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Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

No last mile unbundling: does it mean that every operator has to deploy its own cable from street to home?

That's my (rather depressing) understanding.

I still dream of a non-profit or municipal cable plant, serviced by multiple ISPs. The last mile is a natural monopoly, and we need to stop pretending otherwise.

Wireless last mile might be an option if the FCC actually opens up the 3.5ghz "innovation band" : http://www.fcc.gov/blog/35-ghz-new-ideas-innovation-band

That proposal seems to be for a 150MHz block. If you try to offer broadband speeds to multiple customers simultaneously with that little spectrum you'll end up needing to use cell sizes so small that it would essentially become a fiber to the curb deployment, at which point you might as well finish off with a handful of ethernet segments instead of several radio links that won't work well.

LTE seems to work well enough with less bandwidth (~60MHz). However I'm not sure what kind of range you can get with 3.5ghz. Surely at least a few city blocks?

LTE works well by the standards of its predecessors, when constrained by draconian data caps and overage charges. It is completely unsuitable as a replacement for wired connections like VDSL and DOCSIS.

I agree that it's extremely depressing. I think we actually need to go farther than unbundling on the last mile, though. Ideally, where possible, we ought to go farther than just re-using existing copper links and instead set things up so that we can more easily and cheaply deliver FTTH.

This net neutrality victory is something to celebrate, but we need to keep the bigger goals in mind for this to not be suboptimal longer term.

This. This is the most cogent description of what we need. A common resource that is provided to multiple Telco's but owned by the local community.

I'm hoping that political organizations promoting net neutrality, now expand their attention to this issue or some other way to spur real competition in the last mile.

I read it to mean that FCC will not force last mile unbundling. Whether they go further and write a rule that will act to prevent state a local unbundling rules is another matter.

Isn't last mile unbundling a bigger deal than Title II for ultimately delivering better broadband service? Common carrier provisions are obviously very good, but excluding the possibility of last mile unbundling seems like a bad thing for the longer term.

It may be, but FCC may not have the authority to mandate it, and they seem to think that not mandating it will encourage investment, which is needed.

Last mile unbundling destroys any incentive to invest in network deployment.

Worse, the way title II is written, the FCC can only unbundle the local telephone company. So the cable network that provide broadcand service to most Americans can't be unbundled at all.

Last mile unbundling only works when you have a very strictly regulated monopoly providing the network.

We have last mile unbundling -- if my understanding of the term is correct -- for wired broadband where I live (Toronto area, Canada), and speeds have still been getting progressively faster.

Having said that, it seems like a lot of people here still stick to the big named carriers like Rogers and Bell because of inertia, comfort-levels with service or lack of awareness of third party providers. The cost savings (even with some recent rate increases) of using third party internet access over cable or phone line here are actually quite substantial when you factor in the liberal bandwidth caps you get with TPIA providers.

Looks like the opposite of that. Every operator will be able to use the single connection from exchange to home.

"Local loop unbundling (LLU or LLUB) is the regulatory process of allowing multiple telecommunications operators to use connections from the telephone exchange to the customer's premises."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling

So if there is none of that...

It means that any competitor isnt guaranteed access to the line that is already provided. This makes sense as your local loop (in the internets case) may be fiber optics, may be coaxial cable, may be telephone. So if you get FiOS, comcast won't be granted use of the fiber by law, they'll have to get verizon to agree to use of it in a separate contract.

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