That is not, and has never been, true. BT was privatized in 1984. Over the years since then, they've been forced by regulators to open up more and more of the stack to competing ISPs. At one point, you could buy wholesale services like ISDN lines or p2p E1 circuits. Later, ISPs could rent space in the telephone exchanges and individual copper wires. In the current FTTP world, they can either rent a layer 2 service or deploy their own fiber in BT ducts and pay a few pence per meter rental.

Upvoted.

I thought BT was owned by the government (particularly because every ISP ends up renting from them).

I still think that a centralized network that is rented out ends up working better than one that's deployed by different ISPs.

Just to be clear, I agree. Despite its faults, I still think we are quite fortunate to have BT Openreach in its current form as a country.

I can understand that perception. Essentially, Openreach is regulated so heavily by the government that it might as well be considered public, from the perspective of 'what services it must offer, on what basis, to whom, and the prices it must set.' However, it is a private company, being a 'firewalled' part of BT

This type of system is called “common carrier”. (The firewalled part of BT acts as a common carrier).

Because of the way physics and fiber optics work, having a common carrier that rents out access to wavelengths or bandwidth on the fiber strands is the best economic model, by far.

I disagree since BT/OR * don't rent out fibre or wavelengths. They rent out layer 2 vlans (they own the OLT at the exchange and the terminal in people's homes) this means they set the package speeds, price points and use whatever technology they like. For that reason many ISPs have decided to instead rent duct space from BT/OR and each install thier own fibre. That is not really a common carrier, more like common duct.

*except in very rural areas for highly specific use cases, or in the case of wavelengths for medium range high capacity backhaul.

Also, lots of parallel fibre was laid by NtL and friends in the early 2000s, which is the useful stuff. I think Virgin Media bought it all, and that's what they offer as their broadband.

There's currently a lot of non-BT fibre rollout taking place. Mostly in cities (Hyperoptic et al), as well as B4RN and similar non-profits infilling the rural locations.

Yeah it's great!

Fun fact - if you try to purchase broadband from a service that runs over BT infrastructure, the price you'll be charged will vary depending on whether there is also a Virgin Media service that would also be available to you. As in, if there's no competition, you'll be charged more. That's price gouging, and I think it should be illegal.

That's not true either! Market 1/2/3 has been dead for well over a decade. Openreach and BTW pricing is consistent across the whole country.

It wasn't consistent last year when I tried to look for a better broadband deal.

I do not agree with this in the slightest.

OpenReach is a private company, and has many loopholes to not support you if they do not want to. If you have a line issue and they cannot find the root cause, they will black list you.

I had an intermittent fault on my line which OpenReach couldn't (wouldn't?) resolve when I was with Zen. Magically after switching to BT, they sent out BT engineer, who escalated to OpenReach, who then found the fault and replaced the dodgy part in the green box.

It might be "firewalled" but that's not my experience. It shouldn't be firewalled, it should be a separate entity. The only reason to bundle it with BT is if BT was getting a benefit from it.

We've had BT/OR announce several times over the past 5 years that they are installing proper fibre in the area to squash competition, and then quietly cancel. Funny how we have an AltNet laying fibre here and suddenly BT/OR are getting their act together to upgrade the area.

Similar experience in Canada with our telecom cartel. They're legally required to allow other providers to use their lines but if you need support you're out of luck. We had multi-day outages routinely and a Bell tech couldn't find any issues. We finally switched to FTTH when it became available because we need reliable internet to work from home.

NB 'Despite its faults'.

I hope you complained to your MP, and/or ofcom?

What alternative would you prefer? It would be ideal to turn openreach over to either it's own heavily regulated PLC or a MIC/COOP, but can we really force that in a capitalistic society, when the current status quo is 'acceptable'?

I would prefer openreach were force to sell a regulated single strand dark fibre product, that can be used however the CP wants, but it would cause genuine chaos for ORs business model e.g leased lines would be cancelled.

BT customer service are just as hopeless at dealing with OpenReach as everyone else.

I spent three months trying to get them to switch my line over to fibre after OpenReach had stated it was available. Their approach was to hope that waiting long enough would fix the problem.

Eventually someone just closed my existing line and immediately opened a new one.

Nonsense, Openreach is the worst possible option for consumers. It is just a way to syphon wealth from a previously publicly owned asset to the global elite via dividends.

It just hasn't blown up as big as Thames Water, decades to get a fibre connection (other countries did fibre 15-20 years ago so it was possible) doesn't annoy as many people as filling rivers with sewage.

Someone posted this below, sums up the situation rather nicely. https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...

I'm not a big fan of privatisation either (particularly the way this was handled) however you realise under the GPO there were waiting lists to get a telephone line, and it could easily take months?

Have you tried interacting with a state service recently, like renewing your passport maybe? They are not exactly the pinical of innovation, speed and efficiency.

The fact most of us can get a 1Gb full fibre service for 30-40 pounds a month (and faster is available, for a little bit more) is not bad.

Openreach (BT) doesn't own all the cables in the UK. There are also independent ISPs with separate fibre networks, I'm using one to send this post.

> they've been forced by regulators to open up more and more of the stack to competing ISPs.

