That sucks for citizens of the US. I think the Swedish (Nordic?) model for bringing internet connectivity to it's citizens is superior.
The municipalities own (most of) the networks and all the fiber cables, letting companies use them for a small(ish) fee. These companies later sell it to customers. This help people to get the best deals and ensure that the networks are continually upgraded.
For example, I have 250/100 mbit/s for free. My rent pays for this. But I could if I wanted to easily upgrade to 1gbit/s up and down. I can change ISP (even if that wouldn't be paid for by my rent) and I would know that I always could get the same internet-connectivity speeds.
Although, while this is true for many parts of Sweden, it's not available for everyone. Some places still have networks owned by one company without any access to the city network.
When you say "citizens of the US" you're talking about a continent that would take roughly five days to cross at highway speed, driving ten hours a day. You may as well say "citizens of Europe." If you haven't done that drive, by the way, you should. It will add some perspective to these comparisons. A more reasonable comparison would be between Sweden (population 9.5m) and the state I live in, New Jersey (population 8.9m), which is one of the geographically smaller states in the U.S. We've enjoyed wide access to high speed broadband here for fifteen years or so now. I currently have clean 120 mbps service that is operated at utility levels of reliability. I have no complaints.
Maybe you are a troll, or maybe you just don't understand how networks work. The relevant factor is not the overall size, but rather the population density. Lower population density means more cable per person (on avg.), so it makes it MORE expensive.
Sweden is not very dense, large parts are uninhabited forests.
Sweden 24
United States 35
New Jersey 467.2
You are basically saying, "I live in the most densely populated state in the US, and my Internet is almost as good as the internet of the Swedish country side, U.S.A! U.S.A!"
People from the German Telekom like to us this argument as well, "Germany has much more population, we can't do what they do". That argument has been debunk and shown for what it is many times, by multiple experts. It's simple lobbying by a monopoly provider of copper to defend its monopoly against the competition heavy fiber.
> Sweden is not very dense, large parts are uninhabited forests.
If they're actually uninhabited, then there is no need to build fiber out there, and you shouldn't count them in the density measure. What you're really interested in is the population-weighted density (i.e. the density of the places where people live).
Major U.S. urban areas like Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, and St. Louis are under 900 people per square kilometer. Major cities like Houston, Dallas, and Philly are just north of 1,000. That's 1/3 the density of Stockholm.
Anecdotal evidence. I live in Stockholm. I talk at a conference about once/month, nearly always outside Sweden. Nearly every industrial conference has problems with wifi. Never in Sweden. Anywhere do we have problems at hotels, venues, massive conferences. We have the bandwidth. Most other countries do not, and leaving Sweden is always like going back in time, tbh. Everybody i know has fibre to the home, irrespective if they live in an appartment or suburban house. The suburban house people complain that it costs them 1-2k Euro to pay for the fibre, but they pay for it. The people who don't have fibre to the home are mostly old people (lots of them!) and farmers (and lots of them have it anyways).
I would totally pay 1-2k upfront (assuming I owned the home or was planing to stay at least 5 years) if I "owned" the fiber and could choose my own ISP.
At that level of competition, it could easily drive the prices down into the $10-20 range for high bandwidth, which would probably break even with current cable internet prices now.
I pay nearly $100/mo for 300Mbps/20Mbps since I have about 9 active users in my home. I pay about $1.2k per year in internet, so $1-2k upfront for cheaper monthly pricing and more competitive features.
The carrier owns the fiber, but you still have to pay $2500 upfront plus a $100-500 monthly fee. Most of the time you can choose the ISP though. If you live in a co-operative you can own the fiber yourself and buy transit. Then there's the municipal fiber carriers that will own the fiber, but you only pay the prime cost resulting in lower upfront and monthly fees, and if you live on the countryside you can get a government grant, install the fiber yourself, then sell it for 1$ to one of the carriers usually resulting in low monthly fee.
Is this in Sweden? In the U.S., if a carrier wants to build fiber in a town or suburb, they have to build all the fiber first, then hope people sign up for $70-$100 per month with no money paid up front.
What you describe sounds like a great model. It'd be very difficult to do it in the U.S.
Yes Sweden. The Carriers only own the last mile, then they rent fiber from the backbone. Some carriers have backbone fiber, but most of it is owned by government funded Tier 1 Carrier "Telia" that makes sure all providers and Carriers get equal access.
Maybe that's why there is so much more fiber deployment in Sweden than in the U.S.? The fact that people are willing to pay the infrastructure costs up front? No carrier would be able to get a franchise under those terms in the U.S.
What do carriers in Sweden do with people who can't afford to pay the up front fee?
EDIT: Looking at Stokab, it looks like they don't require an up-front payment. But Stokab built its network over two decades, starting out in the core city and expanding based on market demand: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/sites/digital-age.... That model is illegal in almost every city in the U.S. Any carrier must agree to wire up a whole city on a very short timeline, even areas where there isn't sufficient market demand. Verizon was given less than 8 years to wire up all of New York City.
You get an offer to pay it off in like three or more years. But if you can't you don't get any fiber. But you can often install afterwards if there is fiber in the area.
Stokab is a municipal and non-profit carrier and almost all cities have one of those, competing with the private carriers. The municipal often requires 70% + coverage, witch is very hard to get in a small non tech village with old people. Stokab is a bit different
because they have about 1.5 million people living in their area witch is dense compared to the rest of Sweden.
The private carriers don't even bother if they can't get a few hundred subscribers in the area. So if you live in a small village, but not small enough to get a government grant it can be though.
When you start digging up the streets you must allow competitors to also join, so when one carrier has decided to start digging, you often get offers from other Carriers too, with a slightly lower price. So there's usually many carriers in the same area.
Most of the monthly fee you pay does not go into paying off the initial investment. For example, Verizon wireline's EBITDA margin is 25%. So out of your $100 bill, $75 goes to maintenance, customer service, etc. and $25 is left before paying interest in debt used to build the network, paying taxes, or accounting for the depreciating value of equipment marching toward obsolescence.
They might pay, if they got to chose their provider freely like they can in Sweden, where they build open access networks where any ISP can provide service.
I would happily pay 100-200k if I could capitalize it on a 30y 0-3% mortgage to bring fiber from a carrier neutral facility (say, the Westin Building in Seattle) to a farm. It's about $10k/km for aerial fiber and $50k/km for buried fiber in most places (far higher in a city, but the distances are shorter.)
There's probably a reasonable market doing this at $10-20k/house. There's clearly a market for multi-family dwellings like condos/apartment buildings (webpass, condointernet, etc. have shown), but maybe the next step will be neighborhoods pre-wired with fiber to some kind of switchbox with your choice of carrier coming in.
In the US we typically capitalize utility projects over long time periods, e.g. 30 years. When you pay your water bill the loan is added into the base payment before usage. We built electricity to virtually every home in the US, we could build fiber too.
It's notable that the phone network was built by a government sanctioned monopoly that was permitted to be quite profitable for most of its existence. Pull AT&T annual reports from the 1950s and 1960s and compare them to the financials of Verizon's wireline division today.
> No urban area in the U.S. is as dense as Stockholm's (3,500). NYC is at the low end of that range (2,000), and is less dense than a bunch of Swedish cities with just ~50-100k people.
Wat. NYC is over 10k/km^2. Manhattan is over 25k/km^2.
The "NYC" urban area encompasses NYC + Westchester + Long Island + Newark + parts of CT. Half of the population that lives/works in/around New York lives outside of the city proper.
NYC is not 13,318 sq mi which is what your talking about aka an area ~200 miles wide and bigger than the state of Maryland. By comparison DC is 61 square miles total your figure is like lumping DC, Baltimore, and Richmond VA into one metro area.
Not really: "It is composed primarily of two major metropolitan statistical areas, the Washington–Arlington–Alexandria, DC–VA–MD–WV MSA and the Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, MD MSA. In addition, six other smaller urban areas not contiguous to the main urban area but having strong commuting ties with the main area are also included in the metropolitan area."
I mean some people talk about the Northeast megalopolis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, and some times Richmond. But, that does not mean Boston and DC are somehow the same city.
>"The "NYC" urban area encompasses NYC + Westchester + Long Island + Newark + parts of CT."
Not it does not, that is the "Tri-State" area. I have never heard anyone use the term "NYC Urban area." What you are saying makes it sounds as if those places are suburbs of New York City and none of them are. New York City is 5 boroughs.
Also I think you are confusing Manhattan and New York City. Half the daily population of Manhattan are commuters:
Okay but then you can't compare that to Stockholm proper. It should be exceedingly obvious to anyone who has even Google image searched the two cities that NYC is much denser.
I didn't compare it to Stockholm proper. I compared the NYC urban area (basically, NYC and it's suburbs and satellite cities) to Stockholm's urban area. Stockholm proper is less dense than NYC proper, but that is by itself not that useful a number. More people live outside NYC in the urban area as live inside NYC. The opposite is true for Stockholm.
What you really are interested in is linear density.
The only metric that matters when building a network is linear route miles of cable per subscriber needed to provide service.
There is a single metric you can use to approximate this for any country: people per mile of road. Every (on-grid) dwelling and business is on a street or a road, so if you put a fiber cable on every road or street, then you will pass every inhabitant in the country.
Sweden has 10 people per mile of road. The US has 30 people per mile of road.
Sweden simply does better, despite having to deploy more infrastructure to provide service.
But neither the U.S. nor Sweden puts fiber on every road and street. Only 60% of Swedish households have fiber, and you can reach that figure without serving households outside of relatively dense towns.
Also, it looks like you're counting Sweden's vast unpaved road network, which makes up about 75% of its roads. I bet very few of the 60% of households with fiber live on an unpaved road. If you compare paved roads only, the U.S. and Sweden have the same linear density. And even then, it's much less expensive to connect two dense urban areas at either end of a 100 mile road than to serve sparse suburbs and exurbs along a 100 mile stretch of road.
> But neither the U.S. nor Sweden puts fiber on every road and street.
Firstly, Sweden pretty much intends to do so. The official goal is to bring at least 100 Mbps service to at least 90% of the population by 2020. Many municipalities/states have programs to build out fiber to everybody.
Sweden also already has a cable running to almost every premise, so in practice every road and every street is already passed. In 2011 xDSL covered 98,5% of the population and only 1100 households or businesses had no service or less than 1 Mbps service.
Secondly, it's an estimate, but it's a far better estimate than population density or any other single metric presented so far. It correlates with the linear miles of cable needed to pass all premises, which is the deciding factor in determining costs. It is also readily available and it measures compratively how hard it would be wire up a nation.
By this measure Sweden does far better, even having a need for more infrastructure per inhabitant to reach the same end result, i.e. broadband service for everyone.
You could cover 90% of the population of Sweden while only covering a small fraction of the roads. You could probably cover 98.5% of the population without covering much of the road network.
That's an interesting observation. I wonder if that 99.6% figure is a mistake or if they use a different coverage definition for wireless, because the numbers don't add up.
Looking at the map, the northernmost county has barely any HSPA coverage. Nevertheless that county has a population of a quarter of a million inhabitants. To get 99.6% coverage, you'd still have to cover over 200 000 of those and everybody else in the country. That's clearly impossible as 100 000 inhabitants in that county live outside the ten largest "metro" areas.
There's just no way of not covering a lot of roads if if you aim for coverage in the high nineties with such a dispersed population.
> If you compare paved roads only, the U.S. and Sweden have the same linear density
That's a fair point.
> And even then, it's much less expensive to connect two dense urban areas at either end of a 100 mile road than to serve sparse suburbs and exurbs along a 100 mile stretch of road.
Not necessarily. Build costs in dense urban areas are high, but there are more subscribers. Suburbs and exurbs are cheaper to build per mile, but have less customers. It averages out fairly well.
> Sweden simply does better, despite having to deploy more infrastructure to provide service.
While this is probably true in an absolute sense, Sweden is also a much smaller, more homogeneous country than the U.S.; I don't think governments scale very well, so a small affluent country can likely be more nimble and innovative than a large affluent country (think startups vs enterprises).
I've seen this said many times, but I've never understood why people think this argument makes sense. If anything it's the opposite: the larger the country the larger the economies of scale. If there are diseconomies of scale then you can organise it at the state level or municipal level. Being a larger country simply gives you the option to organise it at a larger scale.
> If anything it's the opposite: the larger the country the larger the economies of scale.
Democracies aren't businesses. Getting some kind of consensus from a huge, diverse populace is hard. I think you end up with diseconomies of scale.
> If there are diseconomies of scale then you can organise it at the state level or municipal level
This requires the federal government to now maintain 50 distinct sets of policy, or delegate to regional bureaucrats. Both of these are diseconomies of scale.
