Sweden is not very dense, large parts are uninhabited forests.

Sweden 24 United States 35 New Jersey 467.2

You are basically saying, "I live in the most densely populated state in the US, and my Internet is almost as good as the internet of the Swedish country side, U.S.A! U.S.A!"

People from the German Telekom like to us this argument as well, "Germany has much more population, we can't do what they do". That argument has been debunk and shown for what it is many times, by multiple experts. It's simple lobbying by a monopoly provider of copper to defend its monopoly against the competition heavy fiber.

If they're actually uninhabited, then there is no need to build fiber out there, and you shouldn't count them in the density measure. What you're really interested in is the population-weighted density (i.e. the density of the places where people live).

Compare the list of U.S. urban areas to that of Sweden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_in_Sweden; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_ar.... The vast majority of the population of Sweden lives in urban areas with between 2,000 to 3,500 people per square kilometer. No urban area in the U.S. is as dense as Stockholm's (3,500). NYC is at the low end of that range (2,000), and is less dense than a bunch of Swedish cities with just ~50-100k people.

Major U.S. urban areas like Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, and St. Louis are under 900 people per square kilometer. Major cities like Houston, Dallas, and Philly are just north of 1,000. That's 1/3 the density of Stockholm.

I think that's the difference - the costs are upfront, not paid by capital/loan with the subscriber having to pay for it eventually.

Rationally, most people wouldn't want to pay that much into a US cable/net provider, considering their historical experience with them.

At that level of competition, it could easily drive the prices down into the $10-20 range for high bandwidth, which would probably break even with current cable internet prices now.

I pay nearly $100/mo for 300Mbps/20Mbps since I have about 9 active users in my home. I pay about $1.2k per year in internet, so $1-2k upfront for cheaper monthly pricing and more competitive features.

What you describe sounds like a great model. It'd be very difficult to do it in the U.S.

What do carriers in Sweden do with people who can't afford to pay the up front fee?

EDIT: Looking at Stokab, it looks like they don't require an up-front payment. But Stokab built its network over two decades, starting out in the core city and expanding based on market demand: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/sites/digital-age.... That model is illegal in almost every city in the U.S. Any carrier must agree to wire up a whole city on a very short timeline, even areas where there isn't sufficient market demand. Verizon was given less than 8 years to wire up all of New York City.

Stokab is a municipal and non-profit carrier and almost all cities have one of those, competing with the private carriers. The municipal often requires 70% + coverage, witch is very hard to get in a small non tech village with old people. Stokab is a bit different because they have about 1.5 million people living in their area witch is dense compared to the rest of Sweden.

The private carriers don't even bother if they can't get a few hundred subscribers in the area. So if you live in a small village, but not small enough to get a government grant it can be though.

When you start digging up the streets you must allow competitors to also join, so when one carrier has decided to start digging, you often get offers from other Carriers too, with a slightly lower price. So there's usually many carriers in the same area.

There's probably a reasonable market doing this at $10-20k/house. There's clearly a market for multi-family dwellings like condos/apartment buildings (webpass, condointernet, etc. have shown), but maybe the next step will be neighborhoods pre-wired with fiber to some kind of switchbox with your choice of carrier coming in.

Wat. NYC is over 10k/km^2. Manhattan is over 25k/km^2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore%E2%80%93Washington_m...

I mean some people talk about the Northeast megalopolis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, and some times Richmond. But, that does not mean Boston and DC are somehow the same city.

Not it does not, that is the "Tri-State" area. I have never heard anyone use the term "NYC Urban area." What you are saying makes it sounds as if those places are suburbs of New York City and none of them are. New York City is 5 boroughs.

Also I think you are confusing Manhattan and New York City. Half the daily population of Manhattan are commuters:

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/commuters-nearl...

The only metric that matters when building a network is linear route miles of cable per subscriber needed to provide service.

There is a single metric you can use to approximate this for any country: people per mile of road. Every (on-grid) dwelling and business is on a street or a road, so if you put a fiber cable on every road or street, then you will pass every inhabitant in the country.

Sweden has 10 people per mile of road. The US has 30 people per mile of road.

Sweden simply does better, despite having to deploy more infrastructure to provide service.

