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0 pointsApolloFortyNine7y ago0 comments

You have to look at areas where Comcast is the only choice, what the prices and speeds available are there, and the prices and speeds that are suddenly available when a competitor arises.

And phone service is not a viable alternative. Even 50gb (the standard cap it seems nowadays before throttling) gets you only 10-20 hours of video at high quality.

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rayiner7y ago· 2 in thread

Sure, in some areas the lack of ISP competition is particularly acute. But on the flip side, lack of competition in tech is a nationwide problem. I’ve got gigabit through both Verizon and Comcast at my house. It’s much easier for me to switch between the two than for me to switch off gmail (which has years of my emails), or to switch off Facebook (which all my aunts and uncles use).

As to cellular—it’s a viable alternative for lots of people. Many people don’t need more than 10-20 hours of high quality video per month. 20% of people are already smartphone-only users, and that figure is growing. At the same time, those data caps are growing. Verizon’s 5G service has no data cap. Even if there is a soft cap of a few hundred GB, that’ll be a viable wired replacement for most people.

The trend in tech, by contrast, is the opposite. We’re not on the precipice of increased competition in search or mobile OSs. Indeed, with Microsoft throwing in the towel on Windows Mobile, there is less competition in that space than ever.

fedorareis7y ago

You are fortunate to be in one of the few areas where there is true ISP competition. For most of the country there is none. Yes, it may be hard to move off of gmail but it isn’t impossible unlike changing high speed internet providers for most of the country. You can leave Facebook and communicate in other ways. I’m sure your aunts and uncles have phones so you could text or call them.

I don’t see how splitting up Apple or Google would increase the number of mobile OSs. There have been companies in the past that have tried building a mobile OS either for a specific phone or as an open source OS and none of them have really gained traction. There have been rumors for a couple years now of some of the phone manufacturers talking about building their own OS to use in place of android, yet those still haven’t appeared. Microsoft failed at mobile because they were too late to the party, people already knew which mobile experience they preferred.

rayiner7y ago

> You are fortunate to be in one of the few areas where there is true ISP competition. For most of the country there is none.

That's not true, and I'm not sure where people get that idea. Slightly over half the country has two or more wired choices at 25 mbps, and that's as of a few years ago.

And if you're saying that texting my aunt in Bangladesh is a viable alternative to sharing pictures of my kids on Facebook, then it makes no sense to discount satellite, DSL, and cellular as viable alternatives to Comcast. (And indeed they are for many people--just over half the households in Comcast's footprint actually subscribe to its service.)

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