>Regulators may also have to consider whether fewer operators may be better for a country, with perhaps only a single underlying fixed and mobile network in many places—just as utilities for electricity, water, gas, and the like are often structured around single (or a limited set of) operators.
There are no words to describe how stupid this is.
It actually works well in most places. Look up the term “common carrier”.
The trick is that the entity that owns the wires has to provide/upgrade the network at cost, and anyone has the right to run a telco on top of the network.
This creates competition for things like pricing plans, and financial incentives for the companies operating in the space to compete on their ability to build out / upgrade the network (or to not do that, but provide cheaper service).
Your second and third paragraph are contradictory.
Common carriers become the barrier to network upgrades. Always. Without fail. Monopolies are a bad idea, whether state or privately owned.
Let me give you 2 examples.
In australia we had Telstra (Formerly Telecom, Formerly Auspost). Testra would resell carriers ADSL services, and they stank. The carriers couldn't justify price increases to upgrade their networks and the whole thing stagnated.
We had a market review, and Telstra was legislatively forced to sell ULL instead. So the non monopolist is now placing their own hardware in Telstra exchanges, which they can upgrade. Which they did. Once they could sell an upgrade (ADSL2+) they could also price in the cost of upgrading peering and transit. We had a huge increase in network speeds. We later forgot this lesson and created the NBN. NBNCo does not sell ULL, and the pennies that ISPs can charge on top of it are causing stagnation again.
ULL works way better than common carrier. In singapore the government just runs glass. They have competition between carriers to provide faster GPON. 2gig 10gig 100gig whatever. Its just a hardware upgrade away.
10 years from now Australia will realise it screwed up with NBNCo. Again. But they wont as easily be able to go to ULL as they did in the past. NBN's fibre isn't built for it. We will have to tear out splitters and install glass.
The actual result is worse than you suggest. A carrier had to take the government/NBNCo to court to get permission to build residential fibre in apartment buildings over the monopoly. We have NBNCo strategically overbuilding other fibre providers and shutting them down (Its an offence to compete with the NBN on the order of importing a couple million bucks of cocaine). Its an absolute handbrake on competition and network upgrades. Innovation is only happening in the gaps left behind by the common carrier.
Yeah, I've noticed the same things with roads. They are common carriers owned mostly by the government, so they never get upgraded. That freeway near my house is always clogged.
Oh wait ... the reason that freeway is always clogged is they are ripping it up, doubling it's width. And now I think about it, hasn't the NBN recently upgraded their max speeds from 100 Mb/s, to 250Mb/s, and now to 1Gb/s. And isn't the NBN currently ripping out the FttN, replacing it woth FttP, at no cost to the cusytomer? Sounds like a major upgrade to me. And wasn't the reason we got the NBN that Telstra point blank refused to replace the monopoly copper infrastructure with fibre?
If I didn't know better, I'd be think the major policy mistake Australia made in Telecom was the liberals to selling off Telstra. In a competitive market when a new technology came along a telecom is forced to upgrade because their a competitors would use the new technology to steal their customers. That works fabulously for 5G, where there is competition. But when the Libs sold Telstra it was a monopoly. Telstra just refused to upgrade the copper. The Libs thought they could fix that though legislation, but what happened instead is Telstra fought the legalisation tooth and nail and we ended up in the absurd situation of having buildings full of federal court judges and lawyers fighting to get reasonable ULL access. In the end Tesltra did give permission to change the equipment at the ends of the wires. But replacing the wires themselves - never. That was their golden goose. No one was permitted to replace them with a new technology.
Desperate to make the obvious move to fibre, the Libs then offered Telstra, the Optus, then anybody money to build a new fibre network - but they all refused to do so unless the government effectively guaranteed monopoly ownership over the new network.
Sorry, what was your point again? Oh, that's right, public ownership shared natural monopolies like wires, roads, water mains is bad. The thing I missed is why a private rent extracting monopoly beholden to no one except the profit seeking share holders owning those things is better.