Also, it looks like you're counting Sweden's vast unpaved road network, which makes up about 75% of its roads. I bet very few of the 60% of households with fiber live on an unpaved road. If you compare paved roads only, the U.S. and Sweden have the same linear density. And even then, it's much less expensive to connect two dense urban areas at either end of a 100 mile road than to serve sparse suburbs and exurbs along a 100 mile stretch of road.

Firstly, Sweden pretty much intends to do so. The official goal is to bring at least 100 Mbps service to at least 90% of the population by 2020. Many municipalities/states have programs to build out fiber to everybody.

Sweden also already has a cable running to almost every premise, so in practice every road and every street is already passed. In 2011 xDSL covered 98,5% of the population and only 1100 households or businesses had no service or less than 1 Mbps service.

Secondly, it's an estimate, but it's a far better estimate than population density or any other single metric presented so far. It correlates with the linear miles of cable needed to pass all premises, which is the deciding factor in determining costs. It is also readily available and it measures compratively how hard it would be wire up a nation.

By this measure Sweden does far better, even having a need for more infrastructure per inhabitant to reach the same end result, i.e. broadband service for everyone.

Is this just a guess or do you have anything to back this up with?

> You could probably cover 98.5% of the population without covering much of the road network.

Here's a map of xDSL coverage: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/20110...

Let's see how you propose to cover that land area without also covering much of the road network.

Looking at the map, the northernmost county has barely any HSPA coverage. Nevertheless that county has a population of a quarter of a million inhabitants. To get 99.6% coverage, you'd still have to cover over 200 000 of those and everybody else in the country. That's clearly impossible as 100 000 inhabitants in that county live outside the ten largest "metro" areas.

There's just no way of not covering a lot of roads if if you aim for coverage in the high nineties with such a dispersed population.

That's a fair point.

> And even then, it's much less expensive to connect two dense urban areas at either end of a 100 mile road than to serve sparse suburbs and exurbs along a 100 mile stretch of road.

Not necessarily. Build costs in dense urban areas are high, but there are more subscribers. Suburbs and exurbs are cheaper to build per mile, but have less customers. It averages out fairly well.

While this is probably true in an absolute sense, Sweden is also a much smaller, more homogeneous country than the U.S.; I don't think governments scale very well, so a small affluent country can likely be more nimble and innovative than a large affluent country (think startups vs enterprises).

Democracies aren't businesses. Getting some kind of consensus from a huge, diverse populace is hard. I think you end up with diseconomies of scale.

> If there are diseconomies of scale then you can organise it at the state level or municipal level

This requires the federal government to now maintain 50 distinct sets of policy, or delegate to regional bureaucrats. Both of these are diseconomies of scale.

These kinds of problems are hard to solve within a large enterprise with a hierarchical power structure; the United States is a much larger, more diverse entity with a distributed/consensus-driven power structure.

The argument that it is merely an option assumes that you are able to rationally choose the best option from the ones available. Not the case when we're talking about government. And the larger the government, the more political power is at stake, the less rational the decision making becomes.

Sometimes you can get DSL, but since Verizon employees get fired for fixing outages now, that will be gone soon.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/verizo...

"The wireless home phone service, VoiceLink, is not a proper replacement for copper phone lines because it doesn’t work with security alarms, fax machines, medical devices such as pacemakers that require telephone monitoring, and other services, the union said."

Really? Verizon should be maintaining and repairing obsolete infrastructure so people can keep using fax machines? GMAFB.

There isn't that much fiber in the forests, but anywhere there is a city there is. Sweden has a goal to give 90% of the population fiber before 2020 even if that is probably not going to happen.

You can use the same trick to come to the surprising conclusion that LA is denser than NYC. Population-weighed density is definitely a better way to measure density if you want numbers that reflect intuition about how dense a place "feels" rather than merely reflecting what arbitrary political boundaries were chosen

You can't really treat an entire region like it has a uniform population density, either. Area is not the relevant unit of measure, but total linear distance of the edges of the spanning tree.

Maybe a more predictive measure for networking costs would be median distance to nearest neighbor?

Sweden has 10 people per mile of road. The US has 30 people per mile of road.

Sweden simply does better, despite having to deploy more infrastructure to provide service.

Sweden used to have a state telecom monopoly which then became the incumbent. You are right that regulatory capture has played a big part in the development of the telecommunications sector. Sweden had a strong incumbent, but that did not stop the municipalities and power companies from building out competing fiber networks, nor stop the regulator from acting in the best interest of the people.