The 1996 US Telecom act did this and all kinds of local ISPs popped up to compete. We suddenly had cheap DSL all over the place; people left dial-up in droves.

But citizens don't write laws, lobbyists do. Within 10 years, ISPs had clawed back all their monopolistic control. Now most of the US is under a monopoly/duopoly again.

BT also employ lobbiests, and there's regular controversy in the industry over ofcom not regulating them hard enough, or in why exactly they won the original 2010 era rural fibre contracts but overall I guess they simply don't work as hard as thier ATT counterparts;)

> I guess they simply don't work as hard as thier ATT counterparts;)

Since at least the 1950s, AT&T has been so tightly tied to US Gov+NatSec, it's practically another agency.

To illustrate that: AT&T once faced a lawsuit for aiding US Gov's unconstitutional, warrantless wiretapping (also for cloning backbone traffic for the NSA).

When Congress presented a bill to grant retroactive immunity to AT&T, both Obama and Clinton paused their presidential campaigns. They flew back to DC to cast their Yea votes and protect AT&T from any possible accountability.

US news orgs weren't able to spot anything out of the ordinary in that.

> When Congress presented a bill to grant retroactive immunity to AT&T, both Obama and Clinton paused their presidential campaigns. They flew back to DC to cast their Yea votes and protect AT&T from any possible accountability.

Your facts are a little scrambled: are you referring to 2008 [0] or 2012 [1][2] or both? I guess you meant 2008 because both Hillary and Obama were running for President; but Hillary was absent from the 2/12/2008 vote, [2] claims Obama voted against it. I located the bill: [3] "S.2248 - FISA Amendments Act of 2008" and that Senate vote record from 2/12/2008, although it says "Clinton (D-NY), Not Voting", "Obama (D-IL), Not Voting"(?). You'd expect journalists to get important facts right. Meanwhile US media barely covered that vote.

[0] 2/2008 "Telecom immunity remains intact as Democrats split on vote" "Obama voted with 30 fellow Democrat Senators, but not the absent Hillary Clinton, to allow the telecom companies to face lawsuits... on the [Bush] admin's programme of warrantless wiretapping. But the immunity survived, with 18 Democrats crossing over to support George Bush." https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2008/feb/12/terrorism.u...

[1] "US Supreme Court finalizes gift of immunity to the telecom giants" - Glenn Greenwald https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/10/suprem...

[2] TheAtlantic: "The Supreme Court Isn't Bothered By the NSA’s Warrantless Wiretapping" ... "refused to hear a case that holds telecom companies accountable for letting the warrantless NSA spying" https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/10/supreme...

[3]: 02/12/2008 "S.2248 - FISA Amendments Act of 2008", click through on "14 roll call votes" https://www.congress.gov/bill/110th-congress/senate-bill/224...

Look on the bright side, the AT&T logo already looks like the eye-in-the-sky. Or the Death Star. Hardly needs any reworking.

> Your facts are a little scrambled

Mostly not. Hillary did vote against the bill so thank you for clarifying that.

> are you referring to 2008 or 2012

2008 because Clinton campaign + Obama campaign + AT&T Amnesty bill.

No, your facts are very scrambled, you were incorrect about the 2/12/2008 vote that passed it 68-29-3, there were 14 roll-call votes on that bill, not one. Saying "Hillary did vote against the bill" is totally wrong about the 2/12/2008 vote; congress.gov says both Hillary and Obama weren't present or voted present (as did Lindsey Graham). The claim "They flew back [from campaigning] to DC to cast their Yea votes and protect AT&T from any possible accountability." was wrong. I even dug up the exact bill and the timeline of all 14 votes for you:

[3]: 02/12/2008 "S.2248 - FISA Amendments Act of 2008", click through on "14 roll call votes" https://www.congress.gov/bill/110th-congress/senate-bill/224...

I believe it. Verizon have a fairly extensive backbone in England and Scotland, all their own duct and chambers yet it's impossible to buy wholesale service from them, even if you're big. I wonder what it's used for :')

Never forget that BT was rolling out fibre across the country when they got privatised, had production in the UK running. The public BT foresaw the need for fibre and the cost of copper in the 70s, and was preparing, once Thatcher sold them off and tried to woo American ISPs that couldn't offer an equivalent, they sold it all off on the cheap and communication infrastructure in the UK was set back decades.

The full story: https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...

Thanks that's interesting. At least the affect was shitty broadband rather than filling rivers with sewage, which is what water company privatisation got us.

If the government owns the lines, what are private telcos... actually doing? Operating the webpage that lets you put in a credit card to pay for service?

In Australia the government a private company owned by the government largely owns the last mile (except where competitors built fibre first). All the backhaul between "points of interconnect" is owned privately.

As a user though you pay for bandwidth at the interchange because that's how the old privatised and divested government monopoly did it.

The model, last mile public utility but all the speed private wouldn't be all that awful if it weren't butchered by various vested interests. In theory the current last mile company will be sold once it becomes profitable.

Last mile ISPs bring your traffic between your house and an internet exchange somewhere in the nearest major city. Transit ISPs bring it from there to some other internet exchange in a different city where the opposite endpoint is. The premise here is that the government would handle the physical part of the last mile and then customers would either buy "internet service" from a transit ISP or from someone reselling transit because the transit provider doesn't want to deal with customer support and retail billing.