Things don’t improve without competition. Roads have to be a monopoly because they take up so much space but we should endeavor to have as few monopolies as possible because they breed complacency every single time. At least here in Chicago the roads are horribly mismanaged but we just have to put up with it.
Last I looked the NASA's capabilities of NASA's space telescopes have been improving rapidly. I'm not aware of any competition. Roads where I live have improved immensely during my lifetime. I'd lay long odds yours have too over the decades, despite your claims. All without competition. I recently heard all the lead water pipes are being replaced in the USA. The water supply people have no competition. Open source projects improve all the time. They aren't driven by competition.
"Things don't improve without competition" sounds like a fairy tale somebody tells themselves to justify a position. People like nice things. They don't need competition to motive them to work towards those things. Granted competition usually speeds things up, but it "nothing improves without competition" clearly wrong. There are too many counter examples.
Which is just as well, because the things we are discussing here are prone to forming natural monopolies. Roads, water, the telephone service, electricity supply - the thing they have in common is you will have one supplier, and you can't change to a different one. There is no competition. So the discussion wasn't about "should there be competition or not", because there is no choice. The discussion was about "who should own a monopoly - people you elect, or people whose only primary interest is extracting money out of their assets (which happen to be you)". You seem arguing for private ownership, and then using competition as the justification - when there is no competition.
By the by, other places do this competition thing far better than the USA. The NBN the parent was complaining about is indeed a government owned monopoly. Their asset is "the last mile". The arrangement in Australia is they are a common carrier in the strictest meaning of the term. But they are not allowed to sell to the public, that's the ISP's job. The NBN's prices are thrashed out in some back room somewhere between the ISP's and the government, in front of a set of open books. The ISP's are allowed to use other technologies like 5G and Starlink without penality, by law. As an consequence every Australian household gets to chose between 100's of ISP's, literally. Those ISP's are require by law to advertise "minimum expected speeds", and none of this "unlimited (meaning we get to define the limit)" bullshit is allowed. In other words, it's nearly a perfect competitive market.
One effect of that is there is no "net neutrality" argument here. The NBN is barred from such distinctions because it's a common carrier. The ISP's are free to do whatever they damned well please, and as a consequence you get all sorts of deals that violate net neutrality. 5G with limited downloads, but unlimited streaming from some platform is free for example. If you don't like that, say because your ISP blocks ports move to one that doesn't. You might be thinking "ahh, but moving between ISP's would be hard". But no, the law mandates churning between ISP's is free, fast, involving no more than a few minutes downtime, and requires no interaction at all with the ISP you're moving from.
Creating near a perfect competitive market in an area that is prone to forming natural monopolies does require some heavy handed government intervention. The NBN was one of the most heavy handed interventions I've seen in a while. The private operators where given every chance to build a new network on the condition it be open to all retailers (including them) at a price the government had some control over. They declined. Partially because government price control on a monopoly was too much to bear, but I think also because they thought their ownership of the copper network was too big a hurdle for even the government to overcome. The government overbuilt it with fibre. In a country that's even more spread out than USA, that was a huge undertaking. I suspect it would be impossible in the USA, where 1/2 the population allows themselves to be brainwashed by large corporates into thinking "government always bad, government always inefficient".
Yes, the government is inefficient compared to private operators in a competitive market. But the corporates who want you to think the government always runs things badly are the ones who want to take control of government owned monopolies. If you want to know what inefficiency looks like, join one as an employee. You won't get to see what's happening otherwise. The sausage is ugly, but they unlike the government are allowed to hide it from prying eyes. So they do, and tell you they are doing a wonderful job. Apparently you swallow it up.
Im not reading all this so Ill just respond to the first paragraph. The space industry was dead in the water before spaceX showed up. Minimal innovation and spend trending down every year and now spaceX has sparked a complete reversal. Competition matters.
> I recently heard all the lead water pipes are being replaced in the USA.
We still have lead pipes to many houses in chicago, and will for the foreseeable future. The water supply people(government) have utterly failed at replacing them in a timely fashion.
