6 ms·

I hear this argument all the time, but I don't really see it. What value is the ISP providing here? They sell you service on physical infrastructure that you th

by quasse 8y ago

I hear this argument all the time, but I don't really see it. What value is the ISP providing here? They sell you service on physical infrastructure that you the taxpayer already paid for? Peering? It seems like it would be much more efficient for a municipality to just negotiate citywide peering agreements for everyone. Some people try to push the "value adds" line, like IPTV and phone service, but I don't see any reason those should be tied to your base internet service. Those arguments smell like the old cable company days, when everything had to be a "bundle".

jgust 8y ago
The last mile infrastructure isn't maintenance free and doesn't last forever, so it has to be paid for somehow be it taxes or commercially. Users (in the above situation) paying an ISP are essentially agreeing to a "maintenance contract".
- takeda 8y ago
  That's why I said "lease to ISP for a fee", the ISP will of course forward that cost to an user, perhaps under extra fees no extra taxes needed, and people who actually use it will pay for it. BTW: this is how it was with DSL. Title II has this provision, and telco companies were required to lease their lines to ISPs at a "reasonable fee" which was up to FCC to decide (this was so they wouldn't charge ridiculous prices to kill their competitors). When Title II was reinstated, Wheeler actually excluded this provision, that's why nothing changed in terms of monopoly.
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> it would be much more efficient for a municipality to just negotiate citywide peering agreements for everyone Negotiating peering, providing customer support, buying routers and modems, maintaining equipment, et cetera isn't a core competency of most municipalities. If municipal broadband scales, we'll likely replace the ISPs with broadband servicing companies. Explicitly privatizing those operations makes it more transparent, while releasing every single municipality from having to acquire a niche skillset.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  > providing customer support It could be argued that they don't even provide this adequately in areas where they are a market monopoly. My local government provides far better customer support. When there is an issue or grievance, there is a place to file it and someone will always respond. As an added bonus, they don't try to sell me additional services every 5 minutes.
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    America's present ISP situation is worse than almost any alternative. Presently, the best-run municipalities are exploring municipal broadband. Their experiences will be positive. But not all municipalities are well-run. And today's well-run municipalities turn into tomorrow dumpster fires. Publicly-owned infrastructure rented to private provider-maintainers is a proven model. It isn't a fire-and-forget solution. But by dividing power between the municipality and private operator, it provides a rudimentary balance. Remember, we got here because municipalities gave ISPs local monopolies. I don't get why we suddenly believe they'll now be totally competent and benevolent.
    - rayiner 8y ago
      > America's present ISP situation is worse than almost any alternative. I strongly disagree. Have you ever been to Germany? All the infrastructure we have in the U.S. is shit compared to Germany. The roads, the trains, etc. The one bit of infrastructure in the U.S. that isn't shit in comparison is broadband.
      - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
        > Have you ever been to Germany? All the infrastructure we have in the U.S. is shit compared to Germany. As a Swiss New Yorker, I get where you're coming from. It doesn't lightly occur to me that our subways were almost entirely built by private companies. (With heap loads of public funding, albeit.) We have ISP competition in New York, which is how we get superior service. That isn't the case in much of America; letting municipalities be that competition is, to me, better than letting Comcast et al retain their monopolies.
netcan 8y ago
Some things tend to be outside the competence of government departments. Face-to-consumer business tends to be one of them. Public telcomms were the norm in most of the world (sans US) until the 80s-90s. It wasn't good. What an ISP is is customer support & infrastructure. These sorts of ideas make ISPs less infrastructure, more customer facing services. Btw, this is not some untested theory. It's been done a bunch of times. Work's well enough, done right.
- ergothus 8y ago
  For areas where occasional failure and/or occasional required provider changes are tolerable (basic education, for example, may not qualify as one of these): competitive market > govt control > uncompetitive market to be more realistic, there's overlap at the ends of these - you can find some local govts that outperformed competitive markets and some uncompetitive markets that outperform local govts, but on average, the above generalization works. The real pain is that all the incentives that make capitalism work well ALSO incentivize finding ways to break the market, so a competitive market won't stay competitive forever just by existing.
  - wool_gather 8y ago
    > so a competitive market won't stay competitive forever just by existing Certainly. If we consider "competitive market" under the same rubric that you proposed: "areas where occasional failure and/or occasional required provider changes are tolerable", it clearly fails that test. So we can probably say that ensuring a stable, competitive market may be a government's responsibility.
pathseeker 8y ago
You do know that an ISP has much more equipment than the cables that run to your house right? Good internet vs bad internet can easily be entirely in mismanaged peering, qos, aggregation, etc. IPv6, support for static IPs, etc all depend on much more than the wire. I'm not confident municipalities have any motivation to do more than the bare minimum when it comes to managing all of this stuff beyond the physical infrastructure.
- onemoresoop 8y ago
  And I'm also confident Comcast business model is to rip you off, everybody hates them because of their practices and their history. This is a step forward. Yes, lots of things can go wrong but we break off the big leech off our backs, we can work on it together rather than empower the big companies to do it for us.
- takeda 8y ago
  By last mile I'm talking about the physical wire between your house and POP. Layer 1-2 none of the protocols you mentioned work on that level, those would be provided by the ISP. The issue is city, users, ISPs can't afford to have a separate wire per ISP per house. It's extremely expensive and wasteful, because most of the time most houses will use at most a single ISP. What I'm saying is that city should be responsible for providing the physical connectivity, think of it like roads. It would be crazy to think that every store, office etc would have to build their own roads to every house. All what's needed is a fiber between your house and POP. What's plugged in on both ends is up to ISP. The city only needs to worry that fiber is there and it works. Same as the city needs to worry there is a road and it is usable. The city then can lease that fiber to ISP for a fee to cover the maintenance. Off topic: I don't want to ISP to do QoS for me so if we could chose between different ISPs I would shop for ones that don't do it. I know better which traffic is more important to me than my ISP.
  - zzzcpan 8y ago
    Don't think of it like roads. Building roads is very expensive, laying down fibers is cheap. It's so cheap, that ISPs can afford to compete with like a dozen other ISPs in densely populated areas and with at least three in sparse areas. They won't get super rich like this, but it's still profitable and sustainable.
takeda 8y ago
The ISP provides the Internet access, while another organization provides the infrastructure to talk to the ISP. This model is used in data centers where a single company is selected by the owner of the building and they are responsible for all the wiring (it would be very expensive and a lot of redundant wiring if multiple companies could do that), but selecting an ISP is a matter of just using a short patch panel in exchange room. You can easily switch ISPs or use several of them. Currently when ISPs own the last mile they are only motivated to have speed that's marginally faster (typically DSL) and cheaper (typically wireless). There's no motivation to improve especially after FCC killed net neutrality, since slow speed can actually make them money by prioritizing traffic. If last mile is separate, ISPs always will be motivated to be fastest and cheapest because the customer can easily switch between them. The last mile is primarily responsible for laying fiber cable and do repairs if it is broken. If they won't do their job, both ISP and users won't be happy and they might end up being replaced by someone else.

