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Are America's Big Telecom Companies Suppressing Fiber? (salon.com)
Salon just published a new interview with Susan Crawford, the author of "Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution -- And Why America Might Miss It."
Crawford has spent years studying the business of these underground fiber optic cables that make fast internet possible. As it turns out, the internet infrastructure situation in the United States is almost hopelessly compromised by the oligopolistic telecom industry, which, due to lack of competition and deregulation, is hesitant to invest in their aging infrastructure... This is going to pose a huge problem for the future, Crawford warns, noting that politicians as well as the telecom industry are largely inept when it comes to prepping us for a well-connected future...
"The decay started in 2004 when -- maybe out of gullibility, maybe out of naivety, maybe out of calculation -- then-chairman of the FCC, Michael Powell, now the head of cable association -- was persuaded that the telcos would battle it out with the cable companies, that their cable modem services would battle it out with wireless, and all of that competition would do a much better job than any regulatory structure could at ensuring that every American had a cheap and fantastic connection of the internet. That's just turned out that's just not true. Since then, he deregulated the entire sector -- and as a result, we got this very stagnant status quo where in most urban areas -- usually the local cable monopoly has a lock in the market and can charge whatever it wants for whatever type of quality services they're providing, leaving a lot of people out."
"Because Americans don't travel," she adds, "you don't get the sense of what a third-world country the U.S. is becoming when it comes to communications."
"The decay started in 2004 when -- maybe out of gullibility, maybe out of naivety, maybe out of calculation -- then-chairman of the FCC, Michael Powell, now the head of cable association -- was persuaded that the telcos would battle it out with the cable companies, that their cable modem services would battle it out with wireless, and all of that competition would do a much better job than any regulatory structure could at ensuring that every American had a cheap and fantastic connection of the internet. That's just turned out that's just not true. Since then, he deregulated the entire sector -- and as a result, we got this very stagnant status quo where in most urban areas -- usually the local cable monopoly has a lock in the market and can charge whatever it wants for whatever type of quality services they're providing, leaving a lot of people out."
"Because Americans don't travel," she adds, "you don't get the sense of what a third-world country the U.S. is becoming when it comes to communications."
Only when it comes to communications, really? What about health care? Taking care of your poor? Having a proper democracy?
The U.S.A. has been a third-world country for quite a while, just ask the other civilized countries.
^^^THIS^^^ The broadband situation in America is a story about government intervention completely breaking the marketplace not a failure of the market place. We really need to be passing state laws that prohibit the creation and renewal of such agreements by local municipalities. That is how you fix this situation.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Municipal monopoly agreements DO NOT EXIST in the United States. Period. They have been banned, at the Federal level, since the Telecommunications Act of 1996. True story.
What you have is an example of first mover effect and natural monopolies. But Libertarians hate to admit to those, as they are natural market failure mechanisms, and they don't like to admit that the market can have inherent failure modes.
There are huge limitation of using a broadcast medium (wireless) vs a point-to-point medium such as fiber. With all advances in wireless technology (such as MIMO or beam forming) - you will never get the same quality that you can achieve with fiber connection. Now imagine all homes using that same 5G technology in addition to mobiles - it will create additional overhead to an already congested spectrum. It is more efficient to dedicate 5G to devices that really need it - cars, public transport services, smartphones and so on, while connecting homes through fiber.
Its got nothing to do with exactly what technology is being used to provide internet service and everything to do with making sure any new players who want to come in and compete with the big boys don't get that chance. And it all comes down to content.
All of these big ISPs know that if these new players come in, they will not only take away the revenue from the internet side of things but they will take away the far more lucrative TV revenue. Even more so for those ISPs like Comcast or AT&T who actually own content producers and channels rather than just cable platforms.
