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 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.
Why is there no competition for them? Is there something stopping another chain from opening a store and charging slightly less and taking all their customer?
Yes, the cost of setting up a new store. That's a significant cost, and if you did do that, they'd drop their prices. I've seen where stores have waited until a competitor bought land near them, then they dropped their prices significantly. The land was sold by the competitor because it was no longer profitable. Then the prices went back up. The monopoly bought the land, making money from their competitor, then developed into something that could never compete with them (offices, rather than retail), then sold it to a property management company, ensuring nobody could get an equivelent piece of land at a reasonable price for miles around them
There are many ways for monopolies to abuse the marketplace without directly manipulating it.
Learn to love Alaska
And as of typing this, three ignorant fools modded you insightful.
Do you know what happens in reality, behind those pretty words and talking points that are carefully fed to you via mass media? When your megatelco sees competition it:
1. Blocks peering at local exchanges which it mostly controls, or puts in prices so high that fledgling business goes under.
2. Lowers its user prices for a short period, dumping the price and bankrupting the competitor. Then pushing prices to even higher level to gain the money lost back.
3. Buys new competitor out outright.
4. Uses local bought and paid for legislature to block the competitor.
5. Reminds its contacts in the local media to talk about 4. as if it's the fault of the government, and that more deregulation is needed to control 1-4. And so useful idiot like yourself types up that wonderful ideological drivel that is being carefully fed to him and he gets to parrot, and three other ignorant fools mod him insightful.
Girlintraining almost has it right. While we are not socialistic and have a government being a good big brother to us, we are pseudo-Capitalistic with the worst part of both Socialism and Capitalism in force. If we had a REALLY free economy, the problem would be solved quite quickly. The problem is, we don't have a friggin clue how to solve the problem infrastructure.
My solution would be to build out via a BOND measure, Fiber to the house/apt/business. Back haul it to a central facility or neighborhood closet, I don't care. Pay a guy to manage connecting Address A to Service Provider B in the closet, where Service Provider B is the company that Address A contracts service through. Allow for a certain number of Service Providers, via auction, to be able to install their CO-LO equipment in said facility, use that auction pricing to pay for the person in the closet connecting Addresses to Service Providers (or other means).
The Municipality would build out the FIOS infrastructure plant, not giving "franchise" rights to any single player. This would provide EACH Address the opportunity to buy whatever services they actually need from whomever they actually like. Bad Players would leave the marketplace, new players come in with compelling products that shake up the marketplace.
The Infrastructure would have to have a service fee for maintenance, based on usage of the FIOS plant. More expensive plans (tax on Service Provider plans) would pay a higher "service fee" and no fee would be charged for people who opt out.
If this were setup this way, the build out would be contracted, to bring FIOS plant to each Address/dwelling/Apt/Business, a bond measure would be the easiest means to achieving this build out.
This would give Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, and any other company access to every Address in the municipality via what is essentially "dark fiber". And the is no known downside, except for those companies.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Why is Broadband more expensive?
Regulatory hurdles, low population density, and we are one of the largest countries by area on Earth.
Why do we pay more for healthcare?
Because America subscribes to a warped version of capitalism that places things in the private domain when most other governments wisely decided to manage these things. This includes, but is not limited to, basic utilities like water, electricity, telecommunications, internet, and even roadways. This policy benefits a tiny fraction of Americans -- perhaps 1 in every 250 Americans, while harming the rest, and it is not changed because our government has essentially been co-opted by wealthy private interests and corporations. As our popular media is controlled by the same, the illusion is presented of choice regarding political affiliation and candidates, when in fact no choice exists.
Why is our productivity so high compared to real wages?
Because we don't take vacation, or sick days, and have no labour party present to defend workers' rights, leading to the majority of states passing variations of Right to Work laws which effectively ban unions and allow employers to fire people for any reason, at any time. As a result, the rights of workers suffer, leading to institutionalized abuse and exploitation of workers. Should labor prices rise, it is easy to simply order Congress to flood the affected market with immigrants and crash the labor price.
Why does our government spy on us and disregard our civil liberties?
All governments do that. Ours just got caught. As far as why they do it, the reasons are too numerous to list here, but effectively it comes down to national security and preventing any widespread political insurrection amongst a highly exploited worker caste.
Why are we below the average in ability according to OECD?
Because we invest very little in public education, and the price of post-secondary education is inflating at double digit percentages every year, effectively eliminating access to higher education for many, if not the majority, of the population.
Why is the gap between the richest and the poorest on par with that of African countries?
This isn't entirely accurate. Japan has the lowest wealth inequity of any country on Earth, and the highest is Bolivia. The United States, while scoring nearly the same as Uguanda, also wasn't that far off from the United Kingdom. Source The problem is not a wealth "gap" per-se but rather that when you plot wealth distribution as a curve, the United States has an uncharacteristically high concentration of wealth amongst the top 1% -- far higher than any other country on Earth.
There are many reasons for this, but essentially it comes down to a lack of inheritance tax and how our economy has been structured; We are much more an investment and service-based economy than most, and both of these, but investment in particular, leads to rapid wealth disparity being created. Deregulation of the stock market, banks, etc., also have contributed significantly to this problem -- we are, as it were, robbing Peter to pay Paul. See also: Too big to fail. While the impact of any one of these legislative initiatives isn't enough to change things, collectively they are excerting a continuous pressure on the economy and over the past thirty years the problem has worsened. However, the retirement of the boomers has acted like a catalyst, rapidly accelerating this trend.
And finally, why the fuck do people keep telling me this is the greatest country on Earth?
Because we live here. Duh. Nobody's national anthem starts with "We're Number Two!"
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I would do similar, but I wouldn't trust the municipality to touch the fiber. Municipalities have little to no experience with Fiber. What they do have huge amounts of experience with is piping. Most municipalities run at least 3 different sets of pipes. 2 to every home, and 1 to most neighborhoods. Water, sewage, and storm drains. If municipalities would run a new set of pipes that were the size of sewer lines, they would have the infrastructure to lease space to dozens of competing businesses. New players could pull whatever cable they see fit at a price that dwarfs what it costs now, and if your cable is having problems, you can push the service provider to replace it, or go to a competitor. It would also allow businesses to run private connections between offices within the same city.