- Why does the electricity supplied to my office come in normal power and brown power versions?
Oh, wait.
When you make an industry a public utility, and eliminate market-rate profit incentives, you get underinvestment, which is exactly what we see in water, power, etc: http://www.asce.org/failuretoact.
You can talk all you want about making internet service into "dumb pipes" but you can't make investors and shareholders pour billions of dollars a year into the "dumb pipe" business. They'll just dump their regulated business lines and shift the money to something more profitable, like Goldman is encouraging Verizon to do: http://stopthecap.com/2012/01/09/wall-street-encourages-veri....
Yes, I am in favor of municipal fiber-to-the-home solutions paid for with public dollars given the critical importance of these "dumb pipes".
Comcast spent $5.4 billion on capital expenditures in 2013: http://www.cmcsa.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=821438. TWC spent $3.2 billion: http://ir.timewarnercable.com/investor-relations/investor-ne....
Verizon and AT&T regularly top the list of companies with the highest U.S. capital expenditures, and Comcast and TWC are usually in the top 25: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-25-companies-investing-mo....
> That's why we're seeing this rent seeking behavior, and one reason why we have slower speeds than other modern nations.
Like? We compare quite favorably to countries like Canada and Australia, which have similar problems as we do with lack of density. According to Akamai's testing, we're in the top 10 worldwide for measured average connection speeds: http://www.akamai.com/dl/akamai/akamai-soti-q413.pdf?WT.mc_i... (page 19, Figure 20). Ookla's NetIndex puts us ahead of Canada and Australia, and only slightly behind the UK and Germany: http://www.netindex.com. Our Northeastern states, like New Jersey and Pennsylvania, which have density comparable to continental Europe, have average connection speeds comparable to France, the EU standout.
> Yes, I am in favor of municipal fiber-to-the-home solutions paid for with public dollars given the critical importance of these "dumb pipes".
You don't, because when public dollars are involved, you get "lowest common denominator" levels of investment. Comcast's average user uses 2-5 GB/month. If telecom infrastructure was provisioned according to these people voting, do you think the resulting level of investment would be at a level that would make the folks on HN happy?
Many people purchase bottled drinking water via delivery service b/c they deem the quality of tap water unacceptable for consumption.
Many people invest in UPS units, backup generators, etc. b/c they deem the reliability of power from the grid unacceptable.
Imagine if the power grid had an additional 9 of reliability -- it would save hospitals tens of millions of dollars on redundant power backup systems, significantly reducing the cost of healthcare. From this vantage-point, the poor quality of grid power is subsidized by those who need life support systems... this seems horribly unfair.
Are you making the counter argument that 25Gb/s is optimal given the reality that we're living in a time where 900Gb/s down is attainable except for the lack of shareholder will preventing its deployment?
I've built my own modems. I witnessed the stagnation around 2400 baud. I'm unimpressed by your suggestion that commercially-available bandwidth is at an "optimal" speed.
Cable Internet for Residential / Cable Internet for Business...
Because SLA.