by quasse 8y ago

jgust 8y ago

The last mile infrastructure isn't maintenance free and doesn't last forever, so it has to be paid for somehow be it taxes or commercially. Users (in the above situation) paying an ISP are essentially agreeing to a "maintenance contract".

takeda 8y ago
That's why I said "lease to ISP for a fee", the ISP will of course forward that cost to an user, perhaps under extra fees no extra taxes needed, and people who actually use it will pay for it. BTW: this is how it was with DSL. Title II has this provision, and telco companies were required to lease their lines to ISPs at a "reasonable fee" which was up to FCC to decide (this was so they wouldn't charge ridiculous prices to kill their competitors). When Title II was reinstated, Wheeler actually excluded this provision, that's why nothing changed in terms of monopoly.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago

> it would be much more efficient for a municipality to just negotiate citywide peering agreements for everyone Negotiating peering, providing customer support, buying routers and modems, maintaining equipment, et cetera isn't a core competency of most municipalities. If municipal broadband scales, we'll likely replace the ISPs with broadband servicing companies. Explicitly privatizing those operations makes it more transparent, while releasing every single municipality from having to acquire a niche skillset.

craftyguy 8y ago
> providing customer support It could be argued that they don't even provide this adequately in areas where they are a market monopoly. My local government provides far better customer support. When there is an issue or grievance, there is a place to file it and someone will always respond. As an added bonus, they don't try to sell me additional services every 5 minutes.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  America's present ISP situation is worse than almost any alternative. Presently, the best-run municipalities are exploring municipal broadband. Their experiences will be positive. But not all municipalities are well-run. And today's well-run municipalities turn into tomorrow dumpster fires. Publicly-owned infrastructure rented to private provider-maintainers is a proven model. It isn't a fire-and-forget solution. But by dividing power between the municipality and private operator, it provides a rudimentary balance. Remember, we got here because municipalities gave ISPs local monopolies. I don't get why we suddenly believe they'll now be totally competent and benevolent.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    > America's present ISP situation is worse than almost any alternative. I strongly disagree. Have you ever been to Germany? All the infrastructure we have in the U.S. is shit compared to Germany. The roads, the trains, etc. The one bit of infrastructure in the U.S. that isn't shit in comparison is broadband.
    - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
      > Have you ever been to Germany? All the infrastructure we have in the U.S. is shit compared to Germany. As a Swiss New Yorker, I get where you're coming from. It doesn't lightly occur to me that our subways were almost entirely built by private companies. (With heap loads of public funding, albeit.) We have ISP competition in New York, which is how we get superior service. That isn't the case in much of America; letting municipalities be that competition is, to me, better than letting Comcast et al retain their monopolies.

