The market failed because of how difficulty it is to establish last mine given municipal regulation, permitting and other bullshit.
If we want to fix broadband and cellular, decouple utility pole ownership/permitting from retail providers.
If we want to fix broadband and cellular, decouple utility pole ownership/permitting from retail providers.
In reductionist terms the real underlying reason for market failure is regulatory capture.
As to utility poles, a large number of poles are owned by power companies who by and large do not offer retail broadband services, so even here you are barking up the wrong tree.
That being said, there are issues with utility poles which need to be addressed. Efforts such as one touch make ready and the like are needed on a national level.
I think by "ownership" they mean monopolization of the poles due to agreements with the local govt to provide service in return for monopoly rights.
The parent to my original post identified a problem, but misdiagnosed the root cause and prescribed an incorrect solution.
As noted above a lot of poles are owned by power companies that do not offer broadband service. Furthermore exclusive franchises have not been permitted for a good while anymore.
Anybody with the correct permits can secure space on poles. This isn’t the issue. Part of the problems is how costs are assigned and how timely work progresses.
Who owns the pole isn’t the big issue.
This is almost exactly what happened in Britain.
The last mile telephone system is owned by Openreach, which is owned by British Telecom, but they're required to sell the things you'd actually want that system for at regulated wholesale prices to any outfit that wants to retail it.
So for example they'll sell you LLU (Local-loop Unbundled) service which means you can put data onto a copper cable between a home or business property and one of the thousands of physical telephone exchanges that used to house Strowger electro-mechanical switches when that's how telephones worked. You also get some footprint inside the exchange. How you make that into an ISP is your business, but unlike running cables to millions of houses, running fibre to a few thousand telephone exchanges is something a business might actually compete at and sure enough BT have competition for that part of the problem, at least outside the very rural areas.
Or if you're a small outfit and you don't want contracts to shove data over fibres around the country you can buy Wholesale Line Rental for a higher price and Openreach will deliver the bits from that copper cable to a single point elsewhere on the telephone network, then you just build your ISP at that location.
Since Openreach isn't allowed to sell retail products, the regulator mostly needs to make sure that it doesn't deliberately tweak these prices to benefit its owner, BT, which does sell retail products to consumers. For example maybe BT doesn't need Wholesale Line Rental, the regulator needs to make sure the price for it makes sense anyway as smaller ISPs would otherwise be run out of business.
Overall I'm very satisfied with the results. Britain's cable Internet is a monopoly instead (Virgin) but of course almost everywhere that can get cable has a telephone line, so at least they are competing with somebody. More than 95% of households could actually get Superfast broadband (ie 30Mbps or better if the WiFi wasn't in an upstairs bedroom connected via a 1970s bell wire phone extension)
And the key weakneses were that the companies weren't restrucured, so retail could charge less than wholesale rates and corporate accounting would sort it out, that makes it really hard to compete; and even bigger was that access was only on a space avaialable basis, and new facilities (namely DSL remote terminals) were purpose built to provide desirable products to end users while minimizing space such that there was no requirement to provide competitive access since there was no space.
From accross the pond, OpenReach seems like a big success, and what we could have had, but didn't end up with.
National regulatory authorities may, in accordance with Article 68, impose obligations on undertakings to meet reasonable requests for access to, and use of, specific network elements and associated facilities, in situations where the national regulatory authorities consider that denial of access or unreasonable terms and conditions having a similar effect would hinder the emergence of a sustainable competitive market at the retail level, and would not be in the end-user’s interest.
I hope it stays the same in the UK now. This practice has also had similar positive development in the Netherlands.
but then fiber came along, and Verizon vs FCC (2002) slowly made it's way through courts, got to the supreme court, and the supreme court sided with Verizon, who said fiber was so fancy, so costly, so new, that they required a monopoly. the Supreme Court overruled Congress & upturned the Tecommimications Act & have fiber a local monopoly, and things in the US have been getting slowly worse ever since.
Went from shitty 256kbps ADSL to 1gps FTTH, with 2gbps and 4gbps options on the horizon.
The usual conservative suspects were complaining about interference with property rights, undermining investor confidence, unnecessary expenditure for the size of the nation, etc.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/telecom-ordered-to-open-...
None of the doom and gloom predictions came to pass.
And now, of course, everyone loves it, and our household monthly bandwidth used has gone from about 100-200GB to terabytes with all the streaming and Linux ISO downloading.
There are some additional requirements - I think in the early days you had to take a modem from BT and there’s a minimum commitment (used to be 18 months).