The line is a piece of copper or glass that ends in a port in a rack at central point. The ISP is providing the connection from that point in the building to their equipment that does switching, routing, and yes billing you.

Some operators do have their own infrastructure and most large ISPs have equipment in local exchanges and operate their own backhaul.

Lots of it is just about marketing though.

> Lots of it is just about marketing though.

But in that case, doesn't it make more sense for the government to just cut out the middleman and offer internet to consumers directly? What is the value-add?

The ISP company offers customer support, installation services and the fiber modem, and owns the equipment in the network closet that peers with the backbone.

They might even own the peering network closet (which is often a weatherproof enclosure with a backup generator).

Don't know how it works, but I do think that's how it should be. Municipality providers dark fiber from the CO(s) to every house.

From there, any ISP can rent rack space, and arrange their own backbone/uplink, and get wired to whatever customers they can. Municipality charges a fee to use the fiber, and that's it.

Muni provides the line to the CO, ISP is responsible after that. They can compete on their internet speed, price, support, and whatever else they want (Netflix box, email, low latency to game servers).

Muni could even add a "no-internet" free service that just provides access to city services, library, etc.

It is worth noting that in the US, there's a not-insignificant part of the country that isn't in a municipality.

> I do think that's how it should be. Municipality providers dark fiber from the CO(s) to every house.

We have a variant of that here. An indy company just laid fiber here but they don't provide service. Instead I have a choice of 8+ competing fiber companies.

Before fiber, I had 1 'choice' of ISP and paid $124/mo for 1Gb/40Mb w/ 40ms latency to the IX.

Now my choices include 1Gb/1Gb $49, 2Gb/2Gb $79, 10Gb/10Gb $199 w/ 4ms latency to the IX.

Wouldn’t that “no-internet” service actually run afoul of the newly reinstated Net Neutrality rules? Or is there an exception in it for non-commercial or governmental services?

> If the government owns the lines, what are private telcos... actually doing?

Providing Layer 3.

Just like the government owns the roads and highways, and lets UPS and FedEx use them for delivery.

The theory is that roads/fibre are natural monopolies, but the services that use them can be competitive. There just needs to be a fee for the upkeep of the infrastructure (but it doesn't necessarily need to make a (hufe) profit).

YES, roads, water, sewage, electricity, it could all work with this formula. It could all be added to the long list of things you pay for that are build and maintained by taxes. road service providers, water service providers, sewage service providers, electric service providers etc Picture it!

You don't need it to be government owned. While that is certainly one effective way of doing it, another can be to let whoever wants to build it build it, but require them to give access to competitors for a regulated fee.

Oh yeah that’s bound to be as equitable as having the government provide it!

It depends how empowered your regulators are. In many European countries that's how it works and it is literally a better system than the government doing it themselves.

There are many ways to do it, e.g. the former monopolist (a now-privatized company that was created from the part of the government doing it) having a mandate to supply everyone.

The downside of having the government do it is that if the government screws it up, it takes decades to fix, while private companies can swoop in much faster if one company is doing a bad job.

I generally consider myself very politically liberal but the idea of the government controlling all internet infrastructure is truly bone-chilling. At least with many ISPs owning the lines we have some semblance of possibility that government tampering with information would be noticed. If all traffic passed through a single entity’s control, we’re only a slippery slope away from the Great Firewall of USA. Probably justified by either preventing terrorism or CSAM.

Other countries with filtering regimes just obligate their private ISPs to block, eg, torrent trackers or Facebook or whoever. Governments have plenty of leverage over ISPs already, namely that ISPs have employees, addresses and hardware they can seize.

There's no reason to believe that commercial entities would be any less likely to spy on you than a government entity. The government can just pass security regulations that require access to infrastructure with gag orders in place so the infrastructure owner isn't allowed to talk about government access requests or actions.

The trick is simply to ensure you pick a government that isn't going to pass that kind of invasive legislation, or will remove it and retrospectively revoke all access granted under the legislation that they're repealing.

As for Great Firewall of USA, what makes you think it doesn't exist already?

In the US at least this would require a court order, the government cannot just blanket search all private communications a priori.

The Snowden leaks proved otherwise. That was over a decade ago, it's wild that everyone just forgot it all and then went back to framing the same fears as hypothetical.

They can and do though...

This ownership model doesn't necessarily give the government access to the contents of your communication. It could be gov-owned dark fiber, rented and lit by private parties at each end.

Governments already control private ISPs and compel them to have the capability to tap massive amounts of data, IIRC 1%. Were also talking about owning the lines not the actual switching and routing, in either case the taps would likely be placed at the ISPs offices.

Why build 4 sets of lines when you can build 1? Isn’t this literally the reason why broad swaths of the US have zero competition?

In london I used to have 4 different physical fibre providers available plus one which is fibre to the building and cat5e to the prem. At a retail level there were hundreds of providers to choose from.

Most of the country has more than one physical fibre (or FTTB/FTTC/CATV) provider available.

Resilience? Exactly the thing which is being optimized out of much critical infrastructure.

