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Ultimately I think Internet access will reach utility status (like water, electricity, telephony), meaning it will be a given (in the developed world at least a

by cletus 14y ago

Ultimately I think Internet access will reach utility status (like water, electricity, telephony), meaning it will be a given (in the developed world at least and hopefully more and more of the developing world as time goes on). It's still priced as a premium product and there's no reason for this other than regional monopolies over the last mile. The one thing that confuses me about the France proposal is how they plan on building this for 20B euros when the NBN in Australia is estimated to cost A$36B [1] for a country with one third the population of France. The biggest cost in any communications network is the last mile so is proportional to population but inversely proportional to population density. Population density is low in Australia but there is 1/3 of the people. Additionally, there are significant regional infrastructure costs. It is more expensive per mile to build fibre in, say, New York City versus Tennessee. Inter-city links are really a small part of the total cost, even in a country as spread out as Australia (given the size, the population is 95% on the coast). Hopefully the NBN in Australia (which I'm a big supporter of) will survive the next election. The Opposition is sadly against it and the present government is hanging on by a thread and in leadership turmoil. For those not from Australia, the current Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, became PM after ousting Kevin Rudd in a partyroom coup d'etat in Rudd's first term, something with little precedent in Australian politics and certainly not in a PM's first term. For example, then-Treasurer Paul Keating ousted fourth-term PM Bob Hawke in much the same way. This sort of thing isn't generally favoured the electorate because (IMHO) it's perceived as the Number 2 saying "it's my turn to be Number 1" yet it plagues politics (Hawke-Keating, Howard-Costello, Blair-Brown in the UK, etc). Keating went on to narrowly win the "unwinnable" 1993 election and then get destroyed in 1996. Gillard narrowly won the last election with a minority in the House of Representatives [2]. Who became PM came down to horse-trading with minor parties and independents such that the change of a single seat changes the government. Obviously this is not a stable situation. Anyway, things look grim for the Gillard government as Kevin Rudd won't go away. He has already failed (twice?) to take back the top job in a partyroom ballot and the issue is rearing its ugly head again. Tony Abbott (the Opposition leader) has campaigned on a half-assed cheaper version of the NBN that is basically the same ADSL system for most people. Technically the proposal is FTTN (fibre to the node) where nodes are within 1.5km of premises and copper the rest of the way, which should improve bandwidth (ADSL2+ can do about 12Mbps at 1.5km and VDSL/VDSL2 could potentially raise that). The worst thing for Australian broadband (IMHO) would be for the NBN to be gutted in this nascent stage but it could happen if the Opposition wins big in the next election. Luckily for the NBN, the National Party, which notionally represents "rural" interests, the traditional party of the Liberal Party, is in favour of the NBN because current (and proposed) broadband solutions for rural areas suck hard. Now all we need is non-backwards reasonably priced broadband in the United States. We can but hope. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillard_Government#Minority_government http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillard_Government#Minority_gov...

cturner 14y ago
Telecommunications has been headed in the other direction. State monopolies get privatised and lose their monopoly status. I don't think your other examples are standardised in the way you suggest either. Control of electricity becomes less and less centralised. I wouldn't want internet to be treated as one-size-fits-all. With competition, if one company tries to block certain features, you can change to another. Also, having a government carrier makes it easier to regulate. This makes it easier for the state to mould the network to its convenience, something the Australian government have tried to do repeatedly. The most effective opponents to this are a handful of small private internet service providers.
- quink 14y ago
  The extenuating circumstance here is that the opposition, which is now trying to get elected, privatised the national telco starting in 1997. What that meant is we had a for profit company, Telstra, owning both the entire phone network and the biggest cable network, with big stakes in PayTV and joined at the hip through that to the biggest media organisation in the country, Murdoch's. The only competition worth speaking of is another HFC rollout by a competitor that Telstra overbuilt at every turn and made much less viable and DSLAMs by other providers in a minority of local exchanges that still require payments to Telstra including ULL fees. Telstra was also privatised without any vertical separation worth speaking of. The NBN, evil as government run business may be, represents the most viable and sensible solution to the problem of Telstra. The people putting it together and the ACCC have made sure that it wouldn't be like Telstra at all. What it represents is, like water or electricity infrastructure, a single path to the premise at the lowest possible cost, a mandate of falling prices in real and nominal terms and restrictions by the ACCC being planned out until 2040 already. How do we know it will be good for competition? Because every telco in the country, Telstra included, is unhappy wih particular details, but they are on board, and Telstra included, happy enough to be there. Also, the NBN is fairly dumb as a network. A lot of things are handled by the provider, the FTTH deployment of the NBN goes up to layer 2 only. We've tried your proposal of letting private enterprise do the lot, and all it has led to is an increasingly decaying copper network and no HFC rollout of any major note since about 1997. If broadband becomes a right, not a privilege, especially in a country of suburban sprawl, then you need to treat it like water or electricity. Dumb wholesale network at the bottom, vibrant conpetitive market at the top.

by cletus 14y ago

cturner 14y ago

Telecommunications has been headed in the other direction. State monopolies get privatised and lose their monopoly status. I don't think your other examples are standardised in the way you suggest either. Control of electricity becomes less and less centralised. I wouldn't want internet to be treated as one-size-fits-all. With competition, if one company tries to block certain features, you can change to another. Also, having a government carrier makes it easier to regulate. This makes it easier for the state to mould the network to its convenience, something the Australian government have tried to do repeatedly. The most effective opponents to this are a handful of small private internet service providers.

quink 14y ago
The extenuating circumstance here is that the opposition, which is now trying to get elected, privatised the national telco starting in 1997. What that meant is we had a for profit company, Telstra, owning both the entire phone network and the biggest cable network, with big stakes in PayTV and joined at the hip through that to the biggest media organisation in the country, Murdoch's. The only competition worth speaking of is another HFC rollout by a competitor that Telstra overbuilt at every turn and made much less viable and DSLAMs by other providers in a minority of local exchanges that still require payments to Telstra including ULL fees. Telstra was also privatised without any vertical separation worth speaking of. The NBN, evil as government run business may be, represents the most viable and sensible solution to the problem of Telstra. The people putting it together and the ACCC have made sure that it wouldn't be like Telstra at all. What it represents is, like water or electricity infrastructure, a single path to the premise at the lowest possible cost, a mandate of falling prices in real and nominal terms and restrictions by the ACCC being planned out until 2040 already. How do we know it will be good for competition? Because every telco in the country, Telstra included, is unhappy wih particular details, but they are on board, and Telstra included, happy enough to be there. Also, the NBN is fairly dumb as a network. A lot of things are handled by the provider, the FTTH deployment of the NBN goes up to layer 2 only. We've tried your proposal of letting private enterprise do the lot, and all it has led to is an increasingly decaying copper network and no HFC rollout of any major note since about 1997. If broadband becomes a right, not a privilege, especially in a country of suburban sprawl, then you need to treat it like water or electricity. Dumb wholesale network at the bottom, vibrant conpetitive market at the top.