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This is where I think we are all wrong. In the UK, the lines are owned by the government and ISPs/telcos rent access to provide service. This allows for prett

This is where I think we are all wrong. In the UK, the lines are owned by the government and ISPs/telcos rent access to provide service. This allows for pretty strong competition from the ISPs and stops there from being a billion dead lines buried underground. To me, government owned lines and connections makes the most sense for society. I think that's also a big part of why the US train system sucks. Private entities generally don't want to own that infrastructure, they want the trains that can haul the goods. So make them rent the line and have the government manage access just like they do with airplanes and roads.

idle_zealot 3y ago
If the government owns the lines, what are private telcos... actually doing? Operating the webpage that lets you put in a credit card to pay for service?
- alexriddle 3y ago
  Some operators do have their own infrastructure and most large ISPs have equipment in local exchanges and operate their own backhaul. Lots of it is just about marketing though.
  - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
    > Lots of it is just about marketing though. But in that case, doesn't it make more sense for the government to just cut out the middleman and offer internet to consumers directly? What is the company's value-add?
    - hedora 3y ago
      The ISP company offers customer support, installation services and the fiber modem, and owns the equipment in the network closet that peers with the backbone. They might even own the peering network closet (which is often a weatherproof enclosure with a backup generator).
- Affric 3y ago
  In Australia the government a private company owned by the government largely owns the last mile (except where competitors built fibre first). All the backhaul between "points of interconnect" is owned privately. As a user though you pay for bandwidth at the interchange because that's how the old privatised and divested government monopoly did it. The model, last mile public utility but all the speed private wouldn't be all that awful if it weren't butchered by various vested interests. In theory the current last mile company will be sold once it becomes profitable.
- storyinmemo 3y ago
  The line is a piece of copper or glass that ends in a port in a rack at central point. The ISP is providing the connection from that point in the building to their equipment that does switching, routing, and yes billing you.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  Last mile ISPs bring your traffic between your house and an internet exchange somewhere in the nearest major city. Transit ISPs bring it from there to some other internet exchange in a different city where the opposite endpoint is. The premise here is that the government would handle the physical part of the last mile and then customers would either buy "internet service" from a transit ISP or from someone reselling transit because the transit provider doesn't want to deal with customer support and retail billing.
- gregmac 3y ago
  Don't know how it works, but I do think that's how it should be. Municipality providers dark fiber from the CO(s) to every house. From there, any ISP can rent rack space, and arrange their own backbone/uplink, and get wired to whatever customers they can. Municipality charges a fee to use the fiber, and that's it. Muni provides the line to the CO, ISP is responsible after that. They can compete on their internet speed, price, support, and whatever else they want (Netflix box, email, low latency to game servers). Muni could even add a "no-internet" free service that just provides access to city services, library, etc.
  - kube-system 3y ago
    It is worth noting that in the US, there's a not-insignificant part of the country that isn't in a municipality.
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    > I do think that's how it should be. Municipality providers dark fiber from the CO(s) to every house. We have a variant of that here. An indy company just laid fiber here but they don't provide service. Instead I have a choice of 8+ competing fiber companies. Before fiber, I had 1 'choice' of ISP and paid $124/mo for 1Gb/40Mb w/ 40ms latency to the IX. Now my choices include 1Gb/1Gb $49, 2Gb/2Gb $79, 10Gb/10Gb $199 w/ 4ms latency to the IX.
  - sgerenser 3y ago
    Wouldn’t that “no-internet” service actually run afoul of the newly reinstated Net Neutrality rules? Or is there an exception in it for non-commercial or governmental services?
- throw0101d 3y ago
  > If the government owns the lines, what are private telcos... actually doing? Providing Layer 3. Just like the government owns the roads and highways, and lets UPS and FedEx use them for delivery. The theory is that roads/fibre are natural monopolies, but the services that use them can be competitive. There just needs to be a fee for the upkeep of the infrastructure (but it doesn't necessarily need to make a (hufe) profit).
- 6510 3y ago
  YES, roads, water, sewage, electricity, it could all work with this formula. It could all be added to the long list of things you pay for that are build and maintained by taxes. road service providers, water service providers, sewage service providers, electric service providers etc Picture it!
