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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

There is an interesting unbalance because Comcast has so much leverage by owning the last mile, they can push around Tier 1 providers. I'd like to fix that, mostly by creating a public policy around municipally owned Layer 1 infrastructure between customers in their cities and a city exchange building. Conceptually it would be no different than the city owning the sewers and outsourcing the water treatment plant to a contractor (or two). Creating a new "ISP" would involve installing equipment in the City Exchange(s), providing compatible customer premises equipment to subscribers, and then patching their 'port' at the City Exchange to the ISP's gear.

Its going to be a long conversation :-)

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Utah already has something like this called UTOPIA (http://www.utopianet.org/about-utopia/). The participating cities run fiber optic lines. The city pays for the fiber optic lines (lots and lots and lots of political controversy about this!) then subscribers can pick and choose what services and from which providers they want. I'm in a participating city and love it! Unfortunately politics, both the governmental and the organizational types, are constantly threatening the viability of UTOPIA (http://www.utopianet.org/press/).

>UTOPIA (Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency) is not an Internet service provider. UTOPIA operates on an open access model, which means we own and manage the infrastructure, but lease the lines to private Internet Service Providers, who then deliver services to subscribers. This allows you to choose the provider that best meets your needs.

edit: added press link

That sounds like a similar model to Australia's endangered National Broadband Network. The government owned NBNCo lays the fibres to customers' homes, then ISPs lease bandwidth to service their customers.

It seems to be facing the same issues that you describe, with some politicians being unable to stomach publicly owned infrastructure.

God no! That is not how Labor's NBN works, nor how it is priced. Simon Hackett, the founder and former owner of Internode did a very good job of explaining by NBN Co.'s pricing model is retarded and why the network build is dumb [1]. In brief, the wholesale pricing model precludes new ISPs entering the market, and Labor's NBN is not dark fibre to the premises, again see [1], along with Simon's other talks on the subject. Frankly, the less of Labor's NBN that gets built the better.

1. http://simonhackett.com/2013/07/17/nbn-fibre-on-a-copper-bud...

That linked preso was terribly salesy. He did a poor job of actually backing up some of his graphs with data.

He has a point when he talks about NBNCo's CPE device offering. But that's not really a big deal. Most of his griping seems like nitpicking. Te point of the NBN is getting fiber in the ground that no one company owns. Once that is done all of his other complaints can be dealt with. We can argue incessently over what kind of CPE device to deploy, and change it, without altering the fact that NBNCo now has the fiber in the ground.

He also has a point about the number of POIs that NBN will require the wholesalers to interface with. But again, this is missing the forest for the trees.

>Frankly, the less of Labor's NBN that gets built the better.

Simon doesn't make that argument. His argument is to do it differently, which is completely different than not do it. In the Q&A he makes suggestions to do some parts of the NBN differently, but it's clear he is generally in favor of it.

The NBN is about getting non-monopolized fiber in the ground. Once that's done everything else about it can be changed to suit his or your desires.

> That linked preso was terribly salesy.

Yeah, I get where you're coming from. I think by the time Simon gave that particular presentation he'd been saying the same stuff on a regular basis for a good two years, so it started to sound really rehearsed. Have a look at some of his older videos eg. [1] Although, that is, to a major degree, just how Simon sounds when he talks.

I don't think you fully understand the implications of what NBN Co is building.

> Te point of the NBN is getting fiber in the ground that no one company owns.

This is exactly what is not happening. Labor's NBN Co is (was?) building another Telstra-like monopoly. The one company that owns the fibre is NBN Co. which will, like almost every other government asset, be sold at a loss to a private company. And, like Telstra, it will become notorious for dragging its feet when it comes to appropriately pricing the wholesale service.

> He also has a point about the number of POIs that NBN will require the wholesalers to interface with. But again, this is missing the forest for the trees.

While you (I don't mean you personally, I mean 'you' in the general sense of the Australian voter) are focus on 'fibre regardless of costs' then yes, sure, you're correct.

> Simon doesn't make that argument.

You're right, he doesn't. That is my argument. And, like I always said from the very first first announcement of the NBN "well that will take Labor winning the next 6 elections".

> The NBN is about getting non-monopolized fiber in the ground. Once that's done everything else about it can be changed to suit his or your desires.

Change. Yes, just like Telstra. In fact, the scenario with Telstra is better than NBN Co. At least Telstra has been forced to resell ULL (Unbundled Local Loop, ie. vacant copper) to ISPs. NBN Co. is being built from the ground up to not be like that.

WHY!

I'll take Dark fibre to the premises, or no fibre thanks.

The creation of NBN Co. even resulted in the enactment of new legislation that prohibits competing fibre network builds. Hell, NBN Co. is taking TPG to court over TPGs pre-existing fibre network! [2] This is decided not the role NBN Co. could be playing.

(edit: clarity)

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMeYr2_rJmo 2. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/nbn-turns-the-heat-...

