It would be nice if NN advocates focused on improving competition in the ISP space instead of using this as a reason to give the FCC control over yet another communication medium. Mesh networks and more ISP choice would "enforce" net neutrality via consumer signals instead of the "just make it happen" solution being proposed.
This sounds nice but is illogical. Actually creating alternative competitor networks are insanely prohibitively expensive, and will likely back up against a backbone served by one of the few capable ISPs anyway.
Besides that, competition is artificially stifled by government sponsored monopolies - but competing ISPs like it that way. It makes new markets difficult but on the up side, makes price collusion easy (and the threat of competition non-existent).
Like it or not, the fight is on the beaches of the FCC, and we don't get to move the front lines willy-nilly in this fight.
As far as I can see the lack of competition happens mainly in the last mile part. There are myriads of community-run ISPs that specifically target this area around the world; the best example I know is the FFDN (http://www.ffdn.org/). I've listened to many conf made by Benjamin Bayart, ex-president of the association that started this movement. The key idea behind running your own ISP (at least in France) are:
- It's easy. A few forms to fill and you're official.
- It's cheap. Expect less than 100 euros
- All it really requires is involvement. People wanting to commit to it for more than the next 6 months.
Technically they absolutely depend on big names' network for transiting data. But the end point is their own; there can be competition if you want to. Plus, the big names would like to create differentiation on the end points, but they actually don't care as much about that when you're your own ISP and peer/transit through them.
Assuming your talking about the US with your question (since the article is), than in the US it really is _that_ expensive.
The main reason it's "easy" in France (and UK, and other places) is that the big name's network are required by law to let you use the end point. That exists in the US on the phone lines (legacy telephone regulations). But not on anything else (no cable or fiber).
So unless you want to pour all of your time and energy into offering flaky, slow, unreliable internet over 100-year-old copper lines, with speeds below 6mb and minor outages daily, your out of luck re-using any lines in the US.
That difference alone suddenly makes it not remotely easy or cheap.
To deploy internet at a reasonable price, you have to start an entire fiber construction company, and local political lobbying firm, simultaneously, just to get a single customer.
We're talking a barrier to entry of at least 1 to 2 million dollars, to wire a neighborhood, just to get your first customer signed up. Customers who've been conditioned to pay no more than $80/month for internet access.
That cost is actually not expensive compared to typical municipal projects. But it's way more than you'll ever get funding for, to chase, unless you are already extremely wealthy from some other business / family history / etc.
Venture firms would rather fund one thousand new Instagrams than pour money into anything remotely resembling a utility business.
The main way around that cost barrier is to deploy "bad" technology, like wireless. That can be done on a shoestring budget. It works really well in places where there is zero density (rural, exurbs). But it's not the future, it's legacy deployment, with legacy problems and legacy speeds. The nicest microwave radios you can buy only barely match the speeds and reliability of the cheapest fiber deployment.
So, if your in any sort of reasonably-sized city, you'd be stupid to not roll out fiber from the start. And to do that, your looking at millions of dollars of cost.
No one will ever fund that. (I've tried -- countless times). Typically, only selfie-sharing iPhone apps can generate investment like that.
This is why most people in the US are pushing for "common carrier". Because no one here believes a honest business will ever deploy a modern network on any large scale, so the best we can hope for is an upgrade from 100-year-old phone lines, to 40-year-old cable lines.
The main reason it's "easy" in France (and UK, and other places) is that the big name's network are required by law to let you use the end point. That exists in the US on the phone lines (legacy telephone regulations). But not on anything else (no cable or fiber).
The regulations are on the books, and through the mid-2000s UNE-P was a somewhat-viable business model. However, the ILECs figured out that they can sabotage the fulfillment process with no repercussions. When your new customers can't get their service actually started, and the only thing you can tell them is "Verizon is being mean to us", you're not long for the business. That's why the only remaining CLECs are "facilities-based", i.e. they don't use the UNE-P program.
This is why I'm not so hopeful for a similar program on the data side. I've seen the kind of bullshit the incumbents pull, and I greatly doubt the FCC will ever prevent that. I don't think investors are dumb enough to fall for the 1996 bait-and-switch again, so any effective program like this would have to include strong structural protections for competitive ISPs. My understanding is that the most effective such programs in Europe have done that, e.g. forbidding the network owner from selling to retail customers.
