3 ms·

The market failed because of how difficulty it is to establish last mine given municipal regulation, permitting and other bullshit. If we want to fix broadband

The market failed because of how difficulty it is to establish last mine given municipal regulation, permitting and other bullshit. If we want to fix broadband and cellular, decouple utility pole ownership/permitting from retail providers.

iptrans 5y ago
The above is, in conciliatory terms, hyperbole. In reductionist terms the real underlying reason for market failure is regulatory capture. As to utility poles, a large number of poles are owned by power companies who by and large do not offer retail broadband services, so even here you are barking up the wrong tree. That being said, there are issues with utility poles which need to be addressed. Efforts such as one touch make ready and the like are needed on a national level.
- unishark 5y ago
  Seems to me you're making the same point as the parent poster. I think by "ownership" they mean monopolization of the poles due to agreements with the local govt to provide service in return for monopoly rights.
  - iptrans 5y ago
    Not really. The parent to my original post identified a problem, but misdiagnosed the root cause and prescribed an incorrect solution. As noted above a lot of poles are owned by power companies that do not offer broadband service. Furthermore exclusive franchises have not been permitted for a good while anymore. Anybody with the correct permits can secure space on poles. This isn’t the issue. Part of the problems is how costs are assigned and how timely work progresses. Who owns the pole isn’t the big issue.
tialaramex 5y ago
I'm guessing by "decouple utility pole ownership/permitting" you're thinking about the Last Mile. This is almost exactly what happened in Britain. The last mile telephone system is owned by Openreach, which is owned by British Telecom, but they're required to sell the things you'd actually want that system for at regulated wholesale prices to any outfit that wants to retail it. So for example they'll sell you LLU (Local-loop Unbundled) service which means you can put data onto a copper cable between a home or business property and one of the thousands of physical telephone exchanges that used to house Strowger electro-mechanical switches when that's how telephones worked. You also get some footprint inside the exchange. How you make that into an ISP is your business, but unlike running cables to millions of houses, running fibre to a few thousand telephone exchanges is something a business might actually compete at and sure enough BT have competition for that part of the problem, at least outside the very rural areas. Or if you're a small outfit and you don't want contracts to shove data over fibres around the country you can buy Wholesale Line Rental for a higher price and Openreach will deliver the bits from that copper cable to a single point elsewhere on the telephone network, then you just build your ISP at that location. Since Openreach isn't allowed to sell retail products, the regulator mostly needs to make sure that it doesn't deliberately tweak these prices to benefit its owner, BT, which does sell retail products to consumers. For example maybe BT doesn't need Wholesale Line Rental, the regulator needs to make sure the price for it makes sense anyway as smaller ISPs would otherwise be run out of business. Overall I'm very satisfied with the results. Britain's cable Internet is a monopoly instead (Virgin) but of course almost everywhere that can get cable has a telephone line, so at least they are competing with somebody. More than 95% of households could actually get Superfast broadband (ie 30Mbps or better if the WiFi wasn't in an upstairs bedroom connected via a 1970s bell wire phone extension)
- rektide 5y ago
  the US had this local loop unbundling. anyone could build, and anyone else could access those incumbent carrier's lines to provide service at regulated wholesale rates. this was created by the 1996 Telecommunications Act. but then fiber came along, and Verizon vs FCC (2002) slowly made it's way through courts, got to the supreme court, and the supreme court sided with Verizon, who said fiber was so fancy, so costly, so new, that they required a monopoly. the Supreme Court overruled Congress & upturned the Tecommimications Act & have fiber a local monopoly, and things in the US have been getting slowly worse ever since.
  - tolien 5y ago
    In the UK the wholesale access part applies even to FTTC/P, so you can get fibre all the way to your door operated by Openreach and connected to BT Wholesale but with packets being passed to your choice of ISP for internet access. There are some additional requirements - I think in the early days you had to take a modem from BT and there’s a minimum commitment (used to be 18 months).
  - indemnity 5y ago
    We had a similar shitshow with the local incumbent in NZ, until LLU was passed in 2006, with a split of the monopoly operator into two separate retail + wholesale and network companies. Went from shitty 256kbps ADSL to 1gps FTTH, with 2gbps and 4gbps options on the horizon. The usual conservative suspects were complaining about interference with property rights, undermining investor confidence, unnecessary expenditure for the size of the nation, etc. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/telecom-ordered-to-open-up-lines/JTOY3ISDUMKJZX47ACAOJ2J55E/ https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/telecom-ordered-to-open-... None of the doom and gloom predictions came to pass. And now, of course, everyone loves it, and our household monthly bandwidth used has gone from about 100-200GB to terabytes with all the streaming and Linux ISO downloading.
- toast0 5y ago
  In the US, the 1996 telecoms act setup similar, but weaker, requirements for incumbent local (telephone) exchange carriers. But a series of regulatory and court decisions ended up with almost all of that being vacated. Basically cable worked to get excluded because they were 'new', and then telco worked to get excluded because it wasn't fair to make them do it when cable didn't have to, and the regulator said between cable, telco, power line (hah!) and radio (hah, but slightly less hah) users had choices and everything was fine. And the key weakneses were that the companies weren't restrucured, so retail could charge less than wholesale rates and corporate accounting would sort it out, that makes it really hard to compete; and even bigger was that access was only on a space avaialable basis, and new facilities (namely DSL remote terminals) were purpose built to provide desirable products to end users while minimizing space such that there was no requirement to provide competitive access since there was no space. From accross the pond, OpenReach seems like a big success, and what we could have had, but didn't end up with.