I've been trying to follow NBN Co since I first heard about it 2-3 years ago, but it's tough not being in AU. Thanks for giving me more to think about, and some more links to read.

It sounds like the NBN that was planned is not the NBN that you guys are getting, and that sucks.

Interestingly, there is an Australian corporation, Macquarie Capitol Group, that may take over the administration of UTOPIA - http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/money/57282051-79/macquarie-uto...

Macquarie Capital isn't little known here. They are famous for being able to extract maximum fees from public infrastructure. If they live up to past form [1,2], they will turn UTOPIA into a river of gold, and the source of that river will be the customers.

[1] http://www.smh.com.au/travel/blogs/travellers-check/the-true...

[2] http://www.smh.com.au/business/macquaries-sydney-airport-pla...

I think we can fully expect that NBN Co. will be sold to some organisation or another just like this. That is the sort of thing the Australian government does with public assets.

Good to know!

That is pretty awesome, I've sent them email to see if we can use some of the work they have done in this space.

My work email archive from a decade ago is hard to search, but when I sent a similar email, I got back a reference to a study of broadband in Japan (?) about early adopters in fiber-to-the-curb communities...

They essentially found that when you installed a network like this in a neighborhood, the economic growth in that neighborhood almost immediately changed trajectory (upward) relative to similar communities without these networks.

When I bought my house, one of my absolute requirements was that the house be in a UTOPIA city. If I were a business owner, I would have the same requirement.

Yay progress!

Don't let it die that's a pretty significant step forward.

Regarding Lever 3 and all other Tier 1 providers I suggest they build a database of all ISP's that let their connection saturate and if this keeps happening they cut connections and ban their ass.

All ISP's on the ban list should be forced to pay a large fee to be able to connect back with any Tier 1 providers.

At the end of the day regardless of how big you are you're not an ISP if you don't have access to the Internet.

If Concast and friends want to play the who is more important game i would wager Tier 1 providers are in a better position to win it.

I can't help but think that Spotify's much derided torrent style streaming of data between users on their upload channels, would be a pragmatic workaround for netflix and others:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify#Technical_information

Netflix is reportedly looking into this already: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/netfli...

Interesting, I thought no government were competent enough to make this happen. Clearly I was wrong.

Once the last mile is owned by the government / building / land owner. They should be able to choose what ever ISP they have without being locked into any one of them.

I am also a happy UTOPIA user. I have a full symmetric gigabit pipe to my house for less than $100 per month. There are huge benefits to open choice networks.

This is how it should probably be done if we were starting from scratch. A system like the one you describe would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $300-500 billion; which isn't completely insane as far as national infrastructure projects go.

The problem is that we're not starting from scratch. It's a lot harder for the government to justify that expense when there are a number of viable privately-owned alternatives. Or to put it another way: if you had $500 billion to spend and you had to choose between overhauling the nation's education system (which desperately needs it) and providing better Internet access to people, which would you choose?

Furthermore, do you trust your city to properly maintain said infrastructure? Because I sure as hell don't. All I have to do is look at the pothole-strewn roads outside my house to know that. Fiber optics are awesome now; but what happens in 10 years when we need a new type of quantum fiber made from carbon nanotubes to go faster? Will the cities be able to make the investments? I have my doubts given the overall poor state of municipal infrastructure around the country for things like water and sewage.

The system we have now is far from perfect, but we're going to need to figure out how to make something work within the confines of what we have today: a privately owned and operated physical infrastructure controlled by a small number of companies. How do we craft regulation such that those companies are more profitable when they do what we want them to do?

Good points, allow me to share with you a bit of my strategy.

There is a case to be made that much of the tearing up of the streets is a function of people laying down multiple communication infrastructures along side each other. We looked though the permits for the last 12 months and compared that activity to a on-going repaving and road maintenance work. There are several interesting variables at play in that, cost to maintain (tax based), property tax (revenue), new permits (revenue). If you consider switching the physical layer to an infrastructure basis you eliminate multiple fiber/copper paths under the street, multiple fiber/copper vaults in sidewalks and on street corners, and replace them with a common set of conduits. That helps a number of costs, site surveys for digs, delays for city work, and multiple trenching/paving jobs with different standards of integrity. My city, Sunnyvale, is dealing with ways to make maintaining the city more efficient. This sort of change helps that in ways that are not immediately obvious to folks because they happen with dozens of different actors across dozens of different departments.

My goal is to get the city thinking differently about communications (more like roads and sewers than 'optional thing some folks have') so that we can move past the current hodgepodge into a more efficient and maintainable system. If I can get my city to change, then other cities can see the change and see how it helps or hurts and decide independently to change. As a particularly tech savvy city we have a strong alignment with citizens who want better communications, and we've seen from places like Kansas with Google fiber that such communications upgrades increase property values, which increases property tax revenues. My hope is we can get everyone (communication providers, city, citizens) all aligned on this idea. If so it will get done.