These kinds of problems are hard to solve within a large enterprise with a hierarchical power structure; the United States is a much larger, more diverse entity with a distributed/consensus-driven power structure.
> Being a larger country simply gives you the option to organise it at a larger scale.
The argument that it is merely an option assumes that you are able to rationally choose the best option from the ones available. Not the case when we're talking about government. And the larger the government, the more political power is at stake, the less rational the decision making becomes.
The Op also pointed out that not all of Sweden is served by this municipal ownership arrangement. It may very well be the case that the Op has his or her own bias and Sweden is in fact not widely services this way.
Sweden does "x" better argument is getting tired. Sweden has a lot of negative outcomes as well from socializing so much. Our problem isn't that fact that internet isn't socialized its that its monopolized by 3-4 companies. The incentive to innovate at rapid rate is not there but rather keep the status quo. That being said Google and Verizon are two fiber companies that are leading innovation and forcing other companies to keep up or get left behind by leaving a vacuum of people that want that service. Thats how/why capitalism works. Over time fiber options will rise and we will be in a better position to have some options of our provider instead of being stuck with a state run service that could become crappier over time.
Meh, this is just union posturing to try to save obsolete jobs.
"The wireless home phone service, VoiceLink, is not a proper replacement for copper phone lines because it doesn’t work with security alarms, fax machines, medical devices such as pacemakers that require telephone monitoring, and other services, the union said."
Really? Verizon should be maintaining and repairing obsolete infrastructure so people can keep using fax machines? GMAFB.
I live in a smaller city, not in Stockholm (the capital) or anything close to it. I still have access to 1gbit/s if I want to. :)
There isn't that much fiber in the forests, but anywhere there is a city there is. Sweden has a goal to give 90% of the population fiber before 2020 even if that is probably not going to happen.
They're comparing to NYC, not Manhattan. NYC includes 5 boroughs (and some of them are _large_), and while Manhattan and inner parts of Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens are dense, most of Staten Island and outer parts of Bronx and Queens are relatively sparse.
You can use the same trick to come to the surprising conclusion that LA is denser than NYC. Population-weighed density is definitely a better way to measure density if you want numbers that reflect intuition about how dense a place "feels" rather than merely reflecting what arbitrary political boundaries were chosen
I'm not going to get into a debate in the comment thread, but I will respond to you. You should try not to be so reactionary. I am neither cheerleading for the U.S.A. nor condemning Sweden. What I am saying is that the U.S. spans a continent. There are areas of awesome internet and areas of horrible internet and everything in between. If you think large areas of Sweden are sparsely inhabited have a drive through Utah or New Mexico or Arizona. If you look at Europe I assume you'll also find areas of awesome internet and areas of horrible internet, and that would at least be a somewhat reasonable comparison to make with the U.S.
I don't think it has all that much to do with population density. I think it has everything to do with Sweden not having AT&T, Comcast, and TWC to establish the ground rules for network deployment with their lobbyists.
You can't really treat an entire region like it has a uniform population density, either. Area is not the relevant unit of measure, but total linear distance of the edges of the spanning tree.
Maybe a more predictive measure for networking costs would be median distance to nearest neighbor?
Yes, but that's hard to calculate. What you really want to calculate is linear density. My best approximation for this is people per mile of road. This is easy to calculate and this data is readily available.
Sweden has 10 people per mile of road. The US has 30 people per mile of road.
Sweden simply does better, despite having to deploy more infrastructure to provide service.
Sweden used to have a state telecom monopoly which then became the incumbent. You are right that regulatory capture has played a big part in the development of the telecommunications sector. Sweden had a strong incumbent, but that did not stop the municipalities and power companies from building out competing fiber networks, nor stop the regulator from acting in the best interest of the people.
So, the big difference was that the Swedes had both political support for building fiber networks and a more can do attitude towards getting things done, without excluding large parts of the community.
> When you say "citizens of the US" you're talking about a continent that would take roughly five days to cross at highway speed, driving ten hours a day. You may as well say "citizens of Europe."
I don't know if the comparison should be valid. Over the past 100 years the US has done incredible things. From developing the first transistor to applied atomic power to the first man on the moon, and more relevantly to your point, it expanded the German Autobahn model and took it to a continental scale.
If America wanted to do it, it eventually could be done - and many people around the world still believe this idea to be true.
Edit: What I think is interesting to add is that defense and national pride or prestige were indeed significant factors in these developments through the decades.
If by America you mean the citizens, yes we want to do it and have made it quite clear we've wanted it for quite a while.
First problem is the cost of the infrastructure for such a huge space. We did offer to subsidize it to a point and the companies took the money without delivering. As usual, no repercussions.
Second problem is very few politicians, in office or wishing to run, will listen to the citizens and prefer taking money from corporations to maintain the status quo.
> Did you hear anyone talk about broadband during this year's presidential election?
While it's hard to hear much about policy plans over the personal, historical, and character attacks this cycle, yes, I've heard Clinton promoting her "broadband for all" plan, as well as seen some criticism of and debate about it in the press, etc.
Clinton's proposal is the usual appeal to rural voters by talking about the "broadband gap." That has little to do with fiber, which is presumably what 'talmund was talking about.
While true, it's not the entire explanation. Apathy is far more of a factor here than corruption; average citizens don't care enough about their Internet access choices to lobby their politicians about it. The incumbent providers do a pretty good job of offering just enough service to keep average people satisfied at a price that is not quite high enough to make customers really angry.
“The United States can always be relied upon to do the right thing — having first exhausted all possible alternatives.” -- misattributed to Winston Churchill
> A more reasonable comparison would be between Sweden and ... New Jersey
Except that Sweden is 20 times larger than New Jersey in area. The continental US is 18 times larger than Sweden, so it is actually a better (if terrible) comparison geographically.
Maybe in your argument you should compare Sweden with Michigan, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, or Minnesota instead of New Jersey, which each have at least half the area of Sweden with varying population density.
I'm not sure you can just look at just total population and total land area. The pattern of development in Europe is very different. I just got back from Munich. You go 15 minutes outside the city and it's farmland! In the U.S., it's low-density suburbs for hours in every direction outside a major city.
Incidentally, I didn't get LTE service in the farmland between Munich and the airport. That would be quite unusual in the U.S.
Look at Google maps around say Blacksburg VA or Charleston WV. Which are both is city, city, city, forest. Which is fairly common across much of the US. The eastern seabord being basically one big city is very much an exception not the rule. The US has ~1/3 it's population in ~1/20th of it's land.
And there's farmland in Maryland 20 miles from the White House, despite the DC metro area having 6 million people. Although, in some directions the suburban sprawl does extend much further (30-35 miles in Virginia, and twice that if you draw a line through to the far side of Baltimore).
Sweden is also the country that people always pick, when they want to illustrate that Europe has better broadband, but as you say, it's one of the best examples.
Take Denmark next to Sweden, while still better than the US, for the most part, the broadband roll out is much different. A single phone company (TDC/YouSee) owns the phone network, but they are force to lease their lines to competitors. TDC more or less dictate the price for renting, it just has to be "reasonable". The result is that a 20Mb DSL line cost the same from all providers. Cable companies have been force to open their networks this year, until then they had monopolies in individual areas. Fiber is being rolled out, but slowly and at great cost to the electric companies (that more or less own the fiber networks). This may sound great overall, but rural areas aren't getting nearly the level of connectivity that they would have gotten in Sweden. There are still plenty of place that are lucky to get 5Mbit, and Denmark is a very small country. I can't imagine the cost of rolling out just 10Mbit to 90% of the US customers.
These arguments are now decades old and unresolvable since everyone is trying to extract a meaningful comparison from a single dimension of a complicated metric. I'm pretty over them. Can we call a halt?
If you want to use a single metric, why not use people per mile of road?
This correlates well with the only network metric that matters, linear route miles of cable per subscriber needed to provide service. Every (on-grid) dwelling and business is on a street or a road, so if you put a fiber cable on every road or street, then you will pass every inhabitant in the country.
Sweden has 10 people per mile of road. The US has 30 people per mile of road.
Sweden simply does better, despite having to deploy more infrastructure to provide service.
People still live in the countryside. Rural areas aren't some uninhabited wilderness.
If your aim is to provide broadband to all, you'll have to build there too. Sweden aims to do 100 Mbps to 90% of the population by 2020. Can't do that by just covering urban areas.
Try driving through Wyoming some time (on a highway!). You can easy drive for an hour or two and there is nothing but BLM (gov't) land all around you. No one lives there.
That metric works great if you have 100% penetration.
But what if a place doesn't have service on a large portion of roads? I doubt that is particularly true for this comparison, but the metric probably shouldn't reward a place with more unserved areas.
Yet the country put people on the Moon, built that highway system that spans edge to edge, has telephone services across it, places cables across oceans, built oil pipelines running crazy lengths, among numerous other ridiculously complex engineering projects.
But "bury big tubes with fiber optic cables in them" is somehow too complicated of an engineering task?
The reality is we could get it done, there's just no political will cause the status quo benefits the entrenched players.
The engineering is not complicated, but it involves fights for right of way and obstructionist land owners and municipalities who will fight against it.
This is what's happening in Mountain View, home of Google. We don't have Google Fiber because of local obstructionism.
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is a bit smaller and more densely populated than New Jersey. Yet I have an unreliable and expensive 20mbps connection. If this issue were about size, Silicon Valley would have world-class high speed internet.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think the problem is the sense of good enough. I have the option to purchase 100mbps but I am only paying for 20mbps because it is virtually good enough for everything I do: working from home, video chat, streaming HD videos, backing up to iCloud, etc. When I rent HD movies from iTunes, my wait time is 0.
Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of cheap super high-speed internet, just like I like my streets to be repaved nicely every year.
GP did mention that his connection is unreliable, which is true for me as well (suburb of Milwaukee, WI). When it's working, it's fast enough. But there are plenty of days it's slow or not working when I want it. That I'd like fixed.
Silicon Valley has 100 or 200 Mbit Internet options available, and for the lucky, gigabit Internet. Funny thing is, like money in the Valley, it's very unevenly distributed. (I pay ~$50/month for 100Mbit)
Silicon Valley covers a large number of municipalities, and without specifying which one you're in, all I can say sorry, 20 Mbit is slow these days.
I live in Redwood City, where I have the choice between a slower AT&T connection and a faster Comcast connection. It's partially my fault for being unwilling to pay Comcast, but these are the only choices available just a short drive from Palo Alto.
I live in San Mateo and also pay $50/month for 100mpbs, which is mostly reliable, and the speed is 'good enough'. I could pay more but the gains in speed aren't worth the extra $$.
The building next door to me is wired for fiber through one provider, Wave, and offers 1gig for $80/month: https://gowaveg.com. I'd love to switch and pay the extra $30 for much better internet but I can't get access to it as a single customer since it is decided building by building.
Except I'm relatively certain that like most states once you're outside one of the major cities the options and quality of broadband access drops significantly. In many non-US countries this is not the case. Likewise the level you're able to get isn't even equally available in main cities across the U.S. My hometown of Milwaukee WI for example has very poor options for s moderately large city.
Compare this to a relatively small city like Pereslavl in Russia where I lived for a summer. It's about 120some km north of Moscow but the base options for most of the ISPs was 50/50; note the plural on ISPs. We had more choices and better service in a small Russian city than most states have across their major cities. And my girlfriend (Russian native) was annoyed that we had to pay an "outrageous 450 ruble" for the access.
It's not just a matter of size with the U.S., the planning in general is very poor and not built out compared to many countries. The priority on the last mile networks just seems to be lower or more poorly managed.
I have heard that response before, but I don't think it holds.
The culture density in Europe is tremendous compared to the US. European countries are not like US states: in a few hours, I can go to a city where nobody speaks my language. Even within my country, many regions have tremendous accents and even completely different languages that are still in heavy use (Brittany's Breton language, for instance).
Even at a governmental level, passports are issued by countries; US citizens have the same passport, with common federal laws and a single military.
Culture variety drives the number of communities regardless of the size of geographic surfaces.
The US is one big community with fairly common concerns, such as ISP monopolies. In Europe, we have very different ISP markets from country to country — each has different companies and different struggles.
Sure, there are inequalities even within a common culture; you can have good phone coverage in Montpellier but no reception around Millau. Still, when you face the same competitors across the country, you are authorized to characterize their behavior towards the market.
Good for you. You probably had a bunch of former AT&T employees on the local board negotiating with cable company twenty years ago. Unfortunately, you're the exception because cable companies are able to exploit gaps in the regulatory framework.
The scaling up of a system to the national level isn't the challenge -- it's the need to scale down to the municipal level that creates the monopoly problems.
