I'm all for VZ being able to reclaim it as long as they open their fiber
which I don't see happening unless its by force via government. At the
end
of the day there needs to be the ability to allow competitors in so of
course they shouldnt be allowed to rip out the regulated part and replace
it with a unregulated one.
I think this partly captures the incentive case here, but there is also a
larger one at play. Over the years the copper infrastructure was installed
and extended through various incentive programs. You can see the
modern-day reflection of that in the RUS (used to manage rural
electrification act, part of USDA) and NTIA (Department of Commerce).
Yes, I find it quite "amusing" that I am paying additional fees on all of my telecommunications services to subsidize high speed PON networks in rural bumf*ck while I can't get anything like it in San Jose, California.
The barriers to entry are significant for a new player in the marketplace.
The cost is putting the cabling in the ground vs the cost of the cable
itself. One can easily pick up hardware for $250 to light a single strand
of 9/125 SM fiber @ 10km for a 1Gb/s ethernet link. That's low enough you
could likely get a consumer to buy the hardware. The real cost is the
installation per strand foot/mile.
Yes, at some point, we need to recognize that LMI (Last Mile Infrastructure) is and likely always will be a natural monopoly in all but the most densely populated areas (and actually even in many of those). THe market simply won't support the costs of deploying duplicate infrastructure installed by multiple providers. Given this fact, the only way to ensure competition in the services arena is to divorce the infrastructure from the services and require an independent operator of the infrastructure to make it available on an equal basis to all service providers.
In the past this has been subsidized for copper plant. There is no reason
in my mind that the fiber plant should be treated differently from this
standpoint. I can find fiber optic cabling for $0.25/ft. The problem here
is a multi-dimensional one that I've seen play out in a few markets:
One reason the fiber plant should be treated differently is that we should learn from the mistakes we made with copper and we shouldn't continue to subsidize corporations to build out infrastructure that extends their ability to block competitors and should, instead insist that subsidized infrastructure is deployed in such a manner as to benefit all and support healthy competition for the services market.
It is my firm belief that without a regulatory regime it will not be
feasible to connect many communities robustly to modern communications
infrastructure. This could clearly change if the carriers involved see fit
to replace this infrastructure, but with their current debt loads, I think
it will be challenging to say the least.
WHile I agree with you, the situation is already somewhat inverted in the US in that the existing USF subsidies have now made it more cost effective to build advanced networks into rural low-density subscriber bases than into moderately populated areas.
I do think we need a new last-mile regime in many areas, be it more "fair"
access similar to pole attach fees or the removal of local barriers to
build this infrastructure.
The mechanism I have described above has been deployed in Sweden for some time now and is working out quite well from what I hear. It's also being tried in Australia now, much to the consternation of Telstra, but, it seems to be going well for the residents and businesses.
Some school and other governments here in Michigan would love to
sell/lease their excess fiber capacity to the private sector, but are
worried about turning a profit when it was built with taxpayer funds and
problems associated with that. I'd like to see these barriers removed. If
it's there, lets make it of value. If the school system turns a profit on
their enterprise, that's fine, it can lower the tax burden elsewhere.
+1
I do not understand this aversion to government having other sources of revenue besides direct taxation. If government can earn money from infrastructure it built with taxpayer money by leasing it to corporations or others, so long as it doesn't interfere with the original purpose for which the taxpayers funded its construction, I think this should absolutely be allowed and even encouraged.
Me? I'd be willing to pay $2500 to have Fiber built to my home. I might
even pay more. At this point, my research continues on building the fiber
and arranging my own easements for where to place it. I suspect you just
need a few geeks that are willing to part with some extra $ for fiber
bragging rights and one can build it.
There was a project in New Zealand that started out not too far off from what you are describing above and resulted in a fiber run that now stretches from one end to the other of one of their islands IIRC. It was presented at PacNOG in American Samoa a couple of years back.
1. Do not mistake a large telco for a communications company or an entity that considers itself in the communications business. They are not and do not. They are very large law firms and lobbying organizations that happen to have significant telecommunications infrastructure. One of the key differentiators of the internet is that it is not dominated as a battleground for lawyers and diplomats, but, rather is worked out between cooperating and competing entities as a (relatively) unregulated business transaction.
2. Because companies are allowed to own infrastructure and sell services over that infrastructure and in many cases without being required to make that (subsidized) infrastructure available to other services providers.
3. Because it is very expensive to build out the infrastructure to a given area and the maximum revenue potential from it is limited to a value unlikely to support 2x or more the infrastructure build-out cost, thus resulting in a sort of natural monopoly because it is cost effective to build out if you have a reasonable chance of capturing ~100% of the revenue, but, much less so if you are faced with the possibility of capturing 50% or less of the revenue.[1]
Owen
[1] Comparing across topologies is not as valid as the carriers would like you to believe. While the end services being offered share significant similarities in a converged digital world, they still retain unique properties that make certain things more optimal for different purposes. Consider the number of places in the US that have more than one cable provider or more than one DSL provider or more than one PON provider. These are few and far between and usually only reflect the very densest population centers.