WillAdams 3y ago
Tell that to the judge who oversaw AT&T's breakup.
legitster 3y ago
I make this point all of the time. In the US, the rails are private and the government owns the passenger service. In Europe, the government owns the rails and the passenger service is private. People try to frame these issues as "socialist/capitalist" or some nonsense all of the time. But the reality is that neither system is more or less capitalist than the other. It's just one is better structured than the other. However, having lived in a town in the US that has had a public ISP for decades, it was abhorrent. Municipalities only care about cost cutting - so there was no investment in wiring infrastructure or customer service. So I think there is an argument to be made that we may take for granted a bit the difference between rails/roads and fiber optics.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  The general image I get from the US is that public infrastructure and customer service in general is lacking in investment.
  - legitster 3y ago
    Maybe, infrastructure. But having spent time in both the US and in Europe, I cannot begin to even describe how much better average customer service in America is compared to Europe. But I think that is also what holds up the adoption of public services - the difference between typical customer service in the US and say, the Post Office or DMV, turns a lot of people off from the idea of public ISPs or etc. (Although, based on some time spent in Munich makes me think the quality/availability of broadband in Europe is also not all that).
    - CogitoCogito 3y ago
      If we’re talking ISPs specifically, I’ve definitely had better customer service in Germany, Sweden and the Czech Republic than I ever had in the US.
      - hedora 3y ago
        I’ve had great experiences with customer support with 7 of the 8 local US ISPs I’ve dealt with. Starlink, comcast, hughes.net and at&t customer support can take my RJ45 crimper and stick it where they don’t need network connectivity (sideways).
philwelch 3y ago
The US train system is great; we move a much higher proportion of freight by rail as opposed to truck than Europe does for that very reason.
- barney54 3y ago
  The freight system is great, the passenger train system in the U.S., not so much.
  - philwelch 3y ago
    Back when passenger rail still made sense, and was run by private industry, it was great. But it’s been mostly obsoleted by automobiles and airlines. There’s a certain population density where it’s still competitive with airlines, but in the US that only exists between Boston and DC, which is also the only profitable part of Amtrak and would work a lot better if Amtrak could be privatized and focus their investments on that route instead of being forced to run a bunch of subsidized nostalgia routes for train geeks.
    - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
      Most of your railway is not electric, India has electrified 95% of its rail, so did China. It makes sence
      - philwelch 3y ago
        The US has reliable access to cheap fuel, and diesel locomotives are still very efficient, especially compared to diesel trucks.
        ClumsyPilot 3y ago
        electric trains are like 2x more powerful, less maintenance and carbon-free
        3y ago
lukevp 3y ago
I generally consider myself very politically liberal but the idea of the government controlling all internet infrastructure is truly bone-chilling. At least with many ISPs owning the lines we have some semblance of possibility that government tampering with information would be noticed. If all traffic passed through a single entity’s control, we’re only a slippery slope away from the Great Firewall of USA. Probably justified by either preventing terrorism or CSAM.
- roywiggins 3y ago
  Other countries with filtering regimes just obligate their private ISPs to block, eg, torrent trackers or Facebook or whoever. Governments have plenty of leverage over ISPs already, namely that ISPs have employees, addresses and hardware they can seize.
- robbiep 3y ago
  Why build 4 sets of lines when you can build 1? Isn’t this literally the reason why broad swaths of the US have zero competition?
  - mhb 3y ago
    Resilience? Exactly the thing which is being optimized out of much critical infrastructure.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      Laying down competing bundles along the same path gains you very little resilience. For the smallest issues, you can expect a single bundle to already have spare connections. For bigger issues, almost anything that takes out one bundle will take out the neighbors too.
    - matt-p 3y ago
      It's easier to build resilience as a single network or organization than by "hoping" to have that with two different ISPs (who will obviously both of taken the cheapest route dig wise between A and B). If I need two diverse fiber paths between points X and Y, I can go to one provider who can contractually guarantee diversity. For example, they can ensure that maintenance work on Circuit 1 is not scheduled at the same time as Circuit 2, and that the paths are never less than X metres between them, as they are fully aware of the two paths.
wbl 3y ago
The US would have lots of constitutional problems enforcing rules that we like ISPs to enforce.
matt-p 3y ago
