In any case, I do happen to agree that domestic roaming charges and charges for incoming calls are stupid.

Only a handful? There are 12 operators in India. Not MVNOs (which are technically illegal, although some are little more than additional brands established through Joint-Ventures with the bigger players, especially Tata) but operators with their own towers and licenses and all.

There used to be 14 before Etisalat and that other one (Spice?) shut up shop... and with Loop now having been acquired that'll bring it down to 11... but compare that to say, China (3) or Russia (4) or even the US (effectively 5 if we do not include MVNOs) so India has A LOT of choice.

And roaming charges are not exorbitant - paying under Rs1 per minute (close enough to US$0.01 that it doesn't matter) and the fact that you can easily switch to one of the many plans that allows you unlimited roaming to different states for under Rs100 (Rs62 to the $1 makes that less than $1.50 for a month) or in some cases even free -- OR if you're not from Mumbai or Delhi you can have service from BSNL and they have their IndiaOne tariff which gets rid of domestic roaming charges altogether... mobile services are some of the cheapest in the world. Even 3G back when it was released in India was about half the price (per GB) as compared to many developed countries, and prices have only gone down since then.

Roaming charge citations:
http://www.airtel.in/mobile/pr...
https://www.vodafone.in/prepai...

And even for international roaming, Vodafone has stuff like free incoming texts so if I'm out of the country I can receive an SMS about whatever and call back if it's urgent or write an email or Skype or whatever.

What costs a lot in India? Data. Yes on mobile (because it's mobile, this is somewhat expected) but more-so on wired connectivity - that was my big shocker when I first moved there, and why I do what I do.

You're either on Google Fiber, one of those municipal fiber projects or not in the USA... which is it? Because I would be very much interested.

Pity you posted as AC.

Which numbers are you referring to? The numbers I quoted are what I pay as direct costs... The cost of regulation is another matter entirely, but even then there are also subsidies offered left, right and centre in some areas which can counteract some or sometimes most of these costs.

For providers offering phone service, there's usually between $5 and $10 on top of the advertised monthly rate that's taken directly from the subscriber as "taxes and fees" for stuff like 911 (which I think is absurd - other countries manage to fund their emergency numbers just fine) - we have something like 8 line-items on our invoices IIRC, it's ridiculous.

As far as other costs are concerned, the franchise agreements in some cases give almost free reign over the rights of way so there's not really any additional payment or differing rates as I understand it, it's just one big bulk thing - in my case, I'm in a Mediacom town and I've seen some really shitty cabling on their part (including stuff run across the ground and just left lying there for what has now been... 4 months?), yet, we got bitched at for having a cable secured in a slightly incorrect way which was 1. temporary (72 hours) and 2. was actually secured to the surface and, we believe, less of a hazard than some of what we've seen. Of course, we don't have a franchise //yet// either.

I deal almost exclusively with smaller towns though so my situation may not be representative of what happens in larger cities - I can imagine those being a complete bitch simply due to their size and the extra layers. I do agree, however, that the "playing fields" **should** be level, monopolies should be absolutely verboten and as above, that all infrastructure should be shared with any licensed provider who wishes to use it (the latter would probably prevent some of these mega-mergers too).

Err... I've seen a bunch of franchise agreements in places we've looked at operating and none of them were exclusive.

There are other barriers though (company has to be a registered CLEC or cable TV operator, FCC hoops to jump through including registrations and contributions which are simply downright confusing and so forth... oh, and sometimes working with the cities themselves can be a royal pain in the arse and/or painstakingly slow).

As for banning competition, I think that's a new thing with those municipalities that have done so, and said bans are probably not entirely legal anyway.

What are the pole leasing rates where you are? In So IL, it costs $9/year per pole, or about what... $0.75 a month per pole? If you assume 25% penetration (or we say that 1 in 4 houses has cable) & roughly 1 pole per 2 houses passed (judging by what I can see out my window), that means about $1.50/cust/mo goes to poles in built-up areas.