> Open source projects improve all the time
Because theyre extremely competitive. With minimal barriers to entry there are different devs trying to get their code merged and different projects trying to be the top dog. When one shows weakness another pops up.
Illinois is mandating lead service line replacement. I'm not wild about it. Solubility of lead in Chicago municipal service water is very low, because the lines are mineralized by the phosphates in the water. Have your water service tested; you're probably more than fine. But replacing the water lines disrupts those lines, which ironically does introduce lead into your water (for a time).
Regardless, Illinois munis don't really have a choice about this anymore.
> The space industry was dead in the water before spaceX showed up.
The point was space telescopes. Nice attempt goal post move.
You mention NASA and the space industry. Sorry, but I'm failing to see the connection. NASA does cutting edge space exploration. They have no customers, they sell nothing, they aren't by any definition "an industry". Anything that's simple enough to be taken on by "industry" they contract out. They only take on the near impossible stuff - like landing a rover on mars. And they have a near impecible record at pull those sorts of things off. Amazing. Literally world beating. Bravo.
Most of their feats are world firsts, almost all are far harder than the previous one they pulled off. They have no competition. Yet your claim was, and I quote, "Things don’t improve without competition". I'm getting cognitive dissonance here. Clearly they do.
> Because theyre extremely competitive.
Do you develop much open source? Do you even use it? The "man in Nebraska" meme is so common it even has a cartoon: https://xkcd.com/2347/ Trust me, that man truly wishes he had some competition. He doesn't, but he plods on, turning out the code that supports the internet without it. Again we have a clear counter example to your thesis "you can't have improvement without competition". These examples are everywhere. You would have to be willfully blind not to see them.
Look, no one argues competitive markets aren't a great tool. The trouble is they aren't that easy to create. Then competition weakens. The solution isn't to go into denial and claim there will be no improvement. Or worse claim being privately owned means there is competition, so we will be ok if we just sell it off. That's just daft. In fact it's worse than daft. Believing lies peddled corporations that want to control stuff you must buy from them at a price they dictate is like subscribing to a cult.
God you really have just drunk the NBN koolaid havent you.
> Roads, water, the telephone service, electricity supply
Fun fact, the US has such a variety of fibre providers, because they have such a variety of electricity and water supply. Its called Subducting. They make partnerships with fibre providers and subduct in the fibre with the power lead in.
So they have 3 speeds.
1. Cities, with ancient telstraesque legislative monopolies, getting BEAD funding to be replaced.
2. Townships and cities with private power/water and 1/2/10/100 gig fibre options.
3. Deep rural with hundreds of wisp cowboys.
10 years ago I remember reading about a township of 900 people being passed by a rural fibre company. Fish lake township or something.
>Their asset is "the last mile".
No their asset includes the last mile, but its includes all the way back to 121 points of interconnect. The original, far better model was to have only 21, but the ACCC at the behest of the big 4 ISPs interceded and determined that government intervention is better than engineering. All under Labor mind. Simms has never shown any network engineering credentials. The NBN is literally welfare for Telstra Optus, AAPT and Vocus.
>One effect of that is there is no "net neutrality" argument here.
Net Neutrality in Australia has more to do with the big 4 peering agreement.
>The private operators where given every chance to build a new network
Private networks have been consistently hampered by the NBN. None of them (rightly) would want to attempt a national network. State based private/public co funding would have gotten you the same result faster and cheaper. But Labor wanted one more BIG NATIONAL PROJECT to hang their hat on.
>Creating near a perfect competitive market
It was Turnbull who slightly corrected the NBN funding model to make it halfway profitable. We still have an issue where NBN is serviced largely by the big 4 (who lobbied to have it built this way) wholesalers, and anyone who cant reach 121 poi's is forced into wholesaling.
>In a country that's even more spread out than USA
Rural australia is still mostly just NBN Fixed Wireless and Satellite. And neither of these is largely going to be overbuilt by NBN Fibre. Labor is promising to bring a few more towns online with fibre but not everything.