netcan 8y ago

Some things tend to be outside the competence of government departments. Face-to-consumer business tends to be one of them. Public telcomms were the norm in most of the world (sans US) until the 80s-90s. It wasn't good. What an ISP is is customer support & infrastructure. These sorts of ideas make ISPs less infrastructure, more customer facing services. Btw, this is not some untested theory. It's been done a bunch of times. Work's well enough, done right.

ergothus 8y ago
For areas where occasional failure and/or occasional required provider changes are tolerable (basic education, for example, may not qualify as one of these): competitive market > govt control > uncompetitive market to be more realistic, there's overlap at the ends of these - you can find some local govts that outperformed competitive markets and some uncompetitive markets that outperform local govts, but on average, the above generalization works. The real pain is that all the incentives that make capitalism work well ALSO incentivize finding ways to break the market, so a competitive market won't stay competitive forever just by existing.
- wool_gather 8y ago
  > so a competitive market won't stay competitive forever just by existing Certainly. If we consider "competitive market" under the same rubric that you proposed: "areas where occasional failure and/or occasional required provider changes are tolerable", it clearly fails that test. So we can probably say that ensuring a stable, competitive market may be a government's responsibility.

pathseeker 8y ago

You do know that an ISP has much more equipment than the cables that run to your house right? Good internet vs bad internet can easily be entirely in mismanaged peering, qos, aggregation, etc. IPv6, support for static IPs, etc all depend on much more than the wire. I'm not confident municipalities have any motivation to do more than the bare minimum when it comes to managing all of this stuff beyond the physical infrastructure.

onemoresoop 8y ago
And I'm also confident Comcast business model is to rip you off, everybody hates them because of their practices and their history. This is a step forward. Yes, lots of things can go wrong but we break off the big leech off our backs, we can work on it together rather than empower the big companies to do it for us.
takeda 8y ago
By last mile I'm talking about the physical wire between your house and POP. Layer 1-2 none of the protocols you mentioned work on that level, those would be provided by the ISP. The issue is city, users, ISPs can't afford to have a separate wire per ISP per house. It's extremely expensive and wasteful, because most of the time most houses will use at most a single ISP. What I'm saying is that city should be responsible for providing the physical connectivity, think of it like roads. It would be crazy to think that every store, office etc would have to build their own roads to every house. All what's needed is a fiber between your house and POP. What's plugged in on both ends is up to ISP. The city only needs to worry that fiber is there and it works. Same as the city needs to worry there is a road and it is usable. The city then can lease that fiber to ISP for a fee to cover the maintenance. Off topic: I don't want to ISP to do QoS for me so if we could chose between different ISPs I would shop for ones that don't do it. I know better which traffic is more important to me than my ISP.
- zzzcpan 8y ago
  Don't think of it like roads. Building roads is very expensive, laying down fibers is cheap. It's so cheap, that ISPs can afford to compete with like a dozen other ISPs in densely populated areas and with at least three in sparse areas. They won't get super rich like this, but it's still profitable and sustainable.

takeda 8y ago

The ISP provides the Internet access, while another organization provides the infrastructure to talk to the ISP. This model is used in data centers where a single company is selected by the owner of the building and they are responsible for all the wiring (it would be very expensive and a lot of redundant wiring if multiple companies could do that), but selecting an ISP is a matter of just using a short patch panel in exchange room. You can easily switch ISPs or use several of them. Currently when ISPs own the last mile they are only motivated to have speed that's marginally faster (typically DSL) and cheaper (typically wireless). There's no motivation to improve especially after FCC killed net neutrality, since slow speed can actually make them money by prioritizing traffic. If last mile is separate, ISPs always will be motivated to be fastest and cheapest because the customer can easily switch between them. The last mile is primarily responsible for laying fiber cable and do repairs if it is broken. If they won't do their job, both ISP and users won't be happy and they might end up being replaced by someone else.