5 ms·

Honestly infrastructure itself like fiber to the homes should be operated separately from the ISPs. Would be far easier to have a competition if new player in t

by ilyt 3y ago

Honestly infrastructure itself like fiber to the homes should be operated separately from the ISPs. Would be far easier to have a competition if new player in town would have to only get their connectivity up to some central spot and then pay per client connected, rather than have to manage their fiber anywhere they go.

gottorf 3y ago
Yeah, there's a good argument to be made that the wire (be it fiber, coax, or whatever) itself should be treated as a public utility, since it is a natural monopoly. Several countries do operate like that.
- tialaramex 3y ago
  This is in effect the regime in the UK for example. The incumbent Telco, BT Openreach, are regulated to offer "last mile" for the same fee to their closely related customer business BT and to third parties. In rural areas BT are required to offer service, if you live somewhere really crazy (like up a mountain) they can make you pay costs, but they can't say "No". On the other hand in a city where a dozen outfits might want to run cable, BT automatically are allowed, everybody else needs to get an OK. It's not perfect but it means that for the actual Internet stuff it's irrelevant, everybody can get a choice, I pay a lot for great customer service, static IPv4 and v6 and zero censorship, there are cheaper options, there are options with so-called "unlimited" usage, but the choice doesn't impact the cable in the ground. Because I live in a city I could buy faster but crappier service from a cable company, or a dedicated fibre Internet company but that wouldn't be an option in a village somewhere. And yes, nobody is building new copper. If a company tells you fibre is too expensive they're telling you they can't afford to be a Telco, they're a badly run business, chances are the unacceptable costs are in their C-suite not buried in the street.
  - rjsw 3y ago
    This isn't true everywhere in the UK. Neither Openreach nor City Fibre have laid fibre in my area of a big city, the only date given for when they will do it is sometime before 2026. A dedicated fibre internet company has cabled my street though. I just switched from an ISP that uses the Openreach infrastructure, probably the same one you are using from your description, to the dedicated fibre internet company as it was the only way I could get a faster connection.
  - te_chris 3y ago
    The UK is a bad example because Openreach have done a shit job rolling out fibre. The govt bottled it and stopped them fully separating from BT after lobbying. NZ is a good example: our BT was actually forced to fully separate retail and wholesale businesses (Spark and Chorus). They have a national fibre network that operates as a utility and fibre internet is ubiquitous and cheap.
    - tialaramex 3y ago
      I'm much less bothered about "fibre Internet". It's a bigger number, people like bigger numbers, but they generally don't matter very much. 1Gbps symmetric would be cheaper here than my current 40Mbps. But, it would come from a typical mediocre "CGNAT is fine for reading Facebook and watching Netflix" company, whereas my ISP gives me a /48 to put all my stuff in so I can use it from anywhere without some dubious tunnelling hack. A long time ago now, 1996, I moved into my first shared student house. We had Always On, because we were a household of nerds and we knew that's what we wanted. That's a shared (between maybe five people, more when girlfriends are in) 56kbps Internet link. But what matters isn't bandwidth it's the Always On nature of the connectivity. Within months, modern habits like searching for the answers to questions on the Web as a reflex, became normal in that house, because everybody had Internet all the time. Now, I'm not suggesting 56kbps is good enough in 2023. But I don't find I have ever wished for 1Gbps rather than 40Mbps. Not even "Sometimes I wonder if it's worth it". It just never arises as a consideration. 1Gbps is more, but more than plenty is just irrelevant. It's like I've never been bothered that my electricity supply is only 100A. I've never felt like I'd need more, so, who cares ?
      - deprecative 3y ago
        It seems like the misunderstanding / issue you have is that you don't appear to download anything. As someone that downloads plenty (video games, large binaries in general) I'm at 1.2Gbps and would definitely need more in the next few future years. Would I be fine with 500Mbps/500Mbps? Sure but I'd be grumpy but at least it would be symmertrical.