Honestly I have never seen anyone as confidently wrong on the internet before.
As I'm sure you are aware the term least mile has always included everthing up to and including termination at the exchange. The only thing that's changed is the name of the exchange. It's now called a POI.
Yes there are fewer of them. It did reduce costs and engineering complexity. There is no consensus whether it effected competitiveness, but given the NBN has been in operation for a decade now and there are many, many ISP's, most small, any detrimental effect must be near negligible. It's time you put that tired old debate behind you.
> The NBN is literally welfare for Telstra Optus, AAPT and Vocus
Telstra earnings dropped off a cliff when the copper became worthless. If that's welfare I'd hate to see what some real competition would do to them. The other three never had fingers in the consumer last mile pie. They bought it off Telstra before, now the buy off the NBN. They buy at the same price as every other ISP. Where is this welfare you speak of?
> Net Neutrality in Australia has more to do with the big 4 peering agreement.
I'm not sure you know what net neutrality means.
> State based private/public co funding would have gotten you the same result faster and cheaper.
Wow. Such confidence. Admit it, you don't have a clue what that would cost. Also admit not one state offered to do it. I think you hallucinating random possibilities.
> It was Turnbull who slightly corrected the NBN funding model to make it halfway profitable
I have a lot of time for Turnbull. His rear guard actions managed to derail Abbotts attempt to kill the NBN. God knows what we would have done if our internet didn't support video during COVID. However, it did involve buying $800 million for the Optus HFC network that was so degraded it was written off. His FttN is being ripped out long before it's anticipated EOL, and replaced at great expense. That's because it costs a small to run air-conditioned nodes a few hundred metres from every house, and the performance topped out at a 1/10 of what the NBN is offering now. So sadly the compromises made to save the NBN are now having to be rectified at great expense. And knowing all this, you are saving it saved us money! Delusional.
> Rural australia ...
I wasn't referring to rural Australia. According to google the average population density of urban Australian is an order of magnitude lower than the USA. Cable runs are consequently much longer. Compared to the effort the USA would need to put in, replacing them was indeed a huge undertaking.
> Honestly I have never seen anyone as confidently wrong on the internet before.
Having reviewed the outright falsehoods you told above, I'm guessing I'm dealing with quite the bullshitter. And I guess, true to form, you will carry on.
I think you read what I posted and decided that what I said was "Private ownership is better than public"
Which is often true but not my point.
My point was that a common carrier with a legislative monopoly is always worse than anything else you can imagine.
Telstra - Bad when the government owned it, bad when it was private. We literally required legislative intervention to get ULL which was an absolute positive despite Telstra misplacing keys and refusing entry etc.
NBNCo - Bad under labors original implementation (ACCC really messed up the special access undertaking and it cant be repeated enough. Rod Simms should be fired out of a cannon into the sun. Hes the greatest villain in Australian internet history), Bad under the LNP (They fixed the market a bit, but introduced the postcode lottery and reduced competition by acquiring the HFC networks). Will not be made better by private ownership. Gets better every now and then, but requires ACCC, Ministerial and its own governance to sign off on changes. NBNCo is not the only imaginable model (private or public). Singapore, a government owned last mile monopoly, is really well done and very hard to argue with. Because they just sell glass.
You have clearly reacted to my posts from an ideological position. You see criticism of the governments terrible telco monopoly, as criticism of government action overall. (We have some pretty sweet state government fibre in Queensland for instance, they make themselves difficult to transact with but once you get in there they rock) You believe in immutable things like Natural Monopolies. The "Natural Monopoly" isn't the wire. The Natural Monopoly is the pit and pipe. And Pit and Pipe can already be shared.
