Its definitely a monopoly but I think this as much derives from the redundancy of running multiple cables/fibers/etc. hence a lot of these are natural monopolies. It's why utilities are handled the way they are as well. Similar concept applies to roads hence why roads are usually publicly owned. Having competing roads wouldn't really make that much sense...

All that said, I'm hoping wireless solutions change this scenario. Effectively, if I can run a 5G (or w/e) hotspot connected to my router, the latency/throughput is good enough, I'm pretty much cool ditching my wired options. A monopoly on the wireless side is still possible (spectrum can be a limiting reagent), but I think it's much less likely to devolve into our current ISP dynamic. I'm certain there are plenty of technical issues with going all wireless but it doesn't seem insurmountable.

A 5g tower is like a WiFi hotspot with maybe 2-3x the range. Any factors that apply to traditional home internet will apply to 5g as well because it needs the same internet access as your home WiFi hotspot.

This is not the case for 4g since the much lower frequencies (with much lower data rates) go much further meaning that the given last mile monopoly in an area has less of an effect on the 4g service.

If a cell phone carrier builds all of its own infrastructure to supply bandwidth to 5g towers, they are subject to all the same difficulties and delays as existing ISPs. This means that build out of 5g as fast as home internet will take decades and many areas will have only one or two options (same as the situation is with home internet).

The waters are muddied by the fact that carriers use “5g” to refer to what will be a wide range of service levels, but right now are only hyping the fastest possible imagined deployments.

> A 5g tower is like a WiFi hotspot with maybe 2-3x the range. Any factors that apply to traditional home internet will apply to 5g as well because it needs the same internet access as your home WiFi hotspot.

It’s more than that, but even there you’re talking about covering 9 houses for the cost of wiring up one. The fan-out math kills you for FTTH.

Everything I've read about 5g makes it sound stupid, why are we even doing this?

My fear with fixed link wireless broadband is that it won’t be “real” internet in the sense of a publically accessible IP.

In the case of regular cellular service, is the IP publically accessible, or is it behind a NAT of some sort? I always assumed that it was behind a NAT for some reason, but I don’t know for sure.

I like to be able to host my own services for personal use.

Wouldn't tunnelling of some sort be an answer here? The percentage of people who want to run their own IP-accessible services is pretty low after all. Tunneling to some kind of proxy service isn't ideal, but it would fulfill most needs.

100% agreed. The "franchise agreement" my local band of cities signed includes a pretty heavy handed set of stipulations. They must provide lots of government access / public access type channels, agree to certain dispute resolution steps, emergency alert systems, construction timetables, etc. etc.

Maybe in rural areas it is easier, but within any suburban area, you probably have to spend a few hundred thousand simply to draft and get an agreement signed...before building a single thing.

I'm sure there was a reason to do this, but it effectively stops all but the big corporations from entering into agreements.

It’s the “public interest” folks that demand all that stuff. Municipalities see franchising as an opportunity to get stuff for free (fiber to schools or whatever), and to give service to residents below cost (requiring all neighborhoods to be covered, even ones that aren’t profitable to serve). Yes, it helps maintain the de facto regional monopolies (actual monopoly franchises have been illegal for decades), and it’s all the fault of the public interest people.

I mean, as much as libertarians like to complain about regulations being the problem, nothing you posted there sounds too onerous. That's all pretty standard stuff for a utility, and a few hundred thousand really isn't that much compared to the scale of investment of wiring up a municipality.

Google has counsel in house to cover a that more or less for free, and still essientially failed. There's deeper issues at play.

> Google has counsel in house to cover a that more or less for free, and still essientially failed. There's deeper issues at play.

Google refused to build Fiber in places that imposed most of those conditions. It demanded the opposite—free use of municipal resources for fiber huts, etc. and it absolutely rejected any attempt to impose one of the most common franchise stipulations: build-out requirements that require universal coverage of neighborhoods.

Google failed because even with all that special treatment, building fiber is not profitable compared to selling ads.

And the primary issue behind that is that a second wire run through the same neighborhood costs the same as the first, and has the effect of splitting users and so cutting profits in half. Therefore it is a natural monopoly.

The secondary issue is that all of the broadband providers have a bad habit of "accidentally" cutting the other provider's wires. It happens enough by real accident that it is impossible to prove in any particular case. But it also happens enough that providers have a pretty legitimate reason to ask that the next provider not be allowed to install wires.

I keep hearing noise (on various urban planning sites - at least the ones that don't suggest getting rid of cars entirely) about how whenever a municipality digs up a street for road work, they should install a tube going down the length of the street for electricity/phone/cable/Internet/any future uses that might require wires in the future. I know of no municipalities that actually do this.

It seems like this is a common-sense solution to that problem. The cost of digging, drilling, and laying building materials is centralized with the municipality that owns the land, who can coordinate maintenance and future drilling with street maintenance that they need to do anyway. It's future proof - if someone invents a great new communication/energy/electromagnetic technology in the future, the last-mile infrastructure to deliver it to residences is already there. New telecom providers need only run wires, a task they already have to do. They don't do digging or have the opportunity to clip each others' wires. It encourages competition.