That is not, and has never been, true. BT was privatized in 1984. Over the years since then, they've been forced by regulators to open up more and more of the stack to competing ISPs. At one point, you could buy wholesale services like ISDN lines or p2p E1 circuits. Later, ISPs could rent space in the telephone exchanges and individual copper wires. In the current FTTP world, they can either rent a layer 2 service or deploy their own fiber in BT ducts and pay a few pence per meter rental.
- cogman10 3y ago
  Upvoted. I thought BT was owned by the government (particularly because every ISP ends up renting from them). I still think that a centralized network that is rented out ends up working better than one that's deployed by different ISPs.
  - matt-p 3y ago
    Just to be clear, I agree. Despite its faults, I still think we are quite fortunate to have BT Openreach in its current form as a country. I can understand that perception. Essentially, Openreach is regulated so heavily by the government that it might as well be considered public, from the perspective of 'what services it must offer, on what basis, to whom, and the prices it must set.' However, it is a private company, being a 'firewalled' part of BT
    - hedora 3y ago
      This type of system is called “common carrier”. (The firewalled part of BT acts as a common carrier). Because of the way physics and fiber optics work, having a common carrier that rents out access to wavelengths or bandwidth on the fiber strands is the best economic model, by far.
      - matt-p 3y ago
        I disagree since BT/OR * don't rent out fibre or wavelengths. They rent out layer 2 vlans (they own the OLT at the exchange and the terminal in people's homes) this means they set the package speeds, price points and use whatever technology they like. For that reason many ISPs have decided to instead rent duct space from BT/OR and each install thier own fibre. That is not really a common carrier, more like common duct. *except in very rural areas for highly specific use cases, or in the case of wavelengths for medium range high capacity backhaul.
tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
You don't need it to be government owned. While that is certainly one effective way of doing it, another can be to let whoever wants to build it build it, but require them to give access to competitors for a regulated fee.
- dools 3y ago
  Oh yeah that’s bound to be as equitable as having the government provide it!
  - matt-p 3y ago
    It depends how empowered your regulators are. In many European countries that's how it works and it is literally a better system than the government doing it themselves.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
    There are many ways to do it, e.g. the former monopolist (a now-privatized company that was created from the part of the government doing it) having a mandate to supply everyone. The downside of having the government do it is that if the government screws it up, it takes decades to fix, while private companies can swoop in much faster if one company is doing a bad job.
metalspoon 3y ago
This is cool, but the government wouldn't be keen on updating the cables, would they? You'd be locked in to whatever cable the local government can afford.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > This is cool, but the government wouldn't be keen on updating the cables, would they? They charge ISPs for use of the infrastructure and that funds maintenance and upgrades. For the sort of core upgrades that occur every few decades, they can do a bond referendum to cover shortfalls. It's the same setup our private infra does here. They own the fiber in the ground and ISPs pay then to sell services. It can be harder for a private infra company to get in the ground because they're limited to municipalities that aren't captured by telecom/ISP lobbying orgs - but still have a dense enough population.
- storyinmemo 3y ago
  Outside plant cable doesn't really change. Telco copper wires, CATV cables, and optical fiber are pretty much it. They stay in place for decades. OS1 from 2004 is the same quality today. You just swap out the transceivers at the ends for better speeds.
admax88qqq 3y ago
> To me, government owned lines and connections makes the most sense for society. I used to think that but now I'm not sure I still believe it. I worry that government owned lines doesn't result in "everyone gets fiber to the home now" but rather "nobody gets fiber yet cause we're still getting cable in Internet to the last X rural users."
- wredue 3y ago
  Why would it mean that? I fear that private IsPs will collude to keep internet slow and prices high, while never delivering to rural.
  - admax88qqq 3y ago
    From my experience most government programs are more focused on ensuring that _everyone_ has the same baseline experience rather than anyone having a better experience. I don't see why internet lines would be any different.
AndrewDucker 3y ago
That's not true. The majority of British lines are owned by OpenReach, which is a subsidiary of BT, which used to be run by the government, but was privatised back in the 80s. But they have not been owned by the government in decades, and there are competitors who have run their own lines.
jaystraw 3y ago
if renting use is viable, then why isn't construction or maintenance? i mean this honestly: an investor may not get crazy returns every year, but they get stable returns every year. why is owning and maintaining infrastructure unattractive?