Its going to hurt you, but let me put this to you. It would have been quite easy to run "NBNCo" as simply a common access arrangement to the pit and pipe. Instead of criminalising deployment of internet to residences, the government could instead subsidise underserviced areas. (which is the correct keynesian arrangement that Labor should be clamouring for if the NBN wasnt just a grab to brand the internet as something Labor did)
I cannot express to you how crazy it is, when I compile a map of fibre providers in metro areas, to see really good private fibre wholesalers holed up in private estates. It looks like a map of gerrymandered congressional districts in the USA. On one side of a fence you can get cheap blistering fast internet and on the other its gig at best with a nice big asterisk about CVC. Not to mention how many places these fibre providers already had hardware ready to go years before NBN came along. Basically, thanks to both Labor and the LNP, the best internet services in this country are available only to people who can afford brand new homes in private estates or inner city apartment buildings. Its BONKERs. Its absolutely MENTAL. My own mother lives in an estate that had 2 stages. Stage 1 was Telstra, now NBN VDSL, and 3 doors up the road when Stage 2 was built, they brought a private provider in first and I remember qualifying it for a 5 gig service 4 years ago. Its the same number of penalty units to overbuild the NBN as importing a million dollars of cocaine. And you would need to be importing vast quantities of drugs to see the NBN, any NBN, as the ideal path forward.
And whats great is you can hate the NBN but still support the government being the agent of success. They could atomise it (my preferred term as privatisation implies selling it to your mate steve and still having it be legislatively required to be shit) or ask it to simply provide pit and pipe. Or just glass. The government could do any number of sensible things, but it wont. Labor cant face up to the monster they created, and the LNP cant face up to the monster they claim to have fixed.
>And isn't the NBN currently ripping out the FttN, replacing it with FttP, at no cost to the cusytomer? Sounds like a major upgrade to me.
In select areas, some of which are currently served by third party fibre providers, who can provide up to 10G, who now will be forbidden to pipe in to new non business customer dwellings.
>And wasn't the reason we got the NBN that Telstra point blank refused to replace the monopoly copper infrastructure with fibre?
Right, a single giant telco monopoly is bad. Instead of removing the monopoly we built a new monopoly and tipped money in.
>If I didn't know better, I'd be think the major policy mistake Australia made in Telecom was the liberals to selling off Telstra.
They sold it off AND enforced ULL. Its the same thing, monopoly is forced to be better, still lagging behind competitive markets.
>In a competitive market when a new technology came along a telecom is forced to upgrade because their a competitors would use the new technology to steal their customers.
Right see my comment about the singapore model, where they just rent glass instead of a service.
>That works fabulously for 5G, where there is competition.
In the cities we had ADSL2+ competing with HFC and Fixed Wireless. The only monopoly was Telstras, who prevented people running residential fibre in their pit and pipe asset. HFC was a hack to use overhead wires because people could not use pit and pipe. That asset has been gifted to NBNCo who also have a legislative monopoly and also dont play nice.
> absurd situation of having buildings full of federal court judges and lawyers fighting to get reasonable ULL access.
Yeah there were a few instances of them fighting it. Which is another reason why monopolies are bad.
>But replacing the wires themselves - never.
Happened all the time. Actually they negotiated a shutdown due to NBNCo, certain copper services were simply stamped beyond economical repair and Telstra could choose to simply cancel services as part of the deal. I think you are upset about the customer owned piece of copper from the demarc in, which most residents would never upgrade.
>Desperate to make the obvious move to fibre, the Libs then offered Telstra, the Optus, then anybody money to build a new fibre network - but they all refused to do so unless the government effectively guaranteed monopoly ownership over the new network.
No one wants to commit to a national scale rollout of fibre. But many people are happy to roll out community and metro scale fibre. The key is open access. When you have a restricted pit and pipe asset, there can only be one provider. But funnily enough, commercial properties like housing estates and apartment buildings dont give a shit and let people come through and overbuild the NBN. TPG had to take NBN co to court and NBN withdrew rather than risking the rest of their monopoly.
>Oh, that's right, public ownership shared natural monopolies like wires, roads, water mains is bad. The thing I missed is why a private rent extracting monopoly beholden to no one except the profit seeking share holders owning those things is better.
