Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

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Telecom is... too nasty to touch to be honest.

Brazil tried it, we had a state company that had a monopoly of telecom, we broke it up intentionally in many tiny parts and sold them.

Results were basically this:

1. A bunch ended eventually merging, often with help of blatant corruption (for example one such merger was first denied, then approved again after the son of the president "sold" to a telecom company, his game company for 30 million, a game company that never made any games, and the son of the president before that was a zoo caretaker and didn't knew how to code).

2. Some are going bankrupt, with parts they bought being unprofitable, and will eventually get merged into the others.

3. A LOT of international 007-style spy shit happened because of this... We had our version of CIA spying on our own president, owner of a bank spied upon (seemly with good reason), Italy and Brazil spying on each other, agents getting arrested, agents disappearing, people bending backwards to release criminals and suspected criminals to avoid diplomatic incidents, people that disappeared or died, etc...

To be honest Telecom looks like the sort of thing that even touching with a mile-long pole you will still get shit splattered on you, and if you try a shorter pole it will be nuclear shit.

I think telecom is like power, the only way it can be split is by creating horizontal markets, emphasis on plural, and preferably along some natural lines to the fictional overhead such as generation/distribution in the case of electrical markets.

For communications I think the way to do it might be to create 3-4 levels of responsibilities and say that no single player can operate in more than a few levels at once and must offer their services via live public auction or standard public wholesale pricing.

For wireless the way I'd split is is: 1. Location/site management, aka who owns/manages the poles. 2. Operating the actual Networking/Peering equipment, networking to the site with permission of #1. 3. Consumer/retail such as MVNO; direct-use in the case of large businesses, or value-add aggregation/resale for intermediates.

For wired the way I'd split is is: 1. Global networking/peering. 2. Regional networking/peering. 2. Last-mile equipment/rights, servicing. 3. Consumer/retail, value-add etc.

The goal here being to reduce the barrier to entry for small players via horizontalization which increases competition but not draw too many hard lines so that players have some flexibility in organization and so that players in one level have the opportunity of punching through to an adjacent or skip level if it is being overpriced.

In NZ we have 2 levels, wholesale and retail providers. By law you cannot be both. The price paid by retail providers to wholesale providers is currently set by the commerce commission because the infrastructure being built and managed by the wholesale providers was heavily subsidised by the govt. The (4) wholesale providers are effectively regional monopolies but importantly cannot set their prices, and the retail providers compete on value-add services and price for which there is fairly healthy competition.

I posted this essay I wrote in the spring:

https://write.as/ccgaoox9alf3hbv4.md

I think the key is to not necessarily have state-run ISPs completely OR private-run ISPs completely. Something like the courier/delivery market where there's access to multiple providers is key.

Any kind of local monopoly is bad.

The other elephant in the room is the right-of-way that's granted to these telecom companies over private and public land. In exchange for what?

Lots of room here for lots of progress.

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