The POTS network was regulated by FCC and State utility commissions, and were run very well. Cable is government by franchise agreements at the local level, which results in poor governance because local governments aren't equipped to negotiate these types of contracts.
The United States was a country last time I checked, unless Mexico and Canada have mysteriously disappeared. A country roughly the same size as Australia, which has a significantly smaller population.
The Australian government came up with a credible plan to provide high speed internet along the lines of the Swedish model being described. It has subsequently been modified to be less fast, but the concept of providing government-owned infrastructure to be leased by multiple providers on a competitive basis stays.
If it's possible in Australia, it's definitely technically feasible in the US too.
I wonder how much of the difference in perception is due to very different urban/suburban/rural dynamics in the U.S. versus Europe. I just bought a house near the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland (a dense east-coast state). My neighborhood just got public sewer/water in the last couple of years, but we've got fiber! Meanwhile, you can't get fiber in Baltimore, the state's largest city.
Very few people have no complaints when it comes to Comcast, one of the most hated companies in the country. And you have no alternative besides Comcast. If it were regulated like a utility that would be one thing, but you're at the mercy of a powerful monopoly which has been know to play all kinds of anti-consumer tricks. I'd recommend keeping a close eye on your bill.
Very few people have no complaints when it comes to Comcast
I guess I'm one of the lucky ones? I've had them for years now and no real complaints. I'm certainly not blow away by their customer service, but they came and setup the internet when they said they would and I've had maybe one outage that lasted less than an hour (in 5 years).
Assuming you're in Verizon's FiOS service area. They do seem to do a fine job, but I had problems when they were unable to foster a decent union relationship and they went to total shit for a few months. I had issues during this period and was totally stuck.
So if you're in the northeastern corridor, you have 1 option for decent isp service, and it's totally reliant on Scrooge McDuck CEO not boning up a labor agreement. Otherwise you're screwed. USA USA USA indeed.
Google's calculation doesn't include stops for gas, food, and bathroom breaks. Not to mention that with that much driving you're bound to run into a few delays due to construction or accidents, or just bad timing hitting a metro area during rush hour.
No it doesn't; you intersperse that with the 10 hours of driving. Ten hours of driving, two hours of generous breaks and lunch, twelve hours for dinner/sleep/shower/relaxing.
I agree, generalizing country to country comparisons without considering population and size are usually not valuable unless you have context to these things.
After giving it some thought, I can not figure out why the time to drive from Boston to Seattle is relevant to whatever argument is trying to be made here.
We've tried, man. Billions of dollars were given to Verizon, AT & T, etc to build out infrastructure. They took the money and did little or nothing. We have "regulatory capture" which is where an incumbent lobbies and gets state or federal regulations that blocks competition. A widely cited figure states that the average broadband customer costs Comcast less than $2/month for broadband internet. Yet they charge more than $50/mo to supply it and recently rolled out data transfer caps. Without any real competition Comcast, et. al. can do what they like.
Google's switching to wireless is in part an acknowledgment that competing in the wired space is costly and fraught with hurdles including lawsuits from incumbents. Could we wire the nation tomorrow with gigabit everywhere? Well not literally, but if there was a "moonshot" program that captured the public's imagination yeah I'd imagine we could get it done in a few years. We've done it before when we really wanted to - the Rural Electrification and Highway programs are two examples from the last century. But it would represent an incredible change from how business is done today and the resulting lawsuits would drag on for decades after the work was done.
Heck, we didn't even invest in "shovel ready" projects. 90% of what we were told was "infrastructure" spending went to shore up state entitlement budgets.
> The municipalities own (most of) the networks and all the fiber cables, letting companies use them for a small(ish) fee. These companies later sell it to customers.
This is the model that should be used everywhere, if we were to actually consider it a utility.
By default it does nothing, but if you pay some company to terminate it to the internet then you get internet, using whatever speed they can provide. Let the ISPs compete based on the service they provide: internet speed, reliability, support, and other add-ons like (e-mail or malware filters or the best wifi-router-modem included) or even the lack of any add-ons.
Even if this isn't a "municipal service" strictly speaking, if contracted out to a telco of sorts, it should be done the same way, and we should not allow the same company that provides the physical lines to provide the actual service, since it's anti-competitive.
The trouble is that in the US, this sort of thing is seen as government unfairly competing with private industry.
Of course, we just get private industry setting up monopolies or duopolies instead, often with the help of local laws prohibiting competition. This is worse, but somehow more acceptable to the American electorate.
Anything that is done at cost by the government is viewed by many as a lost potential profitable and taxable business; one that would drive up the GDP (Gross Domestic Product), a well used measure of an economy. Problem with using GDP, in my limited understanding, is that taxing things, even your breathing air, increases the GDP - I'd rather it not.
> Anything that is done at cost by the government is viewed by many as a lost potential profitable and taxable business; one that would drive up the GDP (Gross Domestic Product), a well used measure of an economy.
No, that's not how GDP works. The GDP measurement is independent of whether the action is performed by the private or public sector.
> Problem with using GDP, in my limited understanding, is that taxing things, even your breathing air, increases the GDP
Taxes are included in the GDP income method, which is why taxing even air (even if free) would increase GDP.
The OECD defines GDP as "an aggregate measure of production equal to the sum of the gross values added of all resident and institutional units engaged in production (plus any taxes, and minus any subsidies, on products not included in the value of their outputs).”
> Taxes are included in the GDP income method, which is why taxing even air (even if free) would increase GDP. The OECD defines GDP as "an aggregate measure of production equal to the sum of the gross values added of all resident and institutional units engaged in production (plus any taxes, and minus any subsidies, on products not included in the value of their outputs).”
GDP is composed of four components. One of those components is government spending, which can be negative (ie, taxes) or positive (subsidies or direct purchasing).
However, government spending doesn't come from nowhere (no, even if the money is printed or issued as debt). A change in government spending is always matched by an equivalent change in consumption, investments, and/or net exports, which are the source of that money.
The secondary effects of tax policies may be to ultimately change the shape of aggregate supply or aggregate demand functions (at least, that's the argument for doing so), but taxation does not directly have any effect on GDP.
I mispoke; GDP == taxable transactions. If it was taxable (privatized), it would increase the GDP, whereas if not (as if the government performed and didnt tax it), it would not increase the GDP.
That's an oversimplification that honestly provides a more confusing definition than the real one, which is that GDP is the sum of consumption, investment, government spending (which can be negative) and net exports.
> If it was taxable (privatized), it would increase the GDP, whereas if not (as if the government performed and didnt tax it), it would not increase the GDP.
No. Whether a service is performed by the private or public sector has no bearing on how much it counts towards GDP.
Thanks you for the reply. Your rigid definition of GDP is only one of many models. GDP(I) and GDP are similar and should be exact but because of statistical and measurement defects, they are not. But GDP(I) does in fact use taxes. I understand (grossly) that to make GDP(I) == GDP, you add taxes to GDP. Regardless, GDP can be modeled in several ways according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. If a government decides to not tax air, no economic activity. If they do, and a company sells you taxable air, there is economic activity. In the former case, it no money is required. In the latter, it generates economic activity, activity that cannot be swept under the rug and must be measured. It does matter, gov vs private industry.
> Your rigid definition of GDP is only one of many models. But GDP(I) does in fact use taxes. I understand (grossly) that to make GDP(I) == GDP, you add taxes to GDP. Regardless, GDP can be modeled in several ways according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis.
GDP can be measured in several ways. In a perfectly observable system, all the measurements would be exactly equal. They are not different models and they do not represent different underlying concepts. It is wrong to say that taxes are included in one measurement of GDP and not the other. In some methods, they are measured directly, and in others, they are measured indirectly. In both cases, taxes have the same effect.
> If a government decides to not tax air, no economic activity. If they do, and a company sells you taxable air, there is economic activity. In the former case, it no money is required. In the latter, it generates economic activity, activity that cannot be swept under the rug and must be measured.
Your usage of "economic activity" isn't really well-defined. But the difference between the two situations you're describing is that, in one, air is free, and in the other, air is being sold. The fact that it's being taxed on top of the sale is irrelevant.
This is also a really pointless example because air is mostly a non-excludable resource, so talking about either "selling" it or "taxing" doesn't reveal anything meaningful.
> It does matter, gov vs private industry.
No, it does not. Taxation doesn't come from nowhere. From a macroeconomics perspective, the government isn't "special".
Let me try one last time: Remember when I said that GDP = consumption + investment + government expenditures + net exports? Some economists would instead say that GDP is really "just" consumption + investment + net exports. And guess what? Regardless of which school of thought you subscribe to, the end result is exactly the same. It doesn't matter whether you break out government expenditures separately from consumption, investment, and net exports or whether you include government consumption in "consumption", government investment in "investment" and so on. The end result is exactly the same.
The OECD defines GDP income method as "an aggregate measure of production equal to the sum of the gross values added of all resident and institutional units engaged in production (plus any taxes, and minus any subsidies, on products not included in the value of their outputs).”
My understanding is that view only applies when the federal government is doing it. If a local government is doing it, the only ones that claim this are the people who would be losing business.
Laws restricting or prohibiting local governments from providing internet access to inhabitants are pretty common. I'm sure the actual underlying reason involves regulatory capture and lobbying from incumbents, but the unfair competition angle is convincing enough for the legislators in question to go ahead with it and not get ejected from office.
A big problem there is that no one knows what laws are on the books in their own states regarding this. I know I do not in New York. I want to look it up at some point, but I don it yet know how.
As mentioned in the other discussion, I totally agree this kind of model seems to work better.
As an example, here in Italy we have a separate company ran by a utility provider (which is used to handle infrastructure at a scale and can leverage existing assets) taking care of deploying fiber in the cities and then they make it available to multiple ISPs (bitstream).
In this way you have an entity who is solely focused on building and managing the infrastructure, which is able to make investments that single ISPs would not be able to do (while trying to still be profitable).
The end result for the consumers is that here in Milan, as an example, multiple operators started offering 1 Gb/s FTTH connections for around 30 EUR/month.
Such fees are only possible if you do not have to try to be profitable while having to absorb the hit from deploying your own infrastructure.
Note that DSL means VDSL2, that is 100Mbps dedicated (while cable is shared with neighbors AFAIK). When I was in Italy I had dramatically better connectivity than my Comcast Business in SF which costs 3 times as much.
Its not clear that the Nordic model is being used in any other European country, so I'm not sure that we can count low fiber rates in e.g. Italy, Germany of evidence of the model's lack of scalability.
Perhaps more significantly, (data from the same table), I'm interested to know what the deployment models look like in Japan and Korea.
This misses the fact that much of that UK figure is FTTC (Fiber to the Cabinet). E.g. I live in the rural UK and have a 'Cable' line that is 200Mbps down/12Mbps up.
Given most consumers use wifi within the home, and at these speeds it becomes the gating factor, is there any advantage (excluding nerd edge-cases of the average HN reader!) of faster speeds than that?
Indeed, there's very little fibre in the UK. VDSL (DSL in that list) is being sold as fibre, and cable (cable in that list) is being sold as fibre, but cruicially, are not fibre.
Very few even vaguely close to fibre-like services (e.g. Hyperoptic) in the UK
I have 330mbs fttp in the UK, and I live in the countryside.
2% have fttp cover now, relatively few take it though.
There are very few use cases right now, I had 12mbs vdsl before, and I hardly notice that there is a difference to be honest, although my wife is a photographer and the high speed upload is a god send for her.
I've asked BT about that one and it looks like it's select exchanges only (even after FTTC has been rolled out), which is a shame as I'd happily pay for it.
The only "superfast" option I've got at the moment is a full leased line, whcih isn't a viable prospect for residential Internet..
No, I got it because of BDUK. I'm on a long leg to a hamlet, which makes fttc difficult (dslam is expensive and you have to run the fibre almost all the way in any case). Then it was option 4 infinity. In your case have you looked to an Openreach community build or Gigaclear?
Only FTTH (fiber-to-the-home) should count as fiber. In Belgium one of the larger cable providers used to advertise their plans as 'FiberNet' while it was only FTTN (fiber-to-the-neighbourhood) and the last step was cable (with significantly lower uplink speeds than what would be attainable with fiber).
We have a lot of fibre-to-the-cabinet in the UK, which means you may only have copper for a few hundred metres. It's obviously nowhere near as good as fibre to the home, but I think lumping it in with plain old DSL is a bit unfair - a lot of people get 60+mbps down and 18+mbps up which isn't too shabby internationally.
I used to have optical fiber in a brand new building in Osaka: the fiber was actually only going to the building, then it was RJ45 (or something very similar, I'll admit never trying to play with it).