So, the big difference was that the Swedes had both political support for building fiber networks and a more can do attitude towards getting things done, without excluding large parts of the community.

I don't know if the comparison should be valid. Over the past 100 years the US has done incredible things. From developing the first transistor to applied atomic power to the first man on the moon, and more relevantly to your point, it expanded the German Autobahn model and took it to a continental scale.

If America wanted to do it, it eventually could be done - and many people around the world still believe this idea to be true.

Edit: What I think is interesting to add is that defense and national pride or prestige were indeed significant factors in these developments through the decades.

First problem is the cost of the infrastructure for such a huge space. We did offer to subsidize it to a point and the companies took the money without delivering. As usual, no repercussions.

Second problem is very few politicians, in office or wishing to run, will listen to the citizens and prefer taking money from corporations to maintain the status quo.

It's a bigger issue than it seems on the outside.

Did you hear anyone talk about broadband during this year's presidential election?

While it's hard to hear much about policy plans over the personal, historical, and character attacks this cycle, yes, I've heard Clinton promoting her "broadband for all" plan, as well as seen some criticism of and debate about it in the press, etc.

Here's an article from earlier this month: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/hillary-clinton-v...

Except that Sweden is 20 times larger than New Jersey in area. The continental US is 18 times larger than Sweden, so it is actually a better (if terrible) comparison geographically.

Maybe in your argument you should compare Sweden with Michigan, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, or Minnesota instead of New Jersey, which each have at least half the area of Sweden with varying population density.

Incidentally, I didn't get LTE service in the farmland between Munich and the airport. That would be quite unusual in the U.S.

...depending on your provider. try driving around in the sticks of Maryland just 20 minutes outside Baltimore, good luck getting EDGE on tmo!

Take Denmark next to Sweden, while still better than the US, for the most part, the broadband roll out is much different. A single phone company (TDC/YouSee) owns the phone network, but they are force to lease their lines to competitors. TDC more or less dictate the price for renting, it just has to be "reasonable". The result is that a 20Mb DSL line cost the same from all providers. Cable companies have been force to open their networks this year, until then they had monopolies in individual areas. Fiber is being rolled out, but slowly and at great cost to the electric companies (that more or less own the fiber networks). This may sound great overall, but rural areas aren't getting nearly the level of connectivity that they would have gotten in Sweden. There are still plenty of place that are lucky to get 5Mbit, and Denmark is a very small country. I can't imagine the cost of rolling out just 10Mbit to 90% of the US customers.

This correlates well with the only network metric that matters, linear route miles of cable per subscriber needed to provide service. Every (on-grid) dwelling and business is on a street or a road, so if you put a fiber cable on every road or street, then you will pass every inhabitant in the country.

Sweden has 10 people per mile of road. The US has 30 people per mile of road.

Sweden simply does better, despite having to deploy more infrastructure to provide service.

If your aim is to provide broadband to all, you'll have to build there too. Sweden aims to do 100 Mbps to 90% of the population by 2020. Can't do that by just covering urban areas.

Try driving through Wyoming some time (on a highway!). You can easy drive for an hour or two and there is nothing but BLM (gov't) land all around you. No one lives there.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS

But what if a place doesn't have service on a large portion of roads? I doubt that is particularly true for this comparison, but the metric probably shouldn't reward a place with more unserved areas.

As an absurd example, you can serve 40% of the population of Alaska by establishing service in Anchorage, which is roughly 0.1% of Alaska by area.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ratio+of+land+area+of+...

But "bury big tubes with fiber optic cables in them" is somehow too complicated of an engineering task?

The reality is we could get it done, there's just no political will cause the status quo benefits the entrenched players.

This is what's happening in Mountain View, home of Google. We don't have Google Fiber because of local obstructionism.

And by "entrenched players", I meant anyone that has a horse in the race, not just ISPs.

Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of cheap super high-speed internet, just like I like my streets to be repaved nicely every year.

I live on the east coast, and was irked to watch neighbors complain about bad cell service and about a new cell tower going up in the same breath.

Silicon Valley covers a large number of municipalities, and without specifying which one you're in, all I can say sorry, 20 Mbit is slow these days.