So where are these "subsidies" going? I live in rural BFE where most
of my neighbors are still dialing in, and the local providers have no
$$ incentive to build out here.
I imagine a lot goes into the general maintenance of rural systems. I recall 12 - 15 years ago, on the local news when it was announced a small town got its first phone line. Cost to GTE at the time was said to be 40K to do it, as the town was 20+ miles from the nearest anything.
I've lived in an area where Verizon had to maintain 10 miles of overhead just for 1 SLC that serves 20 homes. Not that the service was any good but, I'm sure the cost was far higher than what the customers were paying.
CLECs? The FCC? Who's responsible for maintaining the box given it's now
shared. Who takes legal responsibility for outages caused by things done
to this magical prism you speak of? In the LD to LEC carrier model you can
use whatever you want, but this is different from what the FCC intended
when they forced the incumbents to share copper plant. Also PON and WDM are
very different actually, but that's beside the point. Once the incumbent
has to permit access to their nodes the CLECs become customers. Copper
pairs followed a different model because they could be used by anyone at
the whim of hte customer. Not all fiber based networks are implemented
that way.
A fiber wavelength in the described PON scenario is operationally
identical to a dedicated fiber strand or a dedicated copper pair with
respect to management and connection. There's a physical "wire" coming
out at each end which is connected to equipment with "lights" it. The
problem is reduced to the already solved one of how to "share" copper
pairs in a single cable.
Yes, I find it quite "amusing" that I am paying additional fees on
all of my telecommunications services to subsidize high speed PON
networks in rural bumf*ck while I can't get anything like it in San
Jose, California.
That's OK, you're all in the same boat - the subsidized users can't
get it either.
So where are these "subsidies" going?
what a silly question. lining the telcos' pockets. american so called
'broadband' is a joke and a scam.
>>> Yes, I find it quite "amusing" that I am paying additional fees on
>>> all of my telecommunications services to subsidize high speed PON
>>> networks in rural bumf*ck while I can't get anything like it in San
>>> Jose, California.
>> That's OK, you're all in the same boat - the subsidized users can't
>> get it either.
> So where are these "subsidies" going?
what a silly question. lining the telcos' pockets. american so called
'broadband' is a joke and a scam.
Yup.
I'm always shocked by how naive people are; the telcos did a fantastic
job on this front. So few people realize what's actually happened.
This is one of the clearest summaries of how we've been taken for
hundreds of billions of dollars by telecom companies that promised to
provide the "Information Superhighway"; while it has some clear bias,
it is probably the best summarization of how this all went down, and
who, why, and how.
what a silly question. lining the telcos' pockets. american so called
'broadband' is a joke and a scam.
randy
Really. This is from the Governor's "Hawaii Broadband Initiative" speedtest website:
"The indication of above average or below average is based on a comparison of the actual test result to the current NTIA definition of broadband which is 768 kbps download and 200 kbps upload. Any test result above the NTIA definition is considered above average, and any result below is considered below average."
To be fair to the initiative at least its goal is for universal access to 1Gbps by 2018, something they term 'ultra-high-speed' (not sure where that definition comes from): http://hawaii.gov/gov/broadband-policy-outline/
Back when the initiative documents were written, 1Gbps was ulra-high-speed and 768/200k was average broadband. There is no provision for the terms to shift over time, so, the document gets more and more out of date as time goes by.
I suspect that by 2018, 1Gbps will probably be above average, but, not by as much as the document probably thinks.
That's the national definition of "broadband" that we're stuck with. To show
how totally cooked the books are, consider that when they compute "percent of
people with access to residential broadband", they do it on a per-county basis
- and if even *one* subscriber in one corner of the county has broadband, the
entire county counts.
The entire optics is shared by all the subscribers sharing
a fiber.
Thus, the problem is collision avoidance of simultaneous
transmission, which makes PON time shared with L2 protocols.
Hm... i'm thinking one transceiver might malfunction and get
stuck/frozen in the "transmitting pulse" state, thus making
collision avoidance impossible, kind of like a shorted NIC on a shared
bus topology LAN, if just one subscriber's equipment happens to have
the right kind of failure, and that's neglecting the possibility of
intentional attack.
Passive optically-shared fiber networks don't sound so hot in that case.
This article from arstechnica is right on topic. Its about how the
city of Amsterdam built an open-access fibre network. It seems to me
this is the right way to do it, or at least very close to the right
way..
To be fair to the initiative at least its goal is for universal access
to 1Gbps by 2018, something they term 'ultra-high-speed' (not sure where
that definition comes from): Governor Josh Green, M.D.
Paul
A lofty goal to be sure, the biggest challenge of which may be to get those bits to/from where folks want them to go.
RRDWDM? (Really, really, DWDM)