It was much faster, and far more reliable than fios by Verizon that I have now in NYC...
Note that outlier amongst the rest of the European countries excluding Sweden. Spain is a year or two into rolling out FTTP everywhere, replacing the copper twisted pair everywhere it can. 0 cost upgrade for the end user, with a speed upgrade from "Up to 10Mbps" to 30Mbps/10Mbps of actual throughput.
"Stuck on DSL"? I beg to differ: I'll take DSL in Paris over cable in NYC any day. Cheaper, faster and much more reliable. That said large European countries are definitely late when it comes to fiber...
When the DSL network is giving 50Mb/s or more, there's much less incentive for users to choose the fibre service.
I'm on a 100Mb/s cable service, even though there's fibre to my new-built apartment, since the cable company seemed much more competent when I moved in.
> Craig Barratt, chief executive of Access, the Alphabet division containing Google Fiber, also said he planned to step down because the company was shifting to new technologies and methods of deploying high-speed internet.
Fiber is expensive in every way (labor, regulatory hurdles, resistance from existing broadband companies, etc.). If they've found a viable alternative, it could mean they'll be able to accelerate their broadband rollout.
I'm not saying we should assume that's already the case, but we also shouldn't assume this means they're giving up.
First invent better robots that can do the job, or similar tasks. Next sell the technology to refine it to further fund R&D. Finally, purse other ventures that used to have expensive labor costs.
They could do Google Fiber today if they could sell it for more. The only other realistic plan is to reduce to cost of the project.
> The municipalities own (most of) the networks and all the fiber cables, letting companies use them for a small(ish) fee. These companies later sell it to customers. This help people to get the best deals and ensure that the networks are continually upgraded.
well that would be socialism. Sorry comrade, here in the US we have this thing called FREEDOM. It Trumps your smart/efficient/reasonable solutions any day.
I do wonder what would happen, if networks for water, waste, electricity or even streets would have to be build on a large scale in the political climate of the US today.
Implying the political climate has ever been any different.
Something something past, rose-tinted glasses.
Political climate is a function of the people in charge. People in charge, due the nature of power and its effects, are always the same. Therefore the political climate is always the same.
It depends on what you mean by large scale, but there is nothing unusual about a development with hundreds of new homes, with complete utilities (maybe even a small wastewater treatment system for the development).
If my internet connection was maintained in a similar manner to the street I live on, I would be switching to satellite. The US has a severe problem with its ability to maintain infrastructure - which I think is closely related to the ability to scale mentioned in another comment.
For reference, Sweden is around the same size as California, with 1/4th the population.
Do you have the same problem with your water and sewer?
The problem with infrastructure in the US is simply one of money. We don't want to pay for nice things. It's the 50 year old self-fulfilling prophesy of cut budgets, then complain that nothing is maintained and so the budget needs to be cut more because clearly it must have been wasted. Repeat ad nauseum. (This of phenomenon also plays out on the micro scale when people claim poor people are poor because they bought a stick of gum, instead of I guess investing 22 cents in an index fund or something.)
No, it's things like what happened with the Big Dig in Boston...
"However, the project was completed only in December 2007 (instead of 1998), at a cost of over $14.6 billion ($8.08 billion in 1982 dollars, meaning a cost overrun of about 190%)[6] as of 2006"
Lets be honest here. What would you do when you've dug a hole in the middle of Boston and disrupted traffic and every other piece of infrastructure in that part of city after you run out of budget? Walk away and leaving a gaping pit? Spend more money and fill the pit in, and then be left with your original problem, that's now probably even worse than when you started? Fill in the hole, and then dig a new hole? Or do you effectively throw good money after bad and finish the job?
Comparing a government transportation project to anything in the private sector is a canard. There's literally nothing comparable. That isn't the say that government contracting policies and processes are perfect and not abused. They clearly aren't perfect, and they clearly are abused. See the F-35, and well, pretty much every military purchase since the Cold War. See the vast majority of government infrastructure projects. Most importantly, these cost overruns aren't something that's fundamental about private-vs-public, but rather something about how American governments function.[0] Unfortunately, there's no single smoking gun, and instead everyone falls back to their favorite boogeymen. (My favorites are multiple environmental impact studies, public comment periods, fraud, and of course willful incompetence (i.e. "I don't believe the government should do this, so I"m going to do a really shitty job, and then use my poor performance as evidence that the government is intrinsically incompetent."))
> Why not skip the middle step and just have the municipalities provide it to the customers directly?
Because monopolies are wasteful and horrible at things like customer service. The fiber in the ground is a natural monopoly. Connecting that fiber to the rest of the world isn't. You don't want the monopoly to extend one inch more than it has to, regardless of whether the natural monopoly is municipal or Comcast.
As jonathankoren says, the municipal ones rolling out Internet are pretty much all offering better speeds, cost, and service. Further, that Comcast and AT&T are paying legislators millions of dollars to make this illegal shows they would rather intentionally sabotage their customers for profit than benefit them with competition's effects. If private sector was better, they'd welcome the competition with these tiny towns and cities then crush them in the marketplace with superior offerings.
They don't have superior offerings, though. Not at the margins they want. ;)
And if municipal ISPs weren't more efficient than the corporate conglomerates you'd have a point, but the fact is that municipal ISPs have been found to provide cheaper and higher quality service than than the corporate ISPs, quite simply because there isn't a profit motive beyond breaking even. This is why Comcast, Time-Warner and the rest are pressuring state legislatures to ban municipal ISPs.[0]
GP said "regardless of whether the natural monopoly is municipal or Comcast", i.e. both are bad options. Not sure why you are asking the GP to defend a claim that wasn't made.
Because a monopoly isn't inherently bad, if regulated properly. My monopoly water, gas, and electric providers do just fine; all highly reliably (and either a small or no profit right is granted).
Why not my internet? Why can't it be a regulated utility? Because of fear mongers and corruption.
Full steam ahead on municipal bandwidth it appears, and coming for politicians with pitchforks who oppose it.
> Because a monopoly isn't inherently bad, if regulated properly. My monopoly water, gas, and electric providers do just fine; all highly reliably (and either a small or no profit right is granted).
A monopoly provider is always bad for the consumer. (Occasionally, it is less bad for the consumer than any feasible alternative, but it is always a sign that the consumer is receiving the "short end" of the stick)[0]. For so-called "natural monopolies", the most that regulation can do is reduce that disparity, but it cannot eliminate it - and it does this for a hefty premium (the price of the regulation).
In most (but not all) markets, utility companies are the textbook example of natural monopolies. But there is no reason to believe that the entire supply chain of residential Internet access is a natural monopoly. Furthermore, natural monopolies aren't really a "good" thing; they're just unavoidable in some circumstances. For example, utility companies, whether privately or publicly run, typically do horribly with customer satisfaction ratings, response times for non-emergency services, and so on. The fact that their customers' demand is completely inelastic is the main reason for this.
A monopoly is pretty much inherently bad; it just so happens that sometimes it's unavoidable. But, as OP said, there's no reason to sanction a monopoly provider for an industry (or part of an industry) in which it is avoidable.
> either a small or no profit right is granted
Just because something is nominally run by the public sector or as a "non-profit" doesn't mean that a profit is not being made off the good/service chain. The difference is where that profit is accounted for on the books.
[0] This can be illustrated very easily using cost curves; I'm speaking in colloquial terms like "short end of the stick" specifically to avoid the need for economics jargon, but it's a pretty straightforward and fundamental lemma from basic supply and demand.
> A monopoly is pretty much inherently bad; it just so happens that sometimes it's unavoidable. But, as OP said, there's no reason to sanction a monopoly provider for an industry (or part of an industry) in which it is avoidable.
But it is clearly not avoidable. If one of the largest tech companies in the world (with enormous profits and cash reserves) cannot afford to deploy fiber in major cities, it is clear that the private sector cannot reliably and affordably provide this service on the scale required.
No further proof is necessary that the marketplace will resolve this issue.
> But it is clearly not avoidable. If one of the largest tech companies in the world (with enormous profits and cash reserves) cannot afford to deploy fiber in major cities, it is clear that the private sector cannot reliably and affordably provide this service on the scale required.
You're talking about the wrong market. Putting the fiber in the ground is an unavoidable natural monopoly. But connecting that fiber to the rest of the world isn't -- the only reason there is a monopoly today is that the private incumbents are allowed to leverage the monopoly in the first market into a monopoly in the second one.
We could prohibit them from offering termination services and instead require the wires to be leased on the open market. The incumbents will lobby against that just as they do against municipal fiber, because they want to keep leveraging one monopoly into another. We are under no obligation to agree with them.
It's possible that having the municipality own the wires is actually better, or not. That is the whole privatization debate. But that has nothing to do with the fact that regardless of who owns the local wires, it is better to have competition in who terminates them. Because termination is not a natural monopoly.
> But it is clearly not avoidable. If one of the largest tech companies in the world (with enormous profits and cash reserves) cannot afford to deploy fiber in major cities, it is clear that the private sector cannot reliably and affordably provide this service on the scale required.
First of all, the fact that one company tries something and fails doesn't mean that the entire problem is intractable. It means that that particular attempt didn't work. Other variants might. Pretty much every single successful startup you read about is doing something that was previously attempted unsuccessfully or with less success.
And to that point, Google's model wasn't fundamentally different from the model used by existing ISPs[0] - they were doing almost the exact same thing (deploying {fiber, cable} from Tier 1 networks to the last mile) and structured their pricing in the same way. Their main goal was to force competition, not to dramatically change the fundamental business model of ISPs.
For example, one proposal that has been thrown around is the unbundling of the last mile, in which the lines are deployed and maintained by one entity but leased out to multiple private ISPs who actually service the customers[1]. There are other possibilities as well that haven't been tested yet either. Google failed at being a "better traditional ISP", but that doesn't mean that:
1) anyone who tries to be a "better traditional ISP" is doomed to fail, or
2) Google (or someone else) can't be successful as an ISP by using a different, non-traditional model altogether
[0] with one exception: they sought (and received) carve-out agreements
[1] Incidentally, this is what's already done with wireless networks (MVNOs) and in some places (like NYC) for electricity supply (supply only, not the wires).
This is what my city is doing. They just brought fiber to my home, and I pay $50/mo for bidirectional gigabit. I pay for it alongside my trash and water bill. (Longmont, CO)
> The municipalities own (most of) the networks and all the fiber cables, letting companies use them for a small(ish) fee. These companies later sell it to customers. This help people to get the best deals and ensure that the networks are continually upgraded.
The UK version is that the cables are owned by one highly regulated company (BT OpenReach) which then has to sell on to retail ISP's at a set rate.
Fibre To The Cabinet (that is, using copper for the last few hundred metres), was rolled out to probably 70% of households without subsidy, and from then on it has required government funding for rural or otherwise difficult areas. The speed is nowhere near what you're listing, though. It's something like 10-50 Mb/sec.
This seems a little hyperbolic. Where I live I can get gigabit either via Comcast or AT&T here in Chicago. The rollout to gigabit is slow, but its coming. Sweden has 9.5m people. We have 320m and a huge landmass. Infrastructure upgrades simply take longer considering our size and population and a variety of other issues.
Its not exactly Google or bust. Its clear Google doesn't have the chops to enter more markets. Its assumed they were never serious about being competitive and wanted to jump-start gigabit for the home. Whether or not they accomplished that is unknown as both AT&T and Comcast had gigabit plans before Google rolled out its own product. I'm sure it helped push things forward a bit.
Lastly, Google is looking towards a WISP-model for its services. The fiber runs are too encumbered with right-of-way and crony monopolistic practices. Even then Google is taking a loss with its service according to some analysts. With the proper wireless bandwidth and licensed frequencies, you can deliver internet services without a fiber run to the home.
Google is also a mobile company much more than an ISP. It makes no sense to have this artificial division between home and mobile internet. With voip over lte it makes no sense to even have things like gsm or cdma anymore or have your phone number 'owned' by some mobile carrier. It seems google is retooling for a more beefy project fi or something similar that will bridge the gap between home and mobile internet. I imagine, in the future, the idea of having a home internet and a separate mobile internet is going to go away.
edit: -3 score? Please reply instead of drive-by hating.
Where I live I can get Comcast. Slow Comcast. At the price they set. I pay for TV channels and don't own a TV. I asked if I could stop paying for parts of the service I cannot use, and they told me "No." As they are the only ISP in my area, I'd really, really like public involvement in Internet infrastructure, even if just to provide a single competitor. Seeing as I live a few blocks from Tim Berners-Lee's office, it's a little ridiculous that I can only access the web through an abusive monopoly.
