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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

The real problem with the Bell breakup is that last mile telephone service is actually a natural monopoly. The theory was supposed to be that the operators in neighboring states would expand to compete with each other. But that's just iterated prisoner's dilemma where nobody moves first because they don't want the competitor to respond in kind.

Breakups across verticals make a lot more sense. So separating last mile from long distance, and separating Unix from AT&T, those were actually successes.

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Or like the UK did it - separating the service from the infrastructure. Yes, it's not ideal and has issues of its own, but the rolled out infrastructure can be used by many competing providers in that model. Actually it's in the interest of the infra provider that it happens.

As someone completely unfamiliar with British telephone, can you explain the trade offs? I’m curious

Wikipedia has a pretty good overview of the whole issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openreach

The tradeoff is basically: If you don't split the infrastructure, you have people experiencing monopoly of ISPs. If you do, you get ISPs experiencing monopoly of Openreach-like organisation.

Neither situation is amazing, but I believe the second option is still better - and it was a way to prevent BT dictating everything. It's also possible for Ofcom (gov watchdog) now to monitor and slap either ISPs or Openreach for not behaving well.

> Wikipedia has a pretty good overview of the whole issue

It doesn't really.

Openreach was not broken up from BT, it only created a seperate department within BT that continued to skirt various rules.

> It's also possible for Ofcom (gov watchdog) now to monitor and slap either ISPs or Openreach for not behaving well.

Ofcom broke up BT so that O2 and BT were seperate entities because allowing BT to have a dominant mobile network too was considered strongly wrong for competition.

Ofcom allowed the larger mobile networks t-mobile and orange to merge together to become a mega huge mobile network.

Turned around and said no to Three and O2 merging despite being a significant market disadvantage even after merger due to being smaller and having access to significantly less Spectrum. Unlike landlines, mobile networks are heavily restricted by needing radio spectrum to grow.

Allowed BT to acquire EE. Allowed BT to acquire one of the larger virtual ISPs PlusNET. Ofcom denied alternate infrastructure provider Virgin from setting up further competitive mobile network infrastructure and forces them to exist a MVNO.

Ofcom have ignored the fact that BT have been able to offer FTTH connections through their infrastructure to customers before any other ISP is permitted to use it over OpenReach.

"like the UK did it" isn't exactly great.

The OpenReach method however is not exactly unlike the FCC, they do requiring a certain amount of sharing through infrastructure via the Wireline Competition Bureau (WCB) and Wireless Telecommunications Bureau (WTB), but one significant difference to offer coverage of other services. Networks operating in the same area have a tendency to reuse the same infrastructure and mutually piggybacking on each other. There is one added difficulty that State laws do exist to frustrate the federal requirements in place.

No BT sold off O2 to keep the City sweet (I was working for them at the tiem) - of course now they had to buy EE so they had a mobile offering.

And remember ofcoms #1 job is keep Murdoch and the other media barrons happy.

In my opinion, a data connection to the home should be considered infrastructure equal to roads. A natural consequence of that is that the government creates and maintain said network, probably by contracting the work to private companies on a limited time contract that is put in public procurement procedures as per EU law. That way power infrastructure and other companies that solve a similar problem can make a bid that is significantly cheaper than it would otherwise would be.

Once physical connections is public infrastructure, multiple providers can pay for capacity and sell to the end user with great competition resulting.

I have fiber and cable run for data. When an introductory offer ends, I call them up to cancel and if they won't make me a deal, I call the other provider and move an rj45 from one jack to the one next to it until that introductory offer ends. Last mile doesn't have to be a monopoly.

Last mile doesn't have to be a monopoly, but there's a clear limit to how many overbuilt networks can be supported.

Very few organizations are willing to build a third network when an area is already covered by two networks; the cost to build is too high, and the number of customers you'll attract is too low; and the profit margins are too slim, given how quickly incumbent networks can be made competitive when there's a will.

Vanishingly few would overbuild a fourth network.

Often two, sometimes three, and almost never four competitors is not a healthy marketplace. There's no way for a regular person to say 'my ISP stinks, I'm going to go out and do a better job', like you could in the dial-up days by getting a T1 for data, and a T1 for users to call in on. Yes, T1s were expensive, but they weren't as expensive as wiring up to every customer. If we want competition in ISPs, we need local loop unbundling, but for realsies; the companies owning and operating last mile networks should be strictly separate from the companies providing Internet Protocol services on those networks.

Where I live ( Suburbs around Seattle, NOT even close to rural ) for even the FFC's definition of broadband (25M bit down, I forget, like 1M bit up?), until VERY recently there has been exactly ONE provider.

Comcast.

Recently a real competitor opened up. Starlink. They're still more expensive but at least now I technically have a choice other than maybe 7M bit down not even 0.75M bit up DSL. (Century Link, formerly lots of other companies.)

> NOT even close to rural

In Washington you can sometimes do better in certain rural counties thanks to municipal fiber networks maintained by the local PUD. However, the rules surrounding them appeared complicated last time I checked and last mile infrastructure varies wildly by location.

They are, and IIRC they prevent real PUDs, what you're referring to is probably a private co-operative not technically a PUD. I believe sources have attributed the laws to incumbent providers (Think Comcast, USWest and either GTE or Verizon at the time, and whomever those properties have been resold / bought out by since then).

My county (Kitsap) seems to have a municipal PUD. From what I can tell, the rules prevent them from providing retail service; but if they service your building, you can pick from a list of ISPs that provide service. There's some sort of fallback option, where if there's no retail ISPs, the PUD can provide retail service; but I suspect it's pretty easy to provide retail service to any customer on the network once you're an ISP on the network. Maybe if you didn't want to drive all over the county to get on premises.

What would be really nice (in my opinion) is if there was a way to share installation costs without organizing. I've got an installation quote where it's about $30k to build to my pole (and then $20k more to get from my pole to my building, because I have underground utilities from the pole and a long driveway). If I organize a bunch of neighbors along the route, we can share costs on that $30k; but if I just install for me, everyone else along the route can use it at no cost to them. It would be nice if I could pay the $30k now, and get some of that rebated later if other people use the line in some near term future. Although, probably the neighbors would just wait it out; Comcast serves most of them (but not me), and CenturyLink gets me 80/10 mbps on bonded VDSL2, so I imagine most of them can get pretty similar too.

How many nobel prizes did Lucent get?

> How many nobel prizes did Lucent get?

How many is Google getting right now?

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