This reminds me of a ruling by ANACOM (Portugal's FCC) where the subsidised Fiber, granted installation and exploitation rights to a single one of our ISPs, which should be providing infrastructure to people that paid for it in secluded areas, is only ever made residentially, commercially available by that ISP when there is no alternative whatsoever. And guess what ANACOM accepts as an alternative: 2-8Mbps WIRELESS 3/4G or COPPER DSL!
There are thousands of villages in Portugal that have multi-Gbps Fiber installed but also have a faint, miserable 3 or 4G connection and/or copper, where Wireless and Copper fail to reach even the tens of Mbps and are always unstable. Yet since both Wireless and Copper have the POTENTIAL of reaching those numbers (even though they never ever do), the ISP is allowed to NEGATE access to the state-sponsored network, and only sell residential copper and wireless, because those services simply bring in more revenue (Copper: requires a phone fee that adds up to 50% cost; Wireless: is much more expensive and has data caps)!!!
This mostly happens because that infrastructure is also exclusive to the ISP in such a way that they don't even have to re-sell the Fiber to competitors, because in rural areas ANACOM exempts competition rules that would force the ISP to re-sell the Fiber!
This is Big Telecom at its worst. They fed from state funding to expand their networks, then lobbied the state authority to allow them to make use of the state-sponsored infrastructure as they please, even by keeping the villages initially targeted to benefit from the infrastructure in the shadow!
How do you think the data gets from/to those cell sites?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
That's a lie. Most Americansdo not want that.
75% were opposed the repeal of net neutrality.
56% support and only 16% oppose the creation of a publicly-owned internet companies to fill coverage gaps in rural, urban, or remote areas.
And hell, let's throw in some health care statistics too
70% want healthcare for everyone, even the poor who can't afford it.
51% are for and only 21% are against the government manufacturing and selling generic drugs (and that included revoking patents granted to pharma companies that make them too expensive for the average person to afford).
I could go on with similar poll results across every industry... energy, housing, food, utilities... everything.
Americans do not want freedom at the expense of all else. That is a lie that is continually pushed by the same interests that lobby the government to keep their monopolies in place and put former corporate executives into positions of power where they can undermine all regulation of the companies they worked for.
The only reason that lie continues is that the wealthy who benefit the most from this bullshit can use their wealthy to force it to be the only story. They hire PR firms to astroturf the story, buy media outlets and control what stories get published, pay off legislators to ensure that regulations always favor the wealthy and take every step they can to ensure that no other story gets heard.
I travel a fair amount - about 80 days a year out of the country. I've lived (recently) in Belgium and China, and whilst I had more options for high speed Internet, it wasn't really appreciably cheaper than the 100 Mbps cable I get from Spectrum. About $40 in China, Brussels, or Ventura.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
5G won't provide fibre speeds to all. It can't, there just isn't enough bandwidth. Say you live in a city in an apartment block and everyone is using 5G for their broadband. Well for a start 5G uses higher frequencies so you will need an external antenna to get anywhere near the theoretical 10Gbps it offers.
10Gbps between how many users? If it's more than 5 then it's already slower than symmetrical 1/1Gbps cable, and of course the latency is much worse. That 10Gbps is the on-air rate too, not the speed you get after all the protocol overhead and switching time to allow other uses to communicate.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I can tell you much of the problem is about how to retrofit existing areas. New builds get fiber, but anything that existed before 2014 or so is a legacy build. I live in an area that was built in the late 90s and there's no hope of getting anything fast out here so I'm doing it myself. The costs are reasonable (about 30-50k/mile) but the majority of the issue is in permitting to go underground. (If you go on poles, it's actually just as expensive as underground in many cases due to annual fees on the poles, engineering studies, tree clearing fees, make-ready, etc.. Plus then you need to own a bucket truck and other expenses).
