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Comment by matt-p | Hacker News Reader

That is not, and has never been, true. BT was privatized in 1984. Over the years since then, they've been forced by regulators to open up more and more of the stack to competing ISPs. At one point, you could buy wholesale services like ISDN lines or p2p E1 circuits. Later, ISPs could rent space in the telephone exchanges and individual copper wires. In the current FTTP world, they can either rent a layer 2 service or deploy their own fiber in BT ducts and pay a few pence per meter rental.

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> they've been forced by regulators to open up more and more of the stack to competing ISPs.

The 1996 US Telecom act did this and all kinds of local ISPs popped up to compete. We suddenly had cheap DSL all over the place; people left dial-up in droves.

But citizens don't write laws, lobbyists do. Within 10 years, ISPs had clawed back all their monopolistic control. Now most of the US is under a monopoly/duopoly again.

BT also employ lobbiests, and there's regular controversy in the industry over ofcom not regulating them hard enough, or in why exactly they won the original 2010 era rural fibre contracts but overall I guess they simply don't work as hard as thier ATT counterparts;)

> I guess they simply don't work as hard as thier ATT counterparts;)

Since at least the 1950s, AT&T has been so tightly tied to US Gov+NatSec, it's practically another agency.

To illustrate that: AT&T once faced a lawsuit for aiding US Gov's unconstitutional, warrantless wiretapping (also for cloning backbone traffic for the NSA).

When Congress presented a bill to grant retroactive immunity to AT&T, both Obama and Clinton paused their presidential campaigns. They flew back to DC to cast their Yea votes and protect AT&T from any possible accountability.

US news orgs weren't able to spot anything out of the ordinary in that.

> When Congress presented a bill to grant retroactive immunity to AT&T, both Obama and Clinton paused their presidential campaigns. They flew back to DC to cast their Yea votes and protect AT&T from any possible accountability.

Your facts are a little scrambled: are you referring to 2008 [0] or 2012 [1][2] or both? I guess you meant 2008 because both Hillary and Obama were running for President; but Hillary was absent from the 2/12/2008 vote, [2] claims Obama voted against it. I located the bill: [3] "S.2248 - FISA Amendments Act of 2008" and that Senate vote record from 2/12/2008, although it says "Clinton (D-NY), Not Voting", "Obama (D-IL), Not Voting"(?). You'd expect journalists to get important facts right. Meanwhile US media barely covered that vote.

[0] 2/2008 "Telecom immunity remains intact as Democrats split on vote" "Obama voted with 30 fellow Democrat Senators, but not the absent Hillary Clinton, to allow the telecom companies to face lawsuits... on the [Bush] admin's programme of warrantless wiretapping. But the immunity survived, with 18 Democrats crossing over to support George Bush." https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2008/feb/12/terrorism.u...

[1] "US Supreme Court finalizes gift of immunity to the telecom giants" - Glenn Greenwald https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/10/suprem...

[2] TheAtlantic: "The Supreme Court Isn't Bothered By the NSA’s Warrantless Wiretapping" ... "refused to hear a case that holds telecom companies accountable for letting the warrantless NSA spying" https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/10/supreme...

[3]: 02/12/2008 "S.2248 - FISA Amendments Act of 2008", click through on "14 roll call votes" https://www.congress.gov/bill/110th-congress/senate-bill/224...

Look on the bright side, the AT&T logo already looks like the eye-in-the-sky. Or the Death Star. Hardly needs any reworking.

> Your facts are a little scrambled

Mostly not. Hillary did vote against the bill so thank you for clarifying that.

> are you referring to 2008 or 2012

2008 because Clinton campaign + Obama campaign + AT&T Amnesty bill.

No, your facts are very scrambled, you were incorrect about the 2/12/2008 vote that passed it 68-29-3, there were 14 roll-call votes on that bill, not one. Saying "Hillary did vote against the bill" is totally wrong about the 2/12/2008 vote; congress.gov says both Hillary and Obama weren't present or voted present (as did Lindsey Graham). The claim "They flew back [from campaigning] to DC to cast their Yea votes and protect AT&T from any possible accountability." was wrong. I even dug up the exact bill and the timeline of all 14 votes for you:

[3]: 02/12/2008 "S.2248 - FISA Amendments Act of 2008", click through on "14 roll call votes" https://www.congress.gov/bill/110th-congress/senate-bill/224...

I believe it. Verizon have a fairly extensive backbone in England and Scotland, all their own duct and chambers yet it's impossible to buy wholesale service from them, even if you're big. I wonder what it's used for :')

Upvoted.

I thought BT was owned by the government (particularly because every ISP ends up renting from them).

I still think that a centralized network that is rented out ends up working better than one that's deployed by different ISPs.

Just to be clear, I agree. Despite its faults, I still think we are quite fortunate to have BT Openreach in its current form as a country.

