Comment by 59percentmore
14 days ago
It's not the government, and I'm calling bullshit on your narrative because there's no mention of municipal fiber, and the industry's successful lobbying to make it illegal in most of the country. THAT would have been REAL competition.
>Their government paid to build a nation–wide fiber network
So did we. The last step is nationalizing that network and finishing the build-out in-house.
Municipal fiber exists in some places, but not most. It’s actually fairly common up here in the Pacific Northwest. Dozens of towns dotted around the map have their own municipal fiber networks, but Ziply serves more customers than all of them combined. Thus I say that the free market is fixing the problem that the government created. Another good example is Starlink. They provide service to millions in very rural areas that are out of reach of other ISPs.
When we paid for national broadband access here in the US, it was not for fiber to the home. It was for DSL. Worse, the FCC measured coverage not by service address as it does today, but by census district. The phone companies merely had to assert that they could provide service to an address in the district and the FCC would count the whole district as covered. The districts aren’t very big, so in dense areas that was not a bad estimation. In less dense areas it was just a giant loophole. They could provide service to one house on the edge of the district and not bother with the hundreds of homes miles away out in the countryside. Officially we got exactly what we paid for.
As you say we could still nationalize these fiber networks and stitch them together into a real national network. Of course they don’t all use exactly the same technology, and it would be a huge political fight, but in principle I could see a government agency gradually buying networks from the ISPs and integrating them. Of course you know that if Trump proposes it then the Democrats will immediately oppose it on the general principle that Trump proposed it.
The reason municipal fiber doesn't serve more customers is, again, because states were lobbied by telcos to make it illegal. Likewise, the loopholes that allowed the intended broadband buildout to be stymied. The problem is ultimately one of hobbled regulation allowing corporations to move and abuse freely. That makes the problem the free market.
Regulation is not the free market. Of course companies are going to lobby for more regulations if they think that they can get away with it. It only works because the legislators are idiots who think that free markets _must_ be regulated. It is easy to hoodwink them into passing idiotic regulations. They boast about the accomplishment in their press releases as if they had saved the country.
Municipal fiber is not outlawed here in Oregon, so there are quite a few municipal networks here. But they are not expanding as fast as even a single ISP like Ziply Fiber. None of them have expanded beyond their small town to serve unincorporated areas near by. All of them are funded more by taxes than by subscribers.