It's easier to build resilience as a single network or organization than by "hoping" to have that with two different ISPs (who will obviously both of taken the cheapest route dig wise between A and B). If I need two diverse fiber paths between points X and Y, I can go to one provider who can contractually guarantee diversity. For example, they can ensure that maintenance work on Circuit 1 is not scheduled at the same time as Circuit 2, and that the paths are never less than X metres between them, as they are fully aware of the two paths.

The one ISP is not going to do that automatically, because it costs more. Then only banks and others willing to pay a massive premium get it. And sometimes even they don't, because they run completely redundant fiber paths along different streets and then use the same OEM's equipment on both of them and a bad software update takes them both out at once, or their union goes on strike and cuts power to the whole operation before they walk out.

Meanwhile diverse ISPs wouldn't be using the same A and B. ISP A has a central office in a high rise downtown, ISP B primarily targets single family homes and has their switching equipment on a piece of land next to a substation in suburbia, so if you subscribe to both you not only have links coming from opposite directions, they're each operated by independent organizations instead of a monoculture.

That might be your perception, but let me give you real life state of affairs in the UK.

In the last decade a number of ISPs have popped up and decided to fibre up areas. They are invariably buying OLTs from Nokia or Adtran (the same two vendors as BT OR) putting them in a BT OR exchange because that is cheap and very convenient, good access to backhaul etc and then renting BT OR ducts and poles to install the fibre in/on (PIA). To top it off they often are using the same fibre vendor as BT and sometimes even the same contractors to install it. Worked example of this; netomia/youfibre (though there are dozens).

What resilience are we really gaining here? Organisational, and that's pretty much it.

You've created an environment where there is a single large incumbent and the ability and incentive for anyone else to piggyback on their existing infrastructure.

Now suppose that anyone could run an ISP out of their house. They wire up a few of their neighbors and then make a single long-distance run to one of many backhaul providers, none of which has a dominant market position like BT. The backhaul providers connect to their customers and each other in telco hotels, but they're smaller and more numerous because each of the largest providers has their own, so the city has three or four instead of one.

Meanwhile even if you have a BT, organizational independence in itself is better than nothing.

Are there western countries with no incumbent telecom provider?

It is a fine concept but you'd have to actually ban infrastructure sharing between ISPs and be building a completely Greenfield network. Quite theoretical. I'm aware of former eastern bloc countries that have dynamics somewhat reminiscent of what you describe though.

It's not that you have to prohibit it, it's that you have to somehow break their existing monopoly if it already exists, and it's easy to choose rules that don't actually break it but instead cause it to be a de facto utility again. So for example, if the incumbent has a monopoly on transit or interconnection, you have a problem because they could just charge prohibitive rates and bankrupt all their competitors. And prohibitive rates are same thing as banning them from using it, aren't they? It's what happens by default. But then the competitors can't get off the ground because the incumbent has a vertically integrated monopoly.

You could require them to provide those services for their competitors at regulated rates, but then you're not actually breaking that monopoly, you're just regulating it while cementing it in place.

If you have an existing monopolist then first you have to thoroughly break them up, not just mitigate the continued existence of the monopoly.

And then Circuit 1 and Circuit 2 are taken down at the same time because even though they have diverse paths they're part of the same underlying DWDM system which has just encountered a fault.

Ensuring there isn't a single point of failure is not just as simple as 'putting it in the contract.' Carriers can and have groomed their primary and backup circuit on to the same L1 path without realizing it.

That should only happen if your protection is at the optical layer which hasn't been common for a decade or more, partly for that reason.

I've never seen it happen in 20 years. Although of course small parts of the path change over time and sometimes that means bits get put in the same duct for a short run but that also happens when you buy from different providers to be honest. With some carriers you can insist they send you updated route kmls when they change either path and you can detect the change as you'll see different losses/otdr traces before and after a maintenance/fix.

Laying down competing bundles along the same path gains you very little resilience.

For the smallest issues, you can expect a single bundle to already have spare connections. For bigger issues, almost anything that takes out one bundle will take out the neighbors too.

The government could own the physical fiber without controlling the crypto at the endpoints.

Exactly. Govt owning physical fibre in a P2P network (i.e one fibre back to the pop per user) is perfectly fine because an ISP can encrypt between the pop and the user (that comes as standard with pon for example) but anything* involving active equipment is a massive no no in my view.

Edward Snowden revealed this was all already happening under robust private industry.

Privatizing publicly built infrastructure did not inoculate us from surveillance.

To actually do it we need to exercise control through the collective mechanism we call government. Laws, regulation, oversight, audits, sunshine policies. It's the only way to curb it. Mistrusting your only mechanism of control and putting blind faith into private markets did not work. We tried it. It failed.

When the government is the one pressuring AT&T to have a secret room, how is the government going to save you from it?

The actual problem is the centralization, regardless of whether it's public or private. There shouldn't be two ISP options, there should be a thousand, so that anyone wanting to compromise all the traffic has to compromise a thousand independent entities, some of which can then be operated by stubborn curmudgeons who would rather loudly go to jail than silently betray the public.

