6 ms·

> I would love to see a world where the companies that own last-mile infrastructure are required to lease the lines to any ISP the end consumer wants; this wou

> I would love to see a world where the companies that own last-mile infrastructure are required to lease the lines to any ISP the end consumer wants; this would create a competitive market and mostly eliminate the problem. [2] This is pretty much how it works in the UK; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openreach http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openreach It does seem to work pretty well.. there are a wide variety of operators and prices are very low. If I had to pick out common criticisms, Openreach can take their time if you have to deal with them directly (getting a line installed in a new office or apartment can take a few weeks), and there seems to be very limited innovation in the last mile - even in London it's hard to get more than 20mbps, and many people in rural areas are stuck with a crappy DSL line at 2mbps or so.

alex_duf 12y ago
That's also how it works in France.
danielweber 12y ago
I've been led to believe (by conversations here on HN as well as elsewhere) that DSL in the US is operating under that regime -- the phone companies are required to lease them out, so you can have 5 different providers all selling you DSL over the same wires. But DSL bandwidths strongly lag behind cable modem bandwidths because the people laying the wire have no desire to upgrade for the benefit of their competitors. How much truth is there to this?
- exelius 12y ago
  DSL in the US used to operate that way until it failed spectacularly due to the reasons you mention and the FCC reclassified DSL as an information service.
  - bitJericho 12y ago
    I don't know when that happened, but when I had DSL about, oh 6 years ago, they practically begged me to sign up with MSN. I think they got a commission for it. I chose just to go straight with the company who owned the equipment, my phone company.
    - exelius 12y ago
      I think some resellers were grandfathered in when it was reclassified, but not many of them were left at that point anyway. And you're right, they probably did get some sort of commission: providing the service itself was so unprofitable (even with line sharing) the DSL ISPs had to find additional revenue channels.
- rhino369 12y ago
  You can use the local loop, if it exists. It's just not cheap than ADSL, which is already cheap as fuck. Though AT&T and Verizon are ripping out the connections if they bring fiber to your house, and you can't share that line.
- toast0 12y ago
  It's a little bit complex now. The incumbent carrier (ILEC) is still required to lease lines at the Central Office, but they used to be required to lease access to DSL delivered from remote terminals as well. AT&T still provides leased access to DSL delivered from remote terminals, but does not provide leased access to U-Verse, so companies leasing access can put their own DSLAMs in the central office and compete on speeds for users near the central office, but not in areas that are primarily served by remote terminals after AT&T rolls out U-Verse's ADSL2 and VDSL based DSLAMs; the leased access for users behind remote terminals is limited to 6mbps ADSL1. In cities which have been dense for a long time, like San Francisco, there are lots of central offices, and competition using leased access is feasible, but in cities where density is more recent, such as San Jose, there may only be one central office, and there's only a small area with feasible competition with leased access.
twoodfin 12y ago
If I had to pick out common criticisms, Openreach can take their time if you have to deal with them directly (getting a line installed in a new office or apartment can take a few weeks), and there seems to be very limited innovation in the last mile - even in London it's hard to get more than 20mbps, and many people in rural areas are stuck with a crappy DSL line at 2mbps or so. That's exactly what I'd expect. Make infrastructure a low margin utility and a true monopoly and you'll get utility-grade results. If everyone here (as I do) hopes they'll have gigabit speeds to their homes in a few years, you have to plausibly explain how those upgrades happen in a utility infrastructure regulatory world.
- Daishiman 12y ago
  The same way they happen with unregulated providers: some government actor has to step in and provide incentives. We've already seen that expecting multiple last-mile physical providers everywhere is impossible due to cost reasons and the fact that land lines are a natural monopoly, therefore you'll have to manage it as such in the face of absence of normal market pressures. It's still a better scenario than the current situation in the US
- warfangle 12y ago
  >utility-grade results Hopefully not gas-delivery grade results. 5-10% of methane delivered via mains in the UK is lost to atmosphere. Similar leakage rates are found in the US, sometimes much worse. The main (heh, no pun intended) source of these leaks are cast iron pipes that are over 100 years old. And unlike the Internet, when those things fail, things literally explode.
  - danielweber 12y ago
    Methane is a much worse GHG than CO2. This seems like a very significant problem.
    - warfangle 12y ago
      It is. Methane leakage in the US is comparable to the GHG output of half the coal plants in the US.
exelius 12y ago
> and there seems to be very limited innovation in the last mile - even in London it's hard to get more than 20mbps, and many people in rural areas are stuck with a crappy DSL line at 2mbps or so. This is the entirety of the problem with the DSL-style line sharing. If the companies operating the infrastructure get paid on a per-customer basis, they have no incentive to make the service better by improving service for individual customers. The incentive is to provide service to as many customers as possible regardless of the quality / speed of that service. If you want DSL-style line sharing to work in the US, the line owners will need to charge the ISPs on a per-gigabyte basis. This pretty much requires the ISPs to charge on a metered basis as well. This would be an overwhelmingly bad thing for companies doing business over the Internet. I've been banging this drum for a while: companies will act in their own best interest, so you have to align the economic incentives with the desired behavior. If you try to regulate to enforce the behavior you want without the proper incentives, the investment dollars will just move somewhere else because it becomes too hard to make a profit.