This is all well and good if you're talking about relatively wealthy cities like Sunnyvale with a good tax base, but many cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are literally crumbling. They operate much more in a "try to keep the lights on" capacity because they just don't have the money to do anything else. The roads are constantly torn up from traffic and just never get fixed, water and sewer don't always function properly and the schools are an utter disaster.

Basically, many cities have much more pressing problems than telecom infrastructure. Not to mention that federally, the FCC holds jurisdiction and thus final say over what cities can and can't do. What may look like standardization to you in Sunnyvale starts to look like a hodgepodge of municipal implementations at a federal level, and the FCC may stop you from standardizing at the local level until they've developed standards at the federal level. It's bureaucracy at its finest; but it does serve a purpose.

A couple of points, first I talked with a lawyer who works with/for the FCC and established that if the city isn't involved in lighting up the pipes they don't care what they do. The regulations would apply to ISPs using those pipes but it would not apply to the folks maintaining them. He used the example that companies like the old AboveNet which ran dark fiber from place to place and kept it maintained were not liable to FCC regulation.

The second thing that is interesting is that having a city maintained connectivity infrastructure actually has some positive social justice aspects as it starts to chip away at the digital divide. Once existing contracts have expired and the city is in a position to change things (current single provider contracts don't allow for this) a charitable organization could be an "ISP" without the cost of maintaining the physical plant to/from the subscribers. This greatly expands the available market and gives at risk populations more accessibility. Currently kids study at the city library (which has publicly accessible Internet) rather than at home.

Keep them coming folks, these are exactly the sorts of things we're trying to surface and look at.

How do we know that wired broadband is even the answer? Wouldn't wireless connectivity be more attractive if the goal is social justice? Many lower-income homes don't own a PC, and at this point they probably never will. How attractive is a home PC to you if all you've ever known are smartphones?

Wired broadband, to me, is more of an entertainment consumption platform. Wireless serves the needs of low-bandwidth information consumption quite well these days, and at a significantly lower cost and better market dynamics. Wouldn't a city be better served by pushing Wi-Fi or 4G? Especially given the mass adoption of smartphones by all segments of the economy.

The laws of physics prohibit wireless from serving current needs in an urban density. It's not a solution for the future.

The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem limits the information that can be transmitted through a given channel. If you want to send more wired data, you add more channels by adding more wires. Wireless doesn't have that luxury.

Strictly speaking this is true, however you can add more base stations with lower transmit power so the shared media is shared by lower number of clients. This is what is already done in urban areas with smaller base stations.

Are you able to expand? I tend to agree but dont really know why or what / where the physical limits are. Is it the 4g etc tech that can't perform with real load or WiFi that will fall over? Is a mesh network an answer?

The problem is that wireless is a shared medium. If you have a certain amount of spectrum, you can transfer a finite number of bits per second using it, and that capacity is shared between all devices in range. The bandwidth available in a certain chunk of spectrum is a physical limit. There is no way to expand capacity other than by allocating more spectrum, and radio spectrum is extremely scarce. So the more users you have using cellular for internet, the less bandwidth they each get.

The solution when you want to have "wireless" devices but there isn't enough wireless spectrum is to use wireless for the "last 50 meters" rather than the last mile. In other words, you have fiber to the premises and then WiFi within the building. By keeping the wireless power levels as low as possible you reduce the number of other users you're sharing the spectrum with and allow each user to have a satisfactory amount of bandwidth. Then reserve cellular wireless for users not in a building, e.g. accessing a map from your car, and have all manner of stupid bandwidth caps to discourage usage of cellular wireless whenever it isn't strictly necessary.

> Is a mesh network an answer?

No. Mesh networks would allow you to have more bandwidth per user by reducing wireless power levels and shrinking the geographic size of the collision domain, but that would require peers to act as repeaters between other peers and the tower. That's an epic fail. It adds latency, reduces battery life, impacts reliability if any peer's device is flaky, has security implications, etc. Wireless mesh networks ironically work much better for fixed-position devices than mobile devices, because they can use directional antennas, don't have the extreme power constraints mobile devices do, etc.

It all depends how much bandwidth you need for a given use case. For most use cases other than video, existing wireless technologies are sufficient and will only continue to improve as things like beam shaping and micro cells become more prevalent. Wireless is easier to deploy and as its use grows, more spectrum will likely open up. Free markets have the benefit of deploying scarce resources where they are most in demand. Implementing that spectrum is often as easy as a configuration change that can be deployed remotely.

The biggest advantage of a wired home broadband connection over a wireless one that I see is the ability to stream video. A wired connection has a lot of disadvantages: it's useless outside the home and the infrastructure is significantly more expensive. Wireless has signal and coverage issues for sure, but wireless is a much more competitive industry than wired access in no small part because it's cheaper to deploy.

I don't think it would be going out on a limb to say the HN audience is much wealthier and more technology-literate than the average citizen, and thus would be more likely to want multiple Internet connections and have more use cases such as running file servers, etc. I think the HN crowd overestimates what people use their Internet connections for; the average person uses their home broadband connection primarily to watch video. It's not a bad use case by any means; but I'm not sure the government needs to be building infrastructure that will be primarily used by video streaming companies. Traditional cellular wireless (which can use any mix of wireless, wired or satellite backhaul depending on the application) and Wi-Fi are flexible enough to cover the "access" part of Internet access; especially in an increasingly post-PC world.