So the options are

A. Break up the companies, assume mergers and acquisitions don't happen, consolidations never happens and that someone will be defiant of the law in the public interest at a crucial point

B. Change the law

It's important to note that AT&T was broken up and there once was many mobile carriers and there were many surveillance and spy programs going on during that time unabated and then they just bought each other up.

So instead of wishing on a hope and a dream that some invisible hands will orchestrate unexplainable market magic, let's just change the law. There's actual historical evidence of that working.

> assume mergers and acquisitions don't happen

Or just prohibit them. That's a change to the law you can actually see is being enforced.

The problem with changing the spying law is that the spying is happening in secret, so there is no way to verify that they're not lying to you as they have in the past. Laws with no accountability mechanism are a farce. They need to be backstopped by verifiable structural inhibitions on the practice, like diverse decentralized infrastructure subject to competitive pressure and plausible independent reimplementation by anyone who doesn't trust the incumbents.

> someone will be defiant of the law in the public interest at a crucial point

This is required to turn back injustice. But it's more likely to be achieved the more people have the opportunity to do it.

Ironically, the internet is a US government project that was opened up to external participation. The US government has historically controlled significant parts of core internet infrastructure, and didn't fully hand over control of the internet until October 1, 2016.

They already tap into every cable, no matter whether they own it or not. See NSA breaking into Google datacenters and wiretapping cables. Granted, they were only able to do this because the internal traffic was not encrypted. Still, global traffic analysis is nothing to scoff at, and with enough surveilance points privacy becomes almost nonexistent, even in the presence of encryption.

Does the fact that the government controls most road infrastructure in the country make you concerned about freedom of travel?

I make this point all of the time.

In the US, the rails are private and the government owns the passenger service. In Europe, the government owns the rails and the passenger service is private.

People try to frame these issues as "socialist/capitalist" or some nonsense all of the time. But the reality is that neither system is more or less capitalist than the other. It's just one is better structured than the other.

However, having lived in a town in the US that has had a public ISP for decades, it was abhorrent. Municipalities only care about cost cutting - so there was no investment in wiring infrastructure or customer service. So I think there is an argument to be made that we may take for granted a bit the difference between rails/roads and fiber optics.

> Municipalities only care about cost cutting - so there was no investment in wiring infrastructure or customer service. So I think there is an argument to be made that we may take for granted a bit the difference between rails/roads and fiber optics.

Municipal ISPs and ISPs leasing municipal infrastructure dominated PCMag's speed ratings until they excluded local ISPs. Many have excellent satisfaction ratings. Large private ISPs consistently have some of the worst of any business.

> Municipalities only care about cost cutting - so there was no investment in wiring infrastructure or customer service.

Well, there's two aspects at play here.

For starters, you do need to be a certain size as an ISP to really offer cheap services. Imagine, for example, being a town of 500 with a municipal ISP. You'd end up with a lot of equipment to store and maintain and to really be effective, you'd have to employ a bunch of people that spend most of their time doing nothing. (After all, how often would the customer service rep for a small town ACTUALLY be answering any calls?).

That's why a state, county, or national? run ISP would probably make more sense, especially in more rural locations.

That being said, in the UK with BT and the line rentals I described earlier those worked unreasonably well. ISPs could complain to BT to fix problems which ultimately left the various ISPs in a region to compete on tech and price. That was a win for the customer.

This was not at all a small public ISP. And it was managed by the city power company, so it had the economies of scale already.

There's a lot of nitty gritty policy weeds of what went wrong. But the main one was that after the public ISP incorporated in the 90s as a complimentary service to a public cable network, the state passed a legislation regulating public utility rates. Good for power/water/sewer/cable customers. But it meant that the city could not charge customers differently even with wildly different internet speeds.

Going into the 90s, as the internet aspects became more important, they couldn't keep up with upgrading the lines, especially given the costs would be born by all customers regardless of what speed they were getting.

That was 30 years ago (sorry for the reminder) but don't you think times changed how something like that would be deployed?

It could be!

But I think one lesson is that internet and other utilities are not quite as functionally comparable as people claim. Per capita consumption of water has not quadruped in the last 10 years, but home internet has! So the case for internet as a public utility will be stronger when the need for constantly upgrading infrastructure plateaus.

So the issue was poor government regulation and not public ownership of the infrastructure?

The general image I get from the US is that public infrastructure and customer service in general is lacking in investment.

I struggle to think of places that are more customer friendly overall than the US. There are certainly some companies with generally less favorable reputations like, say, Comcast but that's often a result of having a captive audience. One might even argue that our largest consumer oriented companies span so many different industries but all share good customer service and experience as a cornerstone.

I meant public customer service, but, point taken.

Maybe, infrastructure. But having spent time in both the US and in Europe, I cannot begin to even describe how much better average customer service in America is compared to Europe.

But I think that is also what holds up the adoption of public services - the difference between typical customer service in the US and say, the Post Office or DMV, turns a lot of people off from the idea of public ISPs or etc.

(Although, based on some time spent in Munich makes me think the quality/availability of broadband in Europe is also not all that).

If we’re talking ISPs specifically, I’ve definitely had better customer service in Germany, Sweden and the Czech Republic than I ever had in the US.

I’ve had great experiences with customer support with 7 of the 8 local US ISPs I’ve dealt with.