idle_zealot 3y ago

If the government owns the lines, what are private telcos... actually doing? Operating the webpage that lets you put in a credit card to pay for service?

alexriddle 3y ago
Some operators do have their own infrastructure and most large ISPs have equipment in local exchanges and operate their own backhaul. Lots of it is just about marketing though.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  > Lots of it is just about marketing though. But in that case, doesn't it make more sense for the government to just cut out the middleman and offer internet to consumers directly? What is the company's value-add?
  - hedora 3y ago
    The ISP company offers customer support, installation services and the fiber modem, and owns the equipment in the network closet that peers with the backbone. They might even own the peering network closet (which is often a weatherproof enclosure with a backup generator).
Affric 3y ago
In Australia the government a private company owned by the government largely owns the last mile (except where competitors built fibre first). All the backhaul between "points of interconnect" is owned privately. As a user though you pay for bandwidth at the interchange because that's how the old privatised and divested government monopoly did it. The model, last mile public utility but all the speed private wouldn't be all that awful if it weren't butchered by various vested interests. In theory the current last mile company will be sold once it becomes profitable.
storyinmemo 3y ago
The line is a piece of copper or glass that ends in a port in a rack at central point. The ISP is providing the connection from that point in the building to their equipment that does switching, routing, and yes billing you.
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
Last mile ISPs bring your traffic between your house and an internet exchange somewhere in the nearest major city. Transit ISPs bring it from there to some other internet exchange in a different city where the opposite endpoint is. The premise here is that the government would handle the physical part of the last mile and then customers would either buy "internet service" from a transit ISP or from someone reselling transit because the transit provider doesn't want to deal with customer support and retail billing.
gregmac 3y ago
Don't know how it works, but I do think that's how it should be. Municipality providers dark fiber from the CO(s) to every house. From there, any ISP can rent rack space, and arrange their own backbone/uplink, and get wired to whatever customers they can. Municipality charges a fee to use the fiber, and that's it. Muni provides the line to the CO, ISP is responsible after that. They can compete on their internet speed, price, support, and whatever else they want (Netflix box, email, low latency to game servers). Muni could even add a "no-internet" free service that just provides access to city services, library, etc.
- kube-system 3y ago
  It is worth noting that in the US, there's a not-insignificant part of the country that isn't in a municipality.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > I do think that's how it should be. Municipality providers dark fiber from the CO(s) to every house. We have a variant of that here. An indy company just laid fiber here but they don't provide service. Instead I have a choice of 8+ competing fiber companies. Before fiber, I had 1 'choice' of ISP and paid $124/mo for 1Gb/40Mb w/ 40ms latency to the IX. Now my choices include 1Gb/1Gb $49, 2Gb/2Gb $79, 10Gb/10Gb $199 w/ 4ms latency to the IX.
- sgerenser 3y ago
  Wouldn’t that “no-internet” service actually run afoul of the newly reinstated Net Neutrality rules? Or is there an exception in it for non-commercial or governmental services?
throw0101d 3y ago
> If the government owns the lines, what are private telcos... actually doing? Providing Layer 3. Just like the government owns the roads and highways, and lets UPS and FedEx use them for delivery. The theory is that roads/fibre are natural monopolies, but the services that use them can be competitive. There just needs to be a fee for the upkeep of the infrastructure (but it doesn't necessarily need to make a (hufe) profit).
6510 3y ago
YES, roads, water, sewage, electricity, it could all work with this formula. It could all be added to the long list of things you pay for that are build and maintained by taxes. road service providers, water service providers, sewage service providers, electric service providers etc Picture it!