"Abusive Monopoly" is the definition of most cable providers. Its a long sad history of civic corruption and greed. The actual cable should be turned into a utility, and the content competed for channel by channel, service by service, in an open market.
Well every county has a local county cable commission (or something similar) who set the policies for the cable company operating in that particular county. I did a semester project at Comcast Montgomery County MD which is (or was at the time) a top 5 county for them. Every aspect of their business, from what the prices were to where call centers could be had to be approved by the local commission.
You might say that the county cable commission is corrupt but its probably no more so than the people who regulate power companies.
While this is true to a certain extent I wouldn't go as far as calling this the Swedish model.
There are plenty of companies that own and are continually rolling out new fiber in Sweden, especially when you start looking outside the large cities. I would guess that IP-Only (Bynet) and Telia alone are currently putting more fiber in the ground than the state run networks combined.
For rural areas a lot (most?) of the new fiber is built by local organisations and payed for by the members, EU-subsidies and partnerships with companies that take over the operations of the networks once they have been built.
That said, both IP-Only and Telias fiber networks are Open networks that allow the customers to choose from a number of different ISP for their internet connectivity.
The model in South Africa is extremely similar: single country-wide governmental telco/last mile (Telkom) and competing private ISPs. It doesn't work at all. My 10Mb ADSL is currently sitting at 6Mb because of "line optimization." Resolving the last issue on my line took 8 months. I pay €65 for this because there is no other choice. We have a moniker for this pit of incompetence: "Hellkom."
As we speak, private ISPs are rolling out their own fibre-to-the-home in order to break loose of Hellkom. Hellkom is responding by launching their own FTTH packages that are 3x the cost and have caps that can be depleted in a day.
What works for the Swedish will not work for everyone.
We're trying. Our not-too-far-off alternative is to require whoever owns the physical cable within the city to sell services to other providers (usually for a regulated fee).
Basically what we did for long-distance phone service. The recent FCC ruling stopped short of doing just that, but it isn't a stretch of the imagination for the FCC to apply full teleco rules to cable providers in the US.
Of course, every ISP is going to lobby extremely hard against that. But one can only hope...
Norway is a mix of things. In more urban areas, its the cable TV provider that rules (often a subsidiary of the former government telecom monopoly). And out in rural areas it has been mostly DSL. But recently local power companies have started deploying fiber, many of them partnering with a single company for the ISP side of things.
>I think the Swedish (Nordic?) model for bringing internet connectivity to it's citizens is superior.
That's no surprise. The Scandinavian countries are superior nations to every other country on Earth, except maybe Switzerland. Every quality-of-life study ranks them at the very top.
You normally have government funds that are allocated to reduce the "digital divide" (deploying high speed broadband to places where it does not make any sense to do it financially).
Works well especially when the company receiving such funds is only focusing on building the infrastructure to then rent it back to the ISPs that will leverage it to provide services to the customers...
A similar model is also used here in Italy to provide mobile network coverage in certain areas: the mobile operators "teamed up" and deployed "shared" infrastructure instead of having to deploy and mantain each one its own. This is the way in which they cover remote (less profitable) areas or special areas like the entire subway lines.
From taxes, or EU subsidies (which are still taxes).
But it's the same concept as building roads or other basic infrastructure. As a government, you invest in creating infrastructure in your country even if in purely commercial terms is less profitable. You reduce the digital divide, you lay out infrastructure for future growth, you create jobs, and so on. Different models, pros and cons for each one.
That model is useful for environments with high population density living with relatively compact terrestrial coverage. The costs will vary wildly when you apply this model to wire up Arizona, Nebraska, or even greater Los Angeles area.
Allo is bringing fiber to a lot of communities in Nebraska, and the dominant ISPs are freaking out. Six of the seven served locations aren't large towns by any measure.
>ensure that the networks are continually upgraded.
How is that ensured? At least in the US, munis and federal govt are notoriously slow on upgrading tech. Often requiring legislative (slow) approval and tax increases to get it done.
The Stockholm municipal fiber company is wholly owned by the city, makes a profit, and reinvests every single krona into upgrades and expansion.
It took 20 years or so, but they started with the most lucrative routes in the inner city, serving companies and universities, and then slowly expanded their network over the years until they're now at a point where I think they've covered almost every home in the city.
No tax money used beyond the initial funding, since it's a profitable company, and no legislation required, since it's just a company. And the competition can't whine either, because this company isn't doing anything they couldn't do.
Fact check.... I spent nearly a month in Stockholm in July. Stayed with friends and none of them got close to 1Gbps. In-fact speeds were similar to mine here in San Francisco (50 - 100Mbps).
keep in mind the subtext beneath the announcement: they are shifting to other technologies that require less physical infrastructure investment (wireless?)
No, his pays for it with his rent, the same way my rent includes heating.
The owner of the building has probably signed a deal to get a good rate for everyone. Fine if you like it, but a waste of money if you'd prefer a different provider.
Please read the original comment in its entirety, beyond the first half of the two sentences you misleadingly quote.
> municipalities own (most of) the networks and all the fiber cables, letting companies use them for a small(ish) fee.
> For example, I have 250/100 mbit/s for free. My rent pays for this.
He pays rent to the landlord, the landlord pays the broadband company for service to all the apartments, the broadband company pays the municipality to use the fibre network.
The fibre network might have used tax money initially, or it might have been laid with income from usage fees from other areas. There's no ongoing use of tax money for the network.
Well google announced they were exploring a fiber rollout in Chicago. Now both AT&T along with Time Warner Cable have 1G service throughout parts of the city.
Alternatively, one can look at this not as a failure, but as a success. The point of Google fiber was to force carriers to get faster internet to everyone. It appears that it has been working. This benefits google directly as their properties such as Youtube can deliver more and better content.
That's nice for Chicago, and Austin, but what about LA, Houston, etc.?
I pay $75/month for 150Mbps via Comcast... and most days a speed test will say around half of that, and there's infrequent outages (averaging roughly one every month).
The only other service where I live is AT&T: 18Mbps for $50/month. And whatever you may think of Comcast, my experience with AT&T's service and customer service has been far, far worse.
I pay $63.25 for a 2M/256K rural WISP connection, and i'm in a county with 500,000 people. In fact, i'm only 4 miles south of Madison, WI city limits.. I live in a neighborhood of 100 homes. I would kill for a 10M connection, and more than 2M up..
Should add, ATT has said on their website for the last 9 years that DSL is available at my house.. I sign up once a year, to have a guy 2 days later say its a mistake, and neighborhood is too far from the CO. I have been told 4 times to get a petition around the neighborhood, but of course, the people at the call center can't tell me what to do with that petition, or where to send it, etc. so its just to get me off the phone.
So fed up, and needing to start working from home soon, that I'm moving in a few months..
I wonder if you can get regulators involved here. I know internet is still relatively lightly regulated compared to the phone network, but AT&T has been willingly refusing to do new non-Uverse DSL installs the past couple years.
If you can document that DSL was once available at your house or that your neighbors still have it, you might be able to get somewhere.
Oh I'm not saying it is good for users, only that it isn't entirely bad for Google. I want them to succeed and crush Comcast / AT&T. As a consumer of internet service, who doesn't want that? Those companies are terrible.
That being said, the other wildcard (that another user did mention) is whenever SpaceX gets all of the spectrum / permits for their internet microsat constellation, it will happen. That will most likely be a few years out at best, but when it happens, no doubt it will be a good option (LEO Sats have a lot better ping times than existing Satellite based internets).
Edited to mention that it is SpaceX working on a Satellite internet constellation not Tesla (thanks: nickjarboe for the cluebat).
I believe it's SpaceX not Tesla that is investigating an internet microsat constellation, but if the Tesla/Solar City merger goes through, you could be right in the long term.
Just to be clear, Google Fiber in Austin is more marketing than reality. A small area of town has it--most do not. And while the other players have now introduced fiber, their coverage is also limited to select neighborhoods.
So, I don't agree that it's nice for Austin. This removes the incentive for the other providers to continue expanding coverage, and the core of the city will likely be stuck on the old cable lines for much, much longer.
Really I'm mostly bitter because right now I'm paying $57/mo for 12 Mbps U-Verse in Mountain View. I could pay $70/mo to switch to either 50 Mbps Sonic (currently considering) or 100 Mbps Xfinity (really don't want to deal with Comcast customer service). Aside from Sonic, these all come with a data cap.
I was really looking forward to giving Google $70/mo for 1 Gbps or whatever they were offering, and not having a data cap. It's not that I expect to hit the cap, but the fact that I don't want to think about it.
I'm in Mountain View too. I agree it's pretty frustrating that this is supposedly the tech center of the universe, and our home internet is lousy. Five minutes from Google HQ and no Google Fiber for the forseeable future now.
FWIW, I recently switched from Sonic to Comcast and I'm relatively happy now. But that had something to do with Sonic being unable to provide a good connection in my old apartment building.
Their customer service has been appalling every time I've dealt with them.
I moved recently and was forced to sign up with them as the only competitor option was 7mbps. After provisioning my service online successfully, I received a call from them stating that I would not be able to receive the the service I had requested at the price they quoted. I could either cut the speed in half, or increase my bill by $70/month. I was furious, since there is absolutely no reason the website should have given me incorrect information...I put in my service address, after all. I refused to drop my speed or pay more. There was a brief pause, then they told me this was fine and activated my service. I provided my own modem, and am still charged the monthly modem rental fee despite attempting to notify them several times.
Worst fucking company I have ever dealt with. I would happily pay more money to anybody else just to take business away from them.
I wonder how much this stems from improper mapping systems. They are always changing and potentially the price quoted was due to an incorrect map position given?
This is a big reason why I don't trust quotes until I get some sort of confirmed pricing from the seller.
Shouldn't have to, of course, but we kind of demand instant gratification and I feel this has led to poor service in many.
I've often thought well Century Link handles cost predicting well but maybe that is more due to the quality of the service and the fact they are over-charging for a lower quality service so it's easier to guarantee those prices. That doesn't reflect in the price comparison but it does show when you have the service and your comparing to your neighbor whom has the other.
I must be alone in that I've never had a bad customer service experience with Comcast. They've always been able to resolve problems, and service outages in my area are extremely rare. My only beef is with the price I'm paying (around $130 for 50MBps + basic TV), but their Internet service so far has been stellar. They were also one of the first major US ISPs to take IPV6 seriously and roll out native support.
That is the point of why I said a while back, that Google should have purchased TWC. Instant large mostly profitable business with existing customers in a large number of markets.
Then they could have invested another 1-2B (given how little it has cost TWC to roll out faster speeds in cities that google came into) to spit some nodes and install faster backends links. That would have provided 1GB speeds to a much larger swath of people than they are managing to do with their fiber rollout. Then in a few years when they decide they don't want to be in the infrastructure business they could sell it to someone else. But, in the process they would have proven to everyone that the existing cable/telephone monopolies are doing a huge disservice to their customers and the country.
I live in the Bay Area (Berkeley). My only choice above 20mbits is Comcast. AT&T's lines near me are old, I can get a max of 18mbits with them; Sonic says I can get about 12. I own my own home, so I can't get Webpass. LMI and the other local ISPs offer things like 3mbps for $90.
I have literally zero reasonable choice other than Comcast.
I'd happily pay double what Google charges for Fiber for a quarter of the speed they offer. I just want off Comcast. Google shuttering Fiber is the last hope I have. I don't think I'll have any other choice for at least a decade.
Lmi and Paxio started a 1G fiber rollout but it only covers a few streets in West Berkeley.
It took 5 weeks to get Comcast wired at my house in Berkeley. Terrifying that the next best options available to me were Unwired 10Mbps (burst & shared) wireless for $90/month or 1.5Mbps DSL (gah).
But will AT&T's 1GB throughput run into an artificial data cap? The faster the connection, the easier it is for the customer to overshoot any given data limit and get charged overage fees.
I've been trying to get Time Warner Cable for 7 years now. The fiber runs on my street, but they refuse to connect my house and won't give a real reason why. Living in the middle of San Antonio, TX, I rely on tethering and the hope that T-Mobile doesn't terminate my line for going 20 times over the 10 GB limit. While the Fiber influence is nice, it's not doing a vast amount for last mile access.
Have you checked the metro collusion agreement? Here in Austin we have TWC (now spectrum) and Grande. There are places where grande and TWC are literally right across the street, next door, etc and you can't get service from one of them because the other has the franchise agreement.
Forgive me if I'm incorrect... The way I understand it is that they are halting planning in cities that they marked as potential locations, but that does not mean they are discontinuing the roll out and service in cities that are already in progress.
For example in Nashville, they have been trying to roll out fiber in Nashville for over a year now but have only been able to install on less than a dozen utility poles so far.