> For most use cases other than video, existing wireless technologies are sufficient and will only continue to improve as things like beam shaping and micro cells become more prevalent.

Excluding today's most demanding use case doesn't get you anywhere. If you need a wired connection for that then you need a wired connection. The installed base of smartphones and tablets is still growing significantly and that's going to eat any technological improvements you can make to cellular and then some. Meanwhile people still want to be able to watch Netflix on a tablet from the back of a minivan, and to be able to make that happen at scale you're going to have to remove as much other traffic from the cellular network as possible.

> Wireless is easier to deploy and as its use grows, more spectrum will likely open up. Free markets have the benefit of deploying scarce resources where they are most in demand.

Free markets can't change the laws of physics. Allocating more spectrum is a linear increase. 20% more spectrum costs billions of dollars and only makes it 20% faster. The market solution when there is a high demand scarce resource is to shift usage to a resource that isn't as scarce for any use case where the alternative resource is viable. There is a reason one of the first things you already do when you get to a friend's house for the first time is ask for the WiFi password, and it's not because there is no cellular coverage.

> The biggest advantage of a wired home broadband connection over a wireless one that I see is the ability to stream video.

The advantage is that it allows you to transfer more bits cheaply. Today's most prevalent use case for that is streaming video, sure. It's hardly the only one. Anything that requires uploading or downloading large amounts of data is a bad fit for cellular. And we can't predict what interesting applications will become commonplace once the typical connection is 1Gbps.

> A wired connection has a lot of disadvantages: it's useless outside the home and the infrastructure is significantly more expensive.

The infrastructure is significantly more expensive, once. The cost to maintain fiber is not materially different than the cost to maintain copper. And it's not useless outside the home when everybody else has one too. If you're at home you have WiFi. At work? WiFi. Friend's house? Coffee house? Hotel? WiFi. About the only fixed places there is no WiFi are the places there is also no cellular, like the middle of the woods.

Using cellular when you're in a building with WiFi doesn't make sense. Using cellular when you're on the move does -- and that's the use case we should be preserving the scarce wireless spectrum for, by using wired connections everywhere else.

> The cost to maintain fiber is not materially different than the cost to maintain copper.

You're right; and costs to maintain copper run about 5-10% of initial costs PER YEAR. Physical networks with lots of endpoints are very expensive to maintain.

> You're right; and costs to maintain copper run about 5-10% of initial costs PER YEAR. Physical networks with lots of endpoints are very expensive to maintain.

We already have physical networks. Maintaining them is a fixed cost.[1] You can't eliminate it because you can't reasonably expect to replace the entirety of Cable TV and U-verse with cellular, so the money might as well be going to maintain fiber rather than copper.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_cost

$300-500 billion is a lot to install a national fiber network because "we might as well". If they're going to cost the same to operate, what do we get in exchange for this $500 billion investment? The ability to watch Netflix videos at a higher quality? A slightly lower cable bill? (since the cost to maintain won't be significantly lower, the bill won't be either)

I'm not trying to be sarcastic here -- this is how the government thinks about things. We have an existing infrastructure that is less than optimal, but it still functions and is in no danger of imminent collapse. Contrast with our healthcare system which barely functions and is on the verge of effective collapse. Or our public schools and police departments, which have collapsed in a number of cities.

In short, it's hard to drum up political support for large infrastructure projects even if you can show the need. There has to be a demonstrable catastrophic impact if we don't do the project, which just isn't the case with broadband.

Thanks mostly confirming what I suspected. I did think we would be able to use the spectrum more efficiently over time with better, more precise measurements but my guess is that will scale to its own limits a lot faster than a hard line will.

Much like procesing power and moore's law, we're getting very close to shannon's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem.

Wireless isn't this huge gamechanger that people may think. To beat shannon's law you would need so many base stations in the long term it looks awfully like what we have now with DSL/Fiber/DOCSIS and wifi APs.

Wired connectivity certainly isn't either. I find myself using my home internet connection almost exclusively for movies and games -- not exactly the great innovative services everyone talks about.

I use my phone for almost everything else: online shopping, communication, news consumption, even work since I tether my laptop to it when I'm on the go. It's a lot more convenient; and the only thing I really need high bandwidth for is media playback.

How do you think your wireless signals get to the rest of the world? Microwave backhaul is almost dead, those cell towers (and there are tons of them in urban environments, partly for want of spectrum) are wired up with fiber.

Of course wired is used for backhaul between wireless nodes and the internet; but I'm speaking as a consumer technology. Wired access is definitely here to stay for infrastructure uses.

exactly. Plus even if I'm on my phone I prefer the speed and reliability of my own Wi-Fi.

