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In the UK, we have loads of broadband companies who sell service through BT phonelines. (catch: you have to pay BT for line rental, which at £13/month isn't too

In the UK, we have loads of broadband companies who sell service through BT phonelines. (catch: you have to pay BT for line rental, which at £13/month isn't too bad, and you do get a phone number for that.) This acts very much like the "municipal fiber network" proposed in the article - all your customer service is with who you pay your bill to, and they set your download limits and any throttling (and there are more expensive options[1] that offer larger, well-defined limits and promise not to throttle.) Fibre connections seem to be either BT or Virgin running their own (separate) infrastructure all over the place, and you can get cable broadband if you actually want cable TV. Personally I've stuck with ADSL2+ since, in London, that's good enough. When I move out next year, we'll see which hardware can get me the best speeds. [1] http://idnet.net http://idnet.net

cdr 13y ago
That was supposed to be how it worked in the US, at least in the late 90s/early 00s - phone (and cable too, I think?) telco network operators were legally obligated to let other ISP companies lease their lines and deliver service to customers. There was no real enforcement though, and network operators just waged guerrilla warfare on independent ISPs - inexplicable "delays" connecting lines for customers that disappeared if the customer got impatient and signed up for the telco instead, service limitations and outages that telco customers on the same lines didn't notice, etc - until most/all of the independent ISPs went bankrupt or gave up.
davidgerard 13y ago
Yes. OpenReach - the bit that actually runs the network - is legally part of the private company BT, but, through several reorganisations and a privatisation, is still functionally the GPO of the 1970s: a highly-regulated bit of public social functionality. Except a new phone line now takes three weeks instead of six months.
Spittie 13y ago
Sadly this doesn't always work. We have a similar system here in Italy (Telecom Italia own pretty much the whole phone network, and it's forced to rent it to other ISP, at a low price because it's considered a monopoly). Fine, yes? No. The other ISP just rent less bandwidth than they'd really need, so they can't offer a decent service (during peak hour it's very easy to get less speed than what you'd get with a 56k). It doesn't help that we don't have a cable network too, so we're stuck with the phone one. This mean low theoretical max speed (20mb down and 1mb up, with adsl2+), and the signal get really bad as soon as you get a bit far from the central. Now, this is (very slowly) changing, the bigger ISP are starting to get their own infrastructure and some big cities are starting to get cabled in FTTC (no FTTH because "or copper network is good enough" [sic]). I've also the feeling that I won't see FTTC anytime soon, even if I live ~10km from Milan. There's also to say that there isn't really any interests for high-speed internet. Last I've heard, only 15% of the people reached by a 20/1 connection buy it (preferring the slower 10/1 or 7/480k, which cost respectively 1€/month and 5€/month less).
VolatileVoid 13y ago
This is relatively similar to how it works in Israel. To get internet access you actually need two things: infrastructure and an ISP. Infrastructure is through one of two companies (although it may be more now? I'm not sure): Bezeq (DSL) or HOT (Cable). After that you choose your own ISP. Typically infrastructure is the more expensive of the two, and the ISP is quite cheap. It's also illegal to have binding contracts for utilities here so if HOT pisses me off, I can switch to Bezeq. If my ISP pisses me off I can switch to another one within 20 minutes. I think this latter point is actually the most effective in getting what I want from my providers. Customer service here is pretty awful usually (and this is from a person who used to live in NYC and had TWC), but when they know they risk losing you very easily it's easy to get what you want. I think if you unbundle and do away with contracts you'll get a pretty powerful combination.

cdr 13y ago

That was supposed to be how it worked in the US, at least in the late 90s/early 00s - phone (and cable too, I think?) telco network operators were legally obligated to let other ISP companies lease their lines and deliver service to customers. There was no real enforcement though, and network operators just waged guerrilla warfare on independent ISPs - inexplicable "delays" connecting lines for customers that disappeared if the customer got impatient and signed up for the telco instead, service limitations and outages that telco customers on the same lines didn't notice, etc - until most/all of the independent ISPs went bankrupt or gave up.

davidgerard 13y ago

Yes. OpenReach - the bit that actually runs the network - is legally part of the private company BT, but, through several reorganisations and a privatisation, is still functionally the GPO of the 1970s: a highly-regulated bit of public social functionality. Except a new phone line now takes three weeks instead of six months.

Spittie 13y ago

Sadly this doesn't always work. We have a similar system here in Italy (Telecom Italia own pretty much the whole phone network, and it's forced to rent it to other ISP, at a low price because it's considered a monopoly). Fine, yes? No. The other ISP just rent less bandwidth than they'd really need, so they can't offer a decent service (during peak hour it's very easy to get less speed than what you'd get with a 56k). It doesn't help that we don't have a cable network too, so we're stuck with the phone one. This mean low theoretical max speed (20mb down and 1mb up, with adsl2+), and the signal get really bad as soon as you get a bit far from the central. Now, this is (very slowly) changing, the bigger ISP are starting to get their own infrastructure and some big cities are starting to get cabled in FTTC (no FTTH because "or copper network is good enough" [sic]). I've also the feeling that I won't see FTTC anytime soon, even if I live ~10km from Milan. There's also to say that there isn't really any interests for high-speed internet. Last I've heard, only 15% of the people reached by a 20/1 connection buy it (preferring the slower 10/1 or 7/480k, which cost respectively 1€/month and 5€/month less).

VolatileVoid 13y ago

This is relatively similar to how it works in Israel. To get internet access you actually need two things: infrastructure and an ISP. Infrastructure is through one of two companies (although it may be more now? I'm not sure): Bezeq (DSL) or HOT (Cable). After that you choose your own ISP. Typically infrastructure is the more expensive of the two, and the ISP is quite cheap. It's also illegal to have binding contracts for utilities here so if HOT pisses me off, I can switch to Bezeq. If my ISP pisses me off I can switch to another one within 20 minutes. I think this latter point is actually the most effective in getting what I want from my providers. Customer service here is pretty awful usually (and this is from a person who used to live in NYC and had TWC), but when they know they risk losing you very easily it's easy to get what you want. I think if you unbundle and do away with contracts you'll get a pretty powerful combination.