This is because of the rules that prevented anyone other than the owner of the existing lines to move anything. This meant that if Google wanted to add lines to a pole with existing AT&T and Comcast lines, it would require both companies to move their own lines independently of each other in coordination. This means roads would have to be closed 3 separate times for each vendor. Nashville recently passed the One Touch Make Ready ordinance that allows approved vendors to do all of the work at the same time.
I hope that google stills continues to deploy to cities that are already in progress. It took community effort to get the ordinance passed and subjects them a lawsuit. It would be a real letdown.
You are falling for Google's PR-speak. This kind of language they've used for literally dozens of dead projects/products over the years. This is the language Google uses when they say "we quit". It's couched in nuance and weasel words.
I think what they are saying is they are not profitable with what they are currently doing and at best, they are re-evaluating their business model to try to find profitability and at worst they are going to close up shop all together.
I live in KC and they are still rolling out here. Next phase ends Nov 3. I assume they are I'll keep rolling out in the metros they are already in as the leg work is done for the most part.
It's silly to describe what happened to Google Video as "just giving up". They abandoned that specific product because it was getting no traction. Instead, they won the entire category for at least a generation by buying YouTube, working out all of its licensing issues, and integrating the best elements of Google Video's features and design. You'd be hard-pressed to argue they made was the wrong choice for anybody.
Meebo was practically an acqui-hire, never really a Google product.
DISCLAIMER: I'm a contractor who works at Google. My musings are my own and in no way represent the thoughts of any other entity.
I've dwelt on this quite a bit and have come to the conclusion that while Google is amazing at a lot of things it is not necessarily great for leveraging network effects - a domain handled much better by Facebook.
Google's core product is search, an awesome web utility. The next product often named is gmail - again, a utility. Then you have their Drive-oriented applications - Docs, Sheets, etc. which are all amazing... as standalone products that don't need other people to enhance its value.
The problem with G+, Hangouts (and other chat apps), and a variety of other products they have tried to develop is that they're trying to break into the social space - but the company isn't about social at it's core. While I appreciate that the company is trying to bring competition to the social space I think it should focus harder on areas where it has traditionally excelled - utilities that are convenient for individuals and made better by collaboration. If it wants to get into the social space it should break out a new company under Alphabet that can focus on that objective - but there's no reason to tie it directly to Google.
EDIT: I think Fiber can and will still play out strong, mind you.
Google's social projects were clones of models that were already successful. Buzz was a Twitter clone. G+ was a Facebook clone. A clone can get traction only if it's better than the original. That they were not apart from other factors.
I don't think it has anything to do with "core competency". Google was just the last (copycat) dog in the social game trying too hard to figure out what the cool kids want.
I have webpass, it's quite good. However it's only available in large apartment complexes, and I'm not sure that will ever change given the nature of their approach.
But everyone moving to fiber IS building new infrastructure. Sure, they're continuing to cash in on telephone wire and coax, but fiber is new infrastructure.
And Google discovered that you CAN'T just make money deploying Gigabit fiber for $60 a month. Getting even a 50 Mbps fiber circuit around here is hundreds of dollars a month.
The expensive part is "the last mile". I imagine laying down cable on the side of the I-70 is easier than laying fiber in Manhattan under the pavement, above the utilities, and above the subway system. Or finding space to put up those boxes to "land" the fiber optic cables for a neighborhood.
I know in some areas, whole towns are wired up with glass that isn't in use, but around here, I regularly see trenches being dug to run fiber. And nowhere near "to the home" yet even, but along major roads, to industrial parks, etc.
Actually, we don't have the original AT&T. They went bankrupt. Cingular Wireless bought the bankrupt assets and changed their name to AT&T. But yes, building infrastructure is hard.
Indeed. And there's the whole SBC part to the story as well. But the entity that was AT&T in the early 2000's still went belly up and was bought out largely for the logo and those three letters and a single ampersand :-)
Southwestern Bell - became AT&T inc by buying Ameritech, AT&T Corp. Pacific Telesis, BellSouth (all Baby Bells)
Bell Atlantic/NYNEX - merged to become Verizon buying GTE, MCI Worldcom along the way
US West - merged with Qwest, acquired and became CenturyLink
"the original AT&T" is those Baby Bells not just the empty shell that became AT&T Corp. (aka ATT Long Distance)
The takeaway is that the ORIGINAL AT&T split into 3 companies and swallowed GTE, MCI, Worldcom, and Qwest in the process. It ended up being a consolidation. 4 of the 7 baby bells are back together operating under the AT&T name, that's over half the old company.
In the early 2000's there was the "original AT&T", a separate wireless company called AT&T Wireless, then Cingular who was the wireless group/division of SBC (Southwestern Bell) and SBC themselves.
Consolidation started with Cingular buying AT&T Wireless. Then SBC bought AT&T and simply kept the AT&T brand. Eventually the Cingular brand went away and they went back to AT&T and AT&T Wireless.
Wheeeee! The AT&T of today is basically SBC with all the old assets rolled in. SBC bought AT&T, not the other way around.
> Google also seems to just give up on a lot of its products
Yes remember when the mantra was "don't be evil"? They also just let products linger w/o any or many improvements. Google voice is an example. Text to speech is in many cases totally worthless, even with clear speaking speakers.
Well sure but it says "I don't care if you invested time and energy thinking this product would be around. Even though we make billions when it doesn't suit our business purpose we will make a decision that isn't in your interest but ours". And it's not like companies don't do this but they generally don't do it in the way that I have seen google do it with such callousness.
Which is especially odd given how good TTS is on Android, aka Google Assistant (nee Google Now). It easily outperforms Alexa, Siri, and Cortana. But clearly that's some other team...
So bummed to read this. Even though I wasn't going to directly benefit from Google Fiber, it was sure nice to have a non-entrenched player tackle this market.
From the big G's standpoint, it makes good biz sense to exit this market. I sure hope the subtext in the article comes to fruition ie that Google / Alphabet has figured out a better way to get high speed internet to homes in the US sans fiber.
In an ideal world, this fast fiber internet ought to be a municipally managed utility, with my tax dollars paying for the fiber in the ground. Then, my take home dollars paying for whatever competing service(s) I choose to light up said fiber to bring me access to the net.
I read that one first then started seeing these articles like the OP all over. What incredible spin. Two completely different things happened if you read each one separately.
I was thinking this article is simply reducing the market-speak down to relevant information -- Google is putting Fiber on life-support until someone buys them out. Like many acquisitions to buy customers, Fiber may be acquired for the same reasons.
Project Fi doesn't involve nearly the amount of staff though--they're using someone else's network. As Google has found out, digging holes and getting permits doesn't get cheaper with better software.
I have no idea what the economics are but I imagine the carriers they're piggybacking off of could charge higher fees for MVNOing if Fi were to get to a certain scale.
Depending on the contracts they have I guess anything's possible, but MVNOs aren't a new thing and they don't typically get kicked off a network for being successful.
What fate would that be? Fiber isn't going away, they have just stopped expansion. There are also hints about investing in other tech instead of laying new fiber across an entire city (WebPass as the article mentions).
I agree that Fiber isn't Google business, which is why Alphabet was created. It allows for the company to try expanding into areas that aren't just software. Also, Google does a LOT of infrastructure work with datacenters and the fiber they own across the country/world. (though that is more business focused than consumer/residential)
Fiber's operations and infrastructure will be sold to one of the major telecoms within the year (just like Google did with Motorola once it ceased to be useful). My money is on CenturyLink since Google's approach meshes well with their overbuilding strategy and footprint.
It's a 0-5% margin business for the foreseeable future; and best-case scaled scenarios it's a 10% margin business with huge capex. Google shouldn't be interested in anything with less than a 20% margin at scale. So from a portfolio standpoint, it was a stupid bet.
My guess is that Google entered the business without knowing all the nuance of the access world. They made an assumption that there was some magic bullet of architecture and comp sci that could lead to game-changing economies of scale. But it turns out the telecoms are pretty solid on the engineering / design side, and customer service and network maintenance are the big cost centers. Neither of those can be automated with algorithms or AI (well, network maintenance sort of can be, but the telecoms are already on top of it), so there's not a ton of opportunity for Google to leverage its strengths.
Running a datacenter is a very different business from running access networks. Operations that are cheap in a datacenter are expensive in the field (cable runs, equipment swaps, etc.) Likewise, there are different considerations around who does the work -- it makes sense to hire full-time people in a datacenter; less so when your equipment is scattered over a few million square miles. All of that leads to a very different operating model, so it's no wonder that Google couldn't figure it out.
> It's a 0-5% margin business for the foreseeable future; and best-case scaled scenarios it's a 10% margin business with huge capex. Google shouldn't be interested in anything with less than a 20% margin at scale. So from a portfolio standpoint, it was a stupid bet.
I know that's standard financial thinking, because a business is assumed to be able to absorb pretty much any amount of capital and invest it at a rate of it's core rate, which for Google is indeed 20%. However, obviously, Google cannot do that. It can invest maybe 10-15 billion, but no more (presumably unless you want to make Google a low-margin business). So that doesn't appear to be true.
Is it better for Google to "invest" their 80 billion or so at 3% in liquid assets versus investing it in a 10% margin business ? Here's the thing: they'll make more profit with the money in Fiber than they'll make with the money in bonds and stocks. Definitely. If fiber provides a 10% return on investment, definitely.
Sadly I know: for the GOOG and GOOGL stock prices, yes it is a better idea to keep cash on the sidelines, as then you get the benefit of investors assuming Google can deploy cash at 20%, despite it being obviously wrong. But it offends my sense of efficiency.
> Definitely. If fiber provides a 10% return on investment, definitely.
Telecoms return about 10% at scale. Startup stage of a telco is incredibly expensive; and you typically won't see positive cash flow until a decade or so later (which is why it's usually financed by debt offerings; not equity or cash). Risk is also high; because if you enter the wrong market as an overbuilder, you can ensure nobody in the market (including yourself) will ever turn a profit.
All in all, overbuilding a telecom is a high-risk, low-reward investment with a very long payoff period. There's a good reason there aren't more companies lining up to do it.
If Google isn't pursuing development of it, expect it to go away. They'll probably sell off Google Fiber, either in whole to a national ISP or piecemeal to more local providers. Google has no interest in unprofitably maintaining a ton of physical infrastructure for a tiny number of customers.
I think the business, regulatory and infrastructure requirements are entirely different. They co-opt existing networks and only have to provide a SIM card, like other MVNOs. They don't have to deal with multi-year back-room deals for community access to dig trenches or hang wire to get into neighborhoods. I'm a Google fi user and I hope that your prediction doesn't come true. It's a fantastic service. If Google fiber was available in my neighborhood I'd be a subscriber to that too, so perhaps I'm a bit biased. :)
The fact is, they have a national rollout of Project Fi because they were able to operate in a way that allowed them to resell existing carriers' products as an MVNO. And they were able to offer something unique over existing MVNOs by combining Sprint and T-Mobile's networks, which required a special radio/SIM card combination since the networks are quite different. It had the practical upshot where I live of providing superior service to even the best available networks (which are AT&T and Verizon in my area) and giving me excellent coverage in an area served poorly by each of the networks independently[0].
Ensuring that people have fast, reliable, non-discriminatory access to the internet is within Google's best interest. Assuming the next administration undoes network neutrality, Google could find itself and its products penalized if carriers offer alternatives that don't include surcharges (unlikely, yes, but possible considering many don't have more than one choice for broadband service).
And, speaking personally, working with Project Fi has been wonderful. I've interacted with customer service on three occasions (most recently a month ago due to a software update killing my wife's phone) and they're incredible -- going well over and above what the other carriers have done for me when I've run into trouble. It's particularly nice for me since I have data usage requirements that occasionally balloon in a given month but are often very low -- it's saved me about $80/month as a result[1]. And from what I read, it's a lean business. Since they don't manage the network, all of the phones offered are in-house brands (Nexus and Pixel), there's a lot of overlap everywhere except for customer service[2].
[0] I'm about a year out of date with data since I've had Fi since then, but the thumb area of Michigan had parts that were covered well by T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon and AT&T, but those places were interspersed with a lot of dead areas. Sprint and T-Mobile appear to almost exist in places where the other isn't so as a result of combining the two, I get 4G through every part of the thumb that I spend a lot of time in the summer.
[1] My data usage is almost always under a gig, but I occasionally run into a situation where I need a lot of data for a few days. As a result, I always kept a data plan that was five times what I required "just in case" because the overage charges were extreme on Verizon when I was a customer and it was "just easier". I probably could have managed to keep a lower plan and only called in when I went over, upgrading temporarily (they used to let you upgrade and backdate that upgrade to the previous month a few times), but I didn't like the risk or the hassle.