The building next door to me is wired for fiber through one provider, Wave, and offers 1gig for $80/month: https://gowaveg.com. I'd love to switch and pay the extra $30 for much better internet but I can't get access to it as a single customer since it is decided building by building.

Compare this to a relatively small city like Pereslavl in Russia where I lived for a summer. It's about 120some km north of Moscow but the base options for most of the ISPs was 50/50; note the plural on ISPs. We had more choices and better service in a small Russian city than most states have across their major cities. And my girlfriend (Russian native) was annoyed that we had to pay an "outrageous 450 ruble" for the access.

It's not just a matter of size with the U.S., the planning in general is very poor and not built out compared to many countries. The priority on the last mile networks just seems to be lower or more poorly managed.

I have heard that response before, but I don't think it holds.

The culture density in Europe is tremendous compared to the US. European countries are not like US states: in a few hours, I can go to a city where nobody speaks my language. Even within my country, many regions have tremendous accents and even completely different languages that are still in heavy use (Brittany's Breton language, for instance).

Even at a governmental level, passports are issued by countries; US citizens have the same passport, with common federal laws and a single military.

Culture variety drives the number of communities regardless of the size of geographic surfaces.

The US is one big community with fairly common concerns, such as ISP monopolies. In Europe, we have very different ISP markets from country to country — each has different companies and different struggles.

Sure, there are inequalities even within a common culture; you can have good phone coverage in Montpellier but no reception around Millau. Still, when you face the same competitors across the country, you are authorized to characterize their behavior towards the market.

The scaling up of a system to the national level isn't the challenge -- it's the need to scale down to the municipal level that creates the monopoly problems.

The POTS network was regulated by FCC and State utility commissions, and were run very well. Cable is government by franchise agreements at the local level, which results in poor governance because local governments aren't equipped to negotiate these types of contracts.

The Australian government came up with a credible plan to provide high speed internet along the lines of the Swedish model being described. It has subsequently been modified to be less fast, but the concept of providing government-owned infrastructure to be leased by multiple providers on a competitive basis stays.

If it's possible in Australia, it's definitely technically feasible in the US too.

Very few people have no complaints when it comes to Comcast, one of the most hated companies in the country. And you have no alternative besides Comcast. If it were regulated like a utility that would be one thing, but you're at the mercy of a powerful monopoly which has been know to play all kinds of anti-consumer tricks. I'd recommend keeping a close eye on your bill.

I guess I'm one of the lucky ones? I've had them for years now and no real complaints. I'm certainly not blow away by their customer service, but they came and setup the internet when they said they would and I've had maybe one outage that lasted less than an hour (in 5 years).

So if you're in the northeastern corridor, you have 1 option for decent isp service, and it's totally reliant on Scrooge McDuck CEO not boning up a labor agreement. Otherwise you're screwed. USA USA USA indeed.

We are not talking about a federally owned fiber network.

> Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Google's switching to wireless is in part an acknowledgment that competing in the wired space is costly and fraught with hurdles including lawsuits from incumbents. Could we wire the nation tomorrow with gigabit everywhere? Well not literally, but if there was a "moonshot" program that captured the public's imagination yeah I'd imagine we could get it done in a few years. We've done it before when we really wanted to - the Rural Electrification and Highway programs are two examples from the last century. But it would represent an incredible change from how business is done today and the resulting lawsuits would drag on for decades after the work was done.

Sure it's $2/month if you ignore any fixed costs. Net margin after interest and taxes is high single digits.[1]

[1]http://financials.morningstar.com/ratios/r.html?t=CMCSA

This is the model that should be used everywhere, if we were to actually consider it a utility.

By default it does nothing, but if you pay some company to terminate it to the internet then you get internet, using whatever speed they can provide. Let the ISPs compete based on the service they provide: internet speed, reliability, support, and other add-ons like (e-mail or malware filters or the best wifi-router-modem included) or even the lack of any add-ons.

Even if this isn't a "municipal service" strictly speaking, if contracted out to a telco of sorts, it should be done the same way, and we should not allow the same company that provides the physical lines to provide the actual service, since it's anti-competitive.

Of course, we just get private industry setting up monopolies or duopolies instead, often with the help of local laws prohibiting competition. This is worse, but somehow more acceptable to the American electorate.

