9 ms·

One of the better ideas to handle "internet as a utility" is actually not to scrap private ISPs, but to give government a monopoly over the physical infrastruct

One of the better ideas to handle "internet as a utility" is actually not to scrap private ISPs, but to give government a monopoly over the physical infrastructure in the "Last Mile" (i.e. fiber from central hub to business/home). ISPs lease the Last Mile at near cost (to pay for physical maintenance/improvements) and then are responsible for peerage agreements, subscriber management, network equipment, data budgets, plans, customer service, and other services (e.g. VoIP, TV over IP, etc). Nobody benefits from ten+ different fiber runs from data center to home or business, it is inefficient. So you have to consolidate it and then lease it, that way granting an actual competitive landscape where consumers would get many choices for their ISP (and their ISP is responsible for mediating with the government about physical issues/faults). Other countries have done this successfully. It also keeps government from being responsible for actually providing internet services, which could have civil rights problems (or politicians trying to decide winners/losers, etc).

oneplane 6y ago
We have a similar system for electrical distribution; per area a single organisation has sole responsibility for the physical infrastructure and they bill your energy company of choice. That means that on your invoice you have a fixed amount of infrastructure cost as a component, and your service/usage fee from the energy company. Same for gas. This is probably common (or at least more common than internet-infra-as-a-utility), but the concept of doing the same for data would benefit a lot of people. We had that for POTS/PSTN and Coaxical data (CATV/cable/whateveryoucallit) as well, which was privatised and now opened up again so you get your infrastructure component as a national fixed fee and you simply pay your provider of choice for the actual service.
- asploder 6y ago
  I found this terminology confusing for many years, hope this clarification is helpful: - “Coaxial” refers to the design of the physical cable (Wikipedia has a better explanation than I can offer) - CATV refers to “Community Antenna Television”, the first cable systems in the USA, which fed the signal from a shared “community antenna” to homes in areas with poor broadcast reception. - “Cable” is the generic term for pay-TV and ISP services over coaxial cable
  - oneplane 6y ago
    Yeah, the problem is indeed that everyone points to the same general concept but isn't using the same terms which adds to the confusion. Technically you are using a DOCSIS connection which happens to use a coaxial cable. But not the same cable one as you'd have with CATV because that one didn't have the same ratings. There is also a difference with one-way broadcast and two-way communication where you also need a CMTS for that purpose. And to make it worse, sometime EOC is used which in itself is Ethernet, but not over CAT5/6/7 cables. However, all of those words are better than people calling it 'the internet wire'.
stevenjgarner 6y ago
While I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment of having a single last mile connection to each home, IMHO I think giving the government a role is a really bad idea. As a FTTH engineer that has deployed millions of feet of last mile optical fibers, I can tell you government is clueless as to how best do this (as I might add are the MSO's). The majority of small FTTH ISP's have received funding through the USDA RUS, which has specific engineering requirements. Those requirements are prehistoric and dramatically inflate the cost of deployment. For example, one of the better topologies is to implement fast spanning tree to each home over 2 route-diversified connections back to a municipal ring. This dramatically reduces cost vs a star topology build-out (typically endorsed by RUS), and increases fault tolerance. The RUS estimates cost per home well in excess of $1,800 while it is possible to reduce that to well under $1,000 using appropriate engineering. One of the big problems is that most larger organizations (e.g. MSO's) have separate departments for physical networking (buried/aerial cable) and for Ethernet networking (spanning tree etc). As these departments do not communicate well at the design/planning stage, they do not enjoy engineering economies. The MSO's actually believe quite sincerely that their cost of FTTH is at least an order of magnitude higher than it is - they are just plain wrong.
- dbcurtis 6y ago
  Dude, I live in the heart of Silicon Valley and have dealt with AT&T and two different offices and my home. And I can tell you that AT&T are both utterly clueless and shameless liars when it comes to FTTH and FTTN installations. You can not imagine the depth of my anger with those clowns. I have no idea who you work for. But my personal experience with trying to get fiber from AT&T in what is supposed to be one of the most tech-forward regions of the world is laughable. The government may not be better, but at least I know where to aim my pitchforks and torches.
  - e40 6y ago
