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Comment by xp84 | Hacker News Reader

From a US perspective, for your #1, the idea of people “shopping” for broadband, is astonishing. Most people here have available to them one single DOCSIS provider and that’s it. A few lucky ones have a FTTP option too, but that definitely not available to more than 25% of addresses.

(It’s true that you can use cellular for your home internet, but I consider that extremely compromised.)

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You have to decouple the physical infrastructure from the service provider - how else are you supposed to have competition in a market with a natural monopoly? It's just about the only thing the EU did right during the mandated privatization of infrastructure.

This is exactly what Australia did.

The government laid the fibre (sorta) and then the ISP can use the fibre in any location to serve customers. We can select from nearly 100 different ISPs with many different plans (up to 2Gbps) and the switch over can take as little as 10 minutes if provisioned correctly.

* The Australian governement originally elected to roll out fibre everywhere. The next government decided it was too costly and designed "Multi Technology Mix" (MTM). The MTM consisted of Satellite (Skymuster), 4G/5G Towers (Fixed Wireless), FTTN (Fibre to a Node, then Copper to House), FTTC (Fibre to Curb, then copper to house), FTTP (Fibre to the Prem). Many years later, all of this is overtuned and effectively all FTTN/FTTC customers can get a free FTTP upgrade.

What Malcolm Turnbull did to the NBN was absolutely disgraceful

The reforms also resulted in a lot of people never getting FTTN/FFTC in the first place - so will forever be 5G only unless there’s a new scheme rolled out

I firmly believe it was Murdoch’s plan to delay FTTP NBN because he could see it would scuttle his Fox empire preemptively.

I understand your point and generally agree. But I do see some exceptions like the Railway networks (usually a natural monopoly) in Japan being successfully privatized between so many different companies with their own parallel train lines.

Exactly. And because the infra was never public in the US, and thus no “privatisation with rules”, it’s been a bit of a disaster.

> Most people here have available to them one [wireline] provider [mostly DOCSIS] and that’s it.

Three FTTH providers deployed fiber infra here (thanks to BBB funds && before the WhiteHouse clawed those funds back).

The upshot of adding 3 wireline providers is this: I complained to one that I was switching service to the FTTH that had IPv6. My ISP quoted me a 40% lower rate and added a /38 IPv6 to their ASN.

It's like living in a fantasy.

Indeed.

This is a funny legacy of how telecoms was run and regulated in different countries.

Now the US has the least consumer choice, and shitty ISP practices from exploiting peering relations to selling user data.

I often said net neutrality was fine, but it was an answer to a problem created by the legally-enforced monopolies in the US.

Starlink shattered this monopoly in my area.

> Starlink shattered this monopoly in my area.

The parent was noting that most of the US lives in a region, that is under a monopoly of wireline ISP (DOCSIS, FTTH). Starlink can't shatter a wireline monopoly because it is OTA.

I fired my DOCSIS provider for starlink. For many consumers the service is fungible.

A single extra provider does not mean a monopoly is "broken". Especially if they aren't even competing in the same niches

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