WillAdams 3y ago

Tell that to the judge who oversaw AT&T's breakup.

legitster 3y ago

I make this point all of the time. In the US, the rails are private and the government owns the passenger service. In Europe, the government owns the rails and the passenger service is private. People try to frame these issues as "socialist/capitalist" or some nonsense all of the time. But the reality is that neither system is more or less capitalist than the other. It's just one is better structured than the other. However, having lived in a town in the US that has had a public ISP for decades, it was abhorrent. Municipalities only care about cost cutting - so there was no investment in wiring infrastructure or customer service. So I think there is an argument to be made that we may take for granted a bit the difference between rails/roads and fiber optics.

actionfromafar 3y ago
The general image I get from the US is that public infrastructure and customer service in general is lacking in investment.
- legitster 3y ago
  Maybe, infrastructure. But having spent time in both the US and in Europe, I cannot begin to even describe how much better average customer service in America is compared to Europe. But I think that is also what holds up the adoption of public services - the difference between typical customer service in the US and say, the Post Office or DMV, turns a lot of people off from the idea of public ISPs or etc. (Although, based on some time spent in Munich makes me think the quality/availability of broadband in Europe is also not all that).
  - CogitoCogito 3y ago
    If we’re talking ISPs specifically, I’ve definitely had better customer service in Germany, Sweden and the Czech Republic than I ever had in the US.
    - hedora 3y ago
      I’ve had great experiences with customer support with 7 of the 8 local US ISPs I’ve dealt with. Starlink, comcast, hughes.net and at&t customer support can take my RJ45 crimper and stick it where they don’t need network connectivity (sideways).

philwelch 3y ago

The US train system is great; we move a much higher proportion of freight by rail as opposed to truck than Europe does for that very reason.

barney54 3y ago
The freight system is great, the passenger train system in the U.S., not so much.
- philwelch 3y ago
  Back when passenger rail still made sense, and was run by private industry, it was great. But it’s been mostly obsoleted by automobiles and airlines. There’s a certain population density where it’s still competitive with airlines, but in the US that only exists between Boston and DC, which is also the only profitable part of Amtrak and would work a lot better if Amtrak could be privatized and focus their investments on that route instead of being forced to run a bunch of subsidized nostalgia routes for train geeks.
  - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    Most of your railway is not electric, India has electrified 95% of its rail, so did China. It makes sence
    - philwelch 3y ago
      The US has reliable access to cheap fuel, and diesel locomotives are still very efficient, especially compared to diesel trucks.
      - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
        electric trains are like 2x more powerful, less maintenance and carbon-free
        3y ago

lukevp 3y ago

I generally consider myself very politically liberal but the idea of the government controlling all internet infrastructure is truly bone-chilling. At least with many ISPs owning the lines we have some semblance of possibility that government tampering with information would be noticed. If all traffic passed through a single entity’s control, we’re only a slippery slope away from the Great Firewall of USA. Probably justified by either preventing terrorism or CSAM.

roywiggins 3y ago
Other countries with filtering regimes just obligate their private ISPs to block, eg, torrent trackers or Facebook or whoever. Governments have plenty of leverage over ISPs already, namely that ISPs have employees, addresses and hardware they can seize.
robbiep 3y ago
Why build 4 sets of lines when you can build 1? Isn’t this literally the reason why broad swaths of the US have zero competition?
- mhb 3y ago
  Resilience? Exactly the thing which is being optimized out of much critical infrastructure.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    Laying down competing bundles along the same path gains you very little resilience. For the smallest issues, you can expect a single bundle to already have spare connections. For bigger issues, almost anything that takes out one bundle will take out the neighbors too.
  - matt-p 3y ago
    It's easier to build resilience as a single network or organization than by "hoping" to have that with two different ISPs (who will obviously both of taken the cheapest route dig wise between A and B). If I need two diverse fiber paths between points X and Y, I can go to one provider who can contractually guarantee diversity. For example, they can ensure that maintenance work on Circuit 1 is not scheduled at the same time as Circuit 2, and that the paths are never less than X metres between them, as they are fully aware of the two paths.

wbl 3y ago

The US would have lots of constitutional problems enforcing rules that we like ISPs to enforce.

