much more expensive.
Since prices are nationwide the low rural densities mean urban users still have to pay higher rates.
A perfect example would be the way AT&T was allowed to start pulling itself back together after the trouble was taken to split the beast apart. It wasn't long before they were happily providing the government with taps into the backbone if the Internet. This is the paradox of people who scream for deregulation and rail against big government. They don't want the government to have too much power (perfectly understandable), but don't have any qualms giving ALL of the power to oligopolies which then collaborate with the government, thus giving them infinitely more power than the "onerous" rules and regulations ever would.
Except France's small villages are extremely close to each other.
France (not including it's territories) spans 213,010 square miles and has a population of 63,460,000. A population density of 297.92 people per square mile.
Comparatively, If you take the US state I live in and an adjoining state (Arizona and New Mexico), they span a combined 235,587 square miles (comparable to France) and host a combined population of 8,638,538. A population density of 36.6 per square mile. And like France, there are only a few large cities (large is relative).
Natural monopoly is a myth. A city could bury conduit under its streets and charge a reasonable rate for pulling copper or fiber.
Crap article - no reference to New Zealand (ok, so only 4m people, but *are* in the OECD)
Try living in here - crap speed and way overpriced. Although the ultra-fast broadband rollout shows some promise.
I've been paying about the same for a medium-tier broadband service in a number of cities and for a number of years. At this time I am paying $30 a month for what used to be a 15Mbps service to Comcast. The catch is that it's a 6 month deal, it will go up to $40 a month for the next 6 months, and towards the end I have to perform the usual "I am leaving for ATT" song and dance to get the deal again (I have not had to actually switch yet, but might at some point - ATT service is priced the same, though they try to rip me off another $5 a month for equipment.
I also did a quick survey of what broadband services cost in a deregulated place like UK. Here is a link for Glasgow (because I like it :) ): http://www.cable.co.uk/local/broadband/glasgow/glasgow/
Note that prices on the right are for service from a provider and users still have to pay "line fees" (because, much like elsewhere, no one will put a second set of cables in the ground, so infrastructure is shared). If you click through on any of these deals, the total price with line fee for a 1 year contract is about 17-20 GBP which translates to approx. $30 for the same 15 Mbps service.
I don't know - I think we are on par here.
It'd be nice if Comcast didn't make me go through the silly annual rejection cycle, of course.
Everything is greater and better in the US - even prices for basic utilities!
That is why NYC has prices and speed that kick the pants off of these major foreign cities right? oh it doesn't... maybe at least manhatten then? oh still no... Well then that kind of makes your argument completely and utterly wrong then... strange.
Why is Broadband more expensive?
Why do we pay more for healthcare?
Why is our productivity so high compared to real wages?
Why does our government spy on us and disregard our civil liberties?
Why are we below the average in ability according to OECD?
Why is the gap between the richest and the poorest on par with that of African countries?
And finally, why the fuck do people keep telling me this is the greatest country on Earth?
I want to be proud for my country and what it stood for, but it's hard to see nowadays.
$100USD for 50MBps? Americans are seriously complaining about getting those kinds of speeds for that amount of money? I would do unseemly things for those internet speeds! Here in Australia we can get 12MBps MAX (top of the range) at about the $100 mark per month (and AUD almost equals USD these days) with heavy download/upload limits on our aging, unreliable copper cable network. America has nothing to complain about. In fact, they should be lobbying to help us poor Aussies. http://goo.gl/OXkz5t And that's in the CBD. Anyone outside the CBD is practically on dial up. It takes me several hours to download Ubuntu whenever there is a new iso and watching a youtube video in HD renders the internet unusable to all other devices in the house. Yeeeeees there is a new broadband network being implemented (which is outdated technology in itself), but our new "elected" government is considering pulling it out and keeping the crap we've got now instead.
...13 years ago.
13 years I had one choice, DSL, and it was $79/month for 768k/256k asymmetric on the ISP side and then another $20 a month on the telco side. 1 static IP.
Now I pay $72 per month and get 15/5 Mbit and get 5 static IPs. It was $69/month for the last 3 years but crept up $2/month in the last month (no explanation on the bill, just a bigger number).
It sounds like in absolute dollar terms I'm paying about the same price, but I'm getting more than 10 times the download speed and static IPs aren't getting easier to obtain, plus the numbers above aren't corrected for inflation.
I'm really surprised Comcast hasn't jacked the price up horribly -- the ONLY competition they have is CenturyLink who have done pretty much nothing to boost speeds/lay fiber/etc and the municipal wifi network which I think is likely to be not much better if not worse than LTE. Hell, half the time I stay in a hotel I end up ditching the low-rent wifi they offer for the personal hotspot off my LTE smartphone.
Plus, Comcast MUST be facing constant pressure on their network. I hear people in densely populated hipster neighborhoods gripe about slow throughput but I can never tell what that might be.
While oligopolies and the utter failure of the US government to regulate the one thing it really should in a capitalist economy are half the equation, the other half is simple geography. The fact is that the continental US (IE minus Alaska and Hawaii) is twice the size of Europe and less than half the population. Which means a fourth the population density on average, and deploying four times the cables/cell towers per person on average is not a recipe for price parity.