My point is that common carrier sucks. If you instead made the pit and pipe asset the common resource, there would be little to no issue. Or just run glass like Singapore.
The companies on top provide end user customer support, varied pricing models ("unlimited" data vs pay by the GB, etc), and so on. It allows the common carrier to focus solely on the network hardware.
They also sometimes own the machines in the field closets. So, anyone can rent 1U + a bunch of fiber endpoints for the same price. What you do with the slots is up to you. If there's a problem with the power or actual fiber optics, the common carrier fixes it. (Like a colo, sort of.)
Common carriers have some upsides, but one downside is that it sometimes removes the incentive for ISPs to deploy their own networks.
I was stuck with a common carrier for years. I could pick different ISPs, which offered different prices and types of support, but they all used the same connection... which was only stable at lower speeds.
It actually has nefarious benefits. Look up the term "HTLINGUAL" or "ECHELON." It's certainly nice for the government to have fewer places to shop when destroying our privacy.
The trick is that this is essentially wireless spectrum. Which can be leased for limited periods of time and can easily allow for a more competitive environment than what natural monopolies allow for.
It's also possible to separate the infrastructure operators from the backhaul operators and thus entirely avoid the issues of capital investment costs by upstart incumbents. When done there's even less reason to tolerate monopolistic practices on either side.
Feels a lot like whitelabeling. Where you have 200 companies selling exactly the same product at slightly different price points but where there isn't really any difference in the product.
"Common carrier" tends to raise prices for minimum service, though. And once the network is built the carrier is just going to keep their monopoly. You bet they're never upgrading to any new piece of technology until they're legally required to.
It also makes it more vulnerable to legal, bureaucratic and technical threats.
Doesn't make much sense to me to abstract away most of the parts where an entity could build up its competitive advantage and then to pretend like healthy competition could be build on top.
Imagine if one entity did all the t-shirt manufacturing globally but then you congratulated yourself for creating a market based on altered colors and what is printed on top of these t-shirts.
This was a common way to do things before the telcos in the USA were deregulated in the 2000s and 2010s. At the time it was both internet and telephone but due to the timing of de regulation, it never really took off with real high speed internet, only dsl and dialup.
I used to work at a place that did both on top of the various telcos. We offered ‘premium service’ with 24 hour customer support and a low customer to modem and bandwidth ratio.
Most of our competitors beat us in price but would only offer customers support 9-5 and you may get a busy signal/ lower bandwidth in the back haul during peak hours.
There was a single company that owned the wires and poles, because it’s expensive and complex to build physical infrastructure and hard to compete, but they were bared from selling actual services or undercutting providers because of their position. (Which depended on jurisdiction).
It solved the problem we have now of everyone complaining about their ISP but only having one option in their area.
We have that problem now specifically because we deregulated common carriers for internet right as it took over the role of telephone service.
the in world practice seems to have this worked out. I am working for such provider right now and it is neither cash starved not suffocating under undue bureaucracy
And private companies don't even have to be vulnerable, they can just do nasty things nilly willy, because it might be profitable and they might get away with it. Yeah, there could be ones that don't suck, and then customers could pick those, but when there aren't, when they all collude to be equally shitty and raise prices whenever they can -- which they do -- people have no recourse. They do have recourse when it comes to the government.
And for some things it's just too much duplicated effort and wasted resources, T-shirts are one thing, because we don't really need those, but train lines and utilities etc. are another. I can't tell you where the "boundary" is, but if every electric company had to lay their own cables, there would only be one or two.
And in the opinion of many including mine, for example the Deutsche Bundesbahn got worse when it got privatized. They kinda exploited the fact that after reunification, there were two state railroad systems obviously, and instead of merging them into one state railroad system, it was privatized, but because it made more money for some, but not because it benefits the public, the customers. Of course the reasoning was the usual neoliberal spiel, "saving money" and "smaller government" but then that money just ends up not really making things better to the degree privatization made them worse.