iptrans 5y ago

The above is, in conciliatory terms, hyperbole. In reductionist terms the real underlying reason for market failure is regulatory capture. As to utility poles, a large number of poles are owned by power companies who by and large do not offer retail broadband services, so even here you are barking up the wrong tree. That being said, there are issues with utility poles which need to be addressed. Efforts such as one touch make ready and the like are needed on a national level.

unishark 5y ago
Seems to me you're making the same point as the parent poster. I think by "ownership" they mean monopolization of the poles due to agreements with the local govt to provide service in return for monopoly rights.
- iptrans 5y ago
  Not really. The parent to my original post identified a problem, but misdiagnosed the root cause and prescribed an incorrect solution. As noted above a lot of poles are owned by power companies that do not offer broadband service. Furthermore exclusive franchises have not been permitted for a good while anymore. Anybody with the correct permits can secure space on poles. This isn’t the issue. Part of the problems is how costs are assigned and how timely work progresses. Who owns the pole isn’t the big issue.

tialaramex 5y ago

I'm guessing by "decouple utility pole ownership/permitting" you're thinking about the Last Mile. This is almost exactly what happened in Britain. The last mile telephone system is owned by Openreach, which is owned by British Telecom, but they're required to sell the things you'd actually want that system for at regulated wholesale prices to any outfit that wants to retail it. So for example they'll sell you LLU (Local-loop Unbundled) service which means you can put data onto a copper cable between a home or business property and one of the thousands of physical telephone exchanges that used to house Strowger electro-mechanical switches when that's how telephones worked. You also get some footprint inside the exchange. How you make that into an ISP is your business, but unlike running cables to millions of houses, running fibre to a few thousand telephone exchanges is something a business might actually compete at and sure enough BT have competition for that part of the problem, at least outside the very rural areas. Or if you're a small outfit and you don't want contracts to shove data over fibres around the country you can buy Wholesale Line Rental for a higher price and Openreach will deliver the bits from that copper cable to a single point elsewhere on the telephone network, then you just build your ISP at that location. Since Openreach isn't allowed to sell retail products, the regulator mostly needs to make sure that it doesn't deliberately tweak these prices to benefit its owner, BT, which does sell retail products to consumers. For example maybe BT doesn't need Wholesale Line Rental, the regulator needs to make sure the price for it makes sense anyway as smaller ISPs would otherwise be run out of business. Overall I'm very satisfied with the results. Britain's cable Internet is a monopoly instead (Virgin) but of course almost everywhere that can get cable has a telephone line, so at least they are competing with somebody. More than 95% of households could actually get Superfast broadband (ie 30Mbps or better if the WiFi wasn't in an upstairs bedroom connected via a 1970s bell wire phone extension)

rektide 5y ago
the US had this local loop unbundling. anyone could build, and anyone else could access those incumbent carrier's lines to provide service at regulated wholesale rates. this was created by the 1996 Telecommunications Act. but then fiber came along, and Verizon vs FCC (2002) slowly made it's way through courts, got to the supreme court, and the supreme court sided with Verizon, who said fiber was so fancy, so costly, so new, that they required a monopoly. the Supreme Court overruled Congress & upturned the Tecommimications Act & have fiber a local monopoly, and things in the US have been getting slowly worse ever since.
- tolien 5y ago
  In the UK the wholesale access part applies even to FTTC/P, so you can get fibre all the way to your door operated by Openreach and connected to BT Wholesale but with packets being passed to your choice of ISP for internet access. There are some additional requirements - I think in the early days you had to take a modem from BT and there’s a minimum commitment (used to be 18 months).
- indemnity 5y ago
  We had a similar shitshow with the local incumbent in NZ, until LLU was passed in 2006, with a split of the monopoly operator into two separate retail + wholesale and network companies. Went from shitty 256kbps ADSL to 1gps FTTH, with 2gbps and 4gbps options on the horizon. The usual conservative suspects were complaining about interference with property rights, undermining investor confidence, unnecessary expenditure for the size of the nation, etc. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/telecom-ordered-to-open-up-lines/JTOY3ISDUMKJZX47ACAOJ2J55E/ https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/telecom-ordered-to-open-... None of the doom and gloom predictions came to pass. And now, of course, everyone loves it, and our household monthly bandwidth used has gone from about 100-200GB to terabytes with all the streaming and Linux ISO downloading.
toast0 5y ago
In the US, the 1996 telecoms act setup similar, but weaker, requirements for incumbent local (telephone) exchange carriers. But a series of regulatory and court decisions ended up with almost all of that being vacated. Basically cable worked to get excluded because they were 'new', and then telco worked to get excluded because it wasn't fair to make them do it when cable didn't have to, and the regulator said between cable, telco, power line (hah!) and radio (hah, but slightly less hah) users had choices and everything was fine. And the key weakneses were that the companies weren't restrucured, so retail could charge less than wholesale rates and corporate accounting would sort it out, that makes it really hard to compete; and even bigger was that access was only on a space avaialable basis, and new facilities (namely DSL remote terminals) were purpose built to provide desirable products to end users while minimizing space such that there was no requirement to provide competitive access since there was no space. From accross the pond, OpenReach seems like a big success, and what we could have had, but didn't end up with.