    I'm sitting here on a Comcast connection that is expensive and AT&T has FTTH in my neighborhood. I just can't seem to pull the trigger on the order because of the horror stories I've heard, and from personal experience. When I had ADSL from AT&T, they absolutely could not give me a connect that didn't drop randomly 2-10 times a day. I had 10+ visits from them over several years and at one point they told me "don't call us anymore" because I was too expensive for them. This, after being told by someone that put a device on my line and found the problem was in the drop cable (from the pole to the house). The new drop cable was ordered and a guy shows up 2 hours later and tells me it's not the drop cable (he didn't measure anything). When pressed, he told me it was too expensive to replace the drop cable. A subsequent tech told me to have a "tree trimming accident" where the drop cable was severed. I was worried I would be charged many thousands of $'s so I didn't do it and just switched to Comcast. (I have had my own issues with Comcast, and I hate them with a passion.) The situation with home internet is just so shitty.
cactus2093 6y ago
Is the US government at all capable of taking on this role though? They apparently already wasted $400 Billion in contracting out broadband upgrades to telecom companies who pocketed the money and never delivered, and then everyone just forgot about it and moved on. I try to be an optimistic person, but years and decades of gridlock and getting nothing done in the US is definitely wearing on me. There are so many things in this same category, of "We have Big Problem X", here's what research has shown works and doesn't work, here's how other countries are doing it more successfully, here's a very clear solution - but no, we'll just talk about it on and off every few months or years and then let inertia win and never actually do anything.
- mulmen 6y ago
  Why would the US government be doing this? Surely local government is better suited to these decisions? > I try to be an optimistic person, but years and decades of gridlock and getting nothing done in the US is definitely wearing on me. That's just like, your opinion. We do a lot of things well in this country, you just have to be willing to look. Public infrastructure like roads and power seem like they have plenty of examples of what works to get this built out. I don't see why any other utility model needs to change significantly for last mile.
  - charwalker 6y ago
    Some states have regulated so municipal ISPs can't start up or have no control. I haven't read an article saying Municipal ISPs are any worse than commercial and often cheaper and less hostile too. Funny how that happens when the profit motivator is taken away. I'd argue that ISPs end up using infrastructure that is common (think tragedy of the commons) like a water pipe or power line and should be open or publicly owned/maintained. By exploiting exclusive ownership of a common resource, ISPs become rent seeking and suck cash from both customers and taxpayers. As long as they hold ownership of the lines, they can charge what they want or you have to pay a huge cost for a new fiber line or have no access. So seize the lines, just like water and power, and allow well regulated companies to facilitate the utility like many states do for power. Allow cities to push for municipal control and management (ex taking over line maintenance in exchange for providing services. Force it into a system where it pays for its own upgrades vs millions to execs and share holders, just like health insurance in many countries.
kalleboo 6y ago
You don't need to give the government a monopoly on the last mile, you just need to allow them to compete on it. As a Swede living in Japan, that system has worked well in both countries. In Japan you have the former telco monopoly NTT with its national flets network and competition in the private au, Sony NURO and various local networks. In Sweden you have many local municipality-owned companies as well as national competition fighting over customers. It seems like Americans are always see options as black and white. The same thinking is reflected in your politics
- mulmen 6y ago
  Who owns the wires?
  - fomine3 6y ago
    For Japan, Flets (NTT) service is top and widest area FTTH service and it runs on NTT's own fiber. au Hikari (KDDI) is 2nd major service and it uses KDDI's own fiber and partially NTT's dark fiber. Nuro (So-net) is relatively small provider (due to limited area) it uses mainly NTT's dark fiber and AFAIK no own fiber. Other players like eo (K-opticom) are mainly by power company and area is limited.
tehjoker 6y ago
I don't understand why you want to preserve these monopolies. They're already non-competitive. How on earth does granting private monopolies do anything other than give away free money to unaccountable executives? It's already clear, based on this suggestion, that the private "market" has failed so the government needs to step in. Just take these guys over and run them publicly.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bravo22 6y ago
You can achieve the same or better result but simply mandating that the same company can't own the fiber AND provide service. The electricity grid in Europe is run the same way.