Obviously not everything should be state run, far from it. But privatizing everything is a cure actually even worse than the disease, since state-run sinks and swims with how much say the people have, whereas a 100% privatized world just sinks into the abyss.
In New Zealand we have a single company that owns all the telecommunications wires. It was broken up in the 90's from a service provider because they were a monopoly and abusing their position in the market. Now we have a ton of options of ISPs, but only one company to deal with if there are line faults. BTW the line company is the best to deal with, the ISPs are shit.
Same for mobile infrastructure would be great as well.
In NZ we also have the Rural Connectivity Group (RCG) which operates over 400 cellular/mobile sites in rural areas for the three mobile carriers, capital funded jointly by the NZ Government and the three mobile carriers (with operational costs shared between the three carriers I believe). For context the individual carriers operate around 2,000 of their own sites in urban areas and most towns in direct competition with each other. It has worked really well for the more rural parts of the country, filling in gaps in state highway coverage as well as providing coverage to smaller towns that would be uneconomical for the individual carriers to cover otherwise. I'm talking towns of a handful of households getting high speed 4G coverage. Really proud of NZ as this sort of thing is unheard of in most other countries.
Ironically, often you get way faster speeds out on a RCG tower too. (probably due to few users), vs when in the city, where I often get pretty average speeds be it 4g or 5g.
It depends. Some RCG towers have a single channel (sometimes small 10 MHz bandwidth or large 20 MHz bandwidth) which all carriers share which will not perform as well as some native towers where up five channels are operated using CA (Carrier Aggregation) providing up to 100 MHz of total bandwidth. You'll see most of these in smaller towns. However I've seen RCG towers operate with multiple channels across which they load balance all customers (regardless of their native carrier) which are indeed pretty good (but AFAIK, RCG doesn't do CA but I could be wrong on that front). Those higher capacity towns are often in areas like beach towns where they expect lots of traffic during weekends and holidays.
I dunno, it makes conceptual sense. Networks infrastructure is largely commodity utilities where duplication is effectively a waste of resources. e.g. you wouldn't expect your home to have multiple natural gas connections from competing companies.
Regulators have other ways to incentivize quality/pricing and can mandate competition at levels of the stack other than the underlying infrastructure.
I wouldn't expect that "only a single network" is the right model for all locations, but it will be for some locations, so you need a regulatory framework that ensures quality/cost in the case of a single network anyway.
IMO this can be neatly solved with a peer-to-peer market based system similar to Helium
https://www.helium.com/mobile.
(I know that helium's original IoT network mostly failed due to lack of pmf, but idk about their 5G stuff)
Network providers get paid for the bandwidth that flows over their nodes, but the protocol also allows for economically incentivizing network expansion and punishing congestion with subsidization / taxing.
You can unify everyone under the same "network", but the infrastructure providers running it are diverse and in competition.
I personally like the notion of a common public infrastructure that subleases access. We already sort of do that with mobile carriers where the big 3 provide all access and all the other "carriers" (like google fi) are simply leasing access.
Make it easy for a new wireless company to spawn while maintaining the infrastructure everyone needs.
Do private utilities have any incentive to be cheap?
The reason we have utility regulations in the first place is because utilities are natural monopolies with literally zero incentive to be cheap. On the contrary, they are highly incentivized to push up prices as much as possible because they have their customers over a barrel.
A private electric grid is a nightmare. Look at Texas. People pay more, and they get less coverage. It's worse by every metric. The conversation should revolve around, how can we fix the government so that it isn't 5 corporations in a trench coat who systematically defund public utilities and social safety nets in hopes of breaking it so they can privatize it and make billions sucking up tax payer money while doing no work. See the billions in tax funding to ATT, Google, etc... to put in fiber internet that they just pocketed the cash and did nothing.
A big part of the reason that California average electrical price per kWh is high is that a huge portion of the cost is fixed costs, and California's efficiency push has resulted in the lowest lowest per capita electricity usage (and fourth lowest per capita energy usage) in the USA, so the fixed costs are spread over fewer kWh.
