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Comment by gcb0 | Hacker News Reader

lol at calling all the providers. the free market fails if left alone, under shady regulations it is almost a joke.

i found a aDSL number for ATT that was not advertised (and you reached a person on the first minute!) that was the result of some obscure regulation that they had to provide dsl without charging for a phone line if so i wanted. it was a very good service. as i was next door to their trunk.

i moved, less than 20miles, but another city. called att to transfer service, the rep read something and the burst out a sad "ah, sorry, this is verizon territory".

and that is exactly what i get here. verizon. nothing else. the 2nd or 3rd biggest city in los angeles, and i can choose, verizon.

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Eastern Europe, especially Bulgaria and Romania, would beg to differ about the "free market fails if left alone". Between 2000 and 2010 it was basically a free-for-all for ISPs and each city had almost dozens of them running wires on poles, on apartment building facades, on... trees.

And today you can get a 1 Gbps connection (in reality it works at 900 mbps in Europe and at around 300 mbps across the Atlantic) for less than $20 per month.

How could you call the banning of new infrastructure (through an insane ammount of regulation) by local authorities in the USA as Free Market?

Something like this happened in Russian cities too. Broadband is cheap, fast, lot's of competition, cables hanging between apartment buildings etc.

Recently there have been some troubling signs when (government) monopolies started to buy smaller private ISPs. Internet is still cheap and fast, but who knows what will happen…

>had

Bulgaria here. We still have them - smaller ISPs who don't run proper cabling, it's just the major ones don't run their cables through trees any longer. And I want to note - even when they did ran them through trees and a storm would cut the cables or fry the routers, replacements would be put up within an hour. The only downside to me, as a consumer, is that during a storm, a lightning bolt might hit a cable and fry my pc, but that's a very very low probability and I just run the cable through a surge protector.

Sonic.net provides their "Fusion DSL" service in LA through resellers. It's worth to check if you are in the service area at http://www.dslextreme.com/ . I ended up signing up through another company, Omsoft, because they were very down to earth.

Yeah, the advertised throughput is a bit slower being ADSL2+, especially on the upload (although you can bond two channels for a simple twice the cost. and if you really need upload, inquire to see if they've got "Annex M" support yet). But it's fast enough, very predictable, and you won't be giving your money to assholes.

Also FWIW, Speakeasy is also still around, they've just renamed to Megapath and raised their rates a bit.

+1 to the other comments here -- it's the enforced monopolies through local government/provider agreements that has failed in this case, as with other systems often considered failures of the free market.

There is nothing about what you described that was ever free market. Were Verizon not have been granted what I'm sure was exclusive rights for laying cable in your town, there'd be many providers vying for your business.

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