Capitalism 2 and Capitalism Lab Forum

Currently the telecommunications company is an awful firm to do business with for the following reasons:

- It is expensive to build and the returns on investment are relatively slow to come and not that great. This is made worse by the fact that almost every digital AI company loves building these - which drives down the prices due to competition.
- It is a simple firm, with only two possible options, how much you charge for the services and how much you pay for infrastructure. This makes it pretty bland and the only reason I ever build it is to make sure people have internet access in the city (so I can sell more lucrative internet company services).

My suggestions to improve this:

- Add a branding aspect to the telecommunications company. Instead of price being the sole determinant of whether customers will pay or not you could allow advertising in a way similar to the bank/insurance branches and have a brand rating.
- Add an internet speed/bandwidth indicator - more investment in speed/bandwidth upgrades could allow the average speed to be increased and customers would pay a higher price for it. In general you could also perhaps add a feature that allows the company to have more customers sign up, but if the investment level is lacking the average speed/bandwidth of each customer goes down. The dilemma would then be either to have lots of customers with low quality connections or a few customers with high quality connections. Or if you have lots of money to burn you could have both.

I think that this would make this firm more exciting and interesting and the strategy a bit more complex than just lowering prices to the margin as much as possible.

Hi Stylesjl, thanks for your suggestion. I will forward it to the dev team.

It would be interest to expand that,

should ecommerce buildings, software companies selling digital etc have to sign up with an ISP as it were ? with a choice from available ISP's since those sorts of companies would have a large internet bandwidth need.

should ISP's be allowed to create "packages" for customers. .. some people care about speed, some about download limits, some want everything, and they are all prepared to pay different amounts.

Another possibility would be a single government held ISP where you can bid for chunks of the available bandwidth to then sell on to customers

Also maybe not only include the computer users ingame as the ones that need internet but also the cellphone and later on smartphone users that need it aswell. Maybe even a option for prices you charge for normal internet users and for the ones using the mobile internet, or even charge per 1GB like they do in real life so you could decide if you wanna sell a unlimited flatrate kind of internet for mobile users or charge by the gigabytes.

Stylesjl wrote: Mon Aug 12, 2024 9:56 am - Add an internet speed/bandwidth indicator - more investment in speed/bandwidth upgrades could allow the average speed to be increased and customers would pay a higher price for it. In general you could also perhaps add a feature that allows the company to have more customers sign up, but if the investment level is lacking the average speed/bandwidth of each customer goes down. The dilemma would then be either to have lots of customers with low quality connections or a few customers with high quality connections. Or if you have lots of money to burn you could have both.

I think that this would make this firm more exciting and interesting and the strategy a bit more complex than just lowering prices to the margin as much as possible.

This idea was excellent!

Great ideas, actually: nothing was changed

Great idea, I support your suggestion.

Stylesjl wrote: Mon Aug 12, 2024 9:56 am - Add an internet speed/bandwidth indicator - more investment in speed/bandwidth upgrades could allow the average speed to be increased and customers would pay a higher price for it. In general you could also perhaps add a feature that allows the company to have more customers sign up, but if the investment level is lacking the average speed/bandwidth of each customer goes down. The dilemma would then be either to have lots of customers with low quality connections or a few customers with high quality connections. Or if you have lots of money to burn you could have both.

I think that this would make this firm more exciting and interesting and the strategy a bit more complex than just lowering prices to the margin as much as possible.

I have received some feedback from the dev team on your suggestion.

The current system already simulates this: "if the investment level is lacking the average speed/bandwidth of each customer goes down."

FYI, you could see: https://www.capitalismlab.com/digital-age-dlc/telecom/
Use the slider to set the monthly budget for upgrading infrastructure
The maximum number of subscribers that your telecom can serve is limited by its infrastructure capacity. Set a budget here for upgrading its infrastructure capacity if most of its capacity has already been utilized.

It goes without saying that all customers prefer high quality of Internet access. To tell whether your telecom is capable of delivering high quality of services, you could subtract the infrastructure capacity by the utilized capacity. This indicates whether your telecom’s infrastructure capacity is large enough to handle heavy Internet traffic during peak hours.