Kentucky to build 3,400-mile state-owned broadband network – and a fight is brewing Yet another US state is weighing up the idea of laying thousands of miles of cable to create its own broadband network. The Lexington Herald-Leader reports that a group of telcos are pushing back against a proposed $324m network involving 3,400 miles of cabling, which would cover 120 counties in the state. The construction …
That's right. ANYTHING BUT COMPETITION is the rule in this country for "broadband" providers. They sure don't compete with each other. If the states can provide a decent backbone and speeds at a reasonable price and provide some REAL competition, that's how it should be! (And I'm sure Worstall would agree.)
Indeed how come the land of rampant capitalism has allowed so much pigopolist behaviour whilst here in Blighty its not perfect but we seem to be able to get Phone TV and Broadband for about 50% of what it costs in the States, and probably 50% faster too.
Damn those commie Europeans looking after the consumer.
Land of the Fee, Home of the Screwed?
>Indeed how come the land of rampant capitalism has allowed so much pigopolist behaviour whilst here in Blighty its not perfect but we seem to be able to get Phone TV and Broadband for about 50% of what it costs in the States, and probably 50% faster too.
I would say the UK has a "slightly denser" population and on the country side in the UK, you have the same issues.
Don't we love the telcos complaining .... after all it is much better to have <n> parallel backbones in the state, one for each telco, so much cheaper to maintain.... That is what we have in France, they are fighting to bring fiber to the masses, depending on where you live, if you want fiber, you have to go with one, no competition, until the others make it to your doorstep. In the end, they'll pay for over-capacity in densely populated areas and have no cash left to deploy in the less densely populated areas.
Where I live, the cable company tried to tell my that my "promotional rate" was expiring, two years in a row. Meanwhile, a friend in a nearby city subscribed to the same service and speed, but in which Google plans to deploy fiber, got a letter from the cable company saying that they were bumping him from 15Mbps to 45Mbps, with no change in his bill.
Isn't a little bit of competition amazing in its results?
In the area we relocated to, there is precisely one cable company that offers bundled internet, cable and telephone service. Service is mediocre, with outages whenever it drops below freezing.
If we had competition in the area, like where we previously lived, services improved and prices dropped.
I mean, the gubmint already maintains the roads and the bridges and the dams, why not the consumer Internet backbones as well?
And back in the old days, when TVA and the rest were bringing electricity to rural America, it's not like they could tell their far-flung customers "Well, the refined city folk in Lexington get 120 volts at 60 Hz, but you country folks way down here in Jellico, you're only going to get 50 volts at 25 Hz. Make do with what you get..." Imagine how life today would be different if the electric companies had gotten to play by the same lax rules that the whiny, crybaby telco's and cable operators have been playing by for the past 20 years. Wah! Cry me a handful...
Well, the original backbones were private, created with government assistance and leased dark fiber.
Around a decade or so ago, the government didn't renew the lease on a lot of dark fiber that Sprint and AT&T owned, which actually made the companies happy, as they could enlarge their backbone.
The only real difference is, it's the state and municipal taxpayers teat feeding this, rather than the federal government.
What I don't get in their objections is, they're essentially saying, "No! I don't *want* free money!", as they're be able to set up the ISP's to hook into the free backbone. That's free infrastructure they're rejecting!
We have some astonishingly short signed business "leaders" in the US.
Big companies, pressure groups, politicians. America is the ultimate refinement of buzzword politics - to the point that an organisation can, by simply including the word 'family' in their name, immediately state their positions on abortion, healthcare reform, gay marriage, the role of religion in government and vice versa, non-discrimination law, regulation of obscenity and gun control.
Interesting how even red states are starting to realize not only the importance of broadband infrastructure to a modern economy but that if the "free market" isn't getting the job done, government has to step in and make it happen. Maybe there's hope after all.
"with local ISPs linking up individual homes and offices" - so is it Comcast or ATT? I'm far from supporting established monopolies, but spending public money on the backbone without taking care of rules that led to and enforce lack of competition locally, we may end up with another tax and keep paying big $ to current ISP of your "choice".
Normally the lack of competition is due to the lack of good trunk lines other than those of the monopolist, due to high costs for new trunk lines. Are you suggesting that even after the Big Pipe reaches a remote mountain county, access to it will still be restricted somehow? What's to stop a smaller company from laying some local lines or using local radio transmission for the job? If someone attempts any overt restraint of trade on these companies it will stink to high heaven.
I tend to be against government competing with the private sector, but in this case the system isn't correcting itself very well, at least for the rural folk. Okay it's a lot of tax monies just to get high speed for a bunch of yokels, but such wide data access should eventually raise most of said yokels to higher tax brackets, and that can't be bad.
The USA might, just, have a claim to being the world's leading technology country but when it comes to implementation it stinks.
I was involved in communications implementation in the 4-Corners area - the conjunction of southwestern corner of Colorado, southeastern corner of Utah, northeastern corner of Arizona, and northwestern corner of New Mexico - and especially in the Durango area of Colorado.
The terrain comprises many deep rock valleys radiating like spokes from a hub - it is the ridgeline of the Rockies - and very hard to cross from one valley to the next. There was zero communications is even the well populated valleys - not even landline.