[2] When I had this problem with my Nexus phone, I was transferred from Fi support to a much more general hardware support group that sounded like it was specific to the Nexus phones. Despite the transfer, this call was the shortest I've dealt with to get to resolution and I was pleased that the CSRs all had a great command of the English language (the hardware guys had accents but they weren't so thick that I had a difficult time understanding them). Getting a replacement sent over night with Saturday delivery at no charge was really great.
The title of this post is pretty deceptive — it clearly implies that the Fiber project altogether is being halted.
My understanding from this article amongst others is that they are simply rethinking their approach to, rather than laying down fiber throughout all target cities, beam high speed internet from local way points to the roofs of high rises (like WebPass does in SF, which they acquired).
It is pretty reasonable to, if this seems a viable approach, halt expensive infrastructure operations to lay down hard wired fiber and cut the jobs associated with these logistics and operations.
See this title about what's happening to Google Fiber is much more direct, honest, and to the point than the corporate PR google Post and title that confused me into thinking I'm actually going to be able to sign up for Google Fiber.
Their title: "Advancing our amazing bet"
Point being that our ISPs right now need some disruption and I think a lot of people were hoping this Google Fiber would catch on. A lot of folks assumed Google would eat whatever losses to make this a hit. Apperatnly not, apperantly some short term profits trump anything else.
People in the technology community should start organizing the construction of local government owned municipal fiber networks in their communities. I am abroad right now, but I have decided to start speaking up in mine when I return to the United States because I finally believe that I know how such a thing can succeed.
Local communities could use municipal bonds to pay for a 10G-EPON build outs where multiple providers can provide transit, VoIP and IPTV over the same cables using PPPoE and VLANs. Then a per subscriber fee could be assessed to make pay back the bonds. This would be an ILEC/CLEC model, except with local government ownership much like they own the roads.
The situation where incumbents drop prices could be handled by having a default CLEC that offers free ITU broadband service at 256Kbps. People would switch for that and then switching to a better CLEC could just be a phone call. The incumbents could not compete with free service over a 30 year period and the municipal government owned ILEC + private CLEC model would win.
Did Provo handle the fiber to the premise while requiring people to purchase internet service from CLECs to use it with the exception of a crippled free tier to get people to bite? If not, they did not do this. Furthermore, they did not stick with it over 30 years, which is the time frame required for such an endeavor to be a success. The entire point of the idea is to divide responsibilities so that no one organization takes on too much and do so in a way that fosters competition. That includes funding via municipal bonds where pay back is expected to take ~3 decades. Had they done this, Google could have just been one CLEC among many and Provo would still be at it.
Local governments ought to focus on building roads while businesses focus on building the services that are provided through them. Having each business build its own network of private roads is infeasible. It sounds absurd when stated in this way, but that is what is happening. We need the local government to do the one thing it is good at doing, which is enabling transportation for private industry. Private industry can do the rest. That includes IP transit in such a way that tier 1 ISPs like Hurricane Electric would have a very low barrier to becoming CLECs. If each subscriber pays a fee dedicated to repaying the municipal bonds over a 30 year period, this would pay for itself.
If people operating it mess up, they can be replaced. The CLECs are interchangeable from the customer's standpoint. The contractors running the infrastructure are interchangeable from the community advisory board's standpoint. The members of the community advisory board overseeing are replaceable from the local politicians' standpoint. The local politicians are replaceable by the public. It is very different than what we have now where if people are unhappy, they cannot replace the incumbents and have little ability to voice grievances. This is the sort of system that I want in my community. I am abroad right now, but when I get back to the US, I intend to start gathering people to discuss how this could become a reality in my area.
It's due to the fact that building a decent network for residential customers at scale is very expensive and not that profitable unless you have a long-term monopoly.
Ding ding ding! This is exactly it. As a Google Fiber customer in Austin, it honestly wasn't any better than any of the other ISPs. Ironically, the only thing that was better was the DVR and live TV search that came with the TV service.
Is this due to the FCC reclassification of internet as a common carrier?
I wondered a little bit about this, myself, when Fiber was launched. They have a lot more motivation without network neutrality as a matter of regulation because it'd open up the ability of ISPs to penalize their products[0].
I'm generally of the opinion that government over-regulates, but I was in support of the whole "Network Neutrality" situation because broadband services availability for many/most in the US is limited to one provider and that one company is also usually either AT&T or Comcast, known more for how much they suck than for the services they provide. It's not too hard to believe that if common carrier status were removed, AT&T or Comcast would lower their caps and start offering services that are exempt from those caps (especially Comcast - suddenly Hulu or anything NBCUniversal is all-you-can-consume, but Netflix/Amazon Video/YouTube are not).
In a world like that, Google does have more motivation to roll out an ISP that does the opposite with their own services (or more likely just doesn't discriminate with anyone's traffic). Fiber resulted in a sudden expansion by many other ISPs to service with higher performance (and in many areas that are not even on the future Fiber cities list), so they've kind of accomplished the goal that has the greatest benefit to them -- more eyes on their products at a speed that makes them more useful.
At the end of the day, though, I'm not so sure that the FCC reclassification is much more than a tiny bullet point in favor of not spending the money required to do a fiber roll out. They are certainly aware that Republicans are itching to dismantle this reclassification and their nominee has promised to do so IIRC. And though the Democrat's nominee has indicated that she'll keep that reclassification, I'm not willing to take her at her word on that. If that were their main reason for allowing fiber to "transition" to whatever new option they're looking at that (hopefully) costs a lot less to roll out but still doesn't exist in the places they want to roll out to, I'd be pretty surprised.
[0] I'm not advocating that network neutrality be dismantled to give Google more motivation.
There's tons of red tape laying actual fiber, and that probably makes it harder to provide high quality internet to as many customers as they'd like to.
The market changed. When they launched Fiber, they're announcement was reminiscent of GMail when it launched. Back then, getting a 15-30MB free web mailbox was normal and Google announced a start at 2GB. Memory may not serve me perfectly, but I believe when they launched Fiber, there wasn't a single ISP offering residential service at 1Gbps and very few at even 100Mbps. I live in a city that is neither Fiber available or even on the list of future Fiber cities, but I can get multi-gig service for the price that I think the 100Mbps service was offered when Fiber launched. Most of this happened because of Google Fiber -- these companies were not terribly interested in increasing their capacity and service before, but knowing that a huge company like Google, who realistically had the funds to do a roll out, was potentially going to invade their monopoly territories was enough to get the market to move. This also, unfortunately, reduced the need for them to do it. Market-wise, they'd have to fight harder for customers since their service may not be so much faster/better/cheaper to get people to endure the hassle of switching.
The reality of what the market is was discovered. They had hoped they'd be able to do the roll out cheaper, with the involvement of local regulatory bodies itching to have their cities added to the program and paving over regulations that historically made doing a roll out like this very expensive, time consuming and difficult. The incumbents, who already had networks and had to deal with and work through those same regulations cried foul, started suing and made this all more costly and difficult. Back to point #1, with other ISPs offering service at a similar speed and at a far reduced price from when Fiber launched, this took some of the motivation to pave over those regulations away from the regulatory bodies. And this is all without the reality that many of those elected officials who make the laws that caused these problems have their re-election paid for by the AT&Ts, Comcasts and Verizons to a far greater extent than they do Google, so they're even less motivated to help them out.
But now that GF is slowing down, incumbents will fall back into their monopolistic slumber. Without threat of competition, they won't be motivated to spread their upgrades wider. So in a sense, yes, spreading more Google Fiber makes monopolists compete, which makes spreading it harder, but that was the whole point for Google, wasn't it? So if they back down now, their goals will be compromised.
I see the point you're making and it's valid, however, there's one component that's missing. Unlike prior to Fiber, there's now Gigabit offerings from Comcast and AT&T and in many places, Comcast and AT&T are the two available options for internet service. In reality, it's the fact that those two companies are providing Gigabit (and multi-gig service) that's causing the expansion of gigabit service nationwide at this point.
Google Fiber was never offered in my area nor was it even hinted at being a future Fiber city, but Comcast currently offers multi-gig service. I'm not sure about AT&T because my past experience with them has had me swear them off. They could offer next-to-free service and I'd turn it down, so I don't pay attention to their offerings in my area, but I am able to get top-tier U-Verse TV/Internet in my home so I'd imagine gig will be around the corner at some point. Google Fiber wouldn't cause this expansion over here, though it may have been responsible for the initial expansion (or even the idea of delivering speeds like that to consumers). The "cat is out of the bag" so to say. The (limited) competition exists and isn't going to go away with Fiber out of the picture. I think Google saw this and realized it was a somewhat safe time to shed the expense/headaches they're having getting Fiber rolled out nationwide.
And then there's the start-up factor. In the City of Detroit, I'm aware of one small company that's offering (building-to-building) gigabit service on par with Google Fiber. These micro-ISPs probably won't get a footprint the size of Fiber, but if enough of them pop up, the combined numbers might reach that point, further forcing the incumbent's hands. It's not a terrible business to get into the way some of these start-ups are funding their efforts. The fact stands that practically nobody who has worked with the customer service arms of their "big company" ISPs anything positive to say about them. I pay 2.5 times the price of residential broadband for the same speed to get better customer service out of Comcast[0], and I wouldn't dream of leaving Comcast Business for AT&T Business or Comcast or AT&T consumer. I work at home, I need reliable service without caps and nonsense, and I need to know I can get a service call handled quickly when problems arise. If a start-up came to my area offering faster speeds at the same or better price, despite my relative happiness with Comcast, I'd switch just because I know at some point they're going to discover the expense they're paying for Comcast Business's service isn't necessary because "We're a utility company. We don't have to care."
[0] The service paid for itself a while back when I took the bait for U-Verse TV service (offered at a huge discount for 6-months and no cancellation penalty -- yes, I cancelled), and the contractor from AT&T -- who's eyes were bloodshot and speech was slurred -- came to bury my U-Verse wire and managed to cleanly slice my Comcast Business Internet cable. I called at 5:00 PM and they had a guy out at 6:30 PM same day who ran a completely new cable, hooked it all back up, and did so apologising for the service disruption that was their competitor's inept contractor's fault. He was done by 7:00 PM and despite this not being Comcast's fault, I was not charged for the service call (which I would have been fine with paying for). I have not had a single outage lasting more than 15 minutes in three years (which was one time, though, luck may be a factor here), and their Business help line gets me to a proper English speaking representative who doesn't just recite "did you turn it on and then off again" from a script. It's actually a bit distressing knowing that this same company, which deserves its terrible service reputation on the residential side is perfectly capable of providing service bordering on fantastic, but just doesn't (unless you opt into a substantially higher bill).
This is discouraging. I thought that Google Fiber was over-hyped for the number of users actually connected, but didn't think they'd just give up.
Perhaps Sonic, which provides gigabit Internet service to parts of San Francisco at a lower price than Google [1], will take over Google's operation there.
There is some indication in the article that they aren't giving up on providing broadband, but halting expansion of the current Fiber offering and business model as a vehicle for that, preferring other approaches.
The Google Fiber rollout in my neighborhood has been a debacle from the start.
They walked around and put up door tags -- really really big ones saying, "Google Fiber is coming!" and immediately after that the 0 crime neighborhood I live in had a slew of break ins. Anyone who didn't remove this massive door tag was an easy target, the crooks knew who was home and who wasn't.
Then like a week later... they put the exact same door tag up on all the doors. And we all laughed... but we were like, "WTF, Google..." Then the next day they put the exact same door tag up again... even doubling it up on homes that already had a door tag. They door tags were just promos to sign up; they didn't tell us to mark our sprinkler systems, or who to call in case the construction crew accidentally cut our water lines...
The actual cable laying came about a month later... and it's been going on for 7 weeks at this point. Some days the guys work, most they don't. Doesn't appear to be any pattern to it. There are a bunch of expensive drilling and trenching machines parked at the end of my cul-de-sac and along the street in the spots where residents used to park. 7 weeks and counting...
Google really underestimated how hard it was going to be to run cable underground in Austin, with it's limestone ("Austin Chalk") often just inches below the grass & shrubbery.
GF has been tearing up our neighborhood this week and last laying cable (I'm in Chapel Hill). AT&T did the same about 6 months back. I was holding out for Google, but this makes me think even when they get it up and running, the support will be nonexistent. So maybe better to go with the devil we know (we already have AT&T U-Verse, just not gigabit). At least they lasted long enough to force AT&T's hand...
I'd still switch to Google Fiber. As someone who spent over a year dealing with what AT&T calls "support"[0], concerns that Google could be any worse would be minimal for me.