I can understand that perception. Essentially, Openreach is regulated so heavily by the government that it might as well be considered public, from the perspective of 'what services it must offer, on what basis, to whom, and the prices it must set.' However, it is a private company, being a 'firewalled' part of BT

I do not agree with this in the slightest.

OpenReach is a private company, and has many loopholes to not support you if they do not want to. If you have a line issue and they cannot find the root cause, they will black list you.

I had an intermittent fault on my line which OpenReach couldn't (wouldn't?) resolve when I was with Zen. Magically after switching to BT, they sent out BT engineer, who escalated to OpenReach, who then found the fault and replaced the dodgy part in the green box.

It might be "firewalled" but that's not my experience. It shouldn't be firewalled, it should be a separate entity. The only reason to bundle it with BT is if BT was getting a benefit from it.

We've had BT/OR announce several times over the past 5 years that they are installing proper fibre in the area to squash competition, and then quietly cancel. Funny how we have an AltNet laying fibre here and suddenly BT/OR are getting their act together to upgrade the area.

Similar experience in Canada with our telecom cartel. They're legally required to allow other providers to use their lines but if you need support you're out of luck. We had multi-day outages routinely and a Bell tech couldn't find any issues. We finally switched to FTTH when it became available because we need reliable internet to work from home.

BT customer service are just as hopeless at dealing with OpenReach as everyone else.

I spent three months trying to get them to switch my line over to fibre after OpenReach had stated it was available. Their approach was to hope that waiting long enough would fix the problem.

Eventually someone just closed my existing line and immediately opened a new one.

NB 'Despite its faults'.

I hope you complained to your MP, and/or ofcom?

What alternative would you prefer? It would be ideal to turn openreach over to either it's own heavily regulated PLC or a MIC/COOP, but can we really force that in a capitalistic society, when the current status quo is 'acceptable'?

I would prefer openreach were force to sell a regulated single strand dark fibre product, that can be used however the CP wants, but it would cause genuine chaos for ORs business model e.g leased lines would be cancelled.

This type of system is called “common carrier”. (The firewalled part of BT acts as a common carrier).

Because of the way physics and fiber optics work, having a common carrier that rents out access to wavelengths or bandwidth on the fiber strands is the best economic model, by far.

I disagree since BT/OR * don't rent out fibre or wavelengths. They rent out layer 2 vlans (they own the OLT at the exchange and the terminal in people's homes) this means they set the package speeds, price points and use whatever technology they like. For that reason many ISPs have decided to instead rent duct space from BT/OR and each install thier own fibre. That is not really a common carrier, more like common duct.

*except in very rural areas for highly specific use cases, or in the case of wavelengths for medium range high capacity backhaul.

Also, lots of parallel fibre was laid by NtL and friends in the early 2000s, which is the useful stuff. I think Virgin Media bought it all, and that's what they offer as their broadband.

Fun fact - if you try to purchase broadband from a service that runs over BT infrastructure, the price you'll be charged will vary depending on whether there is also a Virgin Media service that would also be available to you. As in, if there's no competition, you'll be charged more. That's price gouging, and I think it should be illegal.

That's not true either! Market 1/2/3 has been dead for well over a decade. Openreach and BTW pricing is consistent across the whole country.

It wasn't consistent last year when I tried to look for a better broadband deal.

There's currently a lot of non-BT fibre rollout taking place. Mostly in cities (Hyperoptic et al), as well as B4RN and similar non-profits infilling the rural locations.

Yeah it's great!

Nonsense, Openreach is the worst possible option for consumers. It is just a way to syphon wealth from a previously publicly owned asset to the global elite via dividends.

It just hasn't blown up as big as Thames Water, decades to get a fibre connection (other countries did fibre 15-20 years ago so it was possible) doesn't annoy as many people as filling rivers with sewage.

Someone posted this below, sums up the situation rather nicely. https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...

I'm not a big fan of privatisation either (particularly the way this was handled) however you realise under the GPO there were waiting lists to get a telephone line, and it could easily take months?

Have you tried interacting with a state service recently, like renewing your passport maybe? They are not exactly the pinical of innovation, speed and efficiency.

The fact most of us can get a 1Gb full fibre service for 30-40 pounds a month (and faster is available, for a little bit more) is not bad.

Openreach (BT) doesn't own all the cables in the UK. There are also independent ISPs with separate fibre networks, I'm using one to send this post.

Never forget that BT was rolling out fibre across the country when they got privatised, had production in the UK running. The public BT foresaw the need for fibre and the cost of copper in the 70s, and was preparing, once Thatcher sold them off and tried to woo American ISPs that couldn't offer an equivalent, they sold it all off on the cheap and communication infrastructure in the UK was set back decades.

The full story: https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...

Thanks that's interesting. At least the affect was shitty broadband rather than filling rivers with sewage, which is what water company privatisation got us.

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