To be sure, this is on average and large population centers have little excuse. But even here geography helps oligopolies form. If Time-Warner is all over the North-East and Comcast is all over the West Coast, it's not exactly trivial to start up infrastructure several thousand miles away from where all your employees, accounting, and legal expertise lay.
So while there's no real way exact price parity with the relatively high density population of Europe could be achieved, as ROI on infrastructure is going to be higher there by nature, it also isn't like George W. Bush didn't screw the American people out of billions either. And of course our current presidents solution is "do nothing about it" as always.
Is ANYTHING in NYC cheap?
Insults are you moron. Now get the fuck outta the way, and let the real men talk you limp-wristed panty boy...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Articles after articles, we learned that Australian internets/ISP/regulators are the worst in the world. That doesn't make other networks better...
In the neighborhood I life in, I can't get FiOS and the AT&T DSL options are a joke (they won't bother putting in capacity). So if you want anything but *shudder* dialup, your options are Warner, Warner, or... Warner.
I'm interested in why you can't move to a competing neighborhood.
What exactly is the excuse in major cities where there IS population density and the prices are just as high?
Should try Australia. Prices here will make you swallow your tongue!
I was wrong.. TALK is cheap in NYC...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Greed.
I am French and I currently live in Arizona, and your logic seems a little bit bad because YOU DON'T NEED TO PUT CABLE/FIBER TO EVERY METER SQUARE IN UNINHABITED LAND. You just don't need to have fiber to every stone in Grand Canyon or Monument Valley but you DO NEED TO HAVE IT in Phoenix, Tucson, Flagstaff, etc.
The population is clustered in such a way that it is easy to connect them.
Yet :
For 20Mbps here (in the center of a 500K inhabitants city) : 56$/mo (that's without TV or phone).
For 25Mbps in France (in the center of 20 houses village, 3Km away from a 8K inhabitants city) : 49.71$/mo (which also includes free and unlimited calls to more than 100 countries and cheap mobile phone plans (2hrs voice, unlimited text)).
Answer: GIMME!
Compare New York to rural Finland. You're still getting screwed.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
It's going to take a while for that. The existing infrastructure put in place by previous monopolies by the telephone companies and the cable companies make it hard for any new competition to start up. There are significant barriers to entry. Maybe wireless will do something or Google will go crazy with fiber but i would not hold my breath.
Honest words from a political spokesman...really news.
When is the last time the government was so honest in a public statement?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Cities compete for your residence. If your city sucks, you could try moving to a different city that does a better job of competing for your tax dollars.
please use common population density, and not 'the whole US'.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Charging by the byte, kilo, mega or gigabyte is a draconic and totally outmoded business paradigm. Unfortunately telcos will never break that paradigm because they are far too stuck in their ways to believe anything else besides that business model. No matter what anyone says, it does not cost the telco to transmit more data.
Different question, same answer. Unregulated capitalism is a disaster for companies and customers. The WSJ ran a story describing how ALL long-haul carriers are giving more interior space to 'first-class', but in order to keep the same capacity in shrinking 'economy/coach' are making the seats progressively narrower. Making first class larger, so it offers more 'luxurious' facilities gains NOTHING at all when every carrier ends up having to do the same. First-class passengers are a self-defining, stable group who DO NOT increase in numbers or willing to pay more because one carrier temporarily creates an advantage over another. So, at the end of the day, the airline makes the SAME amount of money, and first-class passengers have a BETTER experience at the cost of an ever worsening experience for the 'peasant' class.
In other words, unregulated capitalism ALWAYS creates a "let them eat cake" situation.
US broadband suffers from the same problem. Corporate giants with politicians in their pockets (via the USA laws that allow politicians to indulge in INSIDER TRADING, free from legal penalty). The broadband companies pay filthy shills to shill technical forums like this with nonsense about how "every byte transmitted costs a fortune" and how "heavy users are thieves stealing from the pockets of regular users". As Slashdot endlessly proves, your average nerd is VERY thick, has a giant chip on their shoulder, and always thinks that other nerds are seeking to do them down. When the shill sez "kick those heavy bandwidth using nerds when it hurts" every other American nerd seems to cheer.
In other nations, no-one cares about the 'opinions' of ill-informed and aggressive nerds. Instead, they consider the economic and societal benefits gained from an infrastructure of affordable, ever faster network connections. For years, other nations looked upon the USA with envy. America had free local telephone calls for a monthly fee- and other countries did not. America had gizmos and doo-dads in ordinary households that the rest of the planet could only drool over. Well, the American Dream impacted the globe, just as vile classes of monsters rose to power in the USA itself to take the USA in a war mongering direction. The new American Dream is to invade and genocide nation after nation, endlessly cheering the evil uniformed horrors that volunteer to be the nations stormtroopers.
Too much broadband in the USA dangerously encourages TRUE alternative media activities, outside the control of mainstream media companies, or George Soros. When a nation requires every citizen to be goose-stepping to the same beat, the freedom of citizens to effectively challenge the 'New Order' is very dangerous indeed.