Everyone --($$$)--> Private enterprise --($)--> Taxes

.......................................--($)--> Actual service

vs.

Everyone --($)--> State --($)--> Actual service

or

Everyone --($$)--> State --($)--> Actual service

Not to mention: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-01-14

No, that's not how GDP works. The GDP measurement is independent of whether the action is performed by the private or public sector.

> Problem with using GDP, in my limited understanding, is that taxing things, even your breathing air, increases the GDP

No, that's not how GDP works either.

GDP is composed of four components. One of those components is government spending, which can be negative (ie, taxes) or positive (subsidies or direct purchasing).

However, government spending doesn't come from nowhere (no, even if the money is printed or issued as debt). A change in government spending is always matched by an equivalent change in consumption, investments, and/or net exports, which are the source of that money.

The secondary effects of tax policies may be to ultimately change the shape of aggregate supply or aggregate demand functions (at least, that's the argument for doing so), but taxation does not directly have any effect on GDP.

So no, taxing air would not increase the GDP.

That's an oversimplification that honestly provides a more confusing definition than the real one, which is that GDP is the sum of consumption, investment, government spending (which can be negative) and net exports.

> If it was taxable (privatized), it would increase the GDP, whereas if not (as if the government performed and didnt tax it), it would not increase the GDP.

No. Whether a service is performed by the private or public sector has no bearing on how much it counts towards GDP.

GDP can be measured in several ways. In a perfectly observable system, all the measurements would be exactly equal. They are not different models and they do not represent different underlying concepts. It is wrong to say that taxes are included in one measurement of GDP and not the other. In some methods, they are measured directly, and in others, they are measured indirectly. In both cases, taxes have the same effect.

> If a government decides to not tax air, no economic activity. If they do, and a company sells you taxable air, there is economic activity. In the former case, it no money is required. In the latter, it generates economic activity, activity that cannot be swept under the rug and must be measured.

Your usage of "economic activity" isn't really well-defined. But the difference between the two situations you're describing is that, in one, air is free, and in the other, air is being sold. The fact that it's being taxed on top of the sale is irrelevant.

This is also a really pointless example because air is mostly a non-excludable resource, so talking about either "selling" it or "taxing" doesn't reveal anything meaningful.

> It does matter, gov vs private industry.

No, it does not. Taxation doesn't come from nowhere. From a macroeconomics perspective, the government isn't "special".

Let me try one last time: Remember when I said that GDP = consumption + investment + government expenditures + net exports? Some economists would instead say that GDP is really "just" consumption + investment + net exports. And guess what? Regardless of which school of thought you subscribe to, the end result is exactly the same. It doesn't matter whether you break out government expenditures separately from consumption, investment, and net exports or whether you include government consumption in "consumption", government investment in "investment" and so on. The end result is exactly the same.

It's true, if the gov't performs a service, it's included in GDP. And no, taxes don't increase GDP.

As an example, here in Italy we have a separate company ran by a utility provider (which is used to handle infrastructure at a scale and can leverage existing assets) taking care of deploying fiber in the cities and then they make it available to multiple ISPs (bitstream).

In this way you have an entity who is solely focused on building and managing the infrastructure, which is able to make investments that single ISPs would not be able to do (while trying to still be profitable).

The end result for the consumers is that here in Milan, as an example, multiple operators started offering 1 Gb/s FTTH connections for around 30 EUR/month.

Such fees are only possible if you do not have to try to be profitable while having to absorb the hit from deploying your own infrastructure.

Sweden: 11.4 DSL, 6.6 cable, 17.5 fiber.

U.S. 8.2 DSL, 18.5 cable, 3.4 fiber.

U.K. 30.6 DSL, 7.2 cable, 0.0 fiber.

Germany: 28.9 DSL, 8.1 cable, 0.6 fiber.

France: 33.3 DSL, 4.5 cable, 2.1 fiber.

Spain: 16.5 DSL, 5.5 cable, 6.8 fiber.

Italy: 21.1 DSL, 0.0 cable, 0.6 fiber.

The U.S. does better than every big European country, whose residents are by and large stuck on DSL.

Perhaps more significantly, (data from the same table), I'm interested to know what the deployment models look like in Japan and Korea.