The wholesale cost of the bandwidth is nothing, it's all about the cost to put the stuff in the ground and the permit process. Expect 30% of your costs (and 90% of build-time) to be constrained by engineering and permitting costs. The rest of that 30-50k USD/mile cost is the labor and materials needed. You need to put in a place every 2-3 homes you pass to deliver service. There are a lot of people doing this in rural areas to close the gap but most people have only heard of the incumbents so there's a market awareness problem. Many people that are WISPs (see WISPA.org) are now moving into the fiber world, but the capital costs are around 50-250k to get all the equipment you need for underground construction.
Rough costs if you care: 35c/ft for conduit, 7-10c/ft for fiber (once you get large counts like 96 count, it's closer to 1c/strand/foot) and $100-300 for a pedestal or hand-hole, plus splice trays, etc. $1/foot (linear) * $1/foot (depth) for your route if it's not complicated. Costs go up in urban environments very quickly if you have a lot of requirements or other utilities to dodge.
Monopolies are not a libertarian topic. Monopolies rarely occur without assistance from congress and any government intervention inherently means its not a libertarian concept. Granting patents on vague language such as verizons alleged patent against vonage is a perfect example. They were allowed to get a patent in 1998 that literally, and I do mean literally, described how DNS works. They then used that patent to win a lawsuit against vonage. It’s a little known secret that the biggest pushers for “red tape”, aka regulation, are companies already established within the industry. By the way, if you read the ninth amendment you will see that the federal government does not have the power to pass laws that supersede a states right. The only thing they can supersede a states right is a constitutional amendment. If a state wants to have these laws they can challenge the federal government on their ninth amendment right.
Your only telco in town can't offer 1000/1000 services?
Ask them for a 1000/100 service.
When they say no ask them again for 1000/1000 service for the town.
Plan for community broadband.
Ask for 1000/1000 around the town again.
Wait for the NN telco to say no. That wireline is going to stay. That is the NN approved network is the network they have to offer as a monopoly telco.
Tell the city your granted telco monopoly no longer deserves any monopoly protection as they are doing nothing of value with the monopoly.
Get community broadband working.
Connect the community at 1000/1000 when they request that type of connection.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
That is not the point. The point is that a large number of voters voted against their own, stated by them, best interests here and that includes not only those that voted for the, aehm, "stable genius", but also those that voted for Hilary.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
That wasn't because the U.S. is backwards third-world country (well, the sign instead of PIN part was, but not the slow rollout of chipped cards). The rest of the world got to do it better because the U.S. did credit cards first. So the rest of the world got to see all the problems with magnetic swipe credit cards before implementing their credit card systems. The U.S. by virtue of being the first adopter, has to deal with the additional overhead of replacing a much larger legacy system, instead of just implementing a clean system mostly from scratch. Virtually every merchant in the U.S. already had credit card readers which weren't capable of reading chipped cards, so the transition to chipped cards took a lot longer here than in other countries where merchants hadn't widely adopted credit card readers.
Same thing happened with digital cell phone service. The U.S. already had an extensive analog cellular network, so was slowest to transition to digital cellular. The cost to implement digital cellular was the same here as in other countries, but the marginal gain was less because the gain in the U.S. was analog to digital cellular, while the gain in other countries was from no cellular to digital cellular. Consequently there was less market pressure to roll out digital cellular, and it progressed more slowly than in other countries. Likewise, the standard electrical socket and plug in the U.S. is the worst-designed, because other countries to got see the problems with the U.S. design and got to implement designs which fixed those problems as their standard, before they rolled out electricity in their countries. (e.g. Ground wire connects first; and live wires are covered before they're connected so you can't accidentally touch wires carrying current.) The U.S. was saddled with the inertia of that initial socket design being standard, and has never managed to overcome it and replace it with a newer, better socket design.
So these problems aren't because the U.S. is some backwards third-world nation. it's because the U.S. is the world's spearhead - the trailblazer and first adopter. And the first attempt at implementing something is almost never the best way to do it. Other countries get for free the lessons learned from the suffering and pain of trial and error that the U.S. had to go through. Mocking the U.S. for it just means you're an ungrateful prick.