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> Easiest solution would be what we have in Switzerland. If you want that government money, the fiber you lay needs to be accessible to any competitor otherwise

> Easiest solution would be what we have in Switzerland. If you want that government money, the fiber you lay needs to be accessible to any competitor otherwise you aren't getting any of it. How would you square that against one of the core objectives of targeting rural, unserved/underserved communities? E.g. consider Iowa[1], a single state which is ~3.5x larger in land (144,660 km^2), ~63% smaller in population (3.2 million), and ~90% lower density (22/km^2) compared to Switzerland...never mind that there are roughly a dozen other states in similar or more challenging situations. Suppose a small business establishes infra in a way that must be "accessible to any competitor". After laying the ground work and establishing a customer base, what's to stop an asymmetrically well-capitalized competitor from stepping in with the intent of swallowing a relatively small loss to operationally bleed out a much smaller incumbent with no margin? E.g. if your local addressable market were half the population of Iowa with service aggressively priced at what Switzerland customers pay, we'd still be talking about a notional revenue cap that's ~1% of what whales like AT&T and Verizon with growing fiber segments generate annually. I can imagine how outcomes might work out favorably for consumers when the addressable market is a small, wealthy sovereign nation with significant population density...much less when considering rural communities in fly-over states that the rest of the country has a tendency to neglect yet whose economic contributions remain significant. [1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/IA/ https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/IA/

maxerickson 3y ago
I live in a small town in a flyover area. I have 300/10 cable (up might be more, I don't bump into it). It doesn't do me much good to have access to 1 gig symmetric that costs more.
- metaphor 3y ago
  It sounds like you're not part of the addressable market[1][2]: > BEAD prioritizes unserved locations that have no internet access or that only have access under 25/3 Mbps and underserved locations only have access under 100/20 Mbps. [1] https://www.internetforall.gov/sites/default/files/2022-05/BEAD%20Info%20Sheet%20-%20IFA%20Launch%20-%20Final.pdf https://www.internetforall.gov/sites/default/files/2022-05/B... [2] https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/home https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/home
est31 3y ago
Those competitors would still have to pay rent to the company that originally laid the fiber, for prices regulated by the government. The open access regulation ensures that all the additional services like * whether it's easy to get to talk to a human on support * whether there is TV streaming packages * whether CGNAT is used or dedicated ipv4's are exposed * whether there is ipv6 support * upload and download speeds * how much the service gets worse in the peak hours etc, would be entirely decoupled from who invested into the last mile infrastructure. It would be prohibitively expensive (and wasteful) to require competitors to lay a second set of fiber cables next to the existing ones, because in the end it's all paid by the customers.
randomdata 3y ago
> what's to stop an asymmetrically well-capitalized competitor from stepping in with the intent of swallowing a relatively small loss to operationally bleed out a much smaller incumbent with no margin? What's to stop them anyway? Out here in rural Canada, the local ISP built out a fibre network to all the farms a decade ago. Then, the government thought rural areas didn't have internet access, so they decided to step in and put up funding to another ISP to build a second fibre line to those farms which is currently in the process of being trenched. It shall be interesting to see how that plays out once the second ISP lights up.
kalleboo 3y ago
It's accessible to any competitor, not FREE to any competitor. The business that builds the infrastructure gets to charge a reasonable fee to use it. I'm from Sweden which has built lots of rural fiber in the northern parts of the country. One setup is that the local power company builds an open-access fiber network and lets any ISP buy into using it, with the power company not even offering ISP services themselves. The power company already has lots of know-how, infrastructure and right-of-way that they can leverage to build and maintain a network of cables easily, but they aren't interested in running a bunch of customer-facing internet services.

maxerickson 3y ago

I live in a small town in a flyover area. I have 300/10 cable (up might be more, I don't bump into it). It doesn't do me much good to have access to 1 gig symmetric that costs more.

metaphor 3y ago
It sounds like you're not part of the addressable market[1][2]: > BEAD prioritizes unserved locations that have no internet access or that only have access under 25/3 Mbps and underserved locations only have access under 100/20 Mbps. [1] https://www.internetforall.gov/sites/default/files/2022-05/BEAD%20Info%20Sheet%20-%20IFA%20Launch%20-%20Final.pdf https://www.internetforall.gov/sites/default/files/2022-05/B... [2] https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/home https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/home

est31 3y ago

Those competitors would still have to pay rent to the company that originally laid the fiber, for prices regulated by the government. The open access regulation ensures that all the additional services like * whether it's easy to get to talk to a human on support * whether there is TV streaming packages * whether CGNAT is used or dedicated ipv4's are exposed * whether there is ipv6 support * upload and download speeds * how much the service gets worse in the peak hours etc, would be entirely decoupled from who invested into the last mile infrastructure. It would be prohibitively expensive (and wasteful) to require competitors to lay a second set of fiber cables next to the existing ones, because in the end it's all paid by the customers.

randomdata 3y ago

> what's to stop an asymmetrically well-capitalized competitor from stepping in with the intent of swallowing a relatively small loss to operationally bleed out a much smaller incumbent with no margin? What's to stop them anyway? Out here in rural Canada, the local ISP built out a fibre network to all the farms a decade ago. Then, the government thought rural areas didn't have internet access, so they decided to step in and put up funding to another ISP to build a second fibre line to those farms which is currently in the process of being trenched. It shall be interesting to see how that plays out once the second ISP lights up.

kalleboo 3y ago

It's accessible to any competitor, not FREE to any competitor. The business that builds the infrastructure gets to charge a reasonable fee to use it. I'm from Sweden which has built lots of rural fiber in the northern parts of the country. One setup is that the local power company builds an open-access fiber network and lets any ISP buy into using it, with the power company not even offering ISP services themselves. The power company already has lots of know-how, infrastructure and right-of-way that they can leverage to build and maintain a network of cables easily, but they aren't interested in running a bunch of customer-facing internet services.