Japan: 2.6 DSL, 5.3 cable, 21.8 fiber. South Korea: 2.8 DSL, 8.5 cable, 28.3 fiber.

See e.g. https://www.fiber7.ch/ for a very attractive provider :).

Given most consumers use wifi within the home, and at these speeds it becomes the gating factor, is there any advantage (excluding nerd edge-cases of the average HN reader!) of faster speeds than that?

Very few even vaguely close to fibre-like services (e.g. Hyperoptic) in the UK

2% have fttp cover now, relatively few take it though.

There are very few use cases right now, I had 12mbs vdsl before, and I hardly notice that there is a difference to be honest, although my wife is a photographer and the high speed upload is a god send for her.

I've asked BT about that one and it looks like it's select exchanges only (even after FTTC has been rolled out), which is a shame as I'd happily pay for it.

The only "superfast" option I've got at the moment is a full leased line, whcih isn't a viable prospect for residential Internet..

It was much faster, and far more reliable than fios by Verizon that I have now in NYC...

Note that outlier amongst the rest of the European countries excluding Sweden. Spain is a year or two into rolling out FTTP everywhere, replacing the copper twisted pair everywhere it can. 0 cost upgrade for the end user, with a speed upgrade from "Up to 10Mbps" to 30Mbps/10Mbps of actual throughput.

I'm on a 100Mb/s cable service, even though there's fibre to my new-built apartment, since the cable company seemed much more competent when I moved in.

> Craig Barratt, chief executive of Access, the Alphabet division containing Google Fiber, also said he planned to step down because the company was shifting to new technologies and methods of deploying high-speed internet.

Fiber is expensive in every way (labor, regulatory hurdles, resistance from existing broadband companies, etc.). If they've found a viable alternative, it could mean they'll be able to accelerate their broadband rollout.

I'm not saying we should assume that's already the case, but we also shouldn't assume this means they're giving up.

They could do Google Fiber today if they could sell it for more. The only other realistic plan is to reduce to cost of the project.

well that would be socialism. Sorry comrade, here in the US we have this thing called FREEDOM. It Trumps your smart/efficient/reasonable solutions any day.

https://fiber.google.com/about/

By contrast, California municipalities have made building fiber difficult[1].

[1] http://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/blog/morning-roundup/2...

Something something past, rose-tinted glasses.

Political climate is a function of the people in charge. People in charge, due the nature of power and its effects, are always the same. Therefore the political climate is always the same.

You're just inadvertently filtering out.

For reference, Sweden is around the same size as California, with 1/4th the population.

The problem with infrastructure in the US is simply one of money. We don't want to pay for nice things. It's the 50 year old self-fulfilling prophesy of cut budgets, then complain that nothing is maintained and so the budget needs to be cut more because clearly it must have been wasted. Repeat ad nauseum. (This of phenomenon also plays out on the micro scale when people claim poor people are poor because they bought a stick of gum, instead of I guess investing 22 cents in an index fund or something.)

"However, the project was completed only in December 2007 (instead of 1998), at a cost of over $14.6 billion ($8.08 billion in 1982 dollars, meaning a cost overrun of about 190%)[6] as of 2006"

Comparing a government transportation project to anything in the private sector is a canard. There's literally nothing comparable. That isn't the say that government contracting policies and processes are perfect and not abused. They clearly aren't perfect, and they clearly are abused. See the F-35, and well, pretty much every military purchase since the Cold War. See the vast majority of government infrastructure projects. Most importantly, these cost overruns aren't something that's fundamental about private-vs-public, but rather something about how American governments function.[0] Unfortunately, there's no single smoking gun, and instead everyone falls back to their favorite boogeymen. (My favorites are multiple environmental impact studies, public comment periods, fraud, and of course willful incompetence (i.e. "I don't believe the government should do this, so I"m going to do a really shitty job, and then use my poor performance as evidence that the government is intrinsically incompetent."))

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-08/why-u-s-i...

Because monopolies are wasteful and horrible at things like customer service. The fiber in the ground is a natural monopoly. Connecting that fiber to the rest of the world isn't. You don't want the monopoly to extend one inch more than it has to, regardless of whether the natural monopoly is municipal or Comcast.

They don't have superior offerings, though. Not at the margins they want. ;)

[0] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/09/muni-i...

Why not my internet? Why can't it be a regulated utility? Because of fear mongers and corruption.