I pay $30/month and get 60+ Mbps. So, those numbers are certainly not generally true for the US. Maybe Internet access in San Francisco is particularly expensive, or maybe they just screwed up on selecting their plans.
Because your ass is getting wider?
...broadband. One guess who lobbied heavily for those laws.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
If your choice is a. expensive crappy internet from one company, b. expensive crappy internet from the other company, or c. no internet, you're probably going to choose expensive crappy internet. So what motive do either internet companies have to make their internet cheaper or faster? None.
I miss the days when ISPs were actually allowed to have real competition.
Funny, and arguably accurate as well!
Three Squirrels
Yes, running broadband in the USA costs more per household than some of the cheaper countries mentioned, on average. However, since there is no regulation, you'd expect the locations where you actually have a population density to be thriving with competition and low prices.
This is where legislation comes in. In at least Europe, there is a law mandating that there should be a fair and actual competition going and if there isn't, the government gets to set a price for whatever company chooses to provide service, will have to deliver that service. It's not a perfect system and companies still make way more than you would get with a truly competitive market, but at least it's limited.
Here in the Netherlands we basically have two cable companies that divided the country in 2 regions (a few niche players have less than 10 percent of the country) and one former state owned telco that owns the copper pair stuff. That company is mandated to provide access "at cost price" to any ISP that wants access, but they managed to both add a lot of charges to whatever "at cost price" is and also for the uplink point and all that. To add insult to injury, they own most of the glass fibre FTTH stuff and are pulling a similar stunt there. In practice, that leaves most homes that have access to broadband a choice between 2 parties they have to depend on. One of the two cable companies and the former state company. If they choose to not go for cable, they are still going to be using the former state company, even if they get their IP connectivity (and a single bill) from another ISP.
That leaves us with basically at least two major competitors for over 80% of households, that all offer triple play services at a price point starting around 30-40 euros monthly. For that, you typically get 20Mbit or so in internet access (or less if only lower speed DSL is available in your area) some free minutes to selected phones and about 50 channels of digital television. If you're willing to pay around 100 euros monthly and if you can get it, you can get up to 500/500Mbit (yes, that's 500Mbit uplink) with no data limit. I think the current coverage for that is around 15-20% of the people in the Netherlands.
This may sound like a dream to most people in the USA, but believe me, there's a lot of "we're not going to offer anything more competitive if they aren't". There's nobody offering single play internet at the highest speeds, or an a-la-carte solution that would be in place if there was more competition. These three companies more or less are making all the profit that's in this market and the rest is there just as a vehicle to deliver the money to them. Since the cable companies are not mandated to open up their network to third party providers, only two competing companies per household is obviously still not enough to get a truly competing market. The prices are a lot better than they are in the USA, but all three are showing "very healthy" profits and that's not what you'd expect if there was a permanent cut-throat competition going on.
It's about time the USA stopped worrying about communism or "too much regulation" and started to mandate price limits unless at least three independent services would offer full service for something as important as access to the internet. We're past the point that it was a luxury and a hobby thing; you are deprived of many benefits if you don't have a broadband internet connection these days. Just as you want running water, electricity and some sort of sewage system in your home. If a single company would win a contract to be the only gasoline provider in an entire state for 10 years in the future, people would revolt. When it's about internet access, there should not be a difference, even if it's only a single municipality. You can get get gas in the next town, not the next state. With internet, you don't have the luxury to travel to get some, so every home in the USA should have a choice between several providers.
I'm not saying the USA should slavishly copy Europe, but the
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I live in Dallas, TX and we get to choose our electric providers. What we don't get to choose is the company that maintains the wires to our residences. I don't see why internet service should be any different.
More info: http://www.powertochoose.org/
Something I've noticed is that in a number of Asian and European countries, you see ISPs that operate and sell lines line giant WANs. You get a really fast connection to them, but it is way oversubscribed on the backhaul and you don't see that off-network.
For example a few years ago I remember a gentleman from Japan here on Slashdot who was talking about his fast 100mbit Internet connection and how he could download a CD in like 8 minutes. I had to point out that is the kind of speed you get form 10mbit, not 100mbit, and indeed my 12mbit Internet downloaded it faster.
So you do need to make sure you are doing real apples to apples comparisons on speeds. A lot of the amazing Speedtest results I see are people testing to a server on their own ISP which is fine for internal testing, but says nothing about overall speed. When I test my link, I always test to an ISP in another state, about 500 miles away, to verify that indeed I am getting my bandwidth to the larger Internet, not just to things near me.
I'm not trying to say that this means the US is great, but it is a complex issue. I can offer you really cheap "gigabit" Internet... just so long as I don't have to have the backhaul to support it. I can build a gigbat WAN pretty cheap, and even have a local Speedtest server you can use, but it'll cost me a lot more if I want the backhaul to really support those kind of speeds.
No, he covered that bit. It's under the part about how the US is sprawling and has a low population density - Neither of which describes France. Their 'tens of thousands' of villages are crammed into an area that's a small faction of the size of the continental US.
