It's shocking to me how many people come up with elaborate theories about regulatory capture that don't even know the basics of how cable systems work.
I mean, the regulatory capture is absolutely real. I don't mean to absolve cable carriers of their many sins, chief amongst them a decade or more of chronic underinvestment in their infrastructure which is part of why the battleship is so hard to turn today.
I just want to make it clear that there is no magic button that legacy cable carriers could press to suddenly have infrastructure that is fully capable of the latest DOCSIS standard. It is an expensive and time-consuming process that, from what I have seen, is indeed underway at many major providers.
At the same time, they are absolutely lobbying to minimize any regulatory pressure to improve. My personal belief is that increasing competition from LTE has been more of a factor in companies like Comcast suddenly investing in Node+0 than any regulatory activity. Pressure from the government to provide 100mbps upstream could be a huge boost in getting these companies to invest more in the project and get it done more quickly.
It's just, you know, there's no silver bullet here. And most emphatically, "fiber" is not that silver bullet. In most cases the only real advantage of fiber internet is that it puts the infrastructure under control of someone other than an incumbent telco or cable provider, who is more willing to play ball with the community. I can't help but feel, though, that this is a waste of resources when the same goals could be achieved, with less monetary investment, if the cable carriers were deprived of their lobbying operations and forced through franchise agreements or telecom regulation to provide a certain service level.
Put in the most extreme way, I think "roll out fiber" is in many ways a worse solution than "nationalize Comcast." It tries to force a technical solution to what is fundamentally a business problem - a business problem that does have some technical limitations as accomplices, but the way to overcome these is largely well understood.
Are you really shocked? I feel like many people regularly come up with elaborate theories about things they don't really understand.
I'm sure I do it. Though it's something I'd like to minimize. It's definitely not always clear to me which of my opinions are really based on as complete a set of facts as I'd like them to be.
It's a post-hoc rationalization. You can't exactly point at a standard you yourself designed to explain why you are unable to do something. It's the old "it was a software problem", 30 years running now.
What's shocking to me is how many tech people acquiesce to this "sorry, it's just the software/hardware" of what was very obviously a deliberate design choice.
The standard, and what set of options you can use from the standard, reflects physical equipment that was put in the ground and incrementally upgraded over decades.
Sure in a sense the asymmetry is a “deliberate design choice.” But it’s a design choice that was made when cable broadband was first developed starting with cable TV networks that had little and sometimes no uplink capability. Hackers of all people should be able to understand the challenges posed by the old design decisions in big complex systems.
Maybe it's because Comcast sues cities trying to provide municipal fiber, preventing people from being able to purchase the kind of internet they want:
