Comment by g_p | Hacker News Reader

Comment by g_p | Hacker News Reader

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Spun-out infrastructure is probably better than the current situation for many people, but it's not necessarily the best outcome - the UK has a setup a bit like this, with the access networks spun out into a wholesale company. It still took rivals digging up streets to lay fibre to move things along. Absent genuine competition, I am sceptical proper investment can be forced in a wholesale "spinoff" provider.

It also means ISPs are effectively limited to offering the same quality of customer service that the wholesale provider offers, because they need/choose to use the wholesale provider for technician work. That kind of thing can be quite problematic, at least judging by the kinds of complaints you read online.

Depending on the nature of the access network, it might also result in an outdated network seeing no further investment. The UK is only just getting a fibre roll-out going in earnest, and this has come from lots of government encouragement, as well as private new-entrant providers increasingly deciding to just lay their own fibre in. That, plus a reasonably widespread hybrid fibre coax (cable) network offering up to approx gigabit downstream services, providing widespread competition.

I would definitely agree that opening up passive infrastructure (ducts and poles, etc.) would help, as it makes it cheaper for new entrants to rapidly deploy coverage. I think people need to be careful what they wish for though - if the only infrastructure available is outdated copper that can barely manage ADSL2 speeds - where will the investment come from to get to fibre?

If there's already a passive optical network deployed then this is less of an issue for now, but I think it's important to note that, at least in the UK market, the impact of competitive provision has been pivotal to getting fibre rolled out quicker. Without rivals raising investment and digging up roads to lay fibre in large cities, the incumbent "spun out" wholesale provider was calling VDSL "fibre to the cabinet" a "superfast fibre" connection. Once rivals did that, competitive pressures meant FTTP deployment followed.

> It still took rivals digging up streets to lay fibre to move things along.

No it didn't. The UK government had a very forward looking fibre internet rollout that started in the 80s. Thatcher canned it for ideological reasons.

> “In 1979 I presented my results,” he tells us, “and the conclusion was to forget about copper and get into fibre. So BT started a massive effort – that spanned in six years – involving thousands of people to both digitise the network and to put fibre everywhere. The country had more fibre per capita than any other nation.

> “In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper and we started a programme where we built factories for manufacturing the system. By 1990, we had two factories, one in Ipswich and one in Birmingham, where were manufacturing components for systems to roll out to the local loop”.

> At that time, the UK, Japan and the United States were leading the way in fibre optic technology and roll-out. Indeed, the first wide area fibre optic network was set up in Hastings, UK. But, in 1990, then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, decided that BT’s rapid and extensive rollout of fibre optic broadband was anti-competitive and held a monopoly on a technology and service that no other telecom company could do.

> “Unfortunately, the Thatcher government decided that it wanted the American cable companies providing the same service to increase competition. So the decision was made to close down the local loop roll out and in 1991 that roll out was stopped. The two factories that BT had built to build fibre related components were sold to Fujitsu and HP, the assets were stripped and the expertise was shipped out to South East Asia.

> “Our colleagues in Korea and Japan, who were working with quite closely at the time, stood back and looked at what happened to us in amazement. What was pivotal was that they carried on with their respective fibre rollouts. And, well, the rest is history as they say.

> “What is quite astonishing is that a very similar thing happened in the United States. The US, UK and Japan were leading the world. In the US, a judge was appointed by Congress to break up AT&T. And so AT&T became things like BellSouth and at that point, political decisions were made that crippled the roll out of optical fibre across the rest of the western world, because the rest of the countries just followed like sheep.

https://webreturn.co.uk/how-thatcher-killed-the-uks-superfas...

This is the exact opposite where in order to get more competition, the government killed advanced companies.

>> the impact of competitive provision has been pivotal to getting fibre rolled out quicker

Yeah i agree, although it does seem like someone there is now awake to the idea that they might not be the most efficient operation.

OpenReach installed fibre in my street’s existing underground network over the pandemic via a subcontractor then they subcontracted a company for the customer premises hookup. That latter company were way more efficient than i expected. At my property the previous owners cemented over the opening at the house end of the duct that runs from the BT pit out in the street, under my garden to my house. It meant the chap who was due to install my FTTP couldn’t run the fibre from the pit to my house. He phoned his colleagues in another van, they showed up 20 mins later and broke ground in my garden to intercept the duct then run a new sub-duct to my house then fed the fibre. The original chap in the meantime went and installed another house. These chaps put everything back as it was except i had a nice neat new fibre box at the front of the house from under the garden. Original chap came back another hour or two later and finished off the commissioning.

When the problem became apparent i was expecting weeks of delay with openreach, instead my install took 2.5 hours instead of 45 mins but all done same day.

It’s nice finally having decent broadband speeds…

It's also possible for the municipality to lay down empty pipes and lease the pipes to ISPs. The ISPs route the fibre through the pipes. So they don't have to dig again and again, and future entrants have space to grow.

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