- wtallis 12y ago
  > If you want DSL-style line sharing to work in the US, the line owners will need to charge the ISPs on a per-gigabyte basis. This pretty much requires the ISPs to charge on a metered basis as well. This would be an overwhelmingly bad thing for companies doing business over the Internet. Why? It seems to me that metered internet could work just fine, if the prices are at least somewhat connected with reality (meaning cents per gigabyte at most, with a base cost not more than about $20/month). The form of metering we currently have in the US is usually punitive overage charges for data in excess of some unrealistically low monthly quota, and is applied on top of $60+/month subscription fees. That's obviously bad for internet content providers (since their whole point is to deter further usage), but I think reasonable prices are possible.
  - exelius 12y ago
    But the prices you list aren't connected with reality. They're your wishful thinking of what Internet access should cost. Reality says that most telecom companies make about 10-15% net margins, so there really isn't room to drop prices more than 10% or so from where they are currently, even if the ISPs are willing to abandon all hope of profits. It's also a well-known psychological phenomenon that people will curtail usage if they know their usage will cost them more -- even if the amount is trivial. The last thing Internet-based companies like Netflix or Amazon want is for people to use the Internet less. Current metering systems really only "catch" the most egregious offenders (less than 1% of total customers). Most ISPs have a "business class" plan you can purchase for more that truly is unlimited, if you find yourself exceeding the caps on a residential account on a regular basis.
walterbell 12y ago
Didn't 1996 telecom deregulation mandate sharing of last mile copper, creating short-lived (~5 years) DSL CLECs funded by about $20B of public IPOs? Various tactics were employed by incumbent telcos to slow down the CLECs, while nominally complying with the requirement to share the last mile.
- r00fus 12y ago
  Yes, that was rolled back in 2001 as one of the first Bush Administration moves against the internet - I have no doubt this protectionist move was done in exchange for these big telcos to support the "terrorist surveillance" that's now turned into constant surveillance on Americans.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
oesmith 12y ago
+1, I live in a semi-rural town of ~10k residents and I get 75Mbps / 15Mbps fibre-to-the-cabinet broadband. The infrastructure is owned by the incumbent monopoly provider, but the service over the top can be supplied by any one of a number of large and small suppliers.
oesmith 12y ago
+1, I live in a semi-rural town of ~10k residents and I get 75Mbps / 15Mbps fibre-to-the-cabinet broadband. The infrastructure is owned by the incumbent monopoly provider, but the service over the top can be supplied by any one of a number of large and small suppliers.
tzs 12y ago
There was a show on PBS [1] that looked at internet access in several countries, and one of the segments covered the UK. There were two amusing facts they mentioned about line sharing in the UK. 1. BT was very much against it, claiming they would lose a lot of money. They now admit it was great for them. 2. AT&T and Verizon were strongly in favor of this. Ask them about doing it in the US, and they say it would be terrible for consumers. The reporter for that PBS show did an updated print version of this story for Engadget [2]. [1] http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/culture/video-high-fiber/ http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/culture/video-high-fibe... [2] http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/28/why-is-european-broadband-faster-and-cheaper-blame-the-governme/ http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/28/why-is-european-broadband...
- SilasX 12y ago
  OT, but I've been looking for examples where a group opposed a policy that passed anyway and turned out to benefit them by their own admission, and your #1 is exactly what I was looking for: http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-cases-where-a-group-admitted-it-was-mistaken-to-oppose-a-policy-change-because-it-happened-anyway-and-turned-out-to-benefit-them http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-cases-where-a-group-admit...
matthewmacleod 12y ago
"there seems to be very limited innovation in the last mile - even in London it's hard to get more than 20mbps" That's just not true - vast swathes of London now have access to the VDSL-based Infinity service which is up to 76Mb down; there are quite a few FTTP exchanges too.
- njs12345 12y ago
  Well, when I looked (in E1, close to Central London) it wasn't available yet, and only about half the people in my office can get it. Hopefully things have changed in the meantime :)
lloeki 12y ago
Same here in France, both for copper lines — a.k.a "dégroupage" — and FTTH — a.k.a "mutualisation". The first one was imposed to lift the monopoly of France Télécom (then the universal telecom public service, now Orange), while the second one was imposed not to repeat mistakes made when cable operators created local monopolies by negotiating cable installation at discounted prices with syndicated building owners or neighborhoods (Of course prices went through the roof once the monopoly was in place, and up again when one ended up buying them all). Pragmatic result: I'm paying 35€/mo for 100Mb/50Mb (incl. TV/IP and landline/IP), due for an upgrade to 300Mb/100Mb.

