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Re:A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broa... by treis on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @12:50PM (#24982007)
>physical networks are a natural monopoly in the same way as most public utilities

But ISPs are not, generally speaking, a monopoly. There's usually at least two wired options and they compete with cellular and satellite options. Profit margins generally reflect this. The large ISPs are around the average for the S&P 500.

Re:A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broa... by gnopgnip on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @01:46PM (#24982631)
>There's usually at least two wired options

Per https://www.fcc.gov/internet-access-services-reports approximately only about 25% of census blocks have two or more providers for wired internet. Often within a census block most households will only have one option.

Re:A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broa... by treis on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @02:00PM (#24982763)
Census blocks aren't equivalent to households. Most of those census blocks are going to be rural with few people living there.
Re:A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broa... by gnopgnip on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @02:16PM (#24982921)
That is true, and you can look at the data in different ways. But still most households don't have at least two different high speed internet providers.
Re:A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broa... by treis on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @02:47PM (#24983251)
That's just not true. Depending on what you count as broadband 60-90% of households have two or more fixed options:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/50-mi...

Re:A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broa... by FireBeyond on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @10:42PM (#24986316)
Yeah, if 1 household has an option greater than what, 5mbps, that whole census block is considered as having options...

For my home, 2.5mi from the Capital Building in Washington State, I'm offered four wired broadband providers: 1. Comcast, "advertised 100mbps to 1gbps" (true enough, although you can only get 150mbps, so I'm not sure if that's bracketing) 2. CenturyLink, "25-50mbps" (CenturyLink's own website says "Our systems indicate that our High Speed Internet is not currently available at your service address." I tried several other streets in the area that indicated that none of them had availability either.) 3. Platinum Equity LLC, "10-25mbps" (err, Platinum Equity is an investment firm - oh, one of their portfolio offers "T1 and Bonded T1" lines to businesses and after further investigation would offer me 192K SDSL as a residential offering) 4. Integra Telecom Holdings, "3-6mbps" (a Vancouver telco that does business fiber). So there's one - Olympia, WA.

Re:A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broa... by lotsofpulp on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @01:13PM (#24982277)
Low latency, low packet loss, high upload and download bandwidth, unmetered internet service is certainly a monopoly. None of this is possible with wireless. You're lucky if you live in a place with symmetric gigabit fiber service. There's only one provider. And quite frankly, there's no need to string multiple fibers to every house.

Everyone else has a subpar coaxial connection from Comcast/Cox/Spectrum.

Re:A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broa... by treis on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @02:07PM (#24982824)
If you segment any market enough eventually you end up with a monopoly. And your segment is unreasonable. Very very few people need symmetric gigabit fiber. Using that as the criteria is like saying Lamborghini has a monopoly on cars because they're the only one that makes one that goes 200 mph.
Re:A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broa... by lotsofpulp on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @02:20PM (#24982959)
If you're laying fiber, it costs next to nothing to make it gigabit versus 10Mbit.

The issue is that fiber internet itself is a much better product than non fiber internet. And tell the people who have kids and are also working from home that they can't stream video because an HD video stream is 3Mbps+ and 4 people in a house streaming at the same time at high quality is basically impossible.

Some people also have security cameras streaming upload too. The applications for increased bandwidth are numerous. Remote doctor visits can use high quality video, you can stream things from your home NAS, backups are quicker.