It just seems to me quite wasteful that there are so much telco infrastructure is duplicated (redundant): For example digging along the same street more than once to lay fiber. Or have cellular towers from different companies next to each other.

On my last visit to the US, I used both "Straight Talk" and "Trac Phone". These are virtual telcos that use Verizon/AT&T and T Mobile infrastructure. New customers can choose a SIM card before activating the service.

Surely the prices paid by these virtual telcos are set by the regulator.

Here is South Africa, the third and fourth mobile operators roam on the first and second mobile networks. AFAIK, the regulator force these roaming agreements apon the operators. (Here I can get 50 GB of prepaid data for only R500 = $38. Much cheaper than the US!)

So there are ways to set prices.

> It just seems to me quite wasteful that there are so much telco infrastructure is duplicated (redundant): For example digging along the same street more than once to lay fiber. Or have cellular towers from different companies next to each other.

That was the basis of a lot of early 20th century regulatory thinking. That was thoroughly discredited because it turns out that government price controls are worse than duplicated infrastructure.

Governments only have an incentive to keep prices low, which is not the same as the economically efficient price. From the government’s point of view, it’s better to have cheap 3G networks forever than to have prices that lead to investment into 4G and 5G networks. Low prices kill innovation, which is why all the innovation is happening in IPhones and Macs and Surface tablets and not cut-rate Acer and HP products.

MVNO pricing is not set by regulators. The FCC’s last major foray into rate regulation, in connection with DSL loop unbundling, ended up killing DSL as a viable competitor to cable because wholesale prices were set so low there was no incentive to upgrade DSL networks.

> That was the basis of a lot of early 20th century regulatory thinking. That was thoroughly discredited because it turns out that government price controls are worse than duplicated infrastructure.

I'm sorry, I don't buy it.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Read up on the history of the Interstate Commerce Commission and the insane things it used to do (regulate rates for air and truck freight). Read how companies like UPS came into existence after those things were deregulated. Read how most of the western world followed suit in the 1980s and 1990s.

Care to offer more of an explanation?

Especially when you consider in many western countries many people are experiencing congested lines at peak hours. Duplicated infrastructure in these cases are not only a negative but a positive.

So without duplicated infrastructure, we would be experiencing even more congestion so I don't get what your not buying.

Obviously price per gigabyte isn't the only parameter. Things like latency, uptime and maximum throughput should also be specified. Densities in rural areas are lower, so the reasonable price per gigabyte will be higher.

Ideally wholesale prices should be set before the infrastructure is built. Then telcos know what they get themselves into.

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In South Africa, DSL was never unbundled. But it's still in decline due to competition from 4G and fiber.

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IMHO a lot of innovative business models are built on zero rating. Based on what the article says about prices and your thoughts on innovation, zero rating may actually be a good thing.

This is why the best approach would be having each state of government own the infrastructure and lease it out.

Repairs can be either spread evenly or by amount of infrastructure owned.

That’s not great either. It leads to a lowest common denominator approach, because government is over senisitive to affordability. That’s what happens with our water and sewage systems. Rates are about half of what they need to be in order to adequately maintain and upgrade that infrastructure. The result is kids being poisoned with lead and raw sewage being dumped into rivers. But nobody in an elected position wants to raise water rates on grandma with her fixed income.

That's the thing, the government isn't charging people directly, they just manage the hardware, individual companies can charge their own rates on top of that hardware.

But the government has to build the hardware. And that costs money, and a massive amount of evidence shows that the government will underinvest in that hardware.

When I travel to Japan or Germany, it makes me cry to come back to American public roads and trains. But not privatized American broadband. We’re doing something wrong and that isn’t giving government insufficient involvement in the construction of infrastructure.

In Germany we had a state owned train infrastructure for the longest time and the process of privatization isn't completed yet. The problem with a privatization is that unprofitable regional areas are not going to get any investments and will get basically excluded.

While there were some improvements, customers in general do not get better condition today. I think overall using a train got more expensive. To a degree that you should think about using a plane.

Infrastructure investments were low before and are low right now.