jillesvangurp 6y ago
The last mile is an outdated notion. Many people would have mobile internet these days and not really need a separate connection at home. Where I live (Berlin, Germany), 5G connections are actually faster than anything I can get to my house at the moment. And I can only get it from the same provider responsible for deploying fiber optic as well (just not to my house). Which of course would be the local state backed monopolist Deutsche Telekom; better known as t-mobile in the US. Many developing nations never had any last mile to begin with and probably will never have any. There are more phones than people in this world. Multiple companies are bootstrapping satellite networks to serve internet all over the planet. Going forward, the only reason to have a wired connection into your house would be monopolist telcos hogging the locally available radio-spectrum backed by lots of government protection. So, instead of governing the status quo of 15 years ago, governments should focus on ensuring there are no infrastructure monopolies on mobile internet. That means ensuring multiple providers are active and that no barriers exist for customers to switch provider. This drives them to compete on quality rather than luring in customers to years long contracts and lots of hurdles to get out of those; which sadly is the status quo in many countries. The only reason sim cards still exist is because they are a key control mechanism. Soft sims were proposed early this century already and the only reason for sim cards to continue to exist is that it 'solidifies' your relation ship to your local telco monopolist. It's the same reason they make you obsess over owning a phone number, which is an ancient relic from the last century.
- notJim 6y ago
  I strongly disagree with this push to abandon hard-wired internet. I have never found wireless internet to be fast or reliable. My parents had it for years, and then the trees became too tall, and it stopped working. I live in the middle of the city, and yet I don't get LTE service in the back of my house for some reason. Even when I do get it elsewhere, it's slow as shit 50% of the time. I'll keep my gigabit fiber, thanks.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  That's a weird take on SIM cards. I used to work in the wireless industry and the primary benefit was that you could easily swap carriers by swapping out your sim, but you could keep your phone. Software based SIMs sound like a security risk to me.
Aaargh20318 6y ago
Something similar is done where I live, except the last mile is not owned by the government but by a commercial corporation. The government basically states open-access and a level playing field for costs as a requirement for giving the necessary permissions to dig and install fiber.
jpollock 6y ago
The problem is that not all bits are the same, even in the last mile. There is still significant improvement in last mile delivery, where different technologies enable different layouts and possibly different cost structures. There isn't even a safety reason to make this a monopoly. The monopoly in Internet provision is in the right of way. If new providers were able to construct their own last mile networks, then we would see more providers.
tzs 6y ago
Separating last mile ownership from ISPs was how it worked around the turn of the century with DSL in Seattle. US West owned the lines to your home. Your DSL modem communicated with the DSLAM at a US West switching center, and US West relayed raw bits between you and your chosen ISP over something lower level than internet (ATM?). US West essentially provided an unstructured dedicate virtual circuit bit stream between your DSL modem and your ISP, and your ISP provided internet on top of that. Your ISP charged you for providing internet access, and US West charged you a fee for using their line.
- mulmen 6y ago
  What changed and did this work? I had CenturyLink DSL in Seattle circa 2009. IIRC it worked fine and wasn't absurdly expensive.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
At this point, are the ISPs adding a significant amount of value? How much work does it really take to set up peering agreements? I am absolutely ready to be convinced otherwise, but my gut reaction to this strategy is that it sounds like a needless carve out for private industry. If 98% of a project is taxpayer funded, private companies shouldn't be able to charge whatever they like for the final 2%. Maybe competition would stop that from happening, but why take that risk? What is the benefit?
jeffnappi 6y ago
I learned just the other day that a group of Utah cities have banded together to create such a network. It's called Utopia Fiber - https://www.utopiafiber.com/about-us/ https://www.utopiafiber.com/about-us/ They are also avoiding the GPON approach and running fiber direct from "fiber huts" to homes so that they can simply use standard networking equipment to service customers. They have providers offering up to 10Gbps for $199! https://www.utopiafiber.com/residential-pricing/ https://www.utopiafiber.com/residential-pricing/

