There are some industries that are natural monopolies, like water and electricity, because it's incredibly expensive to build both last mile connections and core infrastructure. They're also natural monopolies because you don't really have great, cost competitive alternatives to water and electricity provided on a large scale.

When you consider hard wired internet, it bares of a lot of similarity to utilities, in the cost and difficulty of accumulating infrastructure and in the absence of effective alternatives.

For that very reason, internet should be classified, like other natural monopolies, as a utility.

Moreover, last mile lines should be rentable or available through competitive bidding. There's actually enough dark cable to make some regional ISPs viable if they could actually get access to consumer level last mile lines. But Comcast won't get off them unless they're kicked off them. And if you try to build lines then Comcast will half their rates in the areas that you offer service in!

Of course, Ajit Pai will have a lobbying job earning well north of 400K the moment the Trump administration runs out the door so it's really not his concern.

One counter here is that the reason they have a monopoly is the last mile lines and easements, but arguably there is enough spectral bandwidth in the wireless realm that perhaps whats really missing is competition for home internet from wireless operators. I'm not sure where I stand here but I do think its interesting to consider whether it would be better to help bring competition somehow from that side into the home broadband realm or whether the landline route should be made more public. I'm sure there are some capacity limitations on the wireless side also that may make this a pipedream.

There needs to be more consumer education to allow them to differentiate between high-performance things like fixed-wireless compared to running their home internet off their phone's LTE connection.

Funnily, my iPhone's LTE connection (according to SpeedTest) has very good latency and throughput: I get ~10ms to my nearest major city and ~30mbps downstream, sometimes my LTE upstream speed is faster than my home DOCSIS connection. Alas I can't use it as my home connection because I need a static IP address and more than a few gigabytes of data-transfer per month (more like a few terabytes...)

We have ~50 users on our unlicensed fixed wireless service and we've been running into numerous signal issues. Wireless isn't the answer.

I've read a bit about WISPs, because they seem like a happy solution to the whole monopoly problem but they haven't caught hold in the way that I've hoped. Latency seems to be a pretty significant issue. Consistency in signal strength is also a problem.

I also sort of think that this is kind of the way we get out of problems without ever getting at the root cause. We look to technology that may exist at a later point to fix problems caused by underlying political, organizational and infrastructure issues. Always looking for the next band aid for the bullet hole I suppose.

Clearwire ran into many of these same issues, but they were able to operate at two orders of magnitude more power than most WISPs can (1 watt vs 150 watts) and had way more bandwidth around 2Ghz to work with, all of which was pristine.

What that would solve is high speed low latency access for rural areas.

Now all we need to do is actually make it work...

1) You don't operate wireless in a vacuum. There's all kinds of potential obstructions to the signal, including any physical objects 2) Even if wireless as a medium itself has less latency, it requires far more relay points to travel comparable distances to fiber, which introduces far more latency than the medium itself

As an example we can see what happened when New Orleans did that after Hurricane Katrina. Not only did Bell South take back donated resources to the rescue efforts, but they and several large telephone companies stepped up an aggressive lobby actions against the city during a time where focus should have been to save human lives and restore the infrastructure.

Same for GSM - if you are too high, too low, too far or in shadow from tower it just doesn't work properly. Holiday overload on the cell - goodbye internet.

Wireless is barely functioning as it is and more customers will just make it worse.

PS: also when something in the last mile is not working it is insane to debug it. Phone disconnects for some reason and that's it. Router is working but devices can't connect or auth. Some APs work and some aren't. My devices from same vendor and same model lineup can't even properly restart by themselves after power outage. I need to go and reboot them in order one by one each time. I hate wireless... :)

Hasn't Trump banned this?

It is speculated that much of the lobbying that occurs is by the influential people in an unregistered capacity and it's known as "shadow lobbying".

"1. I will not, within 5 years after the termination of my employment as an appointee in any executive agency in which I am appointed to serve, engage in lobbying activities with respect to that agency."

... and there is the "out". Just engage in lobbying activities with respect to another agency, where you now have a lot of contacts. Or consult with an agency that does engage in lobbying activities with respect to that agency.

You get the idea.

I am happy that the "Revolving Door", made famous by Larry Lessig (whose writing and classes, if you are lucky, can't be recommended enough) is getting more than lip service from some branch of government. However, this is just barely more than lip service.

Is this not beginning to change though? Setting up a local solar farm for a neighborhood and selling on that electricity seems like a valid business model to me. Same with setting up automated water desalinization and treatment plants. But because of regulations, the cost to do either is extreme.

I think the very regulations that add so much cost may be the one's that have us thinking all about 'natural monopolies' today. The more people you can service, the easier it is is to spread the cost of regulation. But why do you need that cost in the first place?

Still, the distribution grid is a natural monopoly, if somehow it became obsolete because everyone was producing energy at home it would become useless but still have the same characteristics that made it a monopoly.

Given the broad prevalence of this type of activity, it seems to at least suggest some fundamental breakdown within the system of representative democracy or, as you suggest, it is an indictment of governments, in general.

