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If you want competition, perhaps the simplest way of doing it might be for municipalities to provide universal service at layer -1: run an underground plastic p
by ajb 12y ago
If you want competition, perhaps the simplest way of doing it might be for municipalities to provide universal service at layer -1: run an underground plastic pipe to each house from the street. That way it suddenly becomes cheap for multiple telcos to run fibre to each house, but the municipalities aren't doing anything with an ongoing technical burden which they might be bad at, or running an ongoing service which might be subject to some kind of capture.
Of course, this assumes that laying a pipe isn't drastically more expensive than fibre, which I don't know.
- _archon_ 12y agoAs I understand it, laying pipe is the fundamentally high cost of expanding or rebuilding a network. The cable itself has a non-negligible cost, but getting zoning and town permissions, securing land for junction cabinets, and digging through existing roads and around existing utilities is hugely expensive. What I don't understand is why any new neighborhood could be built without such underground conduit in place. If they're going in for water, sewer, power, etc. then it should be trivial to pop in an additional tube for "future connections."
- kansface 12y agoCities do this, eg San Francisco, but the pipe is mostly unused.
- codfrantic 12y agoWhen my part of Amsterdam was built (1) all houses were provided with a phoneline (about 6 different providers), Cable (sadly only 1 provider) and Fiber (about 5 providers). (1)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJburg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJburg
- kansface 12y agoIts not a matter of expense in many cases. Municipalities have agreements that span years with cable providers enforcing their local monopolies in exchange for kickbacks and universal access. It is impossible to compete in these markets with any amount of money.