Why doesn’t a single company just roll in and offer unlimited mobile data and shake things up?
Because they can make more money investing the same resources into the existing corrupt oligopoly. The big three are all heavily invested in each other; the reasons why none of them make a big move to try and disrupt the other two are the exact same reasons no other whale comes along and messes up the racket. It is better for capital this way!!
This context should make this all the more obvious: in the end, there is no competition between entrenched capital because it’s all the same capital.
Continue the thought exercise to its logical conclusion:
A new big player comes in and attempts to disrupt the marketplace
A price war ensues where two or three major players try to underbid each other with loss leaders and attractive features users demand
Everyone else is bled to death because they don’t have billions of dollars in their war chests to run at a loss for five or ten years
Either the war continues until there are is one, or the remaining parties revert to an oligarchy and start cooperating
The new “big three” exploit their market position to raise prices and strip features so they can recoup all the money they burned to bury their competition and make the whole thing worthwhile
This was a nice vacation for consumers, but what is in it for investors? Why would they piss away all that money trying to claw market share away from Brand X when they can just buy shares of Brand X? They have been working for more than a century to create the market conditions that exist right now, they only stand to lose by disrupting it.
That’s great and all, but we live in a real world where there’s multiple possible outcomes, like actual anti monopoly/ oligopoly / pro competitive practices, regulations. A CRTC with teeth etc
Sorry, yes, there are lots of ways it could shake down. But this is the way that is ideal for the disrupting party. They have the same objectives that the incumbents do: make money. Show me a consumer telecom network anywhere in the world that is squeezing more out of each customer than ours does. There are very friggin’ few!! So anyone who comes along to disrupt the market is ultimately going to want to restore it to just the way it is now, except with their ownership instead of someone else’s. Any other outcome would be even more pointless than that. My argument is you can achieve that much cheaper by simply buying into the existing companies rather than competing with them.
anti monopoly/ oligopoly / pro competitive practices, regulations. A CRTC with teeth etc
I mean none of those things have anything to do with the question: why doesn’t a new player come along and offer a consumer-friendly product?
Because it’s simply too expensive to build out 4 different fibre optic networks to all the same neighbourhoods, which is the absolute bare minimum number needed to get some semblance of competition.
We’ll never have true competiton in wired, to the home, infrastructure, and wired will fundamentally always out perform wireless. Wired networks should be built out by utilities or municipalities and then virtual network operators (with comparatively low barrier to entry) can compete on top of the same base infrastructure.
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Because they can make more money investing the same resources into the existing corrupt oligopoly. The big three are all heavily invested in each other; the reasons why none of them make a big move to try and disrupt the other two are the exact same reasons no other whale comes along and messes up the racket. It is better for capital this way!!
This context should make this all the more obvious: in the end, there is no competition between entrenched capital because it’s all the same capital.
Continue the thought exercise to its logical conclusion:
A new big player comes in and attempts to disrupt the marketplace
A price war ensues where two or three major players try to underbid each other with loss leaders and attractive features users demand
Everyone else is bled to death because they don’t have billions of dollars in their war chests to run at a loss for five or ten years
Either the war continues until there are is one, or the remaining parties revert to an oligarchy and start cooperating
The new “big three” exploit their market position to raise prices and strip features so they can recoup all the money they burned to bury their competition and make the whole thing worthwhile
This was a nice vacation for consumers, but what is in it for investors? Why would they piss away all that money trying to claw market share away from Brand X when they can just buy shares of Brand X? They have been working for more than a century to create the market conditions that exist right now, they only stand to lose by disrupting it.
That’s great and all, but we live in a real world where there’s multiple possible outcomes, like actual anti monopoly/ oligopoly / pro competitive practices, regulations. A CRTC with teeth etc
Sorry, yes, there are lots of ways it could shake down. But this is the way that is ideal for the disrupting party. They have the same objectives that the incumbents do: make money. Show me a consumer telecom network anywhere in the world that is squeezing more out of each customer than ours does. There are very friggin’ few!! So anyone who comes along to disrupt the market is ultimately going to want to restore it to just the way it is now, except with their ownership instead of someone else’s. Any other outcome would be even more pointless than that. My argument is you can achieve that much cheaper by simply buying into the existing companies rather than competing with them.
I mean none of those things have anything to do with the question: why doesn’t a new player come along and offer a consumer-friendly product?
Because it’s simply too expensive to build out 4 different fibre optic networks to all the same neighbourhoods, which is the absolute bare minimum number needed to get some semblance of competition.
We’ll never have true competiton in wired, to the home, infrastructure, and wired will fundamentally always out perform wireless. Wired networks should be built out by utilities or municipalities and then virtual network operators (with comparatively low barrier to entry) can compete on top of the same base infrastructure.