The main way around that cost barrier is to deploy "bad" technology, like wireless. That can be done on a shoestring budget. It works really well in places where there is zero density (rural, exurbs). But it's not the future, it's legacy deployment, with legacy problems and legacy speeds.
That's the current state of the art, but maintaining that decrepitude has taken a decade of FCC foot-dragging on white spaces and other "cognitive" radio applications. We are nowhere near physical limits of spectrum bandwidth, and radio engineers of the future will laugh at our aversion to innovation in this space.
I think the best thing that could happen for competition and choice in data connection would be for radio regulation to be taken away from FCC and given to a less political organization like NIST.
Thanks for the insight, and thanks for the effort you put in trying to build a network !
I was aware that building your own fiber network can be extremely expensive (though there are tales of villages doing it, such as this one [0], because noone is willing to come to them. Yes, that case is special in that it's extremely rural), but I didn't know that you couldn't even use telephone lines because they're unreliable.
> Actually creating alternative competitor networks are insanely prohibitively expensive,
You don't create new networks, you have the gov/FCC require that the owners of current networks license the last mile connections to any and all other ISPs, opening up consumer choice in the last mile [1]. Your ISP giving you fast lane/slow lanes and you don't like it? Choose another. That last-mile monopoly really needs to get solved first, then we can re-evaluate after a couple years whether Title II reclassification is necessary.
See my response below - I'm all for this. That said, is that actually more or less difficult than declaring ISPs common-carriers? The latter seems much simpler than nationalizing the last mile.
Actually creating alternative competitor networks are insanely prohibitively expensive,
Luckily, you don't have to. Just nationalise the last mile (and maybe some more infrastructure like the DSLAMs, I'm not sure), and have ISPs lease it. And don't offer bulk prices.
That way, barrier to entry drop, there are less advantages to being big, and the environment is less prone to monopolies.
The idea is simple: let free market and competition run wild where they actually work, and let the state have the inevitable monopolies.
I love this idea and have even spoken to some pretty fundamentalist libertarians that see nationalized last-mile fiber as a solution superior to the government sponsored monopolies we have now (and continued easements and digging up of people's property any time someone wants to introduce some competition).
The evidence is so scant in support of your hypothesis that it isn't worth risking the test. All the evidence suggests that lack of neutrality won't be enough of a decisive factor for consumers, so we'll have to choose from really affordable and non-neutral or expensive and limited availability and few people will care enough about neutrality to drive the market.
That doesn't mean people don't care. But markets work on a short cycle and don't consider long-term ramifications. People don't make decisions based on the long-term effect of their choices.
Only a blind-faith market ideologue would suggest that net neutrality regulations are a bad thing.
Not necessarily - look at what's happened in Canada and the UK. The governments have forced the major ISPs to lease lines in order to instill competition.
I'm a Canadian, I left a major ISP for one of the smaller competing ISPs because they were offering unlimited bandwidth. Now, 2 years later that major ISP has caught on and is now offering better high end plans than the smaller competitor I was using. Looks like that might change when new plans come out with the competitor, but... point is, competition helps. At least in the case of high-bandwidth consumers.
This simple change made me go from feeling like my ISP options were terrible, to having 4+ completely acceptable ISP options in a matter of a few years.
Anecdotal, sure, but I think freeing up the lines to competitors is beneficial with or without additional net neutrality legislation. While it might not be the only solution, people having only 1 choice of ISP in any given area certainly hurts. Having an option that doesn't have motives for slowing down service to certain sites basically kills this entire issue.
The earliest material in my e-mail archives that I can find about Net Neutrality dates from 2006. Things like this:
"Major telecommunications companies are spending millions lobbying the U.S. congress to make the Internet into a private network. In political lingo this means abandoning what is called "Net Neutrality". In common sense terms it's about the government withdrawing our right to Internet Freedom, it's about the Death of The Internet."
There's always a lot of doom and gloom talk about what evil US telecoms companies will do if regulation is not enforced to quality fix internet service in one particular country with less than 20% of the world's internet users on it.
The real problem is lack of competition at an urban level in the US. It's a specific problem, quality fixing is not the solution, it will entrench the incumbents. It's not even a new problem, the equivalent of the local loop for broadband has to be unbundled to fix this.
Just imagine all roads & highways being privately owned with no usage regulations. The problem with your argument is that it's the same as saying that lack of roadway competition is the problem.
Comments
It would be nice if NN advocates focused on improving competition in the ISP space instead of using this as a reason to give the FCC control over yet another communication medium. Mesh networks and more ISP choice would "enforce" net neutrality via consumer signals instead of the "just make it happen" solution being proposed.
