It's like you live in a parallel universe from me.

My water, electricity, etc utilities are far more reliable (probably by an order of magnitude) than any private service I've experienced. They don't cut corners in design or safety, and when there is a problem, it's far easier to get in touch with them (they're usually already aware of it and don't pretend to act surprised like say your Telco or ISP) and scheduling is more flexible.

Case in point: I was wondering if my home water pressure could be increased at the meter. I'd gotten conflicting advice from plumbers. I called up one afternoon. They said they'd send someone out to check. I got a knock on my door at 8PM that same evening. I told him I measured 42psi at the hose bib, which was over the zone's minimum of 36. Which was disappointing to me. But still. The level of service just floored me. I've never experienced anything close to that from Time Warner, DiSH, AT&T, T-Mobile, you-name-it. I replaced my 150amp electric meter with a 200amp meter (city provided), it was inspected for less than most people would bother getting out of bed for and I had a fire hazard from our "new to us" house replaced with almost no cost from the utility.

I also feel like I get a lot more for my dollar. Obviously the power grid is far more complex than Time Warner's cabling. Not to mention it can kill you. From TWC I get internet access. From the electric company I get 100% Wind Power generated electricity (for an additional $0.5 I believe), and hundreds of kilowatts of power each and every month.

I never give a thought to wether my sewer service is going to work. It doesn't have "off" days where it backs up a bit. My water doesn't decide to stop flowing every once in awhile so I have to try turning the faucet off and on until it works. When we moved in a couple years ago, I thought I smelled gas outside near the meter. Someone came out within 30 minutes. They found a minor leak (someone in the alley actually ran into the meter!), had it fixed up in no time flat. No charge.

If an ISP could come close to my Utilities experience I'd be overjoyed personally. And it'd be the last time I ever saw an Early Termination Fee, obscene equipment charges for commodity hardware, it'd actually work 99.999% of the time, and (maybe the biggest issue of all with ISPs) I'd actually get the service level I'm paying for.

If you want to swap meaningless anecdotes I can tell you that my cable service is more reliable than my electrical service. Neither are perfect but I have not yet had an internet outage this year that I've noticed; my power has been out for significant amounts of time (> 1 hour) at least a couple of times, and if you count momentary off/on outages it's been closer to a dozen.

Where I grew up we had persistently poor water pressure. It took over a decade for the city-owned water utility to admit there was a problem and install a booster pump for that neighborhood.

All my area utilities have fees for establishing service, deposit requirements if you have low credit or are a new customer, and if you call them out for service and the problem turns out to be with your plumbing or your wiring, you can bet there will be a charge.

Just this morning, comcast had a massive outage across philadelphia and southern new jersey. Comcast is BASED in philadelphia. There was no explanation or warning, just as the work day started. If that were electric, it'd be national news; instead, it's just another day in the shitty world of comcast: accountability is way down on the list compared to fees, bugging me to upgrade my service.

So still anecdotal, but hundreds of thousands of people were affected.

I think what we are really seeing here is that different municipalities have different degrees of success... In mine, no one even thinks about power/water/sewage/roads (except during road repair), but the poor quality of internet service is a weekly subject.

You are addressing the 'seen' issues, but not the 'unseen', and to paraphrase Bastiat, "[the] bad [analyst] confines himself to the visible effect; the good [analyst] takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen".

Please address this part of my post: "none of those areas has [seen] any significant improvement in service level, cost, efficiency, or technology for many years". ISPs and cell service providers have many faults, but they have been constantly improving the service level (bandwidth); I would like to know what comparable improvements have been made with respect to electricity, sewage, potable water supplies, police protection, fire services, or other utilities. These utilities have been constantly increasing in price (at least nominally, and in most cases after correcting for inflation), while providing no improvement in the basic service.

Most utilities providers have not even been improving their back-end technologies, which would serve to reduce costs, or improve the service's availability. As I mentioned in the previous post, this is likely because of how governments use utilities' capital improvement funds as 'piggy banks', preventing infrastructure and technology upgrades.

In addition, you are not addressing any of the drought/road quality & cost/police abuse/fire department cost which I raised, and which are real problems.

Just because you aren't aware of them don't mean they don't exist.

PEX is very common for new residential/commercial buildings for example. I'd be surprised if municipalities in need of water treatment plant upgrades aren't looking at technologies that weren't widely available 20 or 30 years ago when the original system was put into place.