oneplane 6y ago

We have a similar system for electrical distribution; per area a single organisation has sole responsibility for the physical infrastructure and they bill your energy company of choice. That means that on your invoice you have a fixed amount of infrastructure cost as a component, and your service/usage fee from the energy company. Same for gas. This is probably common (or at least more common than internet-infra-as-a-utility), but the concept of doing the same for data would benefit a lot of people. We had that for POTS/PSTN and Coaxical data (CATV/cable/whateveryoucallit) as well, which was privatised and now opened up again so you get your infrastructure component as a national fixed fee and you simply pay your provider of choice for the actual service.

asploder 6y ago
I found this terminology confusing for many years, hope this clarification is helpful: - “Coaxial” refers to the design of the physical cable (Wikipedia has a better explanation than I can offer) - CATV refers to “Community Antenna Television”, the first cable systems in the USA, which fed the signal from a shared “community antenna” to homes in areas with poor broadcast reception. - “Cable” is the generic term for pay-TV and ISP services over coaxial cable
- oneplane 6y ago
  Yeah, the problem is indeed that everyone points to the same general concept but isn't using the same terms which adds to the confusion. Technically you are using a DOCSIS connection which happens to use a coaxial cable. But not the same cable one as you'd have with CATV because that one didn't have the same ratings. There is also a difference with one-way broadcast and two-way communication where you also need a CMTS for that purpose. And to make it worse, sometime EOC is used which in itself is Ethernet, but not over CAT5/6/7 cables. However, all of those words are better than people calling it 'the internet wire'.

stevenjgarner 6y ago

While I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment of having a single last mile connection to each home, IMHO I think giving the government a role is a really bad idea. As a FTTH engineer that has deployed millions of feet of last mile optical fibers, I can tell you government is clueless as to how best do this (as I might add are the MSO's). The majority of small FTTH ISP's have received funding through the USDA RUS, which has specific engineering requirements. Those requirements are prehistoric and dramatically inflate the cost of deployment. For example, one of the better topologies is to implement fast spanning tree to each home over 2 route-diversified connections back to a municipal ring. This dramatically reduces cost vs a star topology build-out (typically endorsed by RUS), and increases fault tolerance. The RUS estimates cost per home well in excess of $1,800 while it is possible to reduce that to well under $1,000 using appropriate engineering. One of the big problems is that most larger organizations (e.g. MSO's) have separate departments for physical networking (buried/aerial cable) and for Ethernet networking (spanning tree etc). As these departments do not communicate well at the design/planning stage, they do not enjoy engineering economies. The MSO's actually believe quite sincerely that their cost of FTTH is at least an order of magnitude higher than it is - they are just plain wrong.

dbcurtis 6y ago
Dude, I live in the heart of Silicon Valley and have dealt with AT&T and two different offices and my home. And I can tell you that AT&T are both utterly clueless and shameless liars when it comes to FTTH and FTTN installations. You can not imagine the depth of my anger with those clowns. I have no idea who you work for. But my personal experience with trying to get fiber from AT&T in what is supposed to be one of the most tech-forward regions of the world is laughable. The government may not be better, but at least I know where to aim my pitchforks and torches.
- e40 6y ago
  I'm sitting here on a Comcast connection that is expensive and AT&T has FTTH in my neighborhood. I just can't seem to pull the trigger on the order because of the horror stories I've heard, and from personal experience. When I had ADSL from AT&T, they absolutely could not give me a connect that didn't drop randomly 2-10 times a day. I had 10+ visits from them over several years and at one point they told me "don't call us anymore" because I was too expensive for them. This, after being told by someone that put a device on my line and found the problem was in the drop cable (from the pole to the house). The new drop cable was ordered and a guy shows up 2 hours later and tells me it's not the drop cable (he didn't measure anything). When pressed, he told me it was too expensive to replace the drop cable. A subsequent tech told me to have a "tree trimming accident" where the drop cable was severed. I was worried I would be charged many thousands of $'s so I didn't do it and just switched to Comcast. (I have had my own issues with Comcast, and I hate them with a passion.) The situation with home internet is just so shitty.