This sounds nice but is illogical. Actually creating alternative competitor networks are insanely prohibitively expensive, and will likely back up against a backbone served by one of the few capable ISPs anyway.
Besides that, competition is artificially stifled by government sponsored monopolies - but competing ISPs like it that way. It makes new markets difficult but on the up side, makes price collusion easy (and the threat of competition non-existent).
Like it or not, the fight is on the beaches of the FCC, and we don't get to move the front lines willy-nilly in this fight.
Is it really _that_ expensive, though ?
As far as I can see the lack of competition happens mainly in the last mile part. There are myriads of community-run ISPs that specifically target this area around the world; the best example I know is the FFDN (http://www.ffdn.org/). I've listened to many conf made by Benjamin Bayart, ex-president of the association that started this movement. The key idea behind running your own ISP (at least in France) are:
- It's easy. A few forms to fill and you're official.
- It's cheap. Expect less than 100 euros
- All it really requires is involvement. People wanting to commit to it for more than the next 6 months.
Technically they absolutely depend on big names' network for transiting data. But the end point is their own; there can be competition if you want to. Plus, the big names would like to create differentiation on the end points, but they actually don't care as much about that when you're your own ISP and peer/transit through them.
Assuming your talking about the US with your question (since the article is), than in the US it really is _that_ expensive.
The main reason it's "easy" in France (and UK, and other places) is that the big name's network are required by law to let you use the end point. That exists in the US on the phone lines (legacy telephone regulations). But not on anything else (no cable or fiber).
So unless you want to pour all of your time and energy into offering flaky, slow, unreliable internet over 100-year-old copper lines, with speeds below 6mb and minor outages daily, your out of luck re-using any lines in the US.
That difference alone suddenly makes it not remotely easy or cheap.
To deploy internet at a reasonable price, you have to start an entire fiber construction company, and local political lobbying firm, simultaneously, just to get a single customer.
We're talking a barrier to entry of at least 1 to 2 million dollars, to wire a neighborhood, just to get your first customer signed up. Customers who've been conditioned to pay no more than $80/month for internet access.
That cost is actually not expensive compared to typical municipal projects. But it's way more than you'll ever get funding for, to chase, unless you are already extremely wealthy from some other business / family history / etc.
Venture firms would rather fund one thousand new Instagrams than pour money into anything remotely resembling a utility business.
The main way around that cost barrier is to deploy "bad" technology, like wireless. That can be done on a shoestring budget. It works really well in places where there is zero density (rural, exurbs). But it's not the future, it's legacy deployment, with legacy problems and legacy speeds. The nicest microwave radios you can buy only barely match the speeds and reliability of the cheapest fiber deployment.
So, if your in any sort of reasonably-sized city, you'd be stupid to not roll out fiber from the start. And to do that, your looking at millions of dollars of cost.
No one will ever fund that. (I've tried -- countless times). Typically, only selfie-sharing iPhone apps can generate investment like that.
This is why most people in the US are pushing for "common carrier". Because no one here believes a honest business will ever deploy a modern network on any large scale, so the best we can hope for is an upgrade from 100-year-old phone lines, to 40-year-old cable lines.
The main reason it's "easy" in France (and UK, and other places) is that the big name's network are required by law to let you use the end point. That exists in the US on the phone lines (legacy telephone regulations). But not on anything else (no cable or fiber).
The regulations are on the books, and through the mid-2000s UNE-P was a somewhat-viable business model. However, the ILECs figured out that they can sabotage the fulfillment process with no repercussions. When your new customers can't get their service actually started, and the only thing you can tell them is "Verizon is being mean to us", you're not long for the business. That's why the only remaining CLECs are "facilities-based", i.e. they don't use the UNE-P program.
This is why I'm not so hopeful for a similar program on the data side. I've seen the kind of bullshit the incumbents pull, and I greatly doubt the FCC will ever prevent that. I don't think investors are dumb enough to fall for the 1996 bait-and-switch again, so any effective program like this would have to include strong structural protections for competitive ISPs. My understanding is that the most effective such programs in Europe have done that, e.g. forbidding the network owner from selling to retail customers.
Yes, that's very true.
Sabotaging fulfillment is yet another problem in re-using lines, which is another reason folks aren't in a rush to reuse lines in the US.