Also, complaining about increasing price (which is modest IME) is an unusual tactic. The price would have to increase at a greater rate than inflation in order to account for the increasing concentration of wealth the past couple decades right? It's a little fuzzy for me, but I feel like that's just math. If 95% of your subscribers make less than they did two decades ago, but your per-subscriber bill is the same, then average cost is going to increase.

Also tightened environmental standards that didn't exist in 80's when the systems were put into place undoubtedly play a role in increasing costs.

I get 200amp service to my house today. It originally (in the 70's) had 100amp service. I'd call doubling the power requirements for the electrical grid quite an upgrade. Houses are most certainly increasing in size. Not to mention 20 years ago you didn't have the option to pay an extra half-cent per kWh to ensure the electric company purchased enough renewable power wholesale to cover your usage.

I pay all my utilities online with auto-pay. There's another upgrade.

The police of today are most certainly better equipped, better prepared, better trained, respond quicker and there are more of them. I don't agree with all of that but it's what the voters want. All that costs money, and it's most definitely different today than a couple decades ago.

Are roads worse today? I feel like they're not. At least not where I live (which is in Dallas proper where the average home is around 2,000sqft and $150K, so not some rich enclave). I feel like we spend too much money on roads in fact. The new 635 toll-road seems a terrible waste of money when we could have just had a DART (commuter train) run West/East along it (there are almost no West/East running lines in Dallas, which makes the public rail system not all that useful for many).

I can't remember the last time I drove on a gravel road. Even the state parks are fully paved. That definitely wasn't the case 30 years ago.

So sure, we pay more today than we did decades ago. Changing subscriber-base, voter priorities and deploying the exact tech you're complaining doesn't exist is a big part of it.

This feels like an argument of "Government Bad! Business Good!" at this point to be honest.

Like saying: "Most utilities providers have not even been improving their back-end technologies, which would serve to reduce costs, or improve the service's availability."

Where do you get that from? Anecdotally that seems far from the truth considering the payment options and Customer Service available to people these days.

So they're not tearing up the roads every few years to upgrade the pipe. That's a good thing. They are OTOH purchasing more efficient fleet vehicles. Even in gas loving TX it's common for Municipal vehicles to run on LNG. My Dad as a TxDOT employee working on the Galveston ferry has been through a lot of training. I can personally guarantee you TxDOT is not the same agency or using the same tech they were 30 years ago. Except where it's not broken.

You appear to want to fix what isn't broken.

> Please address this part of my post: "none of those areas has [seen] any significant improvement in service level, cost, efficiency, or technology for many years".

What improvements are you expecting? Some things don't need to change. It serves its purpose the same way it did a hundred years ago and there is nothing wrong with that.

> ISPs and cell service providers have many faults, but they have been constantly improving the service level (bandwidth)

That's the terminating equipment. The expensive part, which is the wire or fiber in the ground, hasn't changed materially in decades or more. You could easily have a municipal last mile and competing providers who supply their own terminating equipment at the endpoints.

> In addition, you are not addressing any of the drought/road quality & cost/police abuse/fire department cost which I raised, and which are real problems.

Would you like to explain how a monopoly for-profit entity can be expected to do any better? Why would they care about droughts or abuse if it isn't costing them money?

>"What improvements are you expecting? Some things don't need to change. It serves its purpose the same way it did a hundred years ago and there is nothing wrong with that."

You could have said the same of steel if its quality had not improved, or airline travel if it had not gotten much cheaper, and become available to the masses. You are falling into the trap of only analyzing the 'seen', and failing to think of the 'unseen'.

>"The expensive part, which is the wire or fiber in the ground, hasn't changed materially in decades or more."

It will soon have to change if we are to have fibre on the last mile, and may change again when the technology evolves further; one of my concerns is that utilitization causes ossification, and prevents further progress, as is the case with the sewer, power, and water last miles.

>"Would you like to explain how a monopoly for-profit entity can be expected to do any better? Why would they care about droughts or abuse if it isn't costing them money?"

Thanks for setting up a false choice, I love those! I have no idea why there should be a monopoly on the purification and distribution of water.

Having private entities selling water would reduce the number of droughts, as they are likely to price according to volumetric use, and to price based on scarcity. Droughts are a problem of pricing, not of the scarcity of water; if you want a good example of how this is the case, motor vehicles never fall from the sky, and there is no shortage of them.

P.S. people are coming by and down-voting all my comments at once (I have gotten at least 25 down-votes here so far), could someone please let me know if I am being offensive, discriminatory, or going off-topic?

There's only so much you can do with last-mile lines. There is no known way to get data to your house faster and with more bandwidth than using light. There is nothing that travels faster than light in a vacuum.

