Comment by pessimizer
3 years ago
I'm going to skate past the fact that difficult customers and maintenance aren't why monopolies are expensive, in fact they're the things that are most amenable to economies of scale, so bigger gets cheaper.
The real question is: why does he have to get larger than the 600 homes in his nearby rural area, ever? Why does his goal have to be to defeat and replace Comcast rather than to supply internet service to his neighbors?
He doesn’t of course. Local/muni/coop last mile is a well worn path. It’s your local volunteer fire department, but for internet, and local self reliance is not a bad thing. It doesn’t have to grow, it doesn’t have to constantly evolve, it just has to work and be reliable. That is what infrastructure does, and when it does so, it’s mostly invisible (and I argue, that is its most beautiful form).
https://ilsr.org/broadband-2/
https://muninetworks.org/
Displacing Comcast in any degree us a major service to the species.
Exactly. There are tons of smaller businesses not focused on infinitely growing that get by just fine. Especially in rural areas like these
for every small business that "gets by", there are 2 (probably more) that go out of business due to not having grown sufficiently by the time they face some competition.
I think this is a weird framing of the issue. Sure, lots of businesses go under, and maybe being larger would have saved them, but maybe not. Plenty of VC-funded businesses go under precisely because they tried to be too large, when they could have perfectly comfortably served a few satisfied initial clients for enough money to pay all their bills.
I think the idea that companies go under because they aren't ambitious enough says more about modern attitudes towards growth than it does about the reality of business.
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> for every small business that "gets by", there are 2 (probably more) that go out of business due to not having grown sufficiently by the time they face some competition.
If your goal is to fight a monopoly, then the mere existence of competition means that you've accomplished your goal.
the same reason one would file for patents without any intent of enforcing them. For defense and security.
I would say that to attempt to have zero growth/shrinkage is difficult in business. The market is always changing, people's preferences change, etc. If you try to stagnate you will likely find yourself shrinking, either because demand changes, or there are mixups in supply (competitors).
If shrinking is the only non-goal, then growth is likely the only prevention since stagnation is hard to ensure.
The reason he exists is because the competition is bad. If the competition is good, he has no reason to exist. The goal is to supply 600 rural households with broadband at a reasonable price, not to own 600 households.
Since we are asking why questions. Why does everyone else have to support them with tax money when it costs 30k to run a wire to a house? If there is no prospect of scaling it further to boost local infrastructure, then they should be footing the bill themselves or use Starlink.
Because we as a society are better when everyone has access to the Internet. Just as we ran electricity and running water to neighborhoods that could never pay back the investment. Just like we build roads, bridges, and tunnels that probably never be afforded by the people they serve.
Maybe the person that lives in that house in the next generation is the next great scientist that discovers how fusion can work reliably for us. If that is the case, then it was worth 30k to link that house to the Internet.
This is the most bizarre comment I’ve seen in a while. You don’t think folks do cost-benefit analysis before building out infrastructure? If so, you are in for quite a surprise when you attend a hearing at your local municipality.
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