Read comprehension, get some.
Now crunch the figures for Sweden or Finland.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
What I got out of the Mises article was that much of the mess that utilities are in comes from cities' failure to set an efficient price for access to the rights of way that it owns: "Benevolent and enlightened politicians, even ones who have studied at the feet of Harold Demsetz, would have no rational way of determining what prices to charge." I recognize that it'll be impractical as of now for cities to give up their ownership of rights of way, and instead, I set forth a technical solution that a city could put in place to allow more efficient access to its rights of way by competitors without disrupting travel.
during the dot.com boom, so the heavy lifting of connecting our far-flung nation is already done. And much of it is still dark, waiting to be used.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Unregulated greed.
There is no other reason for it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
$20 for broadband in the US?! Where? I can get very crappy(Netflix basically unwatchable) dsl for $30, or cable for $60.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
That's ridiculous. I used to install pipelines and wells beneath roads in southern California. That's a much slower and messier process than laying underground cables (I know because we did that too). Believe me, the residents did stand for it. To them it's just more road work. It would be easy for a company to lay new subterranean cable, and it would be even easier to place it above ground.
Also, look at the SIZE of these places. How many South Korea's, or Japan's would fit within just Texas? Providing high speed to every spot in the USA is problematic at best. Are telcos & cable ops overcharging? Most likely, but the rollout is hard to do, just to the amount of land area in the USA.
If they're already doing the expensive part, they might as well do the cheap part and run the fiber.
Just because the conduit is a natural monopoly given city ownership of roads doesn't mean that the service lines running through the conduit can't be competitive. To increase competition, properly identify the natural monopoly and contain it.
That still leaves a lot of legacy area where there is no conduit currently.
Roads need periodic repair. Storm drain lines need periodic repair. Conduit modernization could hit those areas first and eventually cover the whole city.
Meanwhile, it is notable that several broadband providers HAVE chosen to divide up territories rather than competing head to head.
In other words, they're playing the prisoner's dilemma. Under efficient conduit access, a firm entering the market could choose to serve areas along the border between the territories.
According to Wikipedia:
I am not a big fan of US telco's, but I think the numbers listed clearly indicate that the markets for the three listed countries are dramatically different.
I dont think usa is that expensive. switzerland is just as expensive. anyways, in the usa you dont get internet. it's more like you get comcast or verizon which ALSO happens to link you to the ... internet. there seems to be a well-made virtual wall keeping people from really tapping into the internet. like if you wanted to start your own mini isp, where would you tap in? this possibility (or lack therof) reflects how much the central (federal) goverment has bowed to the industry. one should be able to walk into a big internet backbone regional offfice with three days worth of facial hair, hippy sandels and khaki shorts and be taken seriously when one requests to locate a single mode fibre gibic that can do 80 km ... because its a federal law. what say you? or you know, the airwave spectrum, which is public but licensed off needs to have a tower? well sh1t I want to locate a directional antenna too for my 10 km 2.4 ghz link ...
What we've got today is Corporatism, mixed with a few dashes of Socialism, with a "candy coated surface" giving the shiny appearance of Capitalism.
Truth is, China has more real Capitalism than we do here in the U.S. If you keep your head down and don't run afoul of the government there, you're basically free to do as you wish with a business. Hardly even much to worry about in the way of environmental or safety regulations..... (Why do you think so many businesses traditionally considered American have huge factories over there? The CEO of Coca Cola, not too long ago, declared he'd never be interested in any more company growth inside the U.S. borders. All the real opportunity is elsewhere.)
The mantra was that it made things cheaper. Now you know.
The #1 reason US broadband sucks is because companies that make big bucks selling you TV want to keep it that way.
The cable companies are willing to spend big bucks keeping competition out. They see the Internet as a massive threat to their business model of selling linear TV channels (and they have Hollywood in their corner who see better broadband as being good for the "pirates" who "steal" their content, especially if its broadband run by entities that wont play ball with their "anti-piracy" plans and programs like Google or a local municipality)
If you want a great example of what the cable companies are doing, look up the deal Verizon and Comcast did where Verizon agreed to stop rolling out FiOS (which basically hands Comcast a monopoly on high speed broadband in most of those areas)
More developed countries are cheaper, why is this news?
I live in Argentina. I pay 60USD for 3MB. Some (worse serviced) ISPs offer 5MB for that price.
South Korea is first world, and a VERY developed country, it's only natural that it's chepear than countries that are not.
Either local municipality, coop or contracted monopoly, heavily controlled and regulated for reliability and cost, provides the local delivery, including area distribution, local transformers, and houe connectivity, including the meter. Rate is fixed, and guaranteed for all. They handle outages, hookups and disconnects, the hardware and lowest layer stuff. Then you as a consumer choose from many power generators or brokers, who provide the actual electricity you use. Go onth to month changing when you want to shop the best rates, or find a provider and lock in a long term cheap rate, or even choose a renewable only provider if you want to be "green".