cactus2093 6y ago

Is the US government at all capable of taking on this role though? They apparently already wasted $400 Billion in contracting out broadband upgrades to telecom companies who pocketed the money and never delivered, and then everyone just forgot about it and moved on. I try to be an optimistic person, but years and decades of gridlock and getting nothing done in the US is definitely wearing on me. There are so many things in this same category, of "We have Big Problem X", here's what research has shown works and doesn't work, here's how other countries are doing it more successfully, here's a very clear solution - but no, we'll just talk about it on and off every few months or years and then let inertia win and never actually do anything.

mulmen 6y ago
Why would the US government be doing this? Surely local government is better suited to these decisions? > I try to be an optimistic person, but years and decades of gridlock and getting nothing done in the US is definitely wearing on me. That's just like, your opinion. We do a lot of things well in this country, you just have to be willing to look. Public infrastructure like roads and power seem like they have plenty of examples of what works to get this built out. I don't see why any other utility model needs to change significantly for last mile.
- charwalker 6y ago
  Some states have regulated so municipal ISPs can't start up or have no control. I haven't read an article saying Municipal ISPs are any worse than commercial and often cheaper and less hostile too. Funny how that happens when the profit motivator is taken away. I'd argue that ISPs end up using infrastructure that is common (think tragedy of the commons) like a water pipe or power line and should be open or publicly owned/maintained. By exploiting exclusive ownership of a common resource, ISPs become rent seeking and suck cash from both customers and taxpayers. As long as they hold ownership of the lines, they can charge what they want or you have to pay a huge cost for a new fiber line or have no access. So seize the lines, just like water and power, and allow well regulated companies to facilitate the utility like many states do for power. Allow cities to push for municipal control and management (ex taking over line maintenance in exchange for providing services. Force it into a system where it pays for its own upgrades vs millions to execs and share holders, just like health insurance in many countries.

kalleboo 6y ago

You don't need to give the government a monopoly on the last mile, you just need to allow them to compete on it. As a Swede living in Japan, that system has worked well in both countries. In Japan you have the former telco monopoly NTT with its national flets network and competition in the private au, Sony NURO and various local networks. In Sweden you have many local municipality-owned companies as well as national competition fighting over customers. It seems like Americans are always see options as black and white. The same thinking is reflected in your politics

mulmen 6y ago
Who owns the wires?
- fomine3 6y ago
  For Japan, Flets (NTT) service is top and widest area FTTH service and it runs on NTT's own fiber. au Hikari (KDDI) is 2nd major service and it uses KDDI's own fiber and partially NTT's dark fiber. Nuro (So-net) is relatively small provider (due to limited area) it uses mainly NTT's dark fiber and AFAIK no own fiber. Other players like eo (K-opticom) are mainly by power company and area is limited.

tehjoker 6y ago

I don't understand why you want to preserve these monopolies. They're already non-competitive. How on earth does granting private monopolies do anything other than give away free money to unaccountable executives? It's already clear, based on this suggestion, that the private "market" has failed so the government needs to step in. Just take these guys over and run them publicly.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

bravo22 6y ago

You can achieve the same or better result but simply mandating that the same company can't own the fiber AND provide service. The electricity grid in Europe is run the same way.