Its a reasonable question, the challenge is spectrum management. As the city would provide layer 1 (connectivity) not any above layers, they would have to become the spectrum manager for wireless base stations. That is percieved to be too complex. Also this has to meet the needs of consumers and businesses alike. Currently fiber scales from 1mbit > 1TBit [1] so it has that flexibility. Maintenance of the fiber is independent of the special laser you would attach to it if you were say, the new LinkedIn headquarters, versus a consumer.

Not that fiber is particularly "easy", looking over street maps and figuring out what sort of bundles/routing you need to get full coverage is quite an exercise in itself.

[1] http://www.lightreading.com/optical/400g-terabit/euronews-bt...

If it's too complex for a municipality to manage the right technology, is it the right thing to deploy the only technology they can manage? There are market solutions in place for wireless; and spectrum management is already handled by the FCC (would a municipality even have jurisdiction?)

I guess I remain unconvinced how this is not effectively a subsidy to the media companies (Netflix et. al; including Comcast once they start offering a cable-over-internet product) given that the primary use case of wired high-speed internet access is overwhelmingly streaming video (since over 80% of Internet traffic is streaming video). I also don't imagine it would lower costs significantly over a company like Comcast in the long run; the margins aren't great on a business like that and line maintenance is much more expensive long-term than people realize.

Wireless serves the needs of low-bandwidth information consumption quite well these days, and at a significantly lower cost

How do you figure? I pay $30/month each for wireless & wired services. My wired services are unlimited; wireless is capped.

You have to start somewhere. Sometimes an incremental approach is the easiest to get rolling. Framing it as a national issue likely makes it more complex, however.

Exactly, TBH I don't understand why we don't have the conduit equivalent of the shipping container. i.e. a completely standardized, royalty free design for laying cables in urban environments that are completely interchangeable and manufacturable by any company.

From there, the city can just lease the space on a basis of (meters * diameter * demand coefficient for a particular route)

Does such a standardized conduit design exist?

Sort of, there are lots of standardized pipes and conduits which are spelled out in building codes. I've seen installs where the company doing the install just digs a 20" deep trench and unrolls fiber into it, and installs where they put in pipe and then pull fiber through it. I would be really pleased if, by having a known quantity of installs, we could get some work done a sort of standardized civil engineering plan. Part of the permit process with conduits is that the city requires the conduit not crush under some multiple of the max load the street is rated for (assuming its under the street). That involves some number of billable hours by a civil engineer and some test specifications from companies. If there are more standard versions of these things that can be pre-approved for a wide variety of situations, it will reduce the cost of installation.

Yes, but there is still a very heavy cost in maintaining these conduits. They often collapse under a road (for example), which means closing the road off, digging it up, and then repaving the whole thing which is very expensive to serve a few houses or whatever.

I agree with this approach. This cost does not need to be born by the municipalities alone. Contracting companies will line up to build and maintain the infrastructure. The initial build out could be paid for by bonds which would be repaid by the ISPs who lease access. The ongoing maintenance would be paid out of the same fees. ISP competition would help insure that the whole endeavor would not be too costly.

In California, I feel like 'increases property values' is not that valuable to cities due to prop 13. Big increases in property values serve to lock people into their current homes because they lose their property tax subsidy if they move.

Anything that I can do to help move this forward as a Sunnyvale resident and voter? Thanks!

> if you had $500 billion to spend and you had to choose between overhauling the nation's education system (which desperately needs it) and providing better Internet access to people, which would you choose?

They'll choose D. Build a new sportsball arena

That would be enough money for 500-1000 large stadiums.

Citi Field in New York: $900 million

Allianz Arena in Munich: 340€ million

"How do we craft regulation such that those companies are more profitable when they do what we want them to do?"

Sounds like the U.S. already has such regulation - anti-trust regulation. As ChuckMcM noted above, the problem is that Comcast has a monopoly over the last mile. Effective and enforced anti-trust regulations would break up this monopoly into several different competing companies.

BTW, here in Israel, the government apparently has taken the position that services requiring significant infrastructure investment (Internet or cellular networks) are best handled by handing out a limited number of licenses using a bid. We then get an oligopoly where the companies are wildly profitable, until the government has decided we got the infrastructure we wanted, and removes the barrier to entry. Specifically for Internet, we have a duopoly over the last mile "going until the city exchange" to put it in ChuckMcM's terms, then a lot of ISPs taking it from there. IMO, not a bad way to go - we don't pay a lot and get decent Internet everywhere in the country.

Anti-trust laws are not ideal, though. They effectively act as thresholds or hard lower limits on allowed competition, but they don't directly address the economies of scale and barriers to entry that push the market toward a monopoly state.

True, the original impetus for the market monoply exclusions that exist today was to insure that someone coming into the market had a reasonable chance of making their money back. This encouraged people like Comcast to bring cable to the city. What has changed is that the Internet which was a 'ride along' on the Telephone and Cable monopolies has become more of a lifeline service. Further it has gone to the point where it supercedes both, since a home with a 1 - 3mbps Internet connection can get both phone and television services over it. This is the message that I'm bringing to the city, which is that Internet pipes have become like roads, essential for the citizens and the proper functioning of the city itself.

