ISPs are spending less on their networks as they make more money off them

&quot;<i>Before you jump to any conclusions about these companies, though, remember that the turn of the millennium was precisely when a lot of modern Internet cabling was being rolled out.</i>&quot;<p>I feel like this is a very important point that is getting lost.<p>Of course costs are going to be higher and profits lower (or even negative!) when you&#x27;re laying lots of new fiber and deploying new equipment. Maintaining that equipment in subsequent years will cost much less and you&#x27;ll make more money those years selling service on it. There&#x27;s nothing inherently wrong here.

I don&#x27;t see anything too surprising here. The big problem is the lack of disruption and innovation due to the government sponsored monopolies of internet&#x2F;cable&#x2F;network carriers over geographic regions.<p>However, it&#x27;s normal to spend a lot of money on CAPEX and make higher profits on the services after the financing for capital expenditures used to expand the services has paid off. The only people who might find this less than obvious are probably solely from the lean internet business space, and haven&#x27;t had any real experience in manufacturing or other capital-heavy businesses.

Yep, welcome to capitalism. When you need to raise your profits to justify high prices for shareholders, it is a race to the bottom to see with how little you can spend for market competitive pricing.

The upsetting thing to me is not that the networks make money. That&#x27;s fine. It is that they have stymied growth of our economy in favor of milking as much money as they can.<p>According to Ookla,<p>US: 25.9 Mbps South Korea: 54 Mpbs Netherlands 46.3 Mbps Sweden: 46 Mbps Lithuania: 45.6<p>See also: <a href="http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=internet+speeds+by+country" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wolframalpha.com&#x2F;input&#x2F;?i=internet+speeds+by+coun...</a><p>Think about the tremendous power unleashed when MP3 sharing, YouTube video, and Netflix streaming all became possible thanks to sufficient bandwidth. Now think about what would happen if we ramped up speeds instead of letting them trickle.

Where did the data come from? Is there info for any other ISPs?

I don&#x27;t know why people get PO&#x27;d that companies make money. That&#x27;s the way capitalism works. It&#x27;s not like anybody can just invest billions of dollars in infrastructure and hope to make money on it.<p>Then again, the town of Chattanooga TN may be on to something:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8064947" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8064947</a>

I&#x27;d be more interested to see how more regional expenditures on infrastructure do (or possibly don&#x27;t) change in response to new, viable competition, such as Google Fiber.

&quot;ISPs are spending less on their networks as they make more money off them&quot;<p>Or, Capitalism.