alex_duf 12y ago

That's also how it works in France.

danielweber 12y ago

I've been led to believe (by conversations here on HN as well as elsewhere) that DSL in the US is operating under that regime -- the phone companies are required to lease them out, so you can have 5 different providers all selling you DSL over the same wires. But DSL bandwidths strongly lag behind cable modem bandwidths because the people laying the wire have no desire to upgrade for the benefit of their competitors. How much truth is there to this?

exelius 12y ago
DSL in the US used to operate that way until it failed spectacularly due to the reasons you mention and the FCC reclassified DSL as an information service.
- bitJericho 12y ago
  I don't know when that happened, but when I had DSL about, oh 6 years ago, they practically begged me to sign up with MSN. I think they got a commission for it. I chose just to go straight with the company who owned the equipment, my phone company.
  - exelius 12y ago
    I think some resellers were grandfathered in when it was reclassified, but not many of them were left at that point anyway. And you're right, they probably did get some sort of commission: providing the service itself was so unprofitable (even with line sharing) the DSL ISPs had to find additional revenue channels.
rhino369 12y ago
You can use the local loop, if it exists. It's just not cheap than ADSL, which is already cheap as fuck. Though AT&T and Verizon are ripping out the connections if they bring fiber to your house, and you can't share that line.
toast0 12y ago
It's a little bit complex now. The incumbent carrier (ILEC) is still required to lease lines at the Central Office, but they used to be required to lease access to DSL delivered from remote terminals as well. AT&T still provides leased access to DSL delivered from remote terminals, but does not provide leased access to U-Verse, so companies leasing access can put their own DSLAMs in the central office and compete on speeds for users near the central office, but not in areas that are primarily served by remote terminals after AT&T rolls out U-Verse's ADSL2 and VDSL based DSLAMs; the leased access for users behind remote terminals is limited to 6mbps ADSL1. In cities which have been dense for a long time, like San Francisco, there are lots of central offices, and competition using leased access is feasible, but in cities where density is more recent, such as San Jose, there may only be one central office, and there's only a small area with feasible competition with leased access.

twoodfin 12y ago

If I had to pick out common criticisms, Openreach can take their time if you have to deal with them directly (getting a line installed in a new office or apartment can take a few weeks), and there seems to be very limited innovation in the last mile - even in London it's hard to get more than 20mbps, and many people in rural areas are stuck with a crappy DSL line at 2mbps or so. That's exactly what I'd expect. Make infrastructure a low margin utility and a true monopoly and you'll get utility-grade results. If everyone here (as I do) hopes they'll have gigabit speeds to their homes in a few years, you have to plausibly explain how those upgrades happen in a utility infrastructure regulatory world.

Daishiman 12y ago
The same way they happen with unregulated providers: some government actor has to step in and provide incentives. We've already seen that expecting multiple last-mile physical providers everywhere is impossible due to cost reasons and the fact that land lines are a natural monopoly, therefore you'll have to manage it as such in the face of absence of normal market pressures. It's still a better scenario than the current situation in the US
warfangle 12y ago
>utility-grade results Hopefully not gas-delivery grade results. 5-10% of methane delivered via mains in the UK is lost to atmosphere. Similar leakage rates are found in the US, sometimes much worse. The main (heh, no pun intended) source of these leaks are cast iron pipes that are over 100 years old. And unlike the Internet, when those things fail, things literally explode.
- danielweber 12y ago
  Methane is a much worse GHG than CO2. This seems like a very significant problem.
  - warfangle 12y ago
    It is. Methane leakage in the US is comparable to the GHG output of half the coal plants in the US.

exelius 12y ago

> and there seems to be very limited innovation in the last mile - even in London it's hard to get more than 20mbps, and many people in rural areas are stuck with a crappy DSL line at 2mbps or so. This is the entirety of the problem with the DSL-style line sharing. If the companies operating the infrastructure get paid on a per-customer basis, they have no incentive to make the service better by improving service for individual customers. The incentive is to provide service to as many customers as possible regardless of the quality / speed of that service. If you want DSL-style line sharing to work in the US, the line owners will need to charge the ISPs on a per-gigabyte basis. This pretty much requires the ISPs to charge on a metered basis as well. This would be an overwhelmingly bad thing for companies doing business over the Internet. I've been banging this drum for a while: companies will act in their own best interest, so you have to align the economic incentives with the desired behavior. If you try to regulate to enforce the behavior you want without the proper incentives, the investment dollars will just move somewhere else because it becomes too hard to make a profit.

