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Comment by cjs_ac | Hacker News Reader

Australia and the UK both have a similar business environment to the Swiss model (but without the superior bandwidth) due to the way that their government-owned telephone monopolies were privatised: Telecom Australia (now called Telstra) and British Telecom (now called BT) were required to allow their newly-formed competitors to sell services over their networks (for appropriate maintenance fees, of course).

The US and German models are consequences of just yelling 'Free market!' without stopping to think about what's actually being sold in that market, and how to encourage genuine competition.

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Australia is still pretty messy, Telstra was privatised and pretty much stopped upgrading their network for years around the 24 mb ADSL level

Eventually we had a forward thinking prime Minister create a new company that started running fibre to homes and wholesaling it to non government businesses but they lost power and fibre to the home became fibre to the neighbourhood running the last bit over existing phone lines

Eventually it was returned to fibre to the home as upgrading existing lines to run shitty 100mb connections was actually much more expensive than just running fibre

We're only now starting to get to the point where fibre is fairly available when it could have been ten years ago

They stopped upgrading their network because government was publicly implying they'd do something nationally on broadband.

Before then, they were rolling out fast internet. Telstra's cable network (aka. BigPond Ultimate at the time) could do 100Mbps fifteen years ago!

Today, the Australian government continues to stomp on the neck of the free market. Numerous initiatives for faster and better privately operated fiber wholesale networks have been sunk by the government, including TPG and others.

TPG wanted to roll out faster AND cheaper fiber in the inner city. Government said no thanks, we'll keep NBN with abysmal upload speeds to protect our investment.

> Telstra's cable network (aka. BigPond Ultimate at the time) could do 100Mbps fifteen years ago!

Mhmm, it was great. But at what cost, you had on most plans a 1GB monthly cap.

And then when I went to an ISDN connection they wanted 9c per megabyte. To be fair, they would let you do things like join their squid proxy caching hierarchy, but bleh.

> TPG wanted to roll out faster AND cheaper fiber in the inner city. Government said no thanks, we'll keep NBN with abysmal upload speeds to protect our investment.

Allowing other networks to take away the easiest, highest margin customers would break the NBN. It would likely lead us back to an unfit for purpose, "Free Market" situation, that further disadvantages rural, regional, and remote communities.

I disagree, Sol Trujillo became ceo of Telstra in 2005 and immediately started cutting everything to the bone, Kevin Rudd didn't even get into power until 2007 and the NBN wasn't announced until 2009, fairly large gap there

We've had the same issue in the Netherlands as the UK (telecom getting free infrastructure), and the end result is them blocking every fiber connection for years and then buying up all of the ones trying when it suited them. And the cable companies had a freebie for decades because they got most of their infra for free without the "share space" requirement (because only a major part, and not all, was funded by municipalities and it took a while to get them all in one company), and the cable companies decided not to invest in anything. And now we have the fiber-to-the-bottom where they are installing as fast as they can, but only with a governmental monopoly in place with dubious sharing agreements.

Due to "competition" and "fare ride" my soon to be (it's taken over 4 years and likely will take forever..) fiber will cost me 22 euro/month more than if I would have gotten the cable from across the road ... but the companies have "exclusive" rights since they would not have "financed" it otherwise (the quotes are all marketing bs).

In the UK, they split the infra provider (Openreach) from the consumer company (BT). So it's no longer BT giving access to the other providers.

In theory, BT has no special access to the infra at all, and they're on a level playing field with other providers.

That may not be perfectly true in practice, but my impression is there are no large differences between providers on the same infra. Choosing between providers mostly comes down to packaging and customer service in the end.

The UK could have had it decades ago, but the Thatcher government didn't allow it. Instead the UK gave permission to a couple of companies to dig up the streets and lay infrastructure in places of their choice. Those companies later merged into one shitty company called Virgin Media. The places they targeted were easy, dense neighbourhoods. BT, on the other hand, was required to provide everyone in the country with a phone line, no matter how remote. Today Virgin Media offers asymmetric gigabit and it's still the only choice for many because real fibre rollout is happening at a glacial pace. They also get people to sign 18 month contracts which aren't terminated if you move house. In some places, like mine, existing conduit means some ISPs are allowed to run their own fibre and these are some of the best connections available today. But most ISPs still get you to sign 18 month or longer contracts. The shitty ones, like Virgin Media won't even terminate your contract if you move to place they don't supply.

Australia has the absolute worst internet

> The US and German models are consequences of just yelling 'Free market!' without stopping to think about what's actually being sold in that market, and how to encourage genuine competition.

The point of a system is what it does. In America, it fosters centralization of wealth on a massive scale. That’s the point, not some unexpected side effect of the theory nobody saw coming.

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