Same thing done for data: local or locally controlled monopoly given for local loop and feeder system. Basically they provide the carrier signal, up to layer 2. Then you go to your choice of provider at the head end, to provide you with digital TV, or IP connectivity, routing, DNS, etc - including (guaranteed) data rate, dates volume, latency, bandwidth.
Sometimes the invisible hand flips you a quite visible finger.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium
there is no reason an ogilopoly has to achieve the maximization of global utility
In the US telco companies are required to lease their plant at wholesale rates to competitive exchange carriers. This deregulation is what gave us unlimited long distance and voip. In most areas of the country DSL that can be leased on a wholesale basis is quite slow based in technology issues. CLEC's are mostly stuck buying bare wires from the customer premise to the local telco exchange, putting the loop distance in the ADSL range. They have kept CLEC's out of their VDSL and fiber products due to how the telco deregulation law was written. If we want faster broadband we need to modernize the telco deregulations to include cable companies and vdsl/fiber products. There is no reason who comcast can not lease several blocks of 12 channels to competitors on a wholesale basis to run docsis 3 over. Comcast and other cable co's are very inefficient with their bandwidth and with SDV and an all digital cable system there should be no issues.
I'm currently paying around $80us a month for a land line and 100Gb of 8M-bit broadband.
Fran
:):):)
1st 1st Poster of the new Millennium!
My options were Time Warner and Time Warner. Guess which one I picked?
How many phone companies can run land lines in a given area by law?
Typically 1.
Shockingly one telephone company tends to dominate a given area.
How many cable companies can run cable lines in a given area by law?
Typically 1.
Shockingly one cable company tends to dominate a given area.
These are government backed monopolies. Small towns have tried to set up their own internet and have been sued by major telecoms because they have a government backed monopoly.
Remove those limitations and areas with high costs will have little ISPs pop up that serve just a small community and nothing else. Little guys that run their own cable from the trunk to the home/business. That is how you fix it. US internet access is not expensive at the trunk. Its expensive in the distribution because the government forbids competition.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Actually it has more to do with government interference in the market and the way spectrum was licensed and then sold at high costs by the FCC. As a result at one time there were like 300 little fiefdoms of bandwidth in cellular traffic. Which is one reason we tend to lag on cellular and one of the reasons WiMax and friend don't catch on for wireless broadband throughout a citywide area. Too many companies have paid to much for spectrum that they nickle and dime us to recoup. On the cable stuff the monopolies granted in an area are very anti-competitive. So a Comcast can charge like 97% profit rates for home internet.
The answer to the existing problems is most certainly not more regulation. It is getting government as out of the business and dropping some of the monopolies.
While it's certainly true that the telecom oligopoly has gamed the market towards an artificially high $/Mbit ratio, the root cause is that broadband is still considered a "luxury" rather than a "necessity".
This may even have been true at one time. In today's world, broadband should be considered as much a "basic necessity" as dialtone, complete with subsidies for rural areas.
Don't worry, the wireless side of the industry will make sure to capture "rural broadband" and offer the poor unfortunate country dwellers a 5G/month cap...
With all the info out there about our privacy being invaded, who do you think pays for it. It's passed on the the consumer.
I'd rather pay $70/month for a comm line than $10/gallon for gas.
You only need 1 phone [or cable] line to service a entire block.
Provided that the entire block is being serviced in an efficient way. With one provider, this efficiency cannot be guaranteed.
if there were a competitor a fierce price war would start up until there was only one standing.
Sometimes we need a price war to keep the price of entry-level service from rising faster than inflation. And sometimes different providers can compete on varied services over their respective wires. If an ISP is only interested in providing "consumer" service (tiny upstream, inbound connections strongly discouraged or outright blocked), that leaves an opening for another provider to differentiate its service by providing more symmetric "enthusiast" and "business" tiers.
How much does it cost to bury and maintain conduit?
That depends on whether your city's residents rely on well water and septic systems. Otherwise, as Belial6 pointed out, you could extrapolate from how much it costs to bury and maintain water, sewer, and storm pipes.
more fundamentally, the USA was designed from the start to be a pseudo-democracy, with a governmental structure designed to, in the words of its designer, james madison, 'protect the minority of the opulent against the majority,' and to preserve wealth inequality.
Extorting the citizenry for basic needs such as internet and healthcare, is right in line with this design goal.
So the USA is run somewhat like a livestock operation, but with human livestock. Purely for profit, and not for the benefit of the citizenry.
google 'radicalamericancentrist.blogspot' for more....
Is just not true, based on my experience. See how much a throttled and capped service in Australia costs, by comparison. And don't even start in on how much mobile data costs outside of the States. In the US I get about 12x the data for 2/3 the cost.
Our series of tubes is clogged with bullshit:/
Worst than anywhere else in the world, my @rse.
Come to Australia. We have a government who is trying to keep us in the dark ages of internet speeds.
I would gladly be ranked number 32, rather then sub 50s.
Not only that we pay for capped usage at about 20% more.
I am honestly lucky if I get speeds between 2-4Mb/s...over 5 is unheard of.
It's the same answer for just about everything that we pay more for compared to everyone else. We give the industry the power to take away choices with anti-competitive tactics.