And given that, lets move the infrastructure into the same place, city owned/maintained raw pipes, company services accessible by those pipes.

Agreed. I have been looking now for a while for a rigorous treatment of how to deal with monopoly-related problems (hopefully this would be a summary of the current consensus among economists), are you by chance familiar with one?

Haha, no, I'm not. I only have a 1-year undergrad intro econ course plus a mathematics degree and my own intuition. I don't think I've actually read any primary literature in the econ field, only my textbook (and not much of that, either!).

I don't think that is a hard choice at all. I've see what happens when the government tries to 'overhaul the education system', and it isn't pretty. I'd rather they stay out of that market and leave it to the local governments. Laying fiber on the other hand, that they may be able to accomplish.

> Fiber optics are awesome now; but what happens in 10 years when we need a new type of quantum fiber made from carbon nanotubes to go faster?

Fiber optics are awesome now. Fiber optics were awesome in the 2000s, and the 90s, and the 80s, and the 70s...

Quantum fiber isn't a thing. Nobody has even proposed anything to replace fiber with and copper has lasted more than a hundred years. You can get Tbps out of fiber so we should be good for a while. If somebody invents something to replace fiber with, we can deal with that when it happens (probably a hundred years from now).

Thanks for saying this!

It's worth pointing out the economic benefit to whoever invents the Next Big Thing -- if they make it compatible with existing conduit, it can just be pulled through replacing existing infrastructure.

It turns out the only irreplaceable part is the tubes.

Think datacenters, high density offices and apartments, Level 3's long haul links, etc. They will all be looking for a way to pull Next Big Thing like it was fiber.

> The problem is that we're not starting from scratch. It's a lot harder for the government to justify that expense when there are a number of viable privately-owned alternatives.

This is what the condemnation process is for. The government is unlikely to have to spend $500B to rebuild it; probably much less for the depreciated capital.

> Furthermore, do you trust your city to properly maintain said infrastructure? Because I sure as hell don't. All I have to do is look at the pothole-strewn roads outside my house to know that.

I wouldn't judge that quality of municipal infrastructure maintenance by the number of potholes, because fuel taxes pay for road maintenance, and many jurisdictions haven't raised fuel taxes in decades (i.e. they're not keeping up with inflation).

Instead, you might look to your water, sewage, garbage and electricity services - there, public utilities score quite well, and it's because they're usually not operating at a significant loss.

>Furthermore, do you trust your city to properly maintain said infrastructure? Because I sure as hell don't.

I hear this criticism quite a bit, but I really don't understand. Do we have any evidence at all that the government is actually less efficient, less trustworthy than private companies? The problem we're discussing is caused by private companies not living up to their responsibilities. There are endless examples of this other places as well.

Sure, there are dangers inherent in public services that are not present in private, but the inverse is true as well.

What we're talking about in this specific instance is infrastructure that is a societal benefit, and if that doesn't fall into the domain of public government, I don't know what does.

> Or to put it another way: if you had $500 billion to spend and you had to choose between overhauling the nation's education system (which desperately needs it) and providing better Internet access to people, which would you choose?

Pretty sure that's a false dichotomy, there's no reason you can't have both (given a few years).

US military budget is ~$650 billion. Is that more important than investing in an educational system that desperately needs overhauling?

Let me just point out that $500 billion is larger than the entire yearly non-defense discretionary budget of the US, itself the largest discretionary budget of any government.

>But criley2, how do we spend trillions if $500B is larger than our budget

Discretionary budget, not mandatory spending like social security or welfare.

$500B is an enormous sum of money, it truly is.

$500B/10Y would still be an incredibly large sum subject to an incredible amount of corruption and graft...

> The problem is that we're not starting from scratch

But actually we did have an opportunity to reboot last-mile networks from scratch, because FTTx is essentially all-new network.

And FTTx could be done at considerably lower cost, if we simply had the will to do it, and the patience to leverage existing work.

For example, last week, they were tearing up the street in front of my building to put in new sewer lines. I don't even want to speculate what that might have cost. But now that the work is done, to lay fibre, they'll have to do it again. If, instead, they'd said, "Well, while we're here, let's just drop some conduit for fibre", and continued to do that going forward, a national FTTx last-mile infrastructure would cost considerably less.

It wouldn't be free, of course. It's not merely "[dropping] some conduit", and there are plenty of places where they'd probably have to tear up the streets just for this purpose anyway. But, if every time we tore up the street for unrelated work, we leveraged that to put in place the FTTx-relevant things we'd also need to tear up the street for, we'd be so much closer, and at so much lower a cost...

You think people who tear up the street to put in sewers have never thought "hey, while we are at it, let's build some conduit down here and then sell that?"

I know they literally work on sewers, but they aren't dumb. They understand their business better than random people on the Internet do.