SF has some rules about putting in or making space for extra lines when you do a a new conduit run in the streets. I'm sure other cities do as well.

Wasn't the result of this that nobody runs conduits anymore? "Microtrenching" is the new hotness (aka, let's dig a hole 1cm wide and put a wire in without a conduit, and cover it back up).

Maybe we should separate infrastructure from service. A company may build the lines but cannot provide consumer services. My brother tells me that Japan is like this and service is quite good.

Japan is ... complicated. NTT is required to offer access to its fiber, but also offers its own Internet service. The Japanese government also continues to be the majority shareholder in NTT, so NTT gets preferential treatment because the Japanese government benefits from NTT’s profitability. The Japanese government also gave direct cash subsidies to NTT for building fiber. Japan also has extremely lax rules for running fiber. If you look around Tokyo, the utilities are hanging out in the open all over the place. That makes the build much cheaper. Also, they’re Japanese so they’re good at building infrastructure.

You couldn’t replicate that in say San Francisco just by separating the infrastructure, while still requiring everything to be buried and look pretty, and requiring unprofitable neighborhoods to be served at the ISP’s expense, etc., and all of the roadblocks places like San Francisco throw up to development. All with San Francisco municipal government types overseeing everything and San Francisco NIMBYs protesting and filing lawsuits over the color of the fiber distribution hubs. It wouldn’t work.

> Japan is ... complicated. NTT is required to offer access to its fiber, but also offers its own Internet service

Complicated to say the least. NTT doesn't just offer its own Internet service, it has three different subsidiaries all competing to offer their own Internet services

It is interesting how this is essentially culturally and historically dependent. In Sweden we have what you say doesn’t work in SF. Much (all?) of the fibre is owned by the the municipality and many operators offer services on top. The only redundant cabling is old telephone cabling with ADSL. The whole electric network is the like that with no duplication.

In Stockholm the fiber operator (which is owned by the municipality but operated as a private company) built the network over more than a decade, based on demand and by using revenues to support further expansion. E.g. it primarily targeted businesses first. In New York, the city demanded Verizon wire up the whole city in just five years, and started a civil rights investigation because it’s verboten to wire up profitable areas first. Sweden’s approach to fiber in rural areas was to give rural people a tax credit worth up to $600 or so. In the US, instead of giving tax benefits for fiber, we put a special tax on telecom services (like it’s something bad like cigarettes or alcohol) and use that money to subsidize rural users at up to tens of thousands of dollars per subscriber. Our rural and inner city politics makes for some very bad policies when it comes to fiber deployment.

I'm surprised that in a city as big as Stockholm there's only one fiber operator... in Malmö depending on your building you'll have either Telia, Tele2, ownit, bredband2, etc etc. It's a free market free-for-all.

There are dozens of IP operators offering services over a few different infrastructures. Fibre (mainly Stokab), cable and telephone lines.

>> they’re Japanese so they’re good at building infrastructure

This argument strays into racism, or a circular argument. Either the Japanese are uniquely genetically capable of building public goods cheaply, or their continued success is a result of how they have structured their society.

If it isn’t genetic (how could it be?), this is an argument for emulating the uniquely Japanese cultural aspects that led to the success.

I’m saying that it’s a matter of culture, not policy (and certainly not genetics). You can’t replicate it just by cherry picking some of their policies. And it’s very hard to change culture.

The Japanese take pride in infrastructure and development. Americans try to figure out how to abuse environmental laws to keep it from being built. We turn every development project into a civil rights battle or a rural/urban battle. We hate paying for development with visible taxes, but love creating invisible taxes by attaching mandates as riders to projects. “You can build that apartment building, but only if you widen that public road and build a school. You can build fiber there, but only if you also build fiber in this place where it makes no economic sense.” That often makes development unattractive altogether, but that’s okay because we hate development anyway.

We have this in Utah and it's amazing honestly. https://www.utopiafiber.com/

Utopia can only enter cities that allow & fund it, so for most cities this not an option. Nothing like Comcast.

Singapore is a good example. Every household has two fibre pairs supplied by a single (I believe, government owned) company. ISP's can then sell service over these cables.

Monopoly franchises have been illegal under federal law since 1993. Most places are de facto monopolies because nobody wants to compete with the incumbent. (Largely because the municipality won’t let them compete just in the areas that can profitably support competition. For example, that’s why Baltimore doesn’t have FiOS, whereas all the places around it do. The folks in the city government decided if the vast swaths of the city below the poverty line wouldn’t get $70/month fiber, nobody should be able to.)

A monopoly itself is partly a feature though too. How many copies of each piece of infrastructure do you want in your jurisdiction? The mono- in monopoly means one copy of x cluttering up the landscape, where x might be

construction project

lane closure

fiber vault with a manhole you get to test your shocks on

trench, with its somehow always shitty pavement repair

ugly pole

even-uglier tower

etc.

This means more to people in some jurisdictions than others.

The solution being to differentiate the core infrastructure provider from the services provider. i.e. force the company installing the infrastructure to hire it out at a fair price to all service providers

This is a good argument for dealing with such infrastructure as a regulated public utility.

