Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless

Re:Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless by rayiner on Thursday February 07, 2019 @01:58PM (#19107477)

> 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.

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Re:Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless by qotgalaxy on Thursday February 07, 2019 @10:50PM (#19111366)

> 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.

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Re:Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless by rayiner on Friday February 08, 2019 @09:50AM (#19114636)

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.

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Re:Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless by shard972 on Friday February 08, 2019 @12:45AM (#19111861)

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.

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Re:Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless by nroets on Thursday February 07, 2019 @03:35PM (#19108327)

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.

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

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.

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