This was a super interesting read. The one thing I never fail to get over though is how expensive internet is in the states. In the UK you can get 200/20 for about £58 p/m including TV & Phone. I couldn't imagine paying nearly $100 p/m for 100mbps.
It's not that the bandwidth is expensive; it's the cost to deploy everything. If there was preexisting conduit/fiber in the ground and all we had to do was plug two cables together, I'd be able to charge $25/m too.
I've never been to the UK, but I believe your population density is a lot higher than that of the US; which is where all of our costs originate (interconnecting the customer to our network).
The main reason I can see is that Comcast (or cable internet) has no real competition. I don't understand why that is. AT&T, Verizon etc seem to have given up on competing. Verizon stopped their rollout of FTTH a while back nearly entirely, though it has restarted very slowly.
AT&Ts VDSL based UVerse solution is way too sparse, with very long cable runs. Compare this to BT in the UK where most VDSL2 runs they are doing are <500m. They're now looking at GFast to push fibre even closer to customers, getting copper runs down to ~200m.
Ok, so this may be caused by low population density, but I'm not entirely convinced. It must be way cheaper to dig trenches in suburbia USA as many of the places don't even have sidewalks to dig up and then expensively refill, you could just trench along the side of the road.
One other reason is that counties have the land rights. They negotiate with the big Telco's like Comcast, Verizon, Cox, Charter, etc and then issue a monopoly or duopoly in the county for a fixed period of time - usually 10 years at once.
The Telco can offer a few things like fiber connectivity between county buildings, tax payments, etc. By doing that, they secure the rights to the area. Given the federal system of the United States, this is a difficult thing to stop.
This makes true market-based competition within most areas very difficult to achieve.
> One other reason is that counties have the land rights. They negotiate with the big Telco's like Comcast, Verizon, Cox, Charter, etc and then issue a monopoly or duopoly in the county for a fixed period of time - usually 10 years at once.
They do not do that. It's illegal under federal law. Pole and conduit owners are required to rent out access at non-discriminatory rates: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/224.
The reason companies don't overbuild is because it's expensive and there isn't any return. FiOS came to my building in Baltimore. I was the only person on my floor to switch away from Comcast. Even these days, people choose their broadband provider based primarily on the TV package.
> They do not do that. It's illegal under federal law.
But they most certainly can impose enough bureaucracy and other hurdles to make renting factually impossible. Or simply both the incumbent provider and the county employ just a single FTE (or less!) to handle permits, and one can't do anything about it. All while following the letter of the law, because there's nothing in the law that says "county has X days to deal with the permit else it is being automatically granted".
That feels easily litigated to me. The law probably makes some statement like 'will make available'. You then go to court showing that the opportunity to rent isn't available even though there technically is a service.
> They do not do that. It's illegal under federal law.
They definitely do. Our city has a franchise agreement with the incumbent cable provider; they're the only company allowed to provide cable television service. ~10 years ago a company called NuNet tried to come in and run fiber in a neighboring city, Hazleton, and both they and the city were sued by the incumbent for breaching the franchise.
The 1992 Cable Act made exclusive franchises illegal, but does not retroactively apply to pre-1992 contracts. Almost all of those contracts have since expired and been renewed as non-exclusive contracts under the 1992 Act. Hazelton, for example, granted an exclusive franchise before 1992, which expired in 2005: http://articles.mcall.com/2004-03-25/business/3517245_1_fibe.... The suit in 2004 was over the last year of exclusivity.
I imagine there are some 30-year exclusive franchises granted in 1991 that are still in effect. I don't actually know of any.
But why though? It seems really silly. Even in a hyper competitive market like the UK, the incumbent telco still makes a fortune off home broadband service.
In the US AT&T and Verizon seem to have given up and want to just do cellular to make money and let their copper plant rot. They are gifting the entire market to Comcast et al.
Verizon stopped competing because they are transitioning from a wired and wireless company to solely wireless. They have no interest in holding onto their old POTS, and FCC required them to service it.
Cost of the Telcom union, employers and pension adds up, not to mention infrastructure.
They avoid all this by wireless voice, cellular communications.
It's interesting that this is always the american response whenever the broadband comparisons are made. I don't mean this in a negative way, but it's a very persistent argument and I wonder if there's some external factor that pushes it (telcos/media/other).
I think this is definitely a factor - but it's vastly overstated. The USA is more urbanised than many European countries at 80%, so there's definitely quick wins for the vast majority of the population.
The big difference I see is the way these services are regulated. In the UK for example, the physical infrastructure associated with the last mile is owned by a company that just manages this, with regulated prices linked to asset investment required. Services are then resold to Internet Service Providers who provide the IP services and compete on price and other factors.
The capital costs of providing the infrastructure are restrictive and the advantage of competition does not outweigh the cost of having multiple last-mile infra.
Note - I've used some simplifications on the ownership and extents of infraco/telco ownership, but the concept holds.
The effect of density is not overstated. States' average bandwidth in the Akamai rankings line up closely with population density. I live in Maryland (one of the most densely populated states, though half the density of the U.K.) and most of the urban areas have fiber available (the exception being Baltimore city, for political reasons).
Even if you live in an urban area, the prevalence of rural areas (and poor urban areas), has an impact on you, because the US supports rural telecommunications through various internal cross-subsidies instead of direct support.
The regulatory regime plays a role too, but it's more complicated than your simplistic presentation. In the U.K., the last mile infrastructure is owned by a single company (BT Openreach), but equally importantly, the government ensures it is a quite profitable company. Much more so than American utilities. That was a conscious part of the BT privatization: designing a rate structure that would ensure prices high enough to create adequate incentives for investment.
We do have some examples of this kind of structure in the US - for example, in Manhattan, NYC, a company called "Empire City Subway" has maintained general telecommunications conduit an a license from the state for over a hundred years. http://www.empirecitysubway.com/
Their rates are surprisingly reasonable. For example, I mentioned that leasing conduit from the utility here is $3/ft/yr; those rates are as low as $0.6909/ft/yr, significantly cheaper.
That's thanks to the BT/OpenReach split in the 90s forcing small ISPs to compete on service & cost (because they all have the same guaranteed cost to access the infrastructure).
Plus y'know you can blow fibre to 90% of the population in a reasonable amount of time.
Except it's not - for 200/20 at those prices the GP must be talking about a Virgin Media line, and they run their own cables. The increased competition between providers probably contributes to driving down prices to just above the point of profitability, but its not responsible for the infrastructure in this case.
I think the common base-level infrastructure helped drive ISPs to compete on service & feature + meant they can use their funds to implement those features.
The much slower upload speed means your download is bottlenecked (tcp ACKs). A lot of providers offer such asymmetry because it works well for video (udp) but otherwise it's not the great deal you might think it is.
As another point of reference, I live in semi-rural Canada about an hour from a major city and have 150/150 fibre for CDN$85/month.
I get symmetric 200/200 for about $70/month in Bangalore, India. It's just a dumb pipe though (no included TV/phone, though I could also go for those).
When on the download page for Mac it doesn't mention Windows download anywhere. I assume OP doesn't realise it's available for Windows, I didn't realise at first either.
I mean, it's cool. I like the GPS tracking and Audio alerts but It's bad enough I need to charge my watch, never mind having to charge my Wallet as well.