The only enhancement I can think of is propagation for ever-higher frequencies (UV, X-Ray, etc), allowing more bandwidth. But realistically node hardware improvements regularly boost the performance of the same fiber cable, much like how cable modems are still improving using the same RG-6 from the 60's. (RG-6 is old, but it is still very good- physics still works just the same)

Last-mile power/sewage/data/etc hasn't changed much because it is fundamental. Water travels in pipes. Sewage also travels in pipes. The only reason data changed (POTS to cable/fiber) is because data was originally piggybacked on a network never designed for it.

One day we might do fiber optics with gamma rays, or invent wormhole communication, but I'm prepared to invest in plain-old visible-light fiber optics for now.

------------

As for water distribution in general (not last-mile), that's a problem with water rights, not water companies. It's a legal nightmare that has nothing to do with public vs. private utilities.

The internal combustion engine has not improved much in the last few decades either. Perhaps whoever is building those things is incompetent too.

Oh wait, it's the laws of physics that have greatly diminished progress in this area...

One would think that true based on the thermodynamic first principles of the Otto and Diesel cycles, but you are actually incorrect due to a number of innovations such as fuel injection, EFI, direct injection, intake design, CFD analysis, materials advances which allow higher temperature and more efficient combustion, and turbocharging.[1] In addition, I happen to work on automotive and small engines, and can assure you that engine reliability has dramatically increased over the whole span of their existence, and every interval thereof.

[1] http://www.achatespower.com/pdf/opposed_piston_renaissance.p...

Please forward that link to my 2014 Honda Civic, which didn't get your memo and has the same fuel efficiency like my old 02 Civic.

So you bought a larger, heavier car, with a more powerful engine, and you think the problem is that engines are not getting more efficient?

to be fair, pge did just blow up a city and completely fuck up record keeping for their gas pipelines

But... fuck comcast, their high prices, their annual price increases, their data caps, their shitty service, their missed appointments, their slow speeds. We need government owned broadband.

seemingly good point but I think you're comparing apples to oranges. Providing electrical power, sewage lines, etc.. is not very difficult compared to handling Internet traffic. To make more clear what I mean, I wonder how your electric company would deal with a set of problems like when a torrent shows up on one of your customer's computers? Not to mention that IT support is probably more expensive than having your gas line checked for a leak.

To check for that leak they had to have customer service reps, city vehicles, fleet insurance, technicians qualified to work on a live, potentially leaking gas line, gasoline for the vehicle, and they arrived at my home in less time than a phone-call to TWC generally takes. I really doubt some IT staff costs more.

As for the Torrent: Give the customer what they pay for, and no more. If my internet issues are because of Torrents, I have to ask: Why does the lack of competency ISPs have never seem to work in my favor?

edit: Also "not very difficult compared to":

I have an amateur's idea of the utility side (mostly from DIY and having relatives in the trades) and I think you're sorely underestimating the skill and care involved in making sure this stuff actually works. Large scale projects for anyone can be challenging, but it'd be amazing if anything ever worked at all if utilities put the same (lack of) planning care into their projects that most tech companies do.

Most people probably don't even know what a P-trap is for. Or ever noticed that their gutters are actually sloped for drainage. What material their plumbing is made from. How many receptacles can be placed on a circuit. That the brick on your house isn't actually load-bearing. What weeping holes are for.

This stuff has to last decades.

>> "Providing electrical power, sewage lines, etc.. is not very difficult compared to handling Internet traffic."

There is no question that each of these things is difficult at scale. Furthermore I have never done either of them.

However, power systems EE is perhaps the most widely-known example of Big Boy Engineering except building rockets. In the power business, they have an distribution/cabling problem which is at best isomorphic to that found in the ISP business (though probably greater, because ISP's don't have millions of volts to worry about) wedded to far greater stationing/substationing/production problems, and they still have (as noted by someone else in this thread) far more 9's of uptime than Time Warner. As compensation for this, ISP's have a greater Signals and Systems flavored problem, but it doesn't seem like it balances out.

So basically I'm trying to say that "... not very difficult..." seems inaccurate.