The main way around that cost barrier is to deploy "bad" technology, like wireless. That can be done on a shoestring budget. It works really well in places where there is zero density (rural, exurbs). But it's not the future, it's legacy deployment, with legacy problems and legacy speeds.
That's the current state of the art, but maintaining that decrepitude has taken a decade of FCC foot-dragging on white spaces and other "cognitive" radio applications. We are nowhere near physical limits of spectrum bandwidth, and radio engineers of the future will laugh at our aversion to innovation in this space.
I think the best thing that could happen for competition and choice in data connection would be for radio regulation to be taken away from FCC and given to a less political organization like NIST.
Thanks for the insight, and thanks for the effort you put in trying to build a network !
I was aware that building your own fiber network can be extremely expensive (though there are tales of villages doing it, such as this one [0], because noone is willing to come to them. Yes, that case is special in that it's extremely rural), but I didn't know that you couldn't even use telephone lines because they're unreliable.
[0] http://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-rural-community-is-bui...
> Actually creating alternative competitor networks are insanely prohibitively expensive,
You don't create new networks, you have the gov/FCC require that the owners of current networks license the last mile connections to any and all other ISPs, opening up consumer choice in the last mile [1]. Your ISP giving you fast lane/slow lanes and you don't like it? Choose another. That last-mile monopoly really needs to get solved first, then we can re-evaluate after a couple years whether Title II reclassification is necessary.
[1]:http://blog.samaltman.com/net-neutrality
See my response below - I'm all for this. That said, is that actually more or less difficult than declaring ISPs common-carriers? The latter seems much simpler than nationalizing the last mile.
shrug
Luckily, you don't have to. Just nationalise the last mile (and maybe some more infrastructure like the DSLAMs, I'm not sure), and have ISPs lease it. And don't offer bulk prices.
That way, barrier to entry drop, there are less advantages to being big, and the environment is less prone to monopolies.
The idea is simple: let free market and competition run wild where they actually work, and let the state have the inevitable monopolies.
I love this idea and have even spoken to some pretty fundamentalist libertarians that see nationalized last-mile fiber as a solution superior to the government sponsored monopolies we have now (and continued easements and digging up of people's property any time someone wants to introduce some competition).
Sounds good to me, but I doubt the folks who never question the "magic" of the market would go for your compromise.
The evidence is so scant in support of your hypothesis that it isn't worth risking the test. All the evidence suggests that lack of neutrality won't be enough of a decisive factor for consumers, so we'll have to choose from really affordable and non-neutral or expensive and limited availability and few people will care enough about neutrality to drive the market.
That doesn't mean people don't care. But markets work on a short cycle and don't consider long-term ramifications. People don't make decisions based on the long-term effect of their choices.
Only a blind-faith market ideologue would suggest that net neutrality regulations are a bad thing.
Not necessarily - look at what's happened in Canada and the UK. The governments have forced the major ISPs to lease lines in order to instill competition.
I'm a Canadian, I left a major ISP for one of the smaller competing ISPs because they were offering unlimited bandwidth. Now, 2 years later that major ISP has caught on and is now offering better high end plans than the smaller competitor I was using. Looks like that might change when new plans come out with the competitor, but... point is, competition helps. At least in the case of high-bandwidth consumers.
This simple change made me go from feeling like my ISP options were terrible, to having 4+ completely acceptable ISP options in a matter of a few years.
Anecdotal, sure, but I think freeing up the lines to competitors is beneficial with or without additional net neutrality legislation. While it might not be the only solution, people having only 1 choice of ISP in any given area certainly hurts. Having an option that doesn't have motives for slowing down service to certain sites basically kills this entire issue.
The earliest material in my e-mail archives that I can find about Net Neutrality dates from 2006. Things like this:
"Major telecommunications companies are spending millions lobbying the U.S. congress to make the Internet into a private network. In political lingo this means abandoning what is called "Net Neutrality". In common sense terms it's about the government withdrawing our right to Internet Freedom, it's about the Death of The Internet."
There's always a lot of doom and gloom talk about what evil US telecoms companies will do if regulation is not enforced to quality fix internet service in one particular country with less than 20% of the world's internet users on it.
The real problem is lack of competition at an urban level in the US. It's a specific problem, quality fixing is not the solution, it will entrench the incumbents. It's not even a new problem, the equivalent of the local loop for broadband has to be unbundled to fix this.
Just imagine all roads & highways being privately owned with no usage regulations. The problem with your argument is that it's the same as saying that lack of roadway competition is the problem.