That's true from the standpoint of you want everyone to have access to equally marginal service, but not the latest or greatest service. Instead, I think this is a good argument for removing regulations and stopping the cronyism that inhibits competition.

It's the internet, it drives innovation. Let's stifle it by making a bazillion rules that everyone needs to follow and pay to play. Let's make sure that like most utilities, change and improvements happen at the slowest possible pace, because I like T1 and isdn, ever since they rolled back net neutrality I been stuck on these dial up lines.. Plus, making it a utility, we can ensure that none of these 5G providers can enter the marketplace.. I guess it's cool for everyone to be a socialist now, count me all in..

Poles already carry the cables of both duopolies in areas that have them and fiber ducts have always carried multiple fiber providers - they are public rightaways. The cell tower infrastructure is also increasingly shared the last 10 years days as AMT and Crown and Castle own the towers and lease space on them to multiple providers. So monopolies are not really a feature in those things you mentioned.

This isn't quite accurate. A bunch of municipalities would like to run their own broadband but are prevented from doing so by successful lobbying from the CableCo's which occurred at the state level[0,1,2,3]. So crony capitalism, sure, but it's not at the hyperlocal level.

(In general, I perceive that many of our cities are run better than the states they are in.)

0. https://consumerist.com/2014/08/28/how-isps-compete-with-mun...

1. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-al...

2. https://www.cio.com/article/2447188/more-cities-and-towns-wa...

3. https://www.govtech.com/network/Comcast-Time-Warner-Merger-W...

This was happening with mere coax cable TV providers way before the internet took up the strategy. I do think there is a way through it with local actions against the cities who are signing these exclusivity agreements, but that movement is heretofore disorganized.

can't wait for satellite to some day be robust and cheap enough to utterly destroy the notion of municipal internet. probably not in my lifetime, but hey, my 4g is cheap enough for my current uses :)

Not going to happen. Satellite ISPs are crippled by a couple of largely insurmountable technical limitations:

1. Latency. 600-700 ms RTT is typical on satellite, and it's bounded by the speed of light. This makes a lot of real-time services, like voice chat and video games, essentially unusable.

2. Bandwidth. The satellites you're communicating with have a limited capacity, and provisioning more capacity is nontrivial. As a result, most satellite services have very low data caps, typically 10 - 100 GB/month.

3. Physical concerns. Satellite connectivity requires an antenna with a clear view of the equatorial sky (e.g. south for northern hemisphere). This is often unavailable in cities, apartments, or hilly areas -- if there's a tall building or a mountain between you and the satellite, you can't use their service.

The next generation of satellite Internet is not going to be based on satellites in geostationary orbit. They are close to the surface of the Earth and form a mesh that can make paths that are shorter than the great circle distance.

This should fix all three of your problems, except maybe total bandwidth.

> form a mesh that can make paths that are shorter than the great circle distance

I think that's a slight mis-wording - you can't beat the great circle distance over the surface unless you go underground, but you can definitely beat a packet-switched, zig-zagging network running through the ground with a more or less direct point-to-point mesh running 100km above it.

If I understand correctly, that won't fix the latency problem. It will make it less severe, though.

It should give you latency that you'd expect from a wired connection.

I always wonder about the latency with satellite internet. A friend tried HughesNet one time. I tried to tell him, "I hope you don't care about online gaming..." Sure enough, the link had good bandwidth, but horrid latency. A TCP connection would take >2 seconds to establish.

haha yeah me too. It might actually happen while we are still around.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90268592/elon-musks-spacex-just-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=AdKNCBrkZQ4

Until satellites solve the weather transmission interference problems, that's a long way off.

GPS for example works just fine in the rain. Geostationary orbits have much larger issues with weather than the closer orbits of next gen satilite Internet.

You wouldn't notice when your GPS goes out off and on while in inclement weather. It's a service that can degrade gracefully. Some systems revert to other sensors when you lose GPS signal (tunnels, underground, etc). However, you would certainly notice when your packets drop and your video/audio streaming cuts out.

Bad weather alone does not stop GPS. Other issues can, but in cases of unobstructed views of the sky and solid equipment it’s not an issue.

Most streaming services can also degrade gracefully. Granted, we don’t have actual hardware to examine for these internet services, but many satellite uplinks already work fine in bad weather with at worst some loss of bandwidth.

Tell that to my DirecTV satellite tv.

Direct TV is using a geostationary orbit which as I said has many issues. That’s made worse by using a tiny dish, but even then it’s still much better the closer to the equator you are. The difference between Mane and key west is huge.

It's just capitalism. Nothing especially crony about it.

Except that competition and choice is at the heart of capitalism. Not local governments signing monopoly deals...

Using capital to muscle any advantage they can get away with is the heart of capitalism. The crony part of capitalism is what you get if you're not omnisciently watching everything that the owners and stewards of capital are doing (which is impossible).

The definition of crony capitalism is using government power to protect business interests. It is not impossible to watch the markets, because the invisible hand of free choice does it every day, and it punishes those who cannot compete. It's when governments try to get in the way of competition that things break down.

All capitalism is using government power to protect business interests. The very idea of capital only makes sense with a state enforcing it.