This is actually self-evident in the fact that these companies are actively engaging in non-market strategies. There would be no need to practice such tactics if they could simply hold a 'natural monopoly'. Others certainly disagree, but for me, this argument is the one I find most compelling.

This worked really well so now there is a health population of companies in both the telephone/mobile and isp sectors.

I can get at least 5 different wired isps and maybe 50+ mobile broadband providers in the outskirts of a town of 60k people.

In fact, ISPs thrived, and a lot of them are now installing and contracting the installation of their own Fibre to a lot of residences. Essentially, side-stepping the existing copper infrastructure that kept people tied to the telco monopoly.

In addition, it is quite possible to have competition while still regulating something as a utility. Regulation is really more what the classifacation is about. You want clean water standards, companies that don't turn you off for being a few hours late, and so forth. This stuff is doubly important since in many areas, utilities are a natural monopoly. The classifacation can also ensure that the large companies venture out into small and rural cities and areas. Some folks in the US have only had home phone service less than 20 years despite such laws, after all, and I doubt they would without regulation.

It describes how transmission has stagnated. Particularly the tactics used by large utilities and how they lead to a degraded and unreliable grid.

That's a pretty bad comparison, though, because the transmission of electricity is as commoditized as possible (given that the electricity gets somewhere, the only thing the consumer cares about is price - there's no such thing as "fast" electricity). So what does "stagnation" on energy transmission even mean? There's no innovation - at least, not that the end consumer would ever know or care about - which is the textbook characteristic of a fungible commodity.

The production is not fungible (see: clean energy production vs. dirty), but that's the part that's also somewhat competitive. For example, in New York City, Con Edison has a monopoly on the infrastructure[0], but you can purchase your electricity either though Con Edison or through an ESCO, which can include clean energy providers.

As a general trend, municipalities which decouple the generation from the transmission and allow competition between companies that generate electricity do tend to have more clean-energy options than those which monopolize both the transmission and the generation.

[0] A few parts are serviced by another provider instead of Con Edison, but basically any given household is serviced by only one power company

You're repeating the definition of a commodity, which was exactly what I addressed in my first paragraph.

> Both decreasing costs to customers and environmental impact, as well as increasing profit margins for the company.

"Decreasing cost and increasing profit margins" again is part and parcel of commoditization. The environmental impact is what I addressed in the rest of my comment.

Again, the comparison is bad because the only part of the electric industry which is not fully commoditized and which has the potential for non-commodity innovation is the part that is already competitive and much less regulated.

Broadband Internet, on the other hand, is not at all commoditized. There are at least four different things that consumers can care about besides cost per unit, so comparing it to a commodity utility is a bad comparison.

Hahahaha, 400k? The man is the Chairman of the FCC. Try well into seven figures

> In the final months of the Wheeler FCC, the Commission rushed through orders re-regulating rates for enterprise data services, subjecting ISPs (and only ISPs) to a highly-restrictive privacy regime that upends the model of ad-supported free content, and flirted with banning free and sponsored mobile data services that consumers actually want.

The reason the rules apply to only ISPs is that only ISPs are a natural monopoly. If you don't like gmail scanning your email there are sixty free alternatives that don't.

ISPs have nothing to do with "ad supported free content", nor should they.

And consumers "want" free everything, but that's not how "sponsored mobile data services" work. Instead they allow the ISP to charge high data fees while exempting their own offerings to disadvantage or ransom the competition. And if high data fees and destroying competition are the cost of "free", no consumer who actually understands that wants it.

"Because sewers and electricity are far more static markets than broadband. You don't shit 10x as much every 3 yrs."

I don't understand the resistance to nationalizing the physical Infrastructure. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes sense for consumers. Because somebody famous once said Govt. is part of the problem, we don't even want to entertain this idea anymore.

I buy a new house when I'm single. Three years later I'm married and have two kids. More new houses have been built in my neighborhood, and they all have families moving into them.

I sure hope whoever laid the sewer pipes at year zero anticipated at least 10x capacity in three years.

What perseusprime11 is pointing out is that the typical house will consume much more broadband in a few years than it does now, not just the houses with carefully chosen stories.

The government should lay fiber to every home and business, then sell access to that fiber at cost. Let ISPs setup equipment racks at a local POP and do the termination & CPE.

Now you can innovate by replacing the equipment at either end without digging a single trench.

8K video (near IMAX quality) can be compressed into a 500mbps stream[0], so gigabit should have decent lifespan. If we lay fiber to the premises then we can increase speeds in the future without digging everything up.

[0] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/130238-8k-uhdtv-how-do-y...

But 4K per eye prototypes exist, and will almost certainly be at CES next year. And will ship, maybe next year, maybe the year after. That's 4-ish people on gigabit? Hmm. Doesn't that seems a little bit tight to be confident that "gigabit should have decent lifespan"?

360 video for VR is certainly a bandwidth-hog, but I think that could well be offset by most VR content being game-like, where, though the game might weigh in at 40G, you download it once, and spend 40 hours in it, vs a 4k movie at the same size, which lasts 2 (and which you'd likely re-stream if you watched it again). In other words, widespread VR use, even with next-gen hardware, could actually lead to a reduced demand for bandwidth.

