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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

I make this point all of the time.

In the US, the rails are private and the government owns the passenger service. In Europe, the government owns the rails and the passenger service is private.

People try to frame these issues as "socialist/capitalist" or some nonsense all of the time. But the reality is that neither system is more or less capitalist than the other. It's just one is better structured than the other.

However, having lived in a town in the US that has had a public ISP for decades, it was abhorrent. Municipalities only care about cost cutting - so there was no investment in wiring infrastructure or customer service. So I think there is an argument to be made that we may take for granted a bit the difference between rails/roads and fiber optics.

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> Municipalities only care about cost cutting - so there was no investment in wiring infrastructure or customer service. So I think there is an argument to be made that we may take for granted a bit the difference between rails/roads and fiber optics.

Municipal ISPs and ISPs leasing municipal infrastructure dominated PCMag's speed ratings until they excluded local ISPs. Many have excellent satisfaction ratings. Large private ISPs consistently have some of the worst of any business.

> Municipalities only care about cost cutting - so there was no investment in wiring infrastructure or customer service.

Well, there's two aspects at play here.

For starters, you do need to be a certain size as an ISP to really offer cheap services. Imagine, for example, being a town of 500 with a municipal ISP. You'd end up with a lot of equipment to store and maintain and to really be effective, you'd have to employ a bunch of people that spend most of their time doing nothing. (After all, how often would the customer service rep for a small town ACTUALLY be answering any calls?).

That's why a state, county, or national? run ISP would probably make more sense, especially in more rural locations.

That being said, in the UK with BT and the line rentals I described earlier those worked unreasonably well. ISPs could complain to BT to fix problems which ultimately left the various ISPs in a region to compete on tech and price. That was a win for the customer.

This was not at all a small public ISP. And it was managed by the city power company, so it had the economies of scale already.

There's a lot of nitty gritty policy weeds of what went wrong. But the main one was that after the public ISP incorporated in the 90s as a complimentary service to a public cable network, the state passed a legislation regulating public utility rates. Good for power/water/sewer/cable customers. But it meant that the city could not charge customers differently even with wildly different internet speeds.

Going into the 90s, as the internet aspects became more important, they couldn't keep up with upgrading the lines, especially given the costs would be born by all customers regardless of what speed they were getting.

So the issue was poor government regulation and not public ownership of the infrastructure?

That was 30 years ago (sorry for the reminder) but don't you think times changed how something like that would be deployed?

It could be!

But I think one lesson is that internet and other utilities are not quite as functionally comparable as people claim. Per capita consumption of water has not quadruped in the last 10 years, but home internet has! So the case for internet as a public utility will be stronger when the need for constantly upgrading infrastructure plateaus.

The general image I get from the US is that public infrastructure and customer service in general is lacking in investment.

Maybe, infrastructure. But having spent time in both the US and in Europe, I cannot begin to even describe how much better average customer service in America is compared to Europe.

But I think that is also what holds up the adoption of public services - the difference between typical customer service in the US and say, the Post Office or DMV, turns a lot of people off from the idea of public ISPs or etc.

(Although, based on some time spent in Munich makes me think the quality/availability of broadband in Europe is also not all that).

If we’re talking ISPs specifically, I’ve definitely had better customer service in Germany, Sweden and the Czech Republic than I ever had in the US.

I’ve had great experiences with customer support with 7 of the 8 local US ISPs I’ve dealt with.

Starlink, comcast, hughes.net and at&t customer support can take my RJ45 crimper and stick it where they don’t need network connectivity (sideways).

I guess the lesson here is that none of us can really make any general statement about the quality of customer service between the US and Europe.

I'm sorry but you cannot begin to compare ATT or Comcast customer service with say even BT in the UK. And if I value say customer service highly I get to choose from one of a hundred or more ISPs. Zen, or A&A for example probably have some of the best ISP customer support in the world.

In many other spheres I will concur America has a better customer service culture. But I think alot comes down to taste and incentives. I am happy with not getting fussed over at a restaurant for example, and the odd frustration comes weighed against the fact I'm not really socially obligated to tip (although usually do).

I struggle to think of places that are more customer friendly overall than the US. There are certainly some companies with generally less favorable reputations like, say, Comcast but that's often a result of having a captive audience. One might even argue that our largest consumer oriented companies span so many different industries but all share good customer service and experience as a cornerstone.

I meant public customer service, but, point taken.

As apposed to private businesses who love making big capital heavy investments they don't need to make?

The point stands though that the feedback loop between customer wants and the government is much much longer than between consumer and business.

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