3 ms·

> I'm curious why cities don't directly lay down the infrastructure work for broadband access. Wondering the same thing here (Switzerland), but I might not und

> I'm curious why cities don't directly lay down the infrastructure work for broadband access. Wondering the same thing here (Switzerland), but I might not understand the context: decoupling the "cable" from the "provider" is not common in the US, or there are some other complexities that I don't understand? In my case the company "Swisscom" opened half of the sidewalk, connected my apartment building to their FTTH infrastructure, then sent me a ton of flyers etc.. to advertise their Internet, but I still decided to use a tiny provider located 100km away (being small, high customer focus etc...) => works since 7 months perfectly, latency is good (e.g. 2-8ms to ping 8.8.8.8), etc... . My parents had basically nothing (half-broken copper wire), then on a random day the city's electricity&water&gas company team suddenly turned up, installed the FTTH cable (old house => turned out to be super-complicated to push that tiny cable through the house's structure => took them 4hrs), then they left, that's it => me and my parents then had multiple discussions about providers and they finally chose "Sunrise" (one of the major ones in Switzerland) and everything so far has been perfect. As far as I understand how things work here, the company that provides the cable earns money paid by the providers that use that cable, which in turn earn money paid by their customers => everybody earns money, everybody is happy. For very small communities (e.g. the one where my parents live - ~800 inhabitants), the town/village might have to directly finance a part of the costs needed to lay down the cables (which in turn are covered by common taxes), but that in turn makes the small community more desirable by whoever takes it into consideration when moving.

nine_k 6y ago
Many municipalities expressly made contracts with cable TV networks to wire their towns / neighborhoods in exchange for a monopoly in cable access. Else the cable company did not have enough incentive (or pretended to) to lay the cable at all. So the cable company owned the only copper capable of broadband internet, and also the underground channels to lay fiber in. They naturally upgraded their hub spots to allow Internet traffic, and laying the last mile all over again is prohibitively expensive, or even administratively prohibited, in a lot of places. There is, of course, phone infrastructure! But Bell was a textbook monopoly, and pieces if it retained the infrastructure after its split. So in some places they can profitably reuse the copper they have to also provide Internet service, and sometimes you can even get fiber from them in newer houses which were wired with fiber backbone for the phone service anyway. In some areas the fixed-line copper is not good enough, and running fiber is too expensive because of low housing density. In large proper cities, of course, the situation is much better, because infrastructure cost per reached customer is much lower.
toast0 6y ago
> I might not understand the context: decoupling the "cable" from the "provider" is not common in the US, or there are some other complexities that I don't understand? So the US context in a nutshell; in most places, the provider of the cable is the provider of the service. In a bit more detail. Up until 1982, almost all telephone service was provided by AT&T (also known as the Bell System or just "The Phone Company"); at that point, it was split up through anti-trust into regional local phone companies (the baby Bells, ex Pacific Bell in California, Bell South in the south), and a long distance phone company (AT&T), and it became possible to choose a long distance carrier, if you wanted to make long distance calls. The local phone companies were not permitted to provide this service, although AT&T may have been allowed to be a default choice. This unleashed real competition in long distance service, it was now fairly easy to switch, and as easy to dial, and there were several companies ready to go, because they had been offering less usable services already (dial a local number, get a second dial tone and dial the actual destination, etc); prices dropped, quality improved, etc, etc. In 1996, we got a Telecommunications Act which among other things, required the incumbent local telephone services to lease access to their lines at cost based rates. Under these terms, if there was sufficient space in the central office, a competitive local carrier could install equipment and provide local (and long distance) calling and DSL. However, the regulator (FCC) said this only applied to telephone service and not to "new" services like phone and internet via cable TV lines. Additionally, DSL length restrictions meant many customers weren't close enough to the Central Offices to get good service, and phone companies began building out remote terminals to house the equipment closer to the customers. But there's no space in a remote terminal for competitive carrier equipment, so that wasn't necessarily required to be available either. Finally, courts ruled that it wasn't fair to impose leased access requirements on telephone companies but not cable companies, and the regulator declared the market competitive because consumers could chose from their telephone company, their cable company, internet over power lines (which I don't think every actually happened!), or wireless, so line sharing wasn't important. An additional wrinkle is that although the leased access prices were regulated, and supposed to be based on cost, incumbent carriers would regularly price retail accounts below the leased access prices, making competition unfair. There are a few open access networks that were explicitly built out for this, but it's pretty rare, or it comes with big caveats: I can get on my municipal fiber network where I live, but I'd have to pay all the construction costs to get the network extended; if I organize a group, we can split the costs, but interest is low, I'd rather be able to do it, but get partially reimbursed if someone else connects up on the line I extended (within a reasonable time). TL;DR: we almost had it, but it was a bit broken, and then it was taken away.