matt-p 3y ago

That is not, and has never been, true. BT was privatized in 1984. Over the years since then, they've been forced by regulators to open up more and more of the stack to competing ISPs. At one point, you could buy wholesale services like ISDN lines or p2p E1 circuits. Later, ISPs could rent space in the telephone exchanges and individual copper wires. In the current FTTP world, they can either rent a layer 2 service or deploy their own fiber in BT ducts and pay a few pence per meter rental.

cogman10 3y ago
Upvoted. I thought BT was owned by the government (particularly because every ISP ends up renting from them). I still think that a centralized network that is rented out ends up working better than one that's deployed by different ISPs.
- matt-p 3y ago
  Just to be clear, I agree. Despite its faults, I still think we are quite fortunate to have BT Openreach in its current form as a country. I can understand that perception. Essentially, Openreach is regulated so heavily by the government that it might as well be considered public, from the perspective of 'what services it must offer, on what basis, to whom, and the prices it must set.' However, it is a private company, being a 'firewalled' part of BT
  - hedora 3y ago
    This type of system is called “common carrier”. (The firewalled part of BT acts as a common carrier). Because of the way physics and fiber optics work, having a common carrier that rents out access to wavelengths or bandwidth on the fiber strands is the best economic model, by far.
    - matt-p 3y ago
      I disagree since BT/OR * don't rent out fibre or wavelengths. They rent out layer 2 vlans (they own the OLT at the exchange and the terminal in people's homes) this means they set the package speeds, price points and use whatever technology they like. For that reason many ISPs have decided to instead rent duct space from BT/OR and each install thier own fibre. That is not really a common carrier, more like common duct. *except in very rural areas for highly specific use cases, or in the case of wavelengths for medium range high capacity backhaul.

tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago

You don't need it to be government owned. While that is certainly one effective way of doing it, another can be to let whoever wants to build it build it, but require them to give access to competitors for a regulated fee.

dools 3y ago
Oh yeah that’s bound to be as equitable as having the government provide it!
- matt-p 3y ago
  It depends how empowered your regulators are. In many European countries that's how it works and it is literally a better system than the government doing it themselves.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
  There are many ways to do it, e.g. the former monopolist (a now-privatized company that was created from the part of the government doing it) having a mandate to supply everyone. The downside of having the government do it is that if the government screws it up, it takes decades to fix, while private companies can swoop in much faster if one company is doing a bad job.

metalspoon 3y ago

This is cool, but the government wouldn't be keen on updating the cables, would they? You'd be locked in to whatever cable the local government can afford.

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
> This is cool, but the government wouldn't be keen on updating the cables, would they? They charge ISPs for use of the infrastructure and that funds maintenance and upgrades. For the sort of core upgrades that occur every few decades, they can do a bond referendum to cover shortfalls. It's the same setup our private infra does here. They own the fiber in the ground and ISPs pay then to sell services. It can be harder for a private infra company to get in the ground because they're limited to municipalities that aren't captured by telecom/ISP lobbying orgs - but still have a dense enough population.
storyinmemo 3y ago
Outside plant cable doesn't really change. Telco copper wires, CATV cables, and optical fiber are pretty much it. They stay in place for decades. OS1 from 2004 is the same quality today. You just swap out the transceivers at the ends for better speeds.

admax88qqq 3y ago

> To me, government owned lines and connections makes the most sense for society. I used to think that but now I'm not sure I still believe it. I worry that government owned lines doesn't result in "everyone gets fiber to the home now" but rather "nobody gets fiber yet cause we're still getting cable in Internet to the last X rural users."

wredue 3y ago
Why would it mean that? I fear that private IsPs will collude to keep internet slow and prices high, while never delivering to rural.
- admax88qqq 3y ago
  From my experience most government programs are more focused on ensuring that _everyone_ has the same baseline experience rather than anyone having a better experience. I don't see why internet lines would be any different.

AndrewDucker 3y ago

That's not true. The majority of British lines are owned by OpenReach, which is a subsidiary of BT, which used to be run by the government, but was privatised back in the 80s. But they have not been owned by the government in decades, and there are competitors who have run their own lines.

jaystraw 3y ago

if renting use is viable, then why isn't construction or maintenance? i mean this honestly: an investor may not get crazy returns every year, but they get stable returns every year. why is owning and maintaining infrastructure unattractive?