Starlink, comcast, hughes.net and at&t customer support can take my RJ45 crimper and stick it where they don’t need network connectivity (sideways).

I guess the lesson here is that none of us can really make any general statement about the quality of customer service between the US and Europe.

I'm sorry but you cannot begin to compare ATT or Comcast customer service with say even BT in the UK. And if I value say customer service highly I get to choose from one of a hundred or more ISPs. Zen, or A&A for example probably have some of the best ISP customer support in the world.

In many other spheres I will concur America has a better customer service culture. But I think alot comes down to taste and incentives. I am happy with not getting fussed over at a restaurant for example, and the odd frustration comes weighed against the fact I'm not really socially obligated to tip (although usually do).

As apposed to private businesses who love making big capital heavy investments they don't need to make?

The point stands though that the feedback loop between customer wants and the government is much much longer than between consumer and business.

Tell that to the judge who oversaw AT&T's breakup.

The US would have lots of constitutional problems enforcing rules that we like ISPs to enforce.

The US train system is great; we move a much higher proportion of freight by rail as opposed to truck than Europe does for that very reason.

The freight system is great, the passenger train system in the U.S., not so much.

Back when passenger rail still made sense, and was run by private industry, it was great. But it’s been mostly obsoleted by automobiles and airlines. There’s a certain population density where it’s still competitive with airlines, but in the US that only exists between Boston and DC, which is also the only profitable part of Amtrak and would work a lot better if Amtrak could be privatized and focus their investments on that route instead of being forced to run a bunch of subsidized nostalgia routes for train geeks.

“Train geeks” have no meaningful public policy pull, it is silly and counterproductive to insinuate they have much to do with lobbying and promoting long distance rail especially east of Chicago where most of the routes aren’t particularly touristy.

> would work a lot better if Amtrak could be privatized

That’s a bold claim. While I’m not knee jerk anti-privatization, I’m extremely skeptical that privatizing the NEC will be anything but a fleecing of the public since most of the problems are due to aging infrastructure requiring billions of dollars of investment - which even with your beloved cars and airplanes is not something handled much by the private sector. People who argue it’s bad now just assume you’re too much of an idiot to imagine it could be worse.

Under their former CEO Richard Anderson, Amtrak achieved profitability for the first time in its history and had a solid long term business plan that entailed focusing on Acela and investing in improvements there at the expense of the unprofitable outlying routes (many of which are west of Chicago). We could privatize Amtrak next year and they could follow that same business plan—in fact, they’d probably have to. But unfortunately Anderson’s tenure and plan did not last very long, since “Amtrak CEO” is a three year political appointment.

> “Train geeks” have no meaningful public policy pull, it is silly and counterproductive to insinuate they have much to do with lobbying and promoting long distance rail

So who do you think managed to stuff $22 billion of Amtrak subsidies into the 2021 infrastructure act? Fairies?

There are tons of small, dedicated lobbies that are organized and effective enough that they can pressure the government into these sorts of policies, and the train geeks are certainly one of them. Or maybe they just managed to infiltrate the ranks of policy staffers. These people hated Anderson because he was threatening their favorite “historic” long haul routes, like the Seattle-Chicago “Empire Builder”, in favor of focusing on Acela.

> So who do you think managed to stuff $22 billion

Well congress ultimately, but as far as actual influence? Maybe start with: Labor unions, manufacturers throughout the supply chain, maintenance vendors - you know entities with actual money and financial interests. Also, local constituents and representatives where the train service happens to go, like it or not the train service is hugely important to the chamber of commerce in general of a place like Syracuse for instance where an air carrier just pulled out and one of those destinations is Chicago - it matters not much from optics that the journey takes longer than 100 years ago. The idea that the “train geeks” have anything measurable to do with it doesn’t pass any smell test. Moreover, the companies and organizations that are involved and do exist don’t magically disappear in any imagined privatization future. I also have a hard time believing that a motley bunch of train geeks somehow has any pull over the ReDUcE GoVERNmENT SpENDInG crowd.

> We could privatize Amtrak next year and they could follow that same business plan

The NEC corridor still needs billions of dollars of upgrades and maintenance. Again that is something that the public sector has almost invariably footed the bill on.

As for your initial thesis in this comment, it’s straight up garbage that has been discussed to death, and you have to assume I’m an uninformed moron to believe it uncritically. I’m not going to repeat this: https://viewfromthewing.com/amtrak-is-lying-they-are-nowhere...

The NEC is profitable if you hand wave away most of the costs like maintenance, and the infrastructure so the those brand new trains they just bought (the $10 billion spend just after Mr Andersons tenure, so as not to derail your narrative) can go more than 80mph (there are still major chunks north of NYC that can’t manage that).

I believe you are being willfully disingenuous so will not continue this conversation further.

> you have to assume I’m an uninformed moron to believe it uncritically

> I believe you are being willfully disingenuous so will not continue this conversation further.

Wow, such hostility. I'm not being willfully disingenuous; you just have a short temper and have a hard time staying civil, but I'll give you a second chance and try to respond in good faith here.

> Maybe start with: Labor unions, manufacturers throughout the supply chain, maintenance vendors - you know entities with actual money and financial interests.

Sure. Pork barrel politics all around.