Time-Warner in my area uses government to prevent any competition from gaining a foothold. People would flock to an alternative if local government didn't squash any competition at TWs behest.
The problem is not deregulation. It is crony capitalism.
It is not a lack of quantity of regulation, it's about quality. This is a clear case of regulatory capture. The major players have influenced the rule-making bodies to the point that market entry is very difficult. All the big players have their piece of the pie and can milk it for what it's worth.
To be fair though there are some other practical reasons, like the almost incomprehensible geographical differences. At 243000 km^2 the UK would beat out Minnesota as the 12th largest US state, right behind Michigan. At the same time it's population of 63 million handily beats California's 38 million. The population density on the east coast of the US is comparable, but once you get off the eastern seaboard it's not even close.
The problem is that all communications in the world is routed to the NSA and someone has to pay for all that bandwidth.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
" If you want LAN speeds in the much less densely populated US, it is going to be very costly."
Why not start with the high density areas first? The thing about low density areas is that MOST PEOPLE DON'T LIVE THERE.
New Jersey has 25% greater population density than Belgium, and over twice the density of Switzerland. How to the low density portions of the US explain why New Jersey can't have it as good as Belgium or Switzerland?
"Is ANYTHING in NYC cheap? "
Compared to Zurich? Everything.
But in France we had the most expensive Mobile Phone Bills in the world. Because the major companies made an confidential agreement to not change their prices.
And then another company entered the game, and now we have very low mobile phone bills.
It's the same company who several years ago made the ADSL prices drop:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iliad_(company)
If the USA were a free market there would be competition that would lower prices over time. Corporations have co-opted the government & created a captive market of middle class yuppies they can bleed dry with regulatory capture. All the worse markings of oligarchy & plutocracy rolled in to one giant propaganda machine draped in an american flag swearing allegiance to Wall St. profits.
Essentially: we live in Fascist Italy.
US internet is expensive because regular users have to subsidize heavy users. It's also why you get particularly slow internet service.
If you compare the US with any other country you have to take notice about the sheer size of the country and how it needs to be continuously connected. The setup was expensive and maintaining this connection continues to be expensive. If you compare the US with the Philippines which is probably no bigger than the state of California, it charges around $30USD / month for 2mbps down internet. If you want more, it'll cost up to $90/mo. for just 12mbps. Sure, it's not the end of the world if you think about it in USD but consider the fact that 90% of the population is poor and underpaid, where 90% of the population can barely afford a roof and rice. $30USD is the cost of rent for a month (although it can go up to $200/mo. if you get a good place).
In Japan, the cost of internet is around $40/mo. but you get good speeds and you do get paid pretty well over there. The minimum wage is roughly $7/hr. compared to the Philippines which I believe is $1.40 and in the US it varies but generally people make over $8/hr. I know fast food joints like in-and-out pays $11.50/hr but I haven't had a job like that in forever to know what's going on with it.
So is the internet in the US expensive? I say no, not for what it offers. I would much rather spend $40/mo. for 36mbps through comcast or $90/mo. for 1gbps through a local fiberoptic company than seeing cable companies raise the price because less people have cable now. hahaha
I find it amusing so many people find this to be a big conspiracy or even a mystery.
I will solve it with 4 lines.
France: Population Density 118/sq km.
UK: 257/sq km
South Korea: 508/sq km
US: 33/sq km.
Come on, people. Work with me here this isn't complicated. Of course there are other factors but that right there is a big one.
You guys must know that in some countries ... like mine (Romania) they sell broadband cheap but you don't actually get broadband. ... speed that you'll never get to see.
They advertise it like 150 mbps but is actually up to 150 mbps
So either you get actual speed and you pay for or you just seem like you get speed and the price is acordingly.
www.consultantahr.ro
US broadband prices are the lowest in the world because the free unregulated market and zero government interference give companies incentives to compete on service and/or price ensuring US consumers get the service they want at the price they wish to pay.
ANYONE who believes anything else is an enemy of the state and will be re-educated through being forced to watch American TV 24/7 with 23/7 commercials.
In posts commenting (and damning yourself) please include your service number for easy matching by your friendly NSA agent.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
those stickers on everything claiming the product only causes cancer if you live in California.
Do you have a picture of one?
The ones I've heard of say that the product contains chemicals which the State of California knows cause cancer.
So the stickers don't say the chemicals don't cause cancer elsewhere, just that other states have not recognised their carcinogenous properties (or have recognised them but chose not to require a warning to that effect).
Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
Internet infrastructure is just as vital as roads, water and electricity, and it can't be left to be run by private monopolies. Here in sweden, it's very comming with metropolitan fiber networks that is owned by the county/municipal/city, and then the ISP's rent capacity or channels to delivier to end-customers. This keeps prices low and competitive. My friend pays $15 for a 100/100 Ethernet with a static IP. Traffic caps doesn't exist at all. The swedish then state-owned Telco did a lot of important job in the 80's and almost converting all long-haul links to optical, and so a nationwide data-highway was born. Nowadays several ISP's/Telco's uses the same paths with their own equipment and cables. Socialism internet is great.
free markets regulate themselves when left to their own devices *schadenfreude*
I had to scroll for ages before I found a funny comment....