Full steam ahead on municipal bandwidth it appears, and coming for politicians with pitchforks who oppose it.

A monopoly provider is always bad for the consumer. (Occasionally, it is less bad for the consumer than any feasible alternative, but it is always a sign that the consumer is receiving the "short end" of the stick)[0]. For so-called "natural monopolies", the most that regulation can do is reduce that disparity, but it cannot eliminate it - and it does this for a hefty premium (the price of the regulation).

In most (but not all) markets, utility companies are the textbook example of natural monopolies. But there is no reason to believe that the entire supply chain of residential Internet access is a natural monopoly. Furthermore, natural monopolies aren't really a "good" thing; they're just unavoidable in some circumstances. For example, utility companies, whether privately or publicly run, typically do horribly with customer satisfaction ratings, response times for non-emergency services, and so on. The fact that their customers' demand is completely inelastic is the main reason for this.

A monopoly is pretty much inherently bad; it just so happens that sometimes it's unavoidable. But, as OP said, there's no reason to sanction a monopoly provider for an industry (or part of an industry) in which it is avoidable.

> either a small or no profit right is granted

Just because something is nominally run by the public sector or as a "non-profit" doesn't mean that a profit is not being made off the good/service chain. The difference is where that profit is accounted for on the books.

[0] This can be illustrated very easily using cost curves; I'm speaking in colloquial terms like "short end of the stick" specifically to avoid the need for economics jargon, but it's a pretty straightforward and fundamental lemma from basic supply and demand.

But it is clearly not avoidable. If one of the largest tech companies in the world (with enormous profits and cash reserves) cannot afford to deploy fiber in major cities, it is clear that the private sector cannot reliably and affordably provide this service on the scale required.

No further proof is necessary that the marketplace will resolve this issue.

You're talking about the wrong market. Putting the fiber in the ground is an unavoidable natural monopoly. But connecting that fiber to the rest of the world isn't -- the only reason there is a monopoly today is that the private incumbents are allowed to leverage the monopoly in the first market into a monopoly in the second one.

We could prohibit them from offering termination services and instead require the wires to be leased on the open market. The incumbents will lobby against that just as they do against municipal fiber, because they want to keep leveraging one monopoly into another. We are under no obligation to agree with them.

It's possible that having the municipality own the wires is actually better, or not. That is the whole privatization debate. But that has nothing to do with the fact that regardless of who owns the local wires, it is better to have competition in who terminates them. Because termination is not a natural monopoly.

First of all, the fact that one company tries something and fails doesn't mean that the entire problem is intractable. It means that that particular attempt didn't work. Other variants might. Pretty much every single successful startup you read about is doing something that was previously attempted unsuccessfully or with less success.

And to that point, Google's model wasn't fundamentally different from the model used by existing ISPs[0] - they were doing almost the exact same thing (deploying {fiber, cable} from Tier 1 networks to the last mile) and structured their pricing in the same way. Their main goal was to force competition, not to dramatically change the fundamental business model of ISPs.

For example, one proposal that has been thrown around is the unbundling of the last mile, in which the lines are deployed and maintained by one entity but leased out to multiple private ISPs who actually service the customers[1]. There are other possibilities as well that haven't been tested yet either. Google failed at being a "better traditional ISP", but that doesn't mean that:

1) anyone who tries to be a "better traditional ISP" is doomed to fail, or 2) Google (or someone else) can't be successful as an ISP by using a different, non-traditional model altogether

[0] with one exception: they sought (and received) carve-out agreements

[1] Incidentally, this is what's already done with wireless networks (MVNOs) and in some places (like NYC) for electricity supply (supply only, not the wires).

The UK version is that the cables are owned by one highly regulated company (BT OpenReach) which then has to sell on to retail ISP's at a set rate.

Fibre To The Cabinet (that is, using copper for the last few hundred metres), was rolled out to probably 70% of households without subsidy, and from then on it has required government funding for rural or otherwise difficult areas. The speed is nowhere near what you're listing, though. It's something like 10-50 Mb/sec.

This seems a little hyperbolic. Where I live I can get gigabit either via Comcast or AT&T here in Chicago. The rollout to gigabit is slow, but its coming. Sweden has 9.5m people. We have 320m and a huge landmass. Infrastructure upgrades simply take longer considering our size and population and a variety of other issues.

