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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Internet in NZ used to work a bit like the US does now with one large ISP that is also the network operator and gave exactly zero shits about quality of connections or internationally competitive pricing, except they got greedy and charged their retail arm half what they charged their competitors. Anti-monopoly folks got very pissy about this and managed to get the largest fine permitted by law, forced them to split their wholesale arm off into a separate company, banned them from tendering on the government-funded fibre network (which cost them literally billions of dollars) and then changed the law so that if they did it again there wouldn’t be a cap on the penalty they could impose.

    In 20 years we went from ~35th of the 38 OECD countries in internet speed and accessibility to 9th. Markets only work long-term if you actually regulate them


  • Yeah, pretty much. The way the rest of the world deals with it is by splitting the infrastructure maintenance and retail sides to eliminate the profit incentive to not do maintenance.

    You have a company who owns a/the fibre network in an area and is obligated by anti-monopoly rules to sell access to the network at the same rate and terms to anyone who wants it. They have a profit incentive to maintain the network to a reasonable standard because having a functioning network is how they make money. In a lot of places this wholesale provider will be at least part government owned given that the government usually pays a good chunk of the cost to build out large national infrastructure projects like fibre networks.

    Separately, you have retail ISPs who buy access to the fibre network (or 4g, satellite, …) and sell it to the public along with value adds like tech support, IP addresses, peering agreement etc.

    It’s never work in the US because holding private companies accountable for how they spend public money and maintaining well regulated competitive markets is communism or something.











  • In highschool I worked a shitty job at a butchery, and one day the boss decided to “test how smart” I was or something by asking me to get him 1000 wooden skewers out of the box.

    Being an attention to detail kind of person, I spent a few minutes counting out 1000 cos I wanted to make sure I gave him exactly what he asked for - wouldn’t want a customer to order 1000 and get 995 or something cos I miscounted right?

    Apparently not, cos that was the dumb way to do it - boss slapped 10 skewers on the scale then weighed out 100x that and was really proud until I pointed out that the certificate of accuracy only guaranteed the scale to +/- 2 skewers, then apparently I’m a “smart ass”. Can’t win with some people