Calling the broadband market deregulated it a joke.
The idea of a natural monopoly *sounds* great. But I don't think it holds up under scrutiny. See the myth of the natural monopoly.
Considering what google is doing with fiber, I think the 'natural' monopoly of telcos is as natural as the car dealership problem Tesla is facing in Texas.
If it was truly a scarce resource that one company had monopolized. Then that company should be broken up into competitors and seperated from the businesses that depend on it (so the few companies that control it, don't also own the businesses that depend on it).
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
...In a sense, when we agree to pay for home internet service, we are saying "your prices are acceptable". I bet if we had enough people refusing to pay what it currently costs for internet access, you would see companies suddenly dropping their prices in order to get the customers they need to sustain themselves. However, knowing the under-40 population of this country, I am going to be told I am insane and it is impossible to live without internet access.
"Captive Audience" by Crawford she spends maybe 5% or so of the book explaining WHY we get bent over the barrel for net services in the U.S. It's because of our economic model - charge all the traffic will bear. But it's also because it's COMPLETELY unregulated. She put forth that it costs Comcast maybe $2 per month to provide the net service, yet they charge close to $60 for it. And this is true of all the others - including at&t, Cox, et al. We need people in the FCC that aren't lawyers but engineers and techies, and then move net services into common carrier status. Fully regulated. Then you'll see pricing come back into reality.
A guy with a shotgun is going to jail. That is silly. Do deeds even grant you the right to stop pipes from being run under your property? I know many deeds do not includes mineral rights. Even if they do, I would think eminent domain would be used for the public good there.
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
There is an illusion that it costs more for you than the rest of us. It is caused by very artificial exchange rates. These rates also make you think that you are more highly paid in comparison to us.
For example, 1 UK pound exchanges for about $1.60 but you cannot buy as much with $1.60 as I can with a pound. A more realistic exchange rate is from $2 to as much as $2.50 to the Pound.
If you compare your prices and your wages using this, you get a different view about comparisons.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
"We deregulated high-speed internet access 10 years ago and since then we've seen enormous consolidation and monopolies, so left to their own devices, companies that supply internet access will charge high prices, because they face neither competition nor oversight."
And the giant DUH! Award goes to the obvious.
Let me fix that for you: "US More Expensive than Other 1st World Countries". I am in Brazil and I pay U$ 160,00 for 50 Mbps. In fact, I pay that for a 50 Mbps last-mile link, because my real Internet download performance hardly comes to that. We have a national regulation / monitoring agency (Anatel) that watch broadband services and, surprise, carriers always miss their monthly performance targets.
Why are you attaching a condition that has nothing to do with what MobyDisk wrote? He made no mention of free markets.
This seems to be a big problems with ideologues on both side of the fence. They can't admit that there may be a third way to take, or a compromise to be had. They see that as a giving in, as abandoning their ideals.
Good luck solving anything with that attitude.
Most natural monopolies fail because of a huge shift in the market (cell phones displacing landlines) or the incumbent is truly incompetent.
Sometimes it's a bit of both, such as cable and fiber providers displacing DSL because local loops in the US tend to be so long that DSL can't exceed 3 Mbps down. For comparison, the FCC defines modern broadband as 4 Mbps down.
I can’t see how much value “business class” would add.
For possible arguments, look up the comments to previous Slashdot stories about ISPs imposing caps on home subscribers and not letting them run even low-traffic servers. For businesses that need more nines of reliability than a home, there's also value in using a second ISP as a backup.
Your differences have to be of a greater value then the benefits inherent with the incumbent’s natural monopoly.
When the cable ISP also owns several major cable TV networks, it subtly manipulates the cable Internet service in its service area to discourage Internet subscribers from terminating TV subscription. At various times, Comcast has instituted cap policies that run the meter even during non-congested hours to discourage use of competing video on demand providers such as iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix, and it has shunted traffic from competing video on demand providers onto its more congested lines. And plenty of cable ISPs have inflated the price of their home Internet plans so that they can offer pay TV for negative additional charge to Internet subscribers. A competing ISP could promote its lack of conflict of interest.
And I'll show you ignorance with one:
Australia: 3/sq km.
Canadian here: I pay much more than you for lower speeds. As Arnie says: "Stop whining!"
All those highly trained customer hating MBA's using every ounce of a companies market clout to squeeze every last nickle out of their customers so that at all costs they can avoid having to actually innovate.
...labor unions.
They drive up the price of construction and maintenance of new equipment.
Source: I'm a former telco worker
There are 2 groups of people you can make fun of on the Internet without fear of attack. The illiterate, and the Amish.
In the mid-nineties, I worked for Ameritech, one of the Baby Bells (now swallowed by SBC, er, now ATT). When the deregulation bill came up in Congress, our Division President sent orders down to all that he wanted us to contact our Rep and Sen, and ask them to support the deregulation. AND HE DEMANDED COPIES OF OUR LETTERS. And if you don't think that was a threat to our continuted employment, you're amazingly naive. And, right after starting, they brought us into a meeting where they were trying hard sell to get us to contribute, from our salary, to their PAC.