My brother used to do utility plumbing — literally, laying sewers. I know they think this. It's not them that's the issue; it's short-sighted municipal governments, it's contracts, it's "Well, who's paying for it?", it's liability issues, it's these and countless other little inanities.

That said, it kinda blows my mind that someone on HN would actually think I was talking about the people laying the sewer line when I said, "Well, while we're here..." Were you straw-manning, or did you really just not think that one through?

So please tell us, why is it not done? Contract provisions? Lack of profit?

Both.

Most common, SewerCo says "pay for half of our digging costs" and FibreCo says "You're getting paid by the city to dig it up already! Why should we pay again?"and round and round we go. Also, if either SewerCo or FibreCo's work has delays, then there's another whole drama about who pays/is responsible for additional work, penalties, and so on. And the respective Project Managers don't give a rat's ass about the other company since hitting their budget/timeline is the only thing that matters.

Seems like something that can (and should) be worked out, but unless local government steps in and mediates/forces their hand there doesn't seem to be a great urgency. Locally (in NZ) ElectricCo and FibreCo are starting to be the same company in a number of cases, in which case "stop arguing and just do it" is just a management edict.

This is why the municipalities--in the United States--that have city-operated utilities should be doing this. In Seattle, for example, Seattle City Light is the legal owner or half-owner (with the local telco) of every utility pole in the city, along with ground easements for electrical service. Since Seattle City Light and Seattle Public Utilities (the water and sewer provider) are two departments of the same city, they share the same easements and access rights. Tearing up a street to rebuild the street, reconstruct a sewer, or bury electrical wires is all done by the same entity, so adding in fiber conduits is easy as long as there is the budget.

Sadly, that last sentence is the kicker. "As long as there is the budget." There's no line-item in the city budget for building a municipal data network that covers the last mile (Seattle has a rather sizable not-quite-last-mile fiber network).

Sort of, but doesn't a lot of it reuse existing routes? Depending on who "owns" it (based on leases and contracts), this could limit the ability to make a clean break at this stage. If you had to sublet the routes, would it be cost effective? If you had to dig new trenches, how many and how much would it cost?

This is similar to what we have in the UK. The organisation responsible for last mile connections is Openreach, and for all its failings, we in the UK are served rather well by the setup. I have the option of six ISPs, 4 national and 2 local.

The issue with Openreach is the odd situation it has found itself in after several government reshuffles and countless legislation; leaving it under BT Group's umbrella but accountable to the government regulator Ofcom. As such the network has waned and become difficult to upgrade.

> The organisation responsible for last mile connections is Openreach

About 30% of UK homes are also served by ex-Telewest/NTL/Virgin Media cable. The last mile arrangements for that are almost identical to how AIUI things work in the US: the whole line from your door to the internet is owned and operated by one company, and there is no LLU-like competition.

Yes but the key difference is the word "also". Those 30% have an additional choice over the services using OpenReach final mile connections. In the US many people only have the one service that owns the cable and the service.

I'd hardly say it's difficult to upgrade, they've been rolling out network upgrades for the last decade, starting with the 21cn network, then fttc and persumably ftth as an eventual goal.

They are rolling out FTTC, however slowly, and there was a lot of fighting, bureaucracy and political bargaining to do so; in addition to ruling out widespread FTTH rollout (only available to new-builds and selected rural areas).

> by creating a public policy around municipally owned Layer 1 infrastructure between customers in their cities and a city exchange building. Conceptually it would be no different than the city owning the sewers and outsourcing the water treatment plant to a contractor (or two). Creating a new "ISP" would involve installing equipment in the City Exchange(s), providing compatible customer premises equipment to subscribers, and then patching their 'port' at the City Exchange to the ISP's gear.

This is precisely what we're attempting to do in Australia with the National Broadband Network—with the delays, technical changes and cost estimating issues you'd expect from a project that's survived across two federal governments.

NBNCo installs the fibre, the termination devices, the optical splitters, and brings it back to a POI where ISPs then bring in their own transit or purchase backhaul capacity from NBNCo (as needed).

It also, in my view, makes the critical process of engaging local councils, utilities, and ripping up roads, footpaths and driveways much more 'palatable' to the average householder, because it's seen as a public infrastructure project and not as a private organisation expanding their 'own' reach (even if it would achieve the same end goal).

"Survived" is not a good description for gutting its potential capacity by 90% by switching from FTTP to FTTN.

Looks like it will also cost more in the end once you factor in the lease costs for Testra's existing network. Guess that doesn't appear in this governments' books and they can kick the can (pun intended) down the road.

IIUC that's similar to how the electricity grid works in Texas - the last mile is public, but then there are dozens of power companies that contract and subcontract to supply the actual juice. It is, reportedly, a disaster. You get small new companies popping up all the time and dying through mergers and acquisitions. Some own just a single power plant, some own nothing physical at all and are just a reseller to handle billing & arbitrage or broker cost differences. If there's a problem theres's nobody to call and nobody whose responsibility is fixing it. Consumers are left in the lurch whenever there's a merger or acquisition, and the company they pay their bills to usually bears little resemblance to who they initially signed up with.

