It is quite simple realy. If I pay x€ for y GB/Month, the ISP should not dictate what over the top services I spend that budget on, nor favor its own services (or those of 'partners') by selective exclusion of that traffic from limits that other are held to, or by hindering traffic from the non-partnered services in any way.
Now for the 'complicated' part. In practice it is not difficult to create a situation where everything is degraded. You just under-provision on a choke point. If you then sell alternative routes, or allow edge caches beyond the choke point, you technically didn't 'hinder' any traffic, you just provided such a lousy service to begin with that any not otherwise enabled service provider doesn't stand a chance of offering a decent experience on your network.
But just pointing to a technical situation where it is hard to write a general 'rule' that in any arbitrary case can unequivocally objectively and automatically say whether a certain criterion was fulfilled, and then saying that because it is hard or even impossible to specify the whole regulation should be scrapped, that is disingenuous. The spirit of the regulation can be perfectly fine, even though case-by-case judgement may be required to determine compliance.
Those that will say 'but you can vote with your wallet', I can see where you come from, but the reasoning is flawed. In practice telecoms is not an open market, and many households have near 0 meaningful choice. Strong economic network effects are inherent, and lasting competition has only been present under very strict regulation.
Yeah, healthy competition and choice of providers seems like the real solution to me. Solve that and NN doesn't matter, plus you solve a bunch of other problems as well.
NN just feels like a distraction, driven by incredibly manipulative and overhyped propaganda.
Deregulatory actions are only ever used in service of entrenching telecom monopolies. The part where we actually get meaningful competition never happens.
Even though I wish for minimal regulation, I can't trust the deregulatory side to provide it. Because that side is infected by people like Ajit Pai who filter out any deregulatory actions which might threaten the monopolists.
The majority of states (comprising the vast majority of the population) have little to no restrictions on municipal broadband. Here in Maryland, for example, there is no such law and the governor is actively promoting municipal broadband. But few municipalities are pursuing that option. I'm not aware of any states which have laws "favoring incumbent telecoms over ... Google fiber, or other market entrants." Can you point to anything specific?
> If "deregulation" advocates were actually serious, they would have pursued those actions first.
They did! Two years before Congress deregulated the industry in 1996, it made it illegal for local governments to grant exclusive cable franchises. Then in the 1996 deregulation, it required non-discriminatory access to utility poles and ducts.
The biggest impediments to deployment these days are at the state and local level: permitting requirements, onerous franchise license terms, etc. Congress could (and in my opinion, should) completely preempt these things, but that's a hard sell. Municipalities use these franchises as a vehicle for all sorts of social agendas ("wire up public buildings!" "wire up disadvantaged neighborhoods!"), and as a revenue source (taxing 5% of gross revenue). Google got most of these things waived in Fiber cities, but it was a move strongly opposed by the public-interest types: https://techliberation.com/2012/08/07/what-google-fiber-says....
Most states, including many of the most populous, New York, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Illinois, Georgia, Texas, etc., have no such laws. Many of the states that do have such laws don't have restrictive ones (e.g. in Washington, you just have to be a city with the power to make your own ordinances).
If municipal broadband was something that would actually happen in the absence of these laws, why don't we see these networks popping up in all the places without such laws?
There was a question about citing laws, that link cited 21 of them.
Not all cities are building their own internet so that means we don't need to do anything is logic that I just don't follow.
My city didn't build their own. Last time it came up the news reported that it was because Comcast bribed the city council to charge unreasonable fees for adding cables to the existing poles and ensure that only Comcast could do the work on their own schedules. No one disputes that, but everyone who can do anything about it shrugs because Comcast is still paying them and its not illegal because money=speech.
But I guess because some other states with more broadband competition don't have as many restrictions (sense a link there?), and "all the places" that can haven't built their own broadband, I can no longer complain about not having any competition in my market and my leaders are removing laws that protect me from them but instead put in more laws that protect them from me?
> Not all cities are building their own internet so that means we don't need to do anything is logic that I just don't follow.
If you're citing municipal broadband laws as something suppressing the development of competition, it's fair to point out that most people live in states that don't have such laws, yet we don't see municipal broadband emerging as a source of competition in those states.
The U.S. is a big place, and you can probably name anything and find it happening somewhere in the U.S. The question is, what are the things that are actually creating impediments. If states without municipal broadband laws aren't actually building municipal networks, then getting rid of such laws might be a moral victory, but wouldn't actually change anything.
> My city didn't build their own. Last time it came up the news reported that it was because Comcast bribed the city council to charge unreasonable fees for adding cables to the existing poles and ensure that only Comcast could do the work on their own schedules.
Do you have a link to the story? It seems suspect, because pole attachment rates are governed by formulas set by either the FCC, or by the state (if the state certifies that it regulates such rates). Also, most poles are owned by power companies, and they set the rates, not city councils.
> I'm not aware of any states which have laws "favoring incumbent telecoms over ... Google fiber, or other market entrants." Can you point to anything specific?
> The biggest impediments to deployment these days are at the state and local level: permitting requirements, onerous franchise license terms, etc.
I mean, the reason those things are impediments is because the state and local laws favor incumbent telecoms by imposing permitting requirements and allowing onerous franchise license terms. Aren't you kind of answering your own question here?
The OP's phrasing makes it seem like state and local governments impose in order to favor incumbents. Rather, state and local governments impose these regulations because they're short-sighted. Baltimore is a great example. The city has been railing against the incumbent, Comcast. But then it didn't let Verizon build FiOS in the city, because Verizon wouldn't meet its demand of building out to every neighborhood in the city. The city then appealed to Google, which also wasn't interested, because Google categorically doesn't agree to build-out requirements: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/snubb....