One approach I've seen mentioned is sending a larger-than-used field of view (and resolution), and then locally deciding, with more recent orientation data, which portion to use. Also depth segregation of the scene, and sending multiple copies of nearfield, selected by recent position.

These approaches might result in sending more data than the displayed video.

I don't necessarily disagree with your suggestion of gigabit adequacy. Though after hearing similar suggestions so many times over the decades, about everything on Moore's law curves, and then having them almost always be wrong, I'm... leary of this form of suggestion.

But one way such estimates fail, is being hit by an "oh, we didn't expect that one". So I'm brainstorming (well, merely sort of musing) about potential surprises.

Hmm, surprises... One advantage of a single video stream is the system always knows what's needed next. The user may turn it off, but not much else. The above are perhaps examples of needing to send speculative content, which acts a demand multiplier. The future equivalent of web page preloading.

As people acquire automated assistants, one thing they may do is speculative exploration and data gathering. When a user's eye pauses on a github project, not just download everything about the project, to produce the desired pithy little briefing popup, but also other pages associated with the repo authors (still alive? any replacement project?), news articles, related work, and so on. Automation of the 'github project evaluation dance', which in the fine-grained node.js ecosystem, is frequent. So what is now a few bytes of web link, and a rare on-demand textual mouse popover, followed by slow manual surfing, might be become an immediate massive demand spike, and pervasively common? One potential of VR vs 2D screen UIs, is that while screen realestate must be severely managed, else clutter, VR may permit vastly greater inclusion of speculative "some related stuff", blended as low-cognitive-overhead ambiance. Once upon a time, a web page had the bandwidth demands of a few lines of ascii email from a dumb terminal - no longer.

Consumers at home use bandwidth for exactly one thing: video. I can only watch so much video (just as I can only shit so much).

And the cable that comes into my home - like the sewer line - is 30 years old, and has never been upgraded.

It's really funny because they offer gigabit speed internet but it's cap is lower than the 100Mbit. So you get faster transfer speeds but less actual data.

Also our city (which is relatively small in the 200k range) has two competing cable providers installing fiber for gigabit internet across the city. This doesn't seem uncommon and I'd call that a total replacement.

10 years ago, how many static web pages had several megabytes of JavaScript just to render three paragraphs of text?

:)

Netflix/youtube streams are still garbage in image quality with huge amount of compression artifacts.

All that means is the ongoing infrastructure costs and technology upgrades required are even higher. I don't see how that makes it less like water and electricity infrastructure, surely it makes it even more of an extreme example of the same thing?

The fact is a lot of countries have successfully opened up their telecoms markets to competition through regulation. So the US telco company's assertions that this cannot work has been proven to be false. It has been done, therefore it's a thing that is doable.

This very much reminds me of the US mobile operator's arguments that the European model of standardizing mobile infrastructure on GSM was market interference that would harm consumers. What it did was establish an open market in which consumers could freely switch between providers thanks to common technical standards. Meanwhile the US market was ghettoized into GSM and CDMA silos.

Anyway, I think Andreessen's argument is greatly exaggerated. 20 years ago I had ISDN at 128kb, if memory serves; now I have a cable modem that bursts to something like 90Mb. That's a CAGR of 39%, or a factor of 2.7 every 3 years. Give me gigabit fiber and I'll be happy as a clam for years to come. (I don't expect my cable speed to increase significantly from this point either; that 39% CAGR is not going to be maintained.)

Fierce competition made sense in the 90's and 00's when all the last mile technologies were duking it out. Now we know that DSL and Coax cable don't have a future. It'll be either wireless or fiber, and you just can't go wrong with fiber.

Where the heck do you live that runs fiber to the home but can't deliver better than 10mbps?

Suppose you build a pipe to provide 1gigabit/person that should he more than enough for the future. Multiple streaming HD videos /person in peak time. That capacity should last quite a while

It's a physical monopoly. It doesn't work that way with physical monopolies. We need regulation, just like we do with power and water.

FCC is not really of help here, granted if you would have more competition at the ground level you would get more options like unencumbered access at a reasonable price.

I run an ISP. There's a reason for this. In order to compete, you need a viable business. Unless a competitor can obtain >40% market share, it's not worth the enormous costs of deploying new infrastructure. Competing with Comcast is one of the worst possible business strategies ever; they have limitless access to cash and if you try to compete on price you're going to lose.

> If classifying broadband as a utility is the right way to accomplish this, let's keep it; otherwise, let's find a different way. I'm open to argument about the means, but not so much about the goal.

I honestly don't think that's going to solve anything. We're obtaining "utility" status simply by offering voice service, that won't give us any kind of major advantage other than forcing our local government to be more willing to cooperate with us on infrastructure deployment.

7 inch?

Does it make sense to have like three of them going to the house?...

That means you will then have st least four to five (att, Verizon, Comcast, sprint and T mobile) broadband providers to choose from.

Sounds solid to me... one bill for my Internet on all my devices and lots of choice!