Level 3 blames Internet slowdowns on Technica

Fri Mar 21 14:25:09 UTC 2014

>>How do you get around the problem of natural monopolies, then?   Or should
>>we be moving to a world where, say, a dozen or more separate companies are all running fiber or coax on the poles on my street in an effort to get to my >>house?

We already did it.  The Telecommunications Act allows competitive service providers to buy access circuits on the incumbents infrastructure.  There are some limitations in that you can't always get competitive access to new networks like FIOS (this to allow the incumbent to recoup their costs by exclusive access for some period of time).  The access rates are low only when the infrastructure is already in the ground.  That is why the new stuff is not factored in.

>>IMHO, the only way to get real competition on the last mile is to have the actual fiber/wire infrastructure being owned by a neutral party that's required to >>pass anyone's traffic.

Nice idea, too bad no one can make any money on building infrastructure but not selling the services on top of it.  Remember Global Crossing?  You are asking one company to put up all the capital expense and then try to recover it by allowing access to their infrastructure to anyone at low rates.  Not gonna work.  Just on a piece of paper, figure out what it costs to get fiber to your neighborhood from the nearest central office and then how much you have to charge to pay for that.  If you can get a reasonable price that returns your investment within 20 years, I will be impressed.

The other way that is often suggested is that the municipality own the backbone.  That might work except they want to tax you and then also nail the service providers so they do exclusive deals like you see in cable franchises that screw the consumer.

Steven Naslund

On 3/21/14, 12:28 AM, "Larry Sheldon" <LarrySheldon at cox.net> wrote:

>On 3/20/2014 10:47 PM, David Miller wrote:
>> Unless I am reading the tea leaves wrong "competition" will require
>> "regulation".
>
>"regulation" prevents "competition".  That is why people want regulation.
>
>Look at this thread at the people who do not want to be competed-with at
>L1, for example.
>
>-- 
>Requiescas in pace o email           Two identifying characteristics
>                                         of System Administrators:
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>                                           (Adapted from Stephen Pinker)
>