nine_k 6y ago

Many municipalities expressly made contracts with cable TV networks to wire their towns / neighborhoods in exchange for a monopoly in cable access. Else the cable company did not have enough incentive (or pretended to) to lay the cable at all. So the cable company owned the only copper capable of broadband internet, and also the underground channels to lay fiber in. They naturally upgraded their hub spots to allow Internet traffic, and laying the last mile all over again is prohibitively expensive, or even administratively prohibited, in a lot of places. There is, of course, phone infrastructure! But Bell was a textbook monopoly, and pieces if it retained the infrastructure after its split. So in some places they can profitably reuse the copper they have to also provide Internet service, and sometimes you can even get fiber from them in newer houses which were wired with fiber backbone for the phone service anyway. In some areas the fixed-line copper is not good enough, and running fiber is too expensive because of low housing density. In large proper cities, of course, the situation is much better, because infrastructure cost per reached customer is much lower.

toast0 6y ago

> I might not understand the context: decoupling the "cable" from the "provider" is not common in the US, or there are some other complexities that I don't understand? So the US context in a nutshell; in most places, the provider of the cable is the provider of the service. In a bit more detail. Up until 1982, almost all telephone service was provided by AT&T (also known as the Bell System or just "The Phone Company"); at that point, it was split up through anti-trust into regional local phone companies (the baby Bells, ex Pacific Bell in California, Bell South in the south), and a long distance phone company (AT&T), and it became possible to choose a long distance carrier, if you wanted to make long distance calls. The local phone companies were not permitted to provide this service, although AT&T may have been allowed to be a default choice. This unleashed real competition in long distance service, it was now fairly easy to switch, and as easy to dial, and there were several companies ready to go, because they had been offering less usable services already (dial a local number, get a second dial tone and dial the actual destination, etc); prices dropped, quality improved, etc, etc. In 1996, we got a Telecommunications Act which among other things, required the incumbent local telephone services to lease access to their lines at cost based rates. Under these terms, if there was sufficient space in the central office, a competitive local carrier could install equipment and provide local (and long distance) calling and DSL. However, the regulator (FCC) said this only applied to telephone service and not to "new" services like phone and internet via cable TV lines. Additionally, DSL length restrictions meant many customers weren't close enough to the Central Offices to get good service, and phone companies began building out remote terminals to house the equipment closer to the customers. But there's no space in a remote terminal for competitive carrier equipment, so that wasn't necessarily required to be available either. Finally, courts ruled that it wasn't fair to impose leased access requirements on telephone companies but not cable companies, and the regulator declared the market competitive because consumers could chose from their telephone company, their cable company, internet over power lines (which I don't think every actually happened!), or wireless, so line sharing wasn't important. An additional wrinkle is that although the leased access prices were regulated, and supposed to be based on cost, incumbent carriers would regularly price retail accounts below the leased access prices, making competition unfair. There are a few open access networks that were explicitly built out for this, but it's pretty rare, or it comes with big caveats: I can get on my municipal fiber network where I live, but I'd have to pay all the construction costs to get the network extended; if I organize a group, we can split the costs, but interest is low, I'd rather be able to do it, but get partially reimbursed if someone else connects up on the line I extended (within a reasonable time). TL;DR: we almost had it, but it was a bit broken, and then it was taken away.