4 ms·

Or you know - have the government own the poles and sell access to anyone who wants to run lines. Private roads are impractical except in limited circumstances

Or you know - have the government own the poles and sell access to anyone who wants to run lines. Private roads are impractical except in limited circumstances (that require a huge number of public roads to enable). Infrastructure like this is similar.

diskcat 11y ago
>Or you know - have the government own the poles and sell access to anyone who wants to run lines. That's the status quo with the government owning the land upon which poles may be erected instead of poles. So I don't see how moving the government ownership up a step would solve anything.
- guelo 11y ago
  Because you can't have multiple poles on the same land. One pole owned by the government that all businesses can use.
  - adventured 11y ago
    That can work but you have to do a much better job of outlawing all forms of government-protected monopolization and its half-way equivalents. Otherwise what you end up with, are local governments that want to cut deals for extra cash with AT&T et al. Local governments are supposed to not be allowed to cut monopoly deals today, but they still conspire with big telco to rig the game any way they can.
    - rayiner 11y ago
      For example?
  - diskcat 11y ago
    You can though. The second poles group might need to be taller and more expensive, but there is no reason to be a monopoly.
    - snsr 11y ago
      Multiple, taller telephone poles. Yet another stellar solution from the "free market".
      - CalRobert 11y ago
        Not entirely unlike the GSM/CDMA redundancy.
zanny 11y ago
People always like to say private roads are impractical, but that is 1970's thinking. Today all we need is a common standard for toll readers like most states have for their internal highway toll system, and people could drive on toll roads and be automatically billed, and your GPS can factor in the toll costs in your travels (just as they do now - in most GPS navigation apps, you can elect to avoid toll roads). The comparison to utility lines is not particularly relevant, though. If I want to travel over a road, I just need to bring my car and do it once. If I want to run gigabit fiber over phone poles, it is building a road on a road - the fiber cable is itself a road, build on the infrastructure transit center of phone poles. The more apt comparison is that I want to send data over said fiber channel - it is the functional equivalent to wanting to drive my car along a road, the only real difference is the marginal cost of that traversal is so insignificant on the fiber line (the cost of beaming light along it in a fixed data path) that you may as well disregard it, whereas cars have significant per-distance and per-usage costs associated. But roads and coax / twisted pair / fiber lines are really great comparisons to roads. They have usage limits, they can become congested, but when they are underutilized they are effectively wasted. It seems like something private enterprise would actually be good at, if not for the fact possessing the road or cable line grants yourself an untenable market position giving yourself a monopoly. But public transit authorities demonstrate very poor ability to adapt to consumer demand for expanded roads where there is great congestion, because they aren't profiting off road traffic and are not incentivized directly to fine the maximum tradeoff of value against consumer satisfaction - there are many degrees of separation between the funding of road construction, the maintenance of the road system, and the consequences of your "customers" being dissatisfied. Usually, the only ways dissatisfied customers who dislike the public road network can demonstrate their demand is by moving or voting out politicians - if those were the same barriers to faster Internet speeds, we would probably be as bad off as we are now with telecom monopolies.
- MaysonL 11y ago
  How in hell do you build a private road without government intervention?
  - zanny 11y ago
rayiner 11y ago
Under federal law, utility pole owners are required to sell access to poles on a non-discriminatory basis. There is no doubt that Google is allowed to run their fiber on the poles. The lawsuit is over provisions of the federal law that provide for a notice/"make ready" procedure for new attachments. Under that procedure, Google would file a request to use the pole, and the pole owner would have 145 days to notify everyone else using the pole and move equipment as necessary in order to get it ready for Google's attachment. Here, the municipality passed on ordinance allowing Google (and those similarly situated), to bypass that procedure and move other companies' equipment already on the poles in the process of putting up its own.

diskcat 11y ago

>Or you know - have the government own the poles and sell access to anyone who wants to run lines. That's the status quo with the government owning the land upon which poles may be erected instead of poles. So I don't see how moving the government ownership up a step would solve anything.

guelo 11y ago
Because you can't have multiple poles on the same land. One pole owned by the government that all businesses can use.
- adventured 11y ago
  That can work but you have to do a much better job of outlawing all forms of government-protected monopolization and its half-way equivalents. Otherwise what you end up with, are local governments that want to cut deals for extra cash with AT&T et al. Local governments are supposed to not be allowed to cut monopoly deals today, but they still conspire with big telco to rig the game any way they can.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    For example?
- diskcat 11y ago
  You can though. The second poles group might need to be taller and more expensive, but there is no reason to be a monopoly.
  - snsr 11y ago
    Multiple, taller telephone poles. Yet another stellar solution from the "free market".
    - CalRobert 11y ago
      Not entirely unlike the GSM/CDMA redundancy.

zanny 11y ago

People always like to say private roads are impractical, but that is 1970's thinking. Today all we need is a common standard for toll readers like most states have for their internal highway toll system, and people could drive on toll roads and be automatically billed, and your GPS can factor in the toll costs in your travels (just as they do now - in most GPS navigation apps, you can elect to avoid toll roads). The comparison to utility lines is not particularly relevant, though. If I want to travel over a road, I just need to bring my car and do it once. If I want to run gigabit fiber over phone poles, it is building a road on a road - the fiber cable is itself a road, build on the infrastructure transit center of phone poles. The more apt comparison is that I want to send data over said fiber channel - it is the functional equivalent to wanting to drive my car along a road, the only real difference is the marginal cost of that traversal is so insignificant on the fiber line (the cost of beaming light along it in a fixed data path) that you may as well disregard it, whereas cars have significant per-distance and per-usage costs associated. But roads and coax / twisted pair / fiber lines are really great comparisons to roads. They have usage limits, they can become congested, but when they are underutilized they are effectively wasted. It seems like something private enterprise would actually be good at, if not for the fact possessing the road or cable line grants yourself an untenable market position giving yourself a monopoly. But public transit authorities demonstrate very poor ability to adapt to consumer demand for expanded roads where there is great congestion, because they aren't profiting off road traffic and are not incentivized directly to fine the maximum tradeoff of value against consumer satisfaction - there are many degrees of separation between the funding of road construction, the maintenance of the road system, and the consequences of your "customers" being dissatisfied. Usually, the only ways dissatisfied customers who dislike the public road network can demonstrate their demand is by moving or voting out politicians - if those were the same barriers to faster Internet speeds, we would probably be as bad off as we are now with telecom monopolies.

MaysonL 11y ago
How in hell do you build a private road without government intervention?
- zanny 11y ago

rayiner 11y ago

Under federal law, utility pole owners are required to sell access to poles on a non-discriminatory basis. There is no doubt that Google is allowed to run their fiber on the poles. The lawsuit is over provisions of the federal law that provide for a notice/"make ready" procedure for new attachments. Under that procedure, Google would file a request to use the pole, and the pole owner would have 145 days to notify everyone else using the pole and move equipment as necessary in order to get it ready for Google's attachment. Here, the municipality passed on ordinance allowing Google (and those similarly situated), to bypass that procedure and move other companies' equipment already on the poles in the process of putting up its own.