In all likelihood, if they do completely abandon Fiber, rather than finding another way to provide the service that doesn't require digging, they'll sell it off to another ISP (I think TFA mentioned CenturyLink). Their DVR was (is?) based on SageTV's product, which I ran at home and found to be excellent (the extent to which it differs from their original product may change my mind on that assertion, though).
[0] I had a problem with my DSL service at my family's home up north that required sending out a tech on 13 different occasions, which required me to drive two hours up north to meet him. I went through four different DSL modems (none of which were broken, but they were basically throwing darts at a wall with a blindfold on). They'd show up, find nothing wrong (on one occasion they offered to replace my interior wiring and decided against it when they discovered I ripped it all out and replaced it with one proper cable run using better cable than they'd install ... and the readings from their test equipment indicated the wire was very clean). They never actually fixed the problem as a result of a service call, it just went away at some point last year.
They backed out of Portland after spending a ton of money and time with city officials. Sad to hear this is not happening and hope Google finds a way to get back into this because the options today are a joke. This will just embolden companies like Comcast to charge more for horrible service.
Portland spent a lot of time and resources (during a serious housing crisis), bent over backwards to give them everything they wanted... and they decide to just punk out, lay off their operations team and walk away from years of planning because they can "do fast wireless for some apartment buildings". Thanks, guys.
There's a tiny ISP (US Internet) in Minneapolis that's already wired half of the city with fiber with some loans as capital, they're not a public company and they don't have billions in CoH and they still figured it out. They've already started offering 10Gbps to home users. Yes, ten gigabits, that's not a typo. And they're profitable.
Laying fiber is impossible for a megacorp with billions of CoH and access to the overflowing "talent" of Silicon Valley like Google perhaps, but not for a small business like US Internet. Let's hope Portland gets a US Internet of it's own. We're all better off if the future of the web is built by smaller decentralized companies anyways.
>
There's a tiny ISP (US Internet) in Minneapolis that's already wired half of the city with fiber with some loans as capital, they're not a public company and they don't have billions in CoH and they still figured it out. They've already started offering 10Gbps to home users. Yes, ten gigabits, that's not a typo. And they're profitable.
That's not entirely correct they have about a quarter of the city wired with plans to finish in 6 or 7 years[1]. The linked image is pretty small but it's all I can find. Note the linked map only shows 40% or so of Minneapolis. Also they have been providing Business services like dark fiber for the last 20 years, so it's not like they are completely dependent on home fiber income or new to the business.
I just recently got US Internet fiber, we have the 100 Mbps plan for $39.95 a month and it's great! I noticed that when I ping 8.8.8.8 latency went down from 33ms to 22ms. Also we have more bandwidth and cheaper internet than when we had Comcast. Of course the best part of US Internet is not having to deal with Comcast anymore!
Finally US Internet forced Century Link and Comcast to launch their own fiber services[2].
Fiber the way the US does it is rather lame. Consider that where Google has put in fiber the houses now have:
- Copper telco lines
- Coax cable lines
- Google fiber
There's zero reason for anything other than fiber in an area being updated to it. States/municipalities should solicit bids for a company that wants to maintain the fiber infrastructure, and other companies wishing to provide phone/tv/internet over the fiber can all compete on their service over the one fiber line.
We only have one telco and one cable line because states blessed monopolies for this, they should do the same for fiber, and open access to it for competition from service/content providers. It'll never happen, but I can dream...
> Because Google runs most of its business on the internet, analysts have suggested that its entry into the costly world of fiber optic internet was an attempt to motivate existing internet providers to accelerate the introduction of faster web connections.
Hasn't Google said before that one of their reasons for starting Google Fiber was to push other companies to expand high-speed Internet access in the US? Has this happened or has Google Fiber just run out of steam? I know Sonic is rolling out fiber in the Bay Area. I'm sure Google Fiber has put some pressure on them to up their game.
I wrote about this elsewhere and am pasting my thoughts here as I think they're relevant to this community:
1) Google Fiber is dead. Long Live Google ISP.
Google cannot afford to lay fiber in the ground because it's a long game and Google doesn't really want to play the long game (they just want to put pressure on competitors so they can move more bits along the wires, generating more searches and more streams with which to shove ads in your face). Fiber never was the most efficient way to do this, but there's something sexy about "Google Fiber" as opposed to "Google Point to Point Radio Towers". The reality is that wireless delivery of bits is way cheaper than fiber because you don't have to tear the ground up (over the last mile obviously since the arteries must be fiber links).
Clarification: "long" refers to 30-year payback periods for physical asset investment. There are a lot of things with higher returns on that timeline than fiber that google can invest in. I don't actually think it's profitable for anyone to build unsubsidized networks. This is why networks should be public and operators should be private, but that's a topic for another day!
2) Fiber is cheap, construction is expensive.
When I helped Comcast build out the fiber network in SF, what struck me was the relative cheapness of the assets we were putting in the ground compared to the cost of tearing up the street. The conduit and the glass inside the conduit cost almost nothing, but tearing up the street in SF is $300/sq ft. Crossing cable car tracks was like $50,000. Then there's the actual cost of construction: people. Getting contractors to arrive on time, finish on time, and avoid overtime is fraught with peril. It's actually really hard to move physical atoms around in a manner similar to programmatic systems, and so many models that have real world elements stumble against the harshness of actuality. I suspect Google's cost modeling for building a fiber network was optimistic.
3) Wireless is fast, but does it scale to city size?
It's not hard or particularly expensive to deliver gigabit over wireless. You basically need a tall building to rain down radio waves onto the masses. What I wonder about, given that we have no cities running on majority wireless point to points, is what happens when you hit scale? That is to say, point to points have a limited wireless footprint (because using beamforming we don't need to splay the signal everywhere, we just send it in one direction), but one can easily imagine a saturated wireless environment as generating a significant amount of noise. Wireless networks are easy when there's only a few objects on the network but get significantly harder as the physical area reaches device saturation. That is to say, WebPass might be super easy to operate when only a handful of buildings are on WebPass, but it might be much harder if a whole section of the city is online.
4) Google bought WebPass a while back.
The writing has been on the wall for a while that the fiber game was killing uncle Google. I can only hope that they don't bow out completely. I think that wireless makes Google significantly less of an existential threat to their carrier partners as well.
Overall, I remain cautiously optimistic about Google's future as an ISP.
On a final note: Google Fi is not an answer to Google fiber disappearing. The two are tangential, disjointed offerings that cannot, for a bunch of reasons, compete with one another (most notably the wireless data caps).
>What I wonder about, given that we have no cities running on majority wireless point to points, is what happens when you hit scale?
As long as there is line of sight, the tower has fiber, the hardware upgraded as the network grows and beamforming technology continues to improve it shouldn't be an issue.
I know of no city in the world that operates a primary network of point to points. I think it's a fascinating engineering problem with a bunch of unknown problems that will arise in the process of attempting to deliver the solution.
There are pieces of conduit that we run fiber through into your building. Inside your building there's a fiber termination point that hands off to ethernet. On the other end is a repeater/node that boosts the signal from the other termination point back in the DC.
For a city like San Francisco, only a fraction of what is in the ground is mapped. The only reasonable option is many places is to dig up the ground and look at what you're working with.
Even in the area I live in, ripping up the streets is how it's done. I've only seen horizontal boring machines deployed a few times around here. Maybe they're used a lot and I don't notice them because I don't have to drive around them, but I do keep a eye open for them in the wild. I considered renting or buying one for a project and was impressed how cheap they are, but the benefit of burying things versus the price - no contest.
What I learned, though, is there are eBay-like markets for TBMs and it seems most people buy one with so many hours on it, use it for a project, and sell it +so many hours. I didn't find the thriving rental market I expected.
I can confirm that horizontal boring machines have never been used in any telco digging opportunity I've been a part of :/. I wish it were the case but it is all tear-up-the-streets territory.
No, and AFAIK, in Austin all the early roll outs were in older neighborhoods with physical poles. I'm not sure if google was lashing their cables to existing lines, but I saw TWC doing that a lot when they were splitting nodes here. It was amazingly fast they would show up with a truck and lash a half mile of cable in a couple hours.
Of course one of the early slowdowns was AT&T throwing a fit about google sharing poles owned by AT&T.
1) pole rights matter. In San Francisco, att also owns the poles and does everything they can to prevent other people from using them. I would tell installs that it would be 30 days from the day we got permitted until the circuit was installed, but that despite there being a 30-day limit on replies for pole permits, many times att would wait 180 days before issuing access permits. It was honestly a joke around the office.
2) many cities do not have above-ground power and fewer still have above-ground telco without power. I have not researched this extensively so I am not sure if google picked places with poles specifically, but that would be a smart move. That being said, imagining att would let them use the poles was not really reasonable.
In Estonia I get 500mbps up and down with unlimited bandwidth for 35 euros, monthly. I think it has a lot to do with the ability to roll out newer, faster stuff much easier than with a big country - and we do have quite a few ISPs, each of them fighting to provide even faster speeds. Wonder why in U.S they don't really try to do anything to be better, and if they do increase speeds, the bandwidth is still stupid low.
I understand the legal and other difficulties of dealing with local governments and incumbent providers.
However, it may also be that Google is going to be more careful where it spends its money. Hoarding cash may be protection against interesting changes in the economy.
If they have sped up in a couple of cities then the next cities will get soon too.
You have to evaluate a new business move before scaling up. And data is one of their primary modes of income. Measurement is very valuable.
I certainly have no idea if it's because of fear of Google Fiber, but AT&T has started rolling out their fiber offering in the Charleston, SC suburbs over the past year. It's not all doom and gloom.
Didn't really work because the cost to deploy nationwide 1 gig is super expensive. It's only going to happen if there is profit in it.
If Google wanted to create a market they shouldn't have priced it so low. Even if you could do nationwide gigabit for 70 bucks, there wouldnt be any profit.
Isps aren't going to do a massive capital expenditure to make the same money.
In Montana we're having success installing fiber, but we aren't outsourcing construction and using cheap electronics. I do wish we could use Google's set-top ONT though.
My analysis: They're realizing big cities are not profitable and installation costs a ton of $. My guess is they'll try to go for smaller towns with better utility pole infrastructure.
I think it's hilarious how many people think it's consistent to simultaneously hold the opinion that this is a tragedy and that Google Fiber was the ISP that they wish they could have, while also supporting federally-imposed "net neutrality" and the implicit claim behind it, which is that all ISPs are just dumb pipes that are moving bits, and that consumers are agnostic about who does it.
All the sheep on Reddit who got behind FCC mandated "net neutrality" are directly responsible for this. Urbanites get a warped view of this country and vastly underestimate the amount of places where satellite internet is their only option. Yet they have the nerve to bitch and moan about what a tragedy it is that they can't stream 4k video without buffering. The government must fix this! To hell with the rural schoolchildren and their lack of access to wikipedia, I want to watch high-def cartoons!
There was so much innovation taking place behind the scenes to provide a decent web-browsing experience via satellite internet and WISPs. And it's all for naught.
> "net neutrality" and the implicit claim behind it, which is that all ISPs are just dumb pipes that are moving bits, and that consumers are agnostic about who does it
This is consistent with wanting a dumb ISP that moves more bits for less money and with fewer outages. Nobody wants Goog Fibre because it comes with #"google prime video library" or whatever tie-in. They want it because it moves more bits more reliably as a big dumb pipe ought to.
That's a fair point, maybe some people don't care about the added services... but Google Fiber comes with a lot of added extras:
* 1TB of Google drive
* A Google-made 802.11AC WAP that doesn't suck.
* Cable box has built-in chromecast and is built on top of SageTV.
* Bill management through a Google website.
Maybe I'm just a pessimist but I don't believe that Google put ~$100MM into Fiber simply because they wanted to be a dumb pipe and put pressure on other telecoms to compete. How do you rationalize that to shareholders?
Maybe they have some people in the public convinced that they entered this market out of the goodness of their heart. But it's pretty clear to me from Fiber and from Project Fi and OnHub and NEST that they believed that they could succeed as an ISP because of the frameworks they would put around their internet services, not simply by outperforming in performance.
.jpg){kind=link}
The municipalities own (most of) the networks and all the fiber cables, letting companies use them for a small(ish) fee. These companies later sell it to customers. This help people to get the best deals and ensure that the networks are continually upgraded.
For example, I have 250/100 mbit/s for free. My rent pays for this. But I could if I wanted to easily upgrade to 1gbit/s up and down. I can change ISP (even if that wouldn't be paid for by my rent) and I would know that I always could get the same internet-connectivity speeds.
Although, while this is true for many parts of Sweden, it's not available for everyone. Some places still have networks owned by one company without any access to the city network.