I don't know what the costs are but my point is more that its setting price for a for-profit entity. It gets sticky because I don't know NY state law and perhaps these groups have lobbied for getting regions where you are unable to compete as n independent and with that defacto monopoly they should play by any additional rules.
I would just assume that if you want to provide broadband service to low-income that the government would be making up for some of the lost revenue.
The government is letting you provide service using tax-payer fiber. That makes for a fair bit of profit. Take away the fiber n try operating an ISP. Oh I know there's StarLink but that's not going to giver everyone in a city broadband.
25 mbps isn't much, but... $15/month probably doesn't cover any line to your house.
A low cost landline was $10/month 10+ years ago, and usage was extra. I think that's an ok baseline for a connection that needs maintenance and service.
I think there's also the factor that the US government has already paid ISPs for last mile installations several times now - the line to everyone's house has been paid for... if an ISP diverted that money into stock buy backs I'm sure they can explain that to the court and instead be found to have fraudulently expended that subsidy.
Some of that is one time cost, but you've got ongoing costs like pole maintenance and replacement, repairing breaks, trouble tickets, call centers, etc.
I just don't think you can do that for $15/month, even if the capex of build out has already been paid for. Maaaybe if you had near 100% uptake, like landlines used to have. But no ISP is getting that. Most (certainly not all) people can choose between wired internet from a telco and a cable company, and 4g/5g is available in a lot of places, starlink in less dense places, and a lot of people don't need a separate home internet plan because the only networked device is their phone.
My understanding is there are already federal incentives to get less dense areas wired, though I'm not up to speed on the state of that - a quick Google tells me that USDA has loan and grants for it but unclear how well funded that is and how that would impact economics at $15 and $20 a month.
Given that more than half of the population of NY is in NYC and Long Island, I would imagine that there is enough density and economic diversity at least downstate to make this at minimum cost neutral though this is total conjecture.
As an aside, I remember the days of companies partnering with CLECs taking advantage of rural connectivity loopholes to create free conference calling services by billing larger upstream carriers and splitting that revenue with service providers, which was pretty clever.
I think $180/year/person would more than cover what little maintenance is needed in non-disaster situations. I've maybe made a few phone support calls over the last 1 or 2 decades of broadband service. That would add up to $1,800 – $3,600 for 5 or 10 minutes worth of work.
If it's cheaper to build out their own fiber and not have these plans, that is an option these companies have, too.
well wholesale copper line rental in the uk is under £10 a month, and that includes capex pay back. So it is possible for an internet service but it will probably not be enough to allow for much if any allocation of the capex payback. (and that is sort of OK if you are able to take a position that they would never of taken a full price service anyway. 1 dollar a month back to the capex of building out to that house is better than 0)
25Mb doesn't cost any more or less to provide than say 500Mb in reality. If your last mile infrastructure supports those speeds then it supports those speeds. Even the cheapest router possible to buy will do 500Mb.
This comes down to an argument about what "cost", it will cover the marginal cost of an additional subscriber sure (e.g additional customer support, sending a router out, taking a payment each month, 500GB/month across the backbone etc) but will not really be enough to payback the capital cost of the original fibre or coax rollout.
> 25Mb doesn't cost any more or less to provide than say 500Mb in reality. If your last mile infrastructure supports those speeds then it supports those speeds. Even the cheapest router possible to buy will do 500Mb.
It can once you start adding up all the customers and worrying about 'upstream' connectivity.
One thousand customers at 500Mb can potentially saturate a 400Gb link; one thousand at 25Gb cannot. One has to do capacity planning and average and worst case scenarios to worry about, especially at peak times.
It's only slightly more peaky, and there is no more, or very little additional aggregate bandwidth used. I promise you if you've got 2 x 100G links out of an exchange you will not be able to visually tell from the traffic profile which is 5000 500Mb customers Vs 4000 25Mb customers and 1000 500Mb customers.