Here's my favorite story of said "Big Boy Engineering": http://www.jwz.org/blog/2002/11/engineering-pornography/

It's about fixing a short in a power transmission line. Sounds simple, right? It involves liquid nitrogen and hundreds of people with possibility of explosions or huge oil spills. That's right, the line is suspended in pressurized oil! It goes on…

I tried to find a good pull quote, and it's basically all mind-blowing pull quotes. But here:

"Every vault also has a nipple which allows sampling of the pipe oil. They said you withdraw the oil through a thick membrane with a syringe (?). This happens monthly on all feeders in the LA area. The samples are analyzed downtown by a staff of chemists who can relate the presence of things like acetylene, butane, and benzene in the oil to arcing, coronas, and so forth. Apparently the oil chemistry is a very good indicator of the health of the segments."

I think you are seriously underestimating the modern electrical grid. This is a control room that controls high voltage lines in the Midwest:

http://www.chronicletimes.com/photos/17/86/19/1786193-H.jpg

Ok you don't have to worry about torrents but people expect pretty much 100% uptime on electrical service and you are dealing with transmitting an insane amount of energy which is technically non-trivial and can be extremely dangerous. You have to worry about power plant failure, maintenance, load balancing renewable and fossil fuels, meeting peak demands(rather than just slowing down everyone) and so on.

Why is some customer torrenting movies supposed to be the ISP's problem any more than some customer powering grow lamps to grow marijuana supposed to be the power company's problem?

> Providing electrical power, sewage lines, etc.. is not very difficult compared to handling Internet traffic.

That was true in the 1990s, when I got my first job as a techie at an ISP. Things have changed since then.

> You have enumerated a list of the worst services available to today's consumer.

All these services probably have a better consumer rating than your Internet provider.

> Governments regularly use all of these utilities as revenue-raising 'businesses', which they consistently strip of any capital that could be used for infrastructure improvements.

Is there any evidence of this? I was unable to find anything of value in a cursory web search. I found a couple of counter-examples, such as the Enron (NYSE:ENE) scandal of intentionally causing blackouts and brownouts.

> worst services available

In many places, e.g. DC area, electricity (PEPCO) takes a long time to be restored and is objectively bad. However, regulated utilities are bound to serve rural and otherwise unprofitable customers.

> Roads are often subsidized for truckers

How do you get your food, iPhones, and button-up shirts?

> Water is subsidized for farmers and golf courses, and this often causes everyone else to suffer droughts.

Agreed that it is suboptimal for golf courses and manufacturers (including breweries) to use disproportionate amounts of water. Farmers? Maybe if they're raising livestock or other luxury food products. Causing droughts? How?

The comment about subsidized water for farmers applies to eg California. Yes, the water rights for farmers there are a serious mess and cause problems.

Chattanooga is a great example of providing internet by the local government

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/17...

My sister lives in a town in Massachusetts with community-run Internet. She's always freaking out about broadband caps, violation of which apparently triggers massive fees.

Is the internet truly municipal or is only the fibre community owned? The distinction is important as a lot of private ISPs pay the local government a fee to use their existing infrastructure, while they provide the connectivity to the rest of the internet.

This arrangement also comes with the ISP's own flavor of EULA.

Can you elaborate on which town and who provides the service? The example above you cited Chattanooga and epbfi.com website that basic service costs $57.99/mo for 100 Mbs internet with no reference to a cap. Your comment seems disingenuous that you don't provide any details.

EDIT: I can't read. :/

The linked article mentions that by Oct, 2013, the price for 1Gbit from EPB was reduced ~$70/month, and the folks who were paying ~$58 for 100mbit got bumped to 1Gbit at no additional charge.

Yes, this one anecdote must mean the entire concept of municipal broadband is untenable.

This whole subthread has offered nothing but anecdotal evidence.

You can't pull this card after one person rebuts a single anecdote with another.

I live in Massachusetts and I would have surely heard about this Stalinist regime. Where are these broadband Bolsheviks?

Except for the useless "Lite" level, their bandwidth caps are up in the hundreds of gigabytes. That sounds pretty typical. Unless you are a photographer or videographer moving workflow or backups over that account, your not going to touch those caps.

> You have enumerated a list of the worst services available to today's consumer.

Are you being sarcastic or trolling, can't tell.

What are the worst services? Water? You need better water? You need competition for water and would like 5 companies to lay water pipes through the neighborhoods? You know strawberry flavored water, some with extra calcium ions, maybe one with beer flavor.

> Roads are often subsidized for truckers, which causes everyone else to pay higher gas taxes than they should, and suffer damaged road surfaces

Maybe we should tax truckers more. Wait, we do that. The easiest way to do it is to tax diesel fuel at the moment. Not ideal but we something is already in place.

> Police departments are poorly regulated,

Well go vote against it then.

I don't remember having even the ability to vote on how good or crappy I want my Verizon FIOS experience to be.