> Also, local constituents and representatives where the train service happens to go, like it or not the train service is hugely important to the chamber of commerce in general of a place like Syracuse for instance where an air carrier just pulled out and one of those destinations is Chicago - it matters not much from optics that the journey takes longer than 100 years ago.

I just looked up flights between Syracuse and Chicago, and I can find multiple affordable nonstop flights: https://www.kayak.com/flights/SYR-CHI/2024-05-25/2024-06-01/...

Amtrak (which doesn't provide working deep links, and doesn't let me look up routes unless I turn off my ad blocker) offers a 13 hour overnight train at roughly the same fare as that two hour flight. What practical customer value is Amtrak providing on this route? Maybe train service between Syracuse and Chicago was faster 100 years ago, but it wasn't as fast as as a two hour flight, and it's not going to be. So who actually cares, aside from train geeks and, as you pointed out, people with a vested interest in federal pork?

> Moreover, the companies and organizations that are involved and do exist don’t magically disappear in any imagined privatization future.

I think a lot of them do "magically disappear" if they're dependent on government subsidies in order to remain economically viable!

> I also have a hard time believing that a motley bunch of train geeks somehow has any pull over the ReDUcE GoVERNmENT SpENDInG crowd.

Please, look at any graph of government spending over the past century and then try to tell me with a straight face that the "reduce government spending crowd" has any pull at all. Government spending does not get reduced. On the other hand, the federal government still subsidizes useless train routes that nobody needs, like the Syracuse to Chicago service you pointed out, or the Seattle to Chicago service I pointed out.

> The NEC is profitable if you hand wave away most of the costs like maintenance, and the infrastructure so the those brand new trains they just bought (the $10 billion spend just after Mr Andersons tenure, so as not to derail your narrative) can go more than 80mph (there are still major chunks north of NYC that can’t manage that).

My claim here is that you can make up the shortfall by eliminating all the useless routes that fail to compete with other modes of transportation. Maybe I'm mistaken about this, but you haven't really shown me hard numbers that account for the elimination of useless routes.

> I just looked up flights between Syracuse and Chicago

This has absolutely nothing to do with the point being made (which was why the mention that the train is slower now was even mentioned): a gross miscalculation of general politically relevant public opinion for long distance rail service.

Even so, if you actually want to understand the indisputable utilization of some of these routes, search say only a week out rather than a month and the differential might be more like $120 for a train ticket and $600 for plane ticket. And compare peak to off peak times where plane tickets will sky rocket but rail differentials are far more modest. Those "affordable" fares also have an $80 differential between basic economy and economy, the privilege to even bring a carry-on bag let alone checked baggage. Getting to and from the station is often cheaper than the airport.

> So who actually cares

And here's the thing, many of these routes do sell out or come close to doing so on a daily basis. With a few notable exceptions, they're not running light trains around. In the case of the aforementioned train averaging about 500 pax in each direction. It's not my job to convince you that the majority of these 500 passengers are not train geeks. Yes it is hard for me to comprehend that is the first thing someone would think critically, as if the majority of those using Greyhound and the Chinatown line are "bus geeks".

It's not like I'm saying axing some of these routes is a not a reasonable enough opinion, but my initial reply was pointing out the ridiculous premises.

> Please, look at any graph of government spending over the past century and then try to tell me with a straight face that the "reduce government spending crowd" has any pull at all.

To keep this on topic, compare a system map and timetable of Amtrak today vs 30 years ago.

> My claim here is that you can make up the shortfall by eliminating all the useless routes

And ignoring the $10 billion of outlay for new trainsets and the $16 billion dollar Gateway for starters (these are just for the NEC).

> This has absolutely nothing to do with the point being made (which was why the mention that the train is slower now was even mentioned): a gross miscalculation of general politically relevant public opinion for long distance rail service.

Your point didn't come across very clearly. I'm sorry about that; I also get frustrated when my points don't come across clearly. But I'm operating in good faith here.

I don't understand the relevance of the point that the Syracuse to Chicago train is slower than it was 100 years ago. You can fly from Syracuse to Chicago in 2 hours. No train is going to compete with that--maybe a maglev or hyperloop, but not a train. So if the train service between Syracuse and Chicago is going to compete with air service, it's going to have to compete some other way.

> And here's the thing, many of these routes do sell out or come close to doing so on a daily basis. With a few notable exceptions, they're not running light trains around. In the case of the aforementioned train averaging about 500 pax in each direction.

That's great. If those passengers are willing to pay ticket prices that cover the full long term costs of maintaining their share of the infrastructure they're using, then you could have an economically viable privately operated passenger train service. If not, then the ticket prices are artificially low and should be raised. If raising the ticket prices makes the ridership disappear, then it doesn't have economic sense to run a passenger train route.

> It's not my job to convince you that the majority of these 500 passengers are not train geeks. Yes it is hard for me to comprehend that is the first thing someone would think critically, as if the majority of those using Greyhound and the Chinatown line are "bus geeks".

No, you're right. You've convinced me that the widespread public support for Amtrak doesn't come from people naively romanticizing passenger rail, but rather a coalition of people effectively freeloading off the American taxpayer. As a result I am now even more opposed to Amtrak.