wtallis 12y ago
> If you want DSL-style line sharing to work in the US, the line owners will need to charge the ISPs on a per-gigabyte basis. This pretty much requires the ISPs to charge on a metered basis as well. This would be an overwhelmingly bad thing for companies doing business over the Internet. Why? It seems to me that metered internet could work just fine, if the prices are at least somewhat connected with reality (meaning cents per gigabyte at most, with a base cost not more than about $20/month). The form of metering we currently have in the US is usually punitive overage charges for data in excess of some unrealistically low monthly quota, and is applied on top of $60+/month subscription fees. That's obviously bad for internet content providers (since their whole point is to deter further usage), but I think reasonable prices are possible.
- exelius 12y ago
  But the prices you list aren't connected with reality. They're your wishful thinking of what Internet access should cost. Reality says that most telecom companies make about 10-15% net margins, so there really isn't room to drop prices more than 10% or so from where they are currently, even if the ISPs are willing to abandon all hope of profits. It's also a well-known psychological phenomenon that people will curtail usage if they know their usage will cost them more -- even if the amount is trivial. The last thing Internet-based companies like Netflix or Amazon want is for people to use the Internet less. Current metering systems really only "catch" the most egregious offenders (less than 1% of total customers). Most ISPs have a "business class" plan you can purchase for more that truly is unlimited, if you find yourself exceeding the caps on a residential account on a regular basis.

walterbell 12y ago

Didn't 1996 telecom deregulation mandate sharing of last mile copper, creating short-lived (~5 years) DSL CLECs funded by about $20B of public IPOs? Various tactics were employed by incumbent telcos to slow down the CLECs, while nominally complying with the requirement to share the last mile.

r00fus 12y ago
Yes, that was rolled back in 2001 as one of the first Bush Administration moves against the internet - I have no doubt this protectionist move was done in exchange for these big telcos to support the "terrorist surveillance" that's now turned into constant surveillance on Americans.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

oesmith 12y ago

+1, I live in a semi-rural town of ~10k residents and I get 75Mbps / 15Mbps fibre-to-the-cabinet broadband. The infrastructure is owned by the incumbent monopoly provider, but the service over the top can be supplied by any one of a number of large and small suppliers.

oesmith 12y ago

tzs 12y ago

There was a show on PBS [1] that looked at internet access in several countries, and one of the segments covered the UK. There were two amusing facts they mentioned about line sharing in the UK. 1. BT was very much against it, claiming they would lose a lot of money. They now admit it was great for them. 2. AT&T and Verizon were strongly in favor of this. Ask them about doing it in the US, and they say it would be terrible for consumers. The reporter for that PBS show did an updated print version of this story for Engadget [2]. [1] http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/culture/video-high-fiber/ http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/culture/video-high-fibe... [2] http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/28/why-is-european-broadband-faster-and-cheaper-blame-the-governme/ http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/28/why-is-european-broadband...

SilasX 12y ago
OT, but I've been looking for examples where a group opposed a policy that passed anyway and turned out to benefit them by their own admission, and your #1 is exactly what I was looking for: http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-cases-where-a-group-admitted-it-was-mistaken-to-oppose-a-policy-change-because-it-happened-anyway-and-turned-out-to-benefit-them http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-cases-where-a-group-admit...

matthewmacleod 12y ago

"there seems to be very limited innovation in the last mile - even in London it's hard to get more than 20mbps" That's just not true - vast swathes of London now have access to the VDSL-based Infinity service which is up to 76Mb down; there are quite a few FTTP exchanges too.

njs12345 12y ago
Well, when I looked (in E1, close to Central London) it wasn't available yet, and only about half the people in my office can get it. Hopefully things have changed in the meantime :)

lloeki 12y ago

Same here in France, both for copper lines — a.k.a "dégroupage" — and FTTH — a.k.a "mutualisation". The first one was imposed to lift the monopoly of France Télécom (then the universal telecom public service, now Orange), while the second one was imposed not to repeat mistakes made when cable operators created local monopolies by negotiating cable installation at discounted prices with syndicated building owners or neighborhoods (Of course prices went through the roof once the monopoly was in place, and up again when one ended up buying them all). Pragmatic result: I'm paying 35€/mo for 100Mb/50Mb (incl. TV/IP and landline/IP), due for an upgrade to 300Mb/100Mb.