The residents of several valleys formed a telephone cooperative and then they hired the Canadian company I worked for to install, literally, anything that would connect them to the outside world. We decided to install mountain-top systems so two valleys could be served by a single chain of stations. Lots of mountain climbing and helicopter rides!
After we were well advanced with the installation up pops a big-time carrier and they start stringing a few cables where the cost could be recovered.
Now, after 10-years plus, this private venture has beaten back the 'big' guys, maintained the radio backbone and fully-financed fibre optic feeds using lower-cost Chinese equipment. The 'big' guys withdrew - and sold their paltry assets for a nominal USD$1. It was either that or the cost of removing all their poles.
And last I heard the company was still busy connecting remote parts of the States with the rest of the world.
Kentucky and the other States are to be congratulated on taking these initiatives because the commercial outfits aren't - even though fibre optic is so relatively cheap.
The cable companies generally have a local monopoly, granted by the local government. They have been very lax about upgrading their services in many areas
That is a failure of regulation, not of capitalism. The company does either what generates a commercial return, or what it is mandated to to do by the regulator to protect its licence. Obviously the marginal cost of rural broadband means it isn't economic, but that's where the state regulator should step in and clearly hasn't.
In the scenario described, the residents of Kentucky are paying for government to regulate the telecom monopolists, but government are failing to achieve what the population want. Up pops another bit of the same state government saying "we could build a network ourselves!". If the state government isn't capable of regulation (which is primarily simple: giving monopolists strategic direction with the force of law to compel them to follow it), then which simple minded people honestly believe that the same government will be able to deliver this mythical state backbone?
Only one problem, Ledswinger. When the government regulates and the monopoly states that if enforced, they'll withdraw from the service area and leave no service whatsoever.
Meanwhile, the monopoly pays large campaign contributions to "generate gratitude" in the elected leadership.
Our fiber backbones were supported and financed by the federal government leasing dark fiber. State and local governments are able to do the same, leaving the last mile to whatever organizations are willing to spend a little to connect people in that last mile, while enjoying a free backbone.
Seriously, if I was in that state, I'd be scrambling to try to keep up with that fiber, running those last miles.
"That is a failure of regulation, not of capitalism."
Most real capitalist would say that regulation is the problem, not capitalism. Regulation gets in the way of monopolies and making money.
All the biggest and best US philanthropists started of as the most despicable capitalts you can imagine, stepping on anyone and anything that got in their way before "seeing the light" and then trying to buy their way into heaven. See the bio's of Carnegie, Rothschild, Morgan, Rockefeller, Astor et al The same has happened elsewhere in the world but rarely to the extent those guys managed it. No doubt it's still happening today. Bill Gates might well be an example.
my shine quicker, I'm ALL in!
As a "true" Yank (NYer) I have a couple of kindred spirits in KY. If I can get my cure-all faster,cheaper, safer, and I'm there fur ya... (gota be cheaper than the fuel for the DB9 runnin' the South-North line..)
What, no rum-runnin', black, 2 door seeeedan icon?!!
Government generally gets the monopoly on handling human waste. To do so they/we build huge sewer systems underneath our communities.
Cable comes along and bribes the city council to give them exclusive access to these sewers to lay cable for which they then have a virutual monopoly on, while you and I continue to pay to maintain the sewers and put those crews out there 24/7 if a leak happens to interfere with the cable.
It's about time communities tell these hucksters to take a hike, and for the community to put their own cable in and charge HBO and company for access.
I'm in a rural area - no water delivery, no sewers. I collect rainwater off the roof (and filter it well, including UV) and use a septic system.
Running fiber through my "sewer system" would get me about thirty feet farther down the hill, with no connectivity. Probably not a winning proposition.
Still, I like what Kentucky is proposing. Competition is good.
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The thing that "hampers the growth of private business" in this case, is the private business itself.
These US monopolies, and every one of the predecessor companies that they gobbled up over the last two decades, were licensed and made legal monopolies to do ONE thing: Dig trenches and wire up neighborhoods, communities and cities for CABLE TV. They -all- got into the ISP business BY ACCIDENT, and they have -all- done everything possible to create artificial scarcity, minimize investment, raise prices, and slow advancement to the greatest extent possible.
That we have allowed these regional monopolies to become the 800 pound gorilla lording over our telecom policy is a travesty of our own making. They must not only -not- be allowed to further merge (Charter-TWC) but should be broken up. They should be broken up not only into smaller companies, but separated into "common carrier" and "content" companies. The failure to implement this common-sense policy is proof of a completely corrupt legal and regulatory system in America. A total failure of consumer (and business and technical) policy.
Americans know who they should vote for next November. They probably just won't do it. The US Congress needs to be turned out of corrupt GOP corporate PAC representatives. They're screwing US consumers in IT, health-care, financial services, and more. America will go down the drain if this doesn't stop.
Sorry, pal. We're already in the handbasket. The choices this November are going to be between Dumb and Dumber (and maybe Dumbest on the outside), and that assuming Dumber's even on the ballot.
As for breaking the companies up, we tried that with Ma Bell. They just put themselves back together with acquisitions and threats to pull up stakes otherwise.
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