I personally like the notion of a common public infrastructure that subleases access. We already sort of do that with mobile carriers where the big 3 provide all access and all the other "carriers" (like google fi) are simply leasing access.
Make it easy for a new wireless company to spawn while maintaining the infrastructure everyone needs.
Do private utilities have any incentive to be cheap?
The reason we have utility regulations in the first place is because utilities are natural monopolies with literally zero incentive to be cheap. On the contrary, they are highly incentivized to push up prices as much as possible because they have their customers over a barrel.
A private electric grid is a nightmare. Look at Texas. People pay more, and they get less coverage. It's worse by every metric. The conversation should revolve around, how can we fix the government so that it isn't 5 corporations in a trench coat who systematically defund public utilities and social safety nets in hopes of breaking it so they can privatize it and make billions sucking up tax payer money while doing no work. See the billions in tax funding to ATT, Google, etc... to put in fiber internet that they just pocketed the cash and did nothing.
A big part of the reason that California average electrical price per kWh is high is that a huge portion of the cost is fixed costs, and California's efficiency push has resulted in the lowest lowest per capita electricity usage (and fourth lowest per capita energy usage) in the USA, so the fixed costs are spread over fewer kWh.
Conversely, Texas has significantly above average use per capita, spreading the fixed costs across more kWh, but still results in higher annual costs per capita, despite lower per kWh rates.
Let's also not forget the cost of the things like the campfire fire. That's a huge bill that needs to be paid and that cost is ultimately going to come out of the kwh rates.
Further, the LA fires might have also been caused by a downed line so that's going to be a fairly big cost to the power company.
> Let's also not forget the cost of the things like the campfire fire.
That's, I assume, a reference to the 2018 Camp Fire.
> That's a huge bill that needs to be paid and that cost is ultimately going to come out of the kwh rates.
The Trust established to pay PG&E liabilities for the 2015 Butte, 2017 North Bay, and 2018 Camp Fires, which discharged PG&E's responsibility for them, receives no additional ratepayer funds after its initial funding and is in the wind-down process expecting a single final top-off payment to already approved claimants. So, no, its not a huge bill that will be paid out of future rates.
Because competition drives innovation. 5G exists as widely as it does because carriers were driven to meet the standard and provide faster service to their customers.
This article is essentially arguing innovation is dead in this space and there is no need for bandwidth-related improvements. At the same time, there is no 5G provider without a high-speed cap or throttling for hot spots. What would happen if enough people switched to 5G boxes over cable? Maybe T-Mobile can compete with Comcast?
Coverage requirements could be part of the spectrum auction, like when Google managed to get "no SIM locking" part of the spectrum requirements for the 700 MHz band, opening up Verizon phones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_United_States_wireless_sp...
Competition drives innovation, but also, we've generally seen that things like municipal broadband are _more_ innovative than an incumbent monopoly carrier. Large chunks of the US don't have much competition at all in wired services, and if we approach that in wireless, we are likely to see the same effects starting where the local monopoly tries to extract maximum dollars out of an aging infrastructure. Lookin' at you, Comcast, lookin' at you.
As you say, "incumbent monopoly carrier" is not competition, so a municipal provider which competes with broadband is a great idea. This article, however, is arguing we don't need more bandwidth, and we need more consolidation of major providers: I'm not convinced.
> During congestion, customers on this plan may notice speeds lower than other customers and further reduction if using >1.2TB/mo., due to data prioritization
So not really a cap, but a deprioritization. A few friends using it around me routinely use >2TB/mo and haven't experienced degradation, I guess there's not excessive congestion. YMMV.
2. It must be guaranteed to continue to be well-run.
3. If someone can do it better, they must be allowed to do so - and then their improvements have to be folded into the network somehow if there is to be only one network.
Internet is treated this way in Germany, and it's slow and expensive. Eastern European countries that put their bets on competition instead of regulation have more bang for the buck in their network infrastructure