Yeah, our representatives, right.....
mark
Decentralize USA into https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantons_of_Switzerland
Casteism
BS, it's price fixing, either specifically or just an "understanding" among providers. In my town we have Verizon FIOS, Verizon DSL, Comcast, and RCN. So with 3 major providers of high-speed internet (DSL isn't high-speed) there should be some competition. But no, the cost is the same as in areas that have only one cable provider and Verizon DSL. This doesn't fit with a fair market, and it's not because of deregulation which would be nothing but government price fixing. We already have price fixing, we don't need to add government and increase our costs with government fees and taxes. Add to this that when you work out a speed/feature comparison the cost of all three are surprisingly (sarcasm) close.
I think it's due to the physical size of the USA. Because of the size the dollar amount required initially to get the infrastructure in place is much higher, which explains the raise in premium. Canada is expensive as well.
.......because of all the political corruption? Because our government works on the pay to play principle? Because a few hundred thousand in political donations commonly turns into hundreds of millions in profit? Or is it because Americans are the stupidest smart people on the planet?
When a friend of mine said they had 5 Mbps broadband in USA back in 2008 and paid around $50/month I could hardly believe it.
Here in Hungary it cost $12/month for a 50 Mbps unlimited data back in 2008. Now I use 8 Mbps mobile net, which is $15/month with unlimited data, but I believe fixed line internet got even faster since than for roughly the same money.
The homeowner should pay for a conduit pipe from street then comm vendors can bid to use it by fishing conduit wire thru it to home. This would drastically reduce the price of upgrading services and even allow more than one provider at a time. The problem is cronyism on the local level with Cable deals from the 1970's and then Federal rules that favor the incumbents to collude.
You've shown nothing. Australia's Internet access is not much better than the US's. And only having to wire like 2 cities is no big task.
The reason for higher than worth of internet service in the U.S. is the lack of support for the youth to gain the needed education to creat and implement and improve upon the systems in place for such , such as quality and not the accepted modis of cheat,screw and laugh on the way to the bank. We as consumers
are chaste to the rule of proprietary technology developed by outside monies and interests. Blah,blah,blah, etc and so forth.
If these dimwits WERE "investing" in the future, why don't I see them installing fiber everywhere? Even that said I still don't see them "investing" in their current infrastructure unless they mean the minimal cost in equipment upgrades for their existing increasingly antiquated copper coax nets... ...just saying... after all they're going to be hitting a copper coax deadend sooner or later, and instead of wasting monies playing with it, it would seem to be OBVIOUS to me that IF they were "investing" in teh futar that fiber would be the way to go... just saying, but WTF do I know, it's not like I'm an engineer with a relevant degree or anything... gotta love private sector bureaucrats...
I've shown exactlly what you showed.
So you admit its better, but just not much.
Australia is of similar size, so thats not the difference.
Our cities are more distant from each other, and are much more distant from the rest of the worlds cities. So backhaul will be more expensive. So thats not the difference.
Please tell me what you think the difference is then?
That research done by the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute clearly does not cover Brazil. Even the highest prices, like the one practiced by Comcast in Chattanooga, TN, sound like common-place in Brazil. It is no wonder The Economist's "Big Mac Index" lists us among the six most expensive. It seems we will get the most expensive PS4 in the world. Taxes here are a bitch.
Here in South Africa we have pay one of the highest price for broadband .... and then on top of it, the consumer experience can be woeful at times. Consumers can sometimes wait months for issue to be resolved or the Telco may just say they will not fix!! It's very sad.
Can you answer this WITHOUT YELLING?:
Which scenario has the greater cost/revenue benefit? (thus allowing for lower costs to consumer):
1) Wiring up and connecting 5 towns in a 100 square mile radius, each with a population of 10,000 people. That line you run out to each town services 10,000 people each!
2) Wiring up and connecting 5 towns in a 100 square mile radius, each with a population of 1,000 people. That same line to each line only services 1,000 people.
Both scenarios require similar amounts of infrastructure in place, but one scenario offsets the cost with more revenue. If you can do that, you can lower the cost per customer... Higher population density = more revenue/cost.
"We may be paying more in your eyes today but we are building for tomorrow and the long-term."
How naive is this guy? or a corporate lacky.
Yes they will have more money to invest, and they might use it, but the consumer will never reap the benefits, only the telecos will.
They will continue to fix prices as high as they can get away with, while killing the value of the service. (Ya they might give u faster speeds, but they might pair it with usage caps and/or bad routing, etc.)
Remember, this is evil corporations at work. Don't expect fair competition; expect collusion, insider activities, and every anticompetitive tactic in the book.
Btw, slashdot really needs to enable https:/// ;)
Many ppl that visit this site are at work, where there are devices that spy on web traffic.
Telecos might even decide to degrade the quality of service to and from slashdot
-H**hie @ tr**net.net