        3y ago
- cma 3y ago
  The US used to do that for DSL, at least in some states.
- gregw2 3y ago
  Agreed. But you are 27 years late to this argument at least in the US. In 1996, when the Internet was hot, telcom providers promised to spend tens of billions building out fiber infra US-wide as long as Congress guaranteed them they owned the fiber and would not have to act as a public carrier as they had to do with their copper (phone, xDSL internet). My understanding is that was granted in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. I confess I am finding it hard to find the smoking gun making this so clear but it was moderately clear at the time. The legislation did require unbundling of the copper elements to competitive local exchange (telco) entities which then sprung up but slowly died under the onslaught of Baby Bell marketing and technical neglect. A personal anecdote illustrating the technical neglect: In the competitive DSL era pre-fiber, I once spent weeks trying to get my local CLEC to fix my intermittent DSL connection in my suburban dwelling and their hands were tied because they were in turn dependent on the local Bell company to actually service/debug last-mile issues and the local Bell company was not really incented to debug intermittent issues for others' customers promptly if they could keep their ticket-closing metrics up. They also didn't really want to invest anything more than absolutely necessary in the copper they had to share with others when they could spend their capital on new fiber. I was able to show them the packet and ping drops in service on my connections and even the DSL modem's outbound connection logs along with timestamps proving the intermittent nature of the issue but it took about a dozen calls and several in-person visits to get the copper fixed. I spent maybe... 20 hours trying to get it fixed and I cannot imagine any but the smallest fraction of people being both aware and persistent to overcome such obstacles. In subsequent years, the telcom providers made a point of disabling copper whenever installing fiber so once you were upgraded, you were fully locked in and could no longer competitively downgrade and shop for copper DSL once you went fiber. Quite a racket.
  - gottorf 3y ago
    > Quite a racket. No arguments from me there. Trust-busting and clamping down on anticompetitive behavior has not been a forte of the federal government in decades.
marcosdumay 3y ago
Yeah, that doesn't work. Or rather, that's both not necessary and not sufficient. You are now at the mercy of the fiber operator. He will be the one that gets all of the profits, and who is going to crush you. You just added some random extra parties that add almost no value, but you are required by law to deal with them... what is not a big issue, because they are in a competitive market and won't give you any trouble. What does work is regulating the hell out of the fiber operator. At the extreme, making it answer to you instead of to profits. And that works the same whether the internet service is bundled or unbundled. (But then that creates some other problems, nothing is trouble-free.)
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  > You are now at the mercy of the fiber operator. He will be the one that gets all of the profits, and who is going to crush you. The proposal is that last mile fiber is considered a public utility. You may have noticed that other public utilities (e.g. water, gas, electricity) are tightly regulated.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    > The proposal is that last mile fiber is considered a public utility. Well, that part isn't up there on the comment.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
      Fair dinkum. But you agree that a public utility wouldn't "crush you" ?
      - marcosdumay 3y ago
        Well, that will depend on what the local lawyers mean when they say "public utility". On the general usage of the word, yes, I do agree. But I'd be wary of any law declaring it. The result depends on the details, not on broad categorization.
- 3y ago
linsomniac 3y ago
We had a local ISP that ~10 years ago was doing fiber build outs in new neighborhoods (they had been around for 20 years as dial-up, DSL, and Colo). They told me they had slowed down on that because of the amount of manpower required for doing locates was killing them.