Granted, it could possibly be cheaper, but it's not as absurd or exorbitant as it seems to be being made out to be.

Disclaimer: Prices are based on leasing space on Ameren poles, does not include the cost of having their engineers come to examine the poles to make sure my cables won't cause them to fall over and stuff. I'm on the ISP side & I think all the infrastructure - including cabling - should be shared/open for any provider to use. I also think providers in this country charge too much for too little service, there isn't enough competition, and that the Comcast/TWC merger ultimately is probably a bad idea for consumers.

I respect people's right to be religious. What I do not respect is their right to shove it down my throat or teach it to my children - especially as a factual, scientific thing. Or even as a subject of any kind: if I wanted them to learn a particular religion, I would take them to a particular church. If I'm raising my kids to be Buddhists or Hindus or Muslims, I would take them to an appropriate temple or mosque.

Who in their right mind thinks they have the right to teach them Christianity as the only "correct" doctrine, especially in a nation where church and state are supposed to be separate?

End of the day, it boils down to this: Religion is a choice. Science (and the things that govern science, like the laws of physics and chemical compounds and fossils and bio-diversity and what-have-you) is not. As such, they should keep it to themselves.

And this is why I respect Jimmy Wales telling the holistic people what he's telling them (maybe he could add the fodder about Steve Jobs and his holistic approach shortening his life)

...the powers that be in the US would take a similar approach with other things like evolution vs creationism in schools and all the hoo-hah surrounding NDTs Cosmos series...

"Prove it", meaning, prove it by means OTHER THAN throwing a bible in my face and saying "See? Here it is written! IT IS THE TRUTH!!!!1!1!!!"

Yeah, well, fossils, motherfucker - the only thing I've ever gotten from your book is confused and wondering where all the historical evidence is to correlate the story.

Happy to do it, but who will fund the initial build? Should I go out to every customer in town and promise them a future service in exchange for them signing up and pre-paying for it now? I don't know about you but that would smell of a scam to me.

Personally I think Google's progress isn't half bad, all things considered - and they have pretty deep pockets compared to many budding operators which I expect offers them some advantage.

For the record, I'd love to peer or host a Netflix box, but we're not pulling enough traffic from them yet, so for now my Netflix packets will have to come from Level3.

Hasn't the S-Class had this for a couple of years already now? I seem to recall seeing something about it on Top-Gear.

May not have been an S-Class, it just seems to ring a bell since that series is usually first to get bleeding-edge stuff like this that finds it's way in to regular cars a few years later.

(Fiber is dedicated to the building, active ethernet, not GPON, typically delivered on a gigabit port, rate-limited at the CPE according to the requirements of the complex).

Should mention that we overprovision connections by 20%, just because. Connections are typically FTTB + complex-wide wifi.

We charge $10 for 4mbit/s and $20/mo for 10mbit/s symmetrical per subscriber in Southern IL... but that's mostly because the complex itself buys the connection which means we're providing a lot of subscribers in one go, so in fairness we don't have a last mile to worry about.

There are some entities (peering exchanges) which require this already: if your pipe has a CBR of over 80 or 85% they require you to upgrade. In some countries (like India), it's even mandated in one of the various regulations (along with many other things which providers in that country will quite happily flout or ignore).

I understand where you're coming from, but the devices are not black boxes. As I mentioned, the devices operate using a collection of open-source software (Debian MIPS & Vyatta) and presumably can be hacked/upgraded/fiddled with to your hearts content if you so desire.

As I also mentioned, IF ANYTHING probably it's only the GUI that is closed, but having not bothered to check on my own devices I don't know whether it actually is or is not. Considering however that the functionality you're referring to is in the core system (which appears to be OSS), what you're describing seems largely to be a non-issue - you can SSH in to the device and see a good old mostly-standard Linux CLI.

I can and have successfully installed other debian packages on it just by running apt-get, so, as long as the debian repos are up-to-date, I have no reason to suspect that the software on my own ER is not also up-to-date.