> would work a lot better if Amtrak could be privatized and focus their investments on that route instead of being forced to run a bunch of subsidized nostalgia routes

I don't think that's a fair assessment. There's a public non-monetary value that is gained by having broader accessibility to routes that aren't necessarily profitable. USPS has a universal service obligation for the same reason. We also do the same thing (even more explicitly) with air travel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Air_Service

I don’t think anyone actually relies on Amtrak service in any meaningful way. The only line that anyone might rely on, Acela, is profitable by itself.

USPS has a universal service obligation but also a legal monopoly. Meaning that if you try and start your own postal service, the feds will literally shut it down and throw you in prison. Its probably no coincidence that USPS also has abominably nonexistent spam filtering, to the degree that the majority of USPS service I’ve received in my entire adult life consisted of myself throwing away and/or shredding the vast majority of crap that they shove in my mailbox six days a week. And any suggestion that maybe they cut down to shoving crap in my mailbox 5 or even 4 days a week is treated like it would be the end of Western civilization.

The point of universal service isn't to have routes that a lot of people use. The point is to have routes that few people use, so that places that are otherwise unprofitable to serve have access. The places that are profitable to serve are going to get service anyway.

> The point is to have routes that few people use, so that places that are otherwise unprofitable to serve have access.

Can you name one city or town in the US that is dependent on Amtrak for basic transportation? For instance, is there a single town anywhere in this country that doesn’t have a highway or airport but does have a train station with Amtrak service?

It's not about towns or cities. There are people who do not drive or fly but use trains. Why does any place have more than one transit option?

> There are people who do not drive or fly but use trains.

So this isn't about providing people with access to transportation, because people do, in fact, have access to other transportation options. It's about catering to the whimsical preferences of people who like to ride trains. I don't think catering to those whimsical preferences is a necessary public service.

That's ridiculous. Different modes of transportation have real pros and cons, this isn't just whimsical preferences. That's why every city in America has at least a few options for transportation.

> Different modes of transportation have real pros and cons

Exactly. And the pros and cons for trains, as a mode of transportation, have made them a less viable option for most American journeys ever since the mid-20th century. When you say "there are people who do not drive or fly but use trains", you're not describing the typical, reasonable person who weighs the pros and cons between different modes of transportation, you're describing someone who refuses to even consider alternate modes of transportation. Maybe it's not necessarily a whimsical romanticism for trains, but it's certainly something well short of any actual necessity that's deserving of public subsidy.

I disagree. Just like the USPS USO and Essential Air Service, I think it is not only worth subsidizing accessibility beyond the whims of the free market, but it is a duty of the government to do so.

These things should be done exactly because they are not the norm. There are people in unique circumstances in every corner of this country who rely on niche options. I know some of them who have relied on these things. The free market can take care of “normal” people and circumstances just fine.

Most of your railway is not electric, India has electrified 95% of its rail, so did China. It makes sence

The US has reliable access to cheap fuel, and diesel locomotives are still very efficient, especially compared to diesel trucks.

electric trains are like 2x more powerful, less maintenance and carbon-free

This. With the climate change, any oil powered industry it's doomed from the start.

America's locomotives are diesel-hybrid electrics, so pretty efficient and maintnence is reasonable. You'll see those in Australia and Canada as well, and even China (only 72% electrified, so if you take a train to Lhasa, it will be a diesel hybrid electric...athough they are currently working on an electrified line). 100% of the trans-siberian railroad is electrified, which is impressive.

This is cool, but the government wouldn't be keen on updating the cables, would they? You'd be locked in to whatever cable the local government can afford.

> This is cool, but the government wouldn't be keen on updating the cables, would they?

They charge ISPs for use of the infrastructure and that funds maintenance and upgrades. For the sort of core upgrades that occur every few decades, they can do a bond referendum to cover shortfalls.

It's the same setup our private infra does here. They own the fiber in the ground and ISPs pay then to sell services.

It can be harder for a private infra company to get in the ground because they're limited to municipalities that aren't captured by telecom/ISP lobbying orgs - but still have a dense enough population.

Outside plant cable doesn't really change. Telco copper wires, CATV cables, and optical fiber are pretty much it. They stay in place for decades. OS1 from 2004 is the same quality today. You just swap out the transceivers at the ends for better speeds.

> To me, government owned lines and connections makes the most sense for society.

I used to think that but now I'm not sure I still believe it. I worry that government owned lines doesn't result in "everyone gets fiber to the home now" but rather "nobody gets fiber yet cause we're still getting cable in Internet to the last X rural users."

Why would it mean that?

I fear that private IsPs will collude to keep internet slow and prices high, while never delivering to rural.

From my experience most government programs are more focused on ensuring that _everyone_ has the same baseline experience rather than anyone having a better experience. I don't see why internet lines would be any different.

That's not true.

The majority of British lines are owned by OpenReach, which is a subsidiary of BT, which used to be run by the government, but was privatised back in the 80s.

But they have not been owned by the government in decades, and there are competitors who have run their own lines.

if renting use is viable, then why isn't construction or maintenance?

i mean this honestly: an investor may not get crazy returns every year, but they get stable returns every year. why is owning and maintaining infrastructure unattractive?