jillesvangurp 6y ago

The last mile is an outdated notion. Many people would have mobile internet these days and not really need a separate connection at home. Where I live (Berlin, Germany), 5G connections are actually faster than anything I can get to my house at the moment. And I can only get it from the same provider responsible for deploying fiber optic as well (just not to my house). Which of course would be the local state backed monopolist Deutsche Telekom; better known as t-mobile in the US. Many developing nations never had any last mile to begin with and probably will never have any. There are more phones than people in this world. Multiple companies are bootstrapping satellite networks to serve internet all over the planet. Going forward, the only reason to have a wired connection into your house would be monopolist telcos hogging the locally available radio-spectrum backed by lots of government protection. So, instead of governing the status quo of 15 years ago, governments should focus on ensuring there are no infrastructure monopolies on mobile internet. That means ensuring multiple providers are active and that no barriers exist for customers to switch provider. This drives them to compete on quality rather than luring in customers to years long contracts and lots of hurdles to get out of those; which sadly is the status quo in many countries. The only reason sim cards still exist is because they are a key control mechanism. Soft sims were proposed early this century already and the only reason for sim cards to continue to exist is that it 'solidifies' your relation ship to your local telco monopolist. It's the same reason they make you obsess over owning a phone number, which is an ancient relic from the last century.

notJim 6y ago
I strongly disagree with this push to abandon hard-wired internet. I have never found wireless internet to be fast or reliable. My parents had it for years, and then the trees became too tall, and it stopped working. I live in the middle of the city, and yet I don't get LTE service in the back of my house for some reason. Even when I do get it elsewhere, it's slow as shit 50% of the time. I'll keep my gigabit fiber, thanks.
chrisco255 6y ago
That's a weird take on SIM cards. I used to work in the wireless industry and the primary benefit was that you could easily swap carriers by swapping out your sim, but you could keep your phone. Software based SIMs sound like a security risk to me.

Aaargh20318 6y ago

Something similar is done where I live, except the last mile is not owned by the government but by a commercial corporation. The government basically states open-access and a level playing field for costs as a requirement for giving the necessary permissions to dig and install fiber.

jpollock 6y ago

The problem is that not all bits are the same, even in the last mile. There is still significant improvement in last mile delivery, where different technologies enable different layouts and possibly different cost structures. There isn't even a safety reason to make this a monopoly. The monopoly in Internet provision is in the right of way. If new providers were able to construct their own last mile networks, then we would see more providers.

tzs 6y ago

Separating last mile ownership from ISPs was how it worked around the turn of the century with DSL in Seattle. US West owned the lines to your home. Your DSL modem communicated with the DSLAM at a US West switching center, and US West relayed raw bits between you and your chosen ISP over something lower level than internet (ATM?). US West essentially provided an unstructured dedicate virtual circuit bit stream between your DSL modem and your ISP, and your ISP provided internet on top of that. Your ISP charged you for providing internet access, and US West charged you a fee for using their line.

mulmen 6y ago
What changed and did this work? I had CenturyLink DSL in Seattle circa 2009. IIRC it worked fine and wasn't absurdly expensive.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

At this point, are the ISPs adding a significant amount of value? How much work does it really take to set up peering agreements? I am absolutely ready to be convinced otherwise, but my gut reaction to this strategy is that it sounds like a needless carve out for private industry. If 98% of a project is taxpayer funded, private companies shouldn't be able to charge whatever they like for the final 2%. Maybe competition would stop that from happening, but why take that risk? What is the benefit?

jeffnappi 6y ago

I learned just the other day that a group of Utah cities have banded together to create such a network. It's called Utopia Fiber - https://www.utopiafiber.com/about-us/ https://www.utopiafiber.com/about-us/ They are also avoiding the GPON approach and running fiber direct from "fiber huts" to homes so that they can simply use standard networking equipment to service customers. They have providers offering up to 10Gbps for $199! https://www.utopiafiber.com/residential-pricing/ https://www.utopiafiber.com/residential-pricing/