Its not exactly Google or bust. Its clear Google doesn't have the chops to enter more markets. Its assumed they were never serious about being competitive and wanted to jump-start gigabit for the home. Whether or not they accomplished that is unknown as both AT&T and Comcast had gigabit plans before Google rolled out its own product. I'm sure it helped push things forward a bit.

Lastly, Google is looking towards a WISP-model for its services. The fiber runs are too encumbered with right-of-way and crony monopolistic practices. Even then Google is taking a loss with its service according to some analysts. With the proper wireless bandwidth and licensed frequencies, you can deliver internet services without a fiber run to the home.

Google is also a mobile company much more than an ISP. It makes no sense to have this artificial division between home and mobile internet. With voip over lte it makes no sense to even have things like gsm or cdma anymore or have your phone number 'owned' by some mobile carrier. It seems google is retooling for a more beefy project fi or something similar that will bridge the gap between home and mobile internet. I imagine, in the future, the idea of having a home internet and a separate mobile internet is going to go away.

edit: -3 score? Please reply instead of drive-by hating.

You might say that the county cable commission is corrupt but its probably no more so than the people who regulate power companies.

Florida, for instance, is decided via the state, no local city or county has power at that level.

In other states, it can be set at the city level (different franchise agreements for each city without any county say).

There are plenty of companies that own and are continually rolling out new fiber in Sweden, especially when you start looking outside the large cities. I would guess that IP-Only (Bynet) and Telia alone are currently putting more fiber in the ground than the state run networks combined.

For rural areas a lot (most?) of the new fiber is built by local organisations and payed for by the members, EU-subsidies and partnerships with companies that take over the operations of the networks once they have been built.

That said, both IP-Only and Telias fiber networks are Open networks that allow the customers to choose from a number of different ISP for their internet connectivity.

As we speak, private ISPs are rolling out their own fibre-to-the-home in order to break loose of Hellkom. Hellkom is responding by launching their own FTTH packages that are 3x the cost and have caps that can be depleted in a day.

What works for the Swedish will not work for everyone.

Basically what we did for long-distance phone service. The recent FCC ruling stopped short of doing just that, but it isn't a stretch of the imagination for the FCC to apply full teleco rules to cable providers in the US.

Of course, every ISP is going to lobby extremely hard against that. But one can only hope...

That's no surprise. The Scandinavian countries are superior nations to every other country on Earth, except maybe Switzerland. Every quality-of-life study ranks them at the very top.

Works well especially when the company receiving such funds is only focusing on building the infrastructure to then rent it back to the ISPs that will leverage it to provide services to the customers...

A similar model is also used here in Italy to provide mobile network coverage in certain areas: the mobile operators "teamed up" and deployed "shared" infrastructure instead of having to deploy and mantain each one its own. This is the way in which they cover remote (less profitable) areas or special areas like the entire subway lines.

https://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-rural-community-is-bu...

;)

https://www.allocommunications.com/

How is that ensured? At least in the US, munis and federal govt are notoriously slow on upgrading tech. Often requiring legislative (slow) approval and tax increases to get it done.

It took 20 years or so, but they started with the most lucrative routes in the inner city, serving companies and universities, and then slowly expanded their network over the years until they're now at a point where I think they've covered almost every home in the city.

No tax money used beyond the initial funding, since it's a profitable company, and no legislation required, since it's just a company. And the competition can't whine either, because this company isn't doing anything they couldn't do.

Lätt att stava knasigt :-)

This isn't "free" - your taxes pay for it.

The owner of the building has probably signed a deal to get a good rate for everyone. Fine if you like it, but a waste of money if you'd prefer a different provider.

> The municipalities own (most of) the networks

The municipalities use his tax money.

Please read the original comment in its entirety, beyond the first half of the two sentences you misleadingly quote.

> municipalities own (most of) the networks and all the fiber cables, letting companies use them for a small(ish) fee.

> For example, I have 250/100 mbit/s for free. My rent pays for this.

He pays rent to the landlord, the landlord pays the broadband company for service to all the apartments, the broadband company pays the municipality to use the fibre network.

The fibre network might have used tax money initially, or it might have been laid with income from usage fees from other areas. There's no ongoing use of tax money for the network.