by ilyt 3y ago

gottorf 3y ago

Yeah, there's a good argument to be made that the wire (be it fiber, coax, or whatever) itself should be treated as a public utility, since it is a natural monopoly. Several countries do operate like that.

tialaramex 3y ago
This is in effect the regime in the UK for example. The incumbent Telco, BT Openreach, are regulated to offer "last mile" for the same fee to their closely related customer business BT and to third parties. In rural areas BT are required to offer service, if you live somewhere really crazy (like up a mountain) they can make you pay costs, but they can't say "No". On the other hand in a city where a dozen outfits might want to run cable, BT automatically are allowed, everybody else needs to get an OK. It's not perfect but it means that for the actual Internet stuff it's irrelevant, everybody can get a choice, I pay a lot for great customer service, static IPv4 and v6 and zero censorship, there are cheaper options, there are options with so-called "unlimited" usage, but the choice doesn't impact the cable in the ground. Because I live in a city I could buy faster but crappier service from a cable company, or a dedicated fibre Internet company but that wouldn't be an option in a village somewhere. And yes, nobody is building new copper. If a company tells you fibre is too expensive they're telling you they can't afford to be a Telco, they're a badly run business, chances are the unacceptable costs are in their C-suite not buried in the street.
- rjsw 3y ago
  This isn't true everywhere in the UK. Neither Openreach nor City Fibre have laid fibre in my area of a big city, the only date given for when they will do it is sometime before 2026. A dedicated fibre internet company has cabled my street though. I just switched from an ISP that uses the Openreach infrastructure, probably the same one you are using from your description, to the dedicated fibre internet company as it was the only way I could get a faster connection.
- te_chris 3y ago
  The UK is a bad example because Openreach have done a shit job rolling out fibre. The govt bottled it and stopped them fully separating from BT after lobbying. NZ is a good example: our BT was actually forced to fully separate retail and wholesale businesses (Spark and Chorus). They have a national fibre network that operates as a utility and fibre internet is ubiquitous and cheap.
  - tialaramex 3y ago
    I'm much less bothered about "fibre Internet". It's a bigger number, people like bigger numbers, but they generally don't matter very much. 1Gbps symmetric would be cheaper here than my current 40Mbps. But, it would come from a typical mediocre "CGNAT is fine for reading Facebook and watching Netflix" company, whereas my ISP gives me a /48 to put all my stuff in so I can use it from anywhere without some dubious tunnelling hack. A long time ago now, 1996, I moved into my first shared student house. We had Always On, because we were a household of nerds and we knew that's what we wanted. That's a shared (between maybe five people, more when girlfriends are in) 56kbps Internet link. But what matters isn't bandwidth it's the Always On nature of the connectivity. Within months, modern habits like searching for the answers to questions on the Web as a reflex, became normal in that house, because everybody had Internet all the time. Now, I'm not suggesting 56kbps is good enough in 2023. But I don't find I have ever wished for 1Gbps rather than 40Mbps. Not even "Sometimes I wonder if it's worth it". It just never arises as a consideration. 1Gbps is more, but more than plenty is just irrelevant. It's like I've never been bothered that my electricity supply is only 100A. I've never felt like I'd need more, so, who cares ?
    - deprecative 3y ago
      It seems like the misunderstanding / issue you have is that you don't appear to download anything. As someone that downloads plenty (video games, large binaries in general) I'm at 1.2Gbps and would definitely need more in the next few future years. Would I be fine with 500Mbps/500Mbps? Sure but I'd be grumpy but at least it would be symmertrical.
      - 3y ago
cma 3y ago
The US used to do that for DSL, at least in some states.
gregw2 3y ago
Agreed. But you are 27 years late to this argument at least in the US. In 1996, when the Internet was hot, telcom providers promised to spend tens of billions building out fiber infra US-wide as long as Congress guaranteed them they owned the fiber and would not have to act as a public carrier as they had to do with their copper (phone, xDSL internet). My understanding is that was granted in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. I confess I am finding it hard to find the smoking gun making this so clear but it was moderately clear at the time. The legislation did require unbundling of the copper elements to competitive local exchange (telco) entities which then sprung up but slowly died under the onslaught of Baby Bell marketing and technical neglect. A personal anecdote illustrating the technical neglect: In the competitive DSL era pre-fiber, I once spent weeks trying to get my local CLEC to fix my intermittent DSL connection in my suburban dwelling and their hands were tied because they were in turn dependent on the local Bell company to actually service/debug last-mile issues and the local Bell company was not really incented to debug intermittent issues for others' customers promptly if they could keep their ticket-closing metrics up. They also didn't really want to invest anything more than absolutely necessary in the copper they had to share with others when they could spend their capital on new fiber. I was able to show them the packet and ping drops in service on my connections and even the DSL modem's outbound connection logs along with timestamps proving the intermittent nature of the issue but it took about a dozen calls and several in-person visits to get the copper fixed. I spent maybe... 20 hours trying to get it fixed and I cannot imagine any but the smallest fraction of people being both aware and persistent to overcome such obstacles. In subsequent years, the telcom providers made a point of disabling copper whenever installing fiber so once you were upgraded, you were fully locked in and could no longer competitively downgrade and shop for copper DSL once you went fiber. Quite a racket.
- gottorf 3y ago
  > Quite a racket. No arguments from me there. Trust-busting and clamping down on anticompetitive behavior has not been a forte of the federal government in decades.

marcosdumay 3y ago

Yeah, that doesn't work. Or rather, that's both not necessary and not sufficient. You are now at the mercy of the fiber operator. He will be the one that gets all of the profits, and who is going to crush you. You just added some random extra parties that add almost no value, but you are required by law to deal with them... what is not a big issue, because they are in a competitive market and won't give you any trouble. What does work is regulating the hell out of the fiber operator. At the extreme, making it answer to you instead of to profits. And that works the same whether the internet service is bundled or unbundled. (But then that creates some other problems, nothing is trouble-free.)

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
> You are now at the mercy of the fiber operator. He will be the one that gets all of the profits, and who is going to crush you. The proposal is that last mile fiber is considered a public utility. You may have noticed that other public utilities (e.g. water, gas, electricity) are tightly regulated.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  > The proposal is that last mile fiber is considered a public utility. Well, that part isn't up there on the comment.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    Fair dinkum. But you agree that a public utility wouldn't "crush you" ?
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      Well, that will depend on what the local lawyers mean when they say "public utility". On the general usage of the word, yes, I do agree. But I'd be wary of any law declaring it. The result depends on the details, not on broad categorization.
3y ago

linsomniac 3y ago

We had a local ISP that ~10 years ago was doing fiber build outs in new neighborhoods (they had been around for 20 years as dial-up, DSL, and Colo). They told me they had slowed down on that because of the amount of manpower required for doing locates was killing them.