(Come to think of it, before the wave of banking consolidation in the mid-2000s, this also described the banking situation in New England. My college bank account went from Bank of the West to BankNorth to TD BankNorth in the time it took me to graduate, and my credit card went from BankNorth to TD BankNorth to FIA Card Services to Bank of America in the 3 years I stayed in Massachusetts after graduation.)

IMHO the root problem is that consumers have no leverage because there are millions of them and none own any of the means of production, and so I'm more bullish on new technologies like mesh networking as a way of solving the problem.

A lot of this is not true. I live in Texas, and electricity is not a disaster. You can choose from a variety of rates and providers (you can visit powertochoose.org to see the site), but the local electric utility provider (the company that used to have the monopoly) is the guy you call when electricity goes out.

In the D/FW area, that's Oncor (and is for most of Texas).

Interesting. I'm reporting on my sister's complaints, for providers in the Houston area.

Edit: Hmm, interesting. Perhaps they just picked an unlucky initial provider and then got gobbled up successively.

I'm in the Houston area and haven't had these issues.

- You get small new companies popping up all the time and dying through mergers and acquisitions: to some extent this can be mitigated through your choice of provider. I haven't gone through one merger/acquisition, and I've used 3-5 different providers in ~10 years.

- If there's a problem theres's nobody to call and nobody whose responsibility is fixing it: I don't remember how it was at my apartments, but since I've moved into my house, I call Centerpoint to fix all power problems, regardless of whose service I'm actually using.

Local utility companies and cable companies typically have terrible reputations across the board. I'd rather have competition and bad customer service/experience than no competition and bad customer service/experience.

So, like Singapore? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axia_NetMedia#Singapore_-_SingT...

Sounds like the situation in the UK which largely works quite well.

Madison, WI sort of has this. It's called the MUFN network.

http://www.mufn.org

The different ISPs etc in the city can sign contracts with the city and get access to the MUFN fiber network. The city owns the main fiber network and does repair/maintenance. The city can take ownership of any lateral you build where the conduit is 3" or more if they desire. Also, they can take it if they decide to use it to hook up traffic signals, etc. It's much more complicated than I've detailed but it's really a partnership with the city and ultimately they can take ownership of any fiber you build off it if it would benefit the city as a whole, while still allowing you access of course.

Municipal governments should threaten to regulate last-mile ISPs like power companies unless they agree to let competitors use their cables. Virginia requires that competing power companies be allowed to use power lines, why not fiber as well?

Absolutely. Isn't this what the FCC's Title II / common carrier provisions are for?

my understanding is that's what happened to make long distance affordable: the maintainers of the copper had to allow other forms to connect to customers.

I think that is exactly what it was done in Viladecans, Barcelona: http://www.diba.cat/web/ri/newsletter_bcn_int_reg/-/butlleti...

But the telcos aren't going to like it: http://www.telecompaper.com/news/telefonica-urges-viladecans...

This is close to what Britain has. The last mile infrastructure is owned by BT, who used to be a US-style monopoly, and now they have to give access to their infrastructure to the other ISPs. Unfortunately, quality is restricted by the fees BT charge being too high, and their general woeful underinvestment into much of their network. Having the last mile infrastructure be nationally owned would be a far better idea.

Exactly what happened in France circa 2000. France Telecom the national operator was forced to maintain the last mile and open to other ISP at the city exchange. This has allowed newcomers like Free (Free ISP), to disrupt the high speed internet market both in costs and speeds. It seems that telecom is one area where laissez-faire leads to less competition, and worse offers for potential customers.

This is the case in most EU countries, due to EU regulation of the telecoms sector.

Ironically, it is a result of deregulation of the sector, from a situation where most EU countries previously had a single government-owned operator. As part of the de-regulation, to ensure the former public telcos did not get a stranglehold, a long range of rules were put in place to guarantee competitors access to the existing subscriber base.

Sorry to be dense, but it is not quite clear to me how ownership of the last mile affords such leverage. It would seem that if you need to buy bandwidth for end users, you would be negotiating transit like anyone else - I'm clearly missing something.

Pay us $x to connect our network to Y network to your Z network, our our millions of Y users won't have access to customers on your Z network, and that will make the Z network look bad to your customers.

Of course, it goes the other way - Y looks bad because they can't get to Z's customers - but I suspect the commercial customers on Z might be more likely to ditch Z rather than the end users (who probably don't understand the situation) ditching Y.

> It would seem that if you need to buy bandwidth for end users, you would be negotiating transit like anyone else

It would sure seem that way, but the recent Comcast-Netflix deal shows that it isn't necessarily that way; big ISPs can exert enough pressure on content distributors to get the distributors to effectively pay the transit costs.

Internet peering has been a giant game of chicken ever since commercial connections were allowed.

Come to Australia and revel in the NBN. Oh wait...

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