Conversely, Texas has significantly above average use per capita, spreading the fixed costs across more kWh, but still results in higher annual costs per capita, despite lower per kWh rates.
Let's also not forget the cost of the things like the campfire fire. That's a huge bill that needs to be paid and that cost is ultimately going to come out of the kwh rates.
Further, the LA fires might have also been caused by a downed line so that's going to be a fairly big cost to the power company.
> Let's also not forget the cost of the things like the campfire fire.
That's, I assume, a reference to the 2018 Camp Fire.
> That's a huge bill that needs to be paid and that cost is ultimately going to come out of the kwh rates.
The Trust established to pay PG&E liabilities for the 2015 Butte, 2017 North Bay, and 2018 Camp Fires, which discharged PG&E's responsibility for them, receives no additional ratepayer funds after its initial funding and is in the wind-down process expecting a single final top-off payment to already approved claimants. So, no, its not a huge bill that will be paid out of future rates.
Because competition drives innovation. 5G exists as widely as it does because carriers were driven to meet the standard and provide faster service to their customers.
This article is essentially arguing innovation is dead in this space and there is no need for bandwidth-related improvements. At the same time, there is no 5G provider without a high-speed cap or throttling for hot spots. What would happen if enough people switched to 5G boxes over cable? Maybe T-Mobile can compete with Comcast?
Coverage requirements could be part of the spectrum auction, like when Google managed to get "no SIM locking" part of the spectrum requirements for the 700 MHz band, opening up Verizon phones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_United_States_wireless_sp...
Competition drives innovation, but also, we've generally seen that things like municipal broadband are _more_ innovative than an incumbent monopoly carrier. Large chunks of the US don't have much competition at all in wired services, and if we approach that in wireless, we are likely to see the same effects starting where the local monopoly tries to extract maximum dollars out of an aging infrastructure. Lookin' at you, Comcast, lookin' at you.
As you say, "incumbent monopoly carrier" is not competition, so a municipal provider which competes with broadband is a great idea. This article, however, is arguing we don't need more bandwidth, and we need more consolidation of major providers: I'm not convinced.
> During congestion, customers on this plan may notice speeds lower than other customers and further reduction if using >1.2TB/mo., due to data prioritization
So not really a cap, but a deprioritization. A few friends using it around me routinely use >2TB/mo and haven't experienced degradation, I guess there's not excessive congestion. YMMV.
2. It must be guaranteed to continue to be well-run.
3. If someone can do it better, they must be allowed to do so - and then their improvements have to be folded into the network somehow if there is to be only one network.
Internet is treated this way in Germany, and it's slow and expensive. Eastern European countries that put their bets on competition instead of regulation have more bang for the buck in their network infrastructure
Maybe it is. Building multiple networks for smaller populations comes at enormous cost though. In my country there have been a tradition for this kind of network sharing, where operators are required to allow alternative operators on their physical network for a fee set by government.
It's not that stupid IMO, they could handle it like some places handle electricity — there's a single distributor managing infra but you can select from a number of providers offering different generation rates
Having 5 competing infrastructures trying to blanket the country means that you end up with a ton of waste and the most populated places get priority as they constantly fight each other for the most valuable markets while neglecting the less profitable fringe
You’re thinking legacy. In our new Italian Fascist/Peronist governance model, maximizing return on assets for our cronies is the priority. The regulatory infrastructure that fostered both good and bad aspects of the last 75 years is being destroyed and will not return.
Nationalizing telecom is a great way to reward the tech oligarchs by making the capital investments in giant data centers more valuable. If 10 gig can be delivered cheaply over the air, those hyperscale data centers will end up obsolete if technology continues to advance at the current pace. Why would the companies that represent 30% of the stock markets value want that?
Having a single provider of utilities is great when owned by the gov and run "at cost". Problem is, dickheads get voted in and they sell the utility to their mates who get an instant monopoly and start running the utility for profit.
There are no words to describe how stupid this is.