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What I am interested in: a single entity responsible for trenching/fibre infrastructure, then allowing providers to resell access to it. Requiring each ISP to r
by jonpurdy 5y ago
What I am interested in: a single entity responsible for trenching/fibre infrastructure, then allowing providers to resell access to it. Requiring each ISP to run their own fibre makes no sense to me. Let ISPs compete on price and quality of service, not on having billions in the bank to roll out the fibre (or take subsidies and not roll it out, like in many places in USA).
Even worse in condos (like in Toronto) where the condo board has signed an agreement with a provider and not allowing occupants any choice.
Huge shoutouts to Beanfield (Toronto) and Sonic (SF) for actually providing symmetric gigabit for cheaper than the incumbents with lower, asymmetric plans. If all companies were like them I wouldn't be advocating for municipal broadband.
- q3k 5y agoWhat you're talking about is called Unbundled Access / Bitstream access [1]. Although that's currently mostly talked about in the context of copper/DSL access. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbundled_access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbundled_access
- jonpurdy 5y agoThanks for the clarification; that's exactly what I was referring to. I'd like to see fibre included in that since it's likely to be the physical medium that will last a century or more, regardless of the protocols on top of it.
- Ericson2314 5y agoThis would be better, but exactly what is the purpose of last-mile-only competition? It feels like LARPing capitalism because we are embarrassed natural monopolies exist.
- hedora 5y agoThe purpose is to align incentives so that there is competition for customers on both ends of the fiber cable. The fiber cable itself is enough a commodity that it can be structured (from a business perspective) more like roads or water lines. This is actually how ISP’s worked at the dawn of home Internet in the US. There’s no way the incumbent monopolies would have given people access to raw TCP/IP if not for decentralized competition. (Look at Prodigy, AOL and Compuserve’s behavior for the decade prior for hard evidence). Historically, the phone company in the US could even block the usage of answering machines and modems. It took anti-trust action to eliminate those bans. We see the same thing today, with AT&T’s crappy FTTN routers, intentional cable modem buffer bloating, and the abomination that is IPTV cable service. Last mile only competition eliminates all those things.