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No, I don’t need to. The gas I use doesn’t necessarily come from the energy company I’m contracted with. Say I use 2000 cubic meters of gas a year, then my gas
by Aaargh20318 6y ago
No, I don’t need to. The gas I use doesn’t necessarily come from the energy company I’m contracted with. Say I use 2000 cubic meters of gas a year, then my gas company is obligated to pump that amount of gas into the national gas network somewhere. There is no gas line for each company, instead they are each responsible for providing enough gas into the national network to cover their customers.
In the same way I don’t have 13 fiber lines to my home. There is just 1 fiber from my home to a PoP. The company that owns that fiber is obligated to provide a level playing field, open access to anyone. They don’t actually operate an ISP, they simply rent out the fiber and rack space in the PoPs to the ISPs.
Some smaller ISPs may simply piggy-back on the equipment of larger ISPs and resell part of their capacity. Others install their own equipment and only pay a fixed price for each customers fiber + rent for the rack space they use. Neighborhood PoPs are connected to city PoPs which are then connected to whatever backhaul network your ISP has. Same applies here, you can either rent capacity from someone else or just pay for the dark fiber and run your own network.
You can be a pure ‘paper’ provider and simply resell someone else’s stuff, or you can only rent the dark fibers and PoP space and do everything yourself, or anything in between.
You can also transition from one to the other. My current ISP started out by reselling bandwidth, but after a few years they started converting to using their own network and equipment, one city at a time. That’s how they were able to provide gbit service before anyone else.
- war1025 6y agoThis makes sense to me on a conceptual level, and I think that's more or less how it works here. The difference is I believe the company you pay is just whoever owns the local infrastructure, and they take care of buying / supplying on the wholesale market. For example, I live in Iowa, which is a huge wind energy state. Most of the wind farms are actually owned by out of state electric companies though. I'm sure the electricity actually gets used in the strictest sense right here next to the wind mills, but it gets credited to people hundreds of miles away. The wind farm up by where I grew up is actually owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority [1], despite being no where near Tennessee. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Prairie_Wind_Farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Prairie_Wind_Farm
- Aaargh20318 6y ago> . The difference is I believe the company you pay is just whoever owns the local infrastructure, and they take care of buying / supplying on the wholesale market. But in that case there is no competition. They buy on the wholesale market, but since they have a monopoly there is no incentive for them to lower the prices they charge to the customer. Here there is aggressive competition on price.
- war1025 6y agoI believe the way it works is there are laws on how much profit they are allowed to make. Our provider is technically a non-profit electric cooperative [1]. Maybe it's dumb, but being from a rural area, I've always been big on cooperatives. [1] https://consumersenergy.coop/ https://consumersenergy.coop/