> Rather, state and local governments impose these regulations because they're short-sighted.
See, I don't think this is always true. In my city its more like "state and local governments impose these regulations because they're _paid by Comcast and that's ok because money=speech_".
Calling it short-sighted is letting them off the hook, IMHO.
"We didn't realize that this company paying us to put up barriers to competition would use those barriers to prevent competition later" is right on the verge of being ridiculous.
> Congress could (and in my opinion, should) completely preempt these things, but that's a hard sell.
It's always easier to do what big telecom wants. So we have action on "deregulating" Net Neutrality which allows the telecoms to further leverage their local monopoly power, but no action which might actually put those monopolies in danger of real competition.
> It's always easier to do what big telecom wants.
I'm pretty sure that "big telecom" never wanted to have their exclusive franchises eliminated, to be forced to provide non-discriminatory access to poles and ducts, be forced to provide universal service, etc. But Congress did all those things in the 1996 act. The cynicism misconceives the situation. The real problem is building a coalition to take away authority from state/local governments. It's hard to get republicans to say that state/local governments shouldn't have authority over the permitting process used for building wires in their jurisdiction. That's a quintessentially state/local issue. And it's hard to get democrats to say that state/local governments shouldn't be able to use these processes to advance various social agendas.
It's just a microcosm of a bigger problem, which is that while our federal government has joined with the rest of the world in deregulating large spheres of the economy, our state/local governments are hopelessly backwards, and for the most part Congress can't do anything about that. I was just in Tokyo and the loose zoning laws meant that even space under freeway overpasses was being utilized for stores and shops. You're just not allowed to do that sort of thing in the U.S.
So, with efforts past and efforts abandoned having failed to produce meaningful competition among ISPs... our response is to enlarge the market space in which monopoly power can be abused?
First: meaningful competition for the telecoms. Only then, does it make sense to even consider rolling back Net Neutrality.
And if deregulation is powerless to introduce telecom competition, who can blame people for turning to more aggressive last mile unbundling instead?
Competition in ISPs, I mean. I don't see how zero-rating would hurt that.
(From what I've observed casually in Mexico zero-rating is a pretty benign thing, basically giving super-cheap plans to people who don't care about the internet-at-large.)
"But the offer alarmed Swedish media companies, which warned that the deal gave Facebook an advantage over competitors, and Telia an edge over other telecom operators."
ISP's have a million and one other ways to be anti-competitive. Example, in New Zealand, one of the major ISP's runs 'Lightbox' a streaming competitor. If you sign up to any of their plans, you get free Lightbox.
This incentives the customer to not use other streaming services. You can talk about zero-rating all day long but no amount of neutrality regulation will prevent something like the example above from happening. What happens if Comcast decides that Hulu Plus will be free with their broadband? It has the same effect as if Comcast decided to zero-rate Hulu on their network.
For their to be real changes in the American ISP market, you need competition.
Well...if they are treating all traffic equally then the only advantage the ISP has is bundling. That's a marketing advantage, but not a total competition killer. Amazon bundles streaming with free delivery subscriptions.
Not treating traffic equally would mean they could eliminate Netflix as competition for their customers. That's worse. Same for mail, social networking, news, dating etc. Video is just more pertinent in 2017.
The big thing to protect is always categories that don't exist yet.
Competition helps, but infrastructure markets are always suboptimal.
It wouldn't give an ISP advantage over other ISPs, but that doesn't matter because ISPs are for the most part regional monopolies. It would give Hulu Plus an advantage over other streaming video services, though.
Many states have passed laws that prevent local governments from creating municipal Internet services. Since Internet service is textbook inter-state commerce, the federal government would have authority to override those laws.
That's exactly the problem: selective actions favoring the monopolists are pursued aggressively (e.g. demolition of Net Neutrality), while actions which might actually harm monopolists are deferred indefinitely. Thus the effect of supposed "deregulation" is to deliver the market to the monopolists.
Yes but I was referring to comment saying there are current regulations that helps telecom monopolies that govt needs to destroy but it isn't. I was wondering what those regulations are that need to be destroyed.
I think this is a reason not to allow ISPs to do any business that might conflict with their main business, like say ISPs owning a TV network, whose content passes through its cables.
More or less like the Three-tier system (alcohol distribution) in the USA? Large brewers cannot distribute their own product.
That might of helped prevent, unproven, Intel from exploiting Anti-Competitive tactics since DELL and HP would of had to go through a distribution company instead of Intel.
I've always been under the impression that smaller brewers are harder hit by this than larger brewers, as they have to convince distributors to carry their product, which was really difficult prior to the craft brew craze.
That's where net neutrality comes in, so you don't have to convince ISPs not to throttle your streaming service.
Also, I'm having trouble imagining a small streaming service getting into the ISP business in order to reach a couple thousand people when they can reach hundreds of millions through the internet.
A small ISP getting into the streaming business to provide local content is less outlandish, but still seems rare; I think that's a reasonable price to pay, particularly given that the status quo makes it prohibitively difficult for small ISPs to exist at all, in many places.
I'm not sure that would be feasible; in a case like this, doing a reverse "hollywood accounting" would be easy. The bandwidth is "free", since it runs on their existing network. The content is "free", since it's included in their TV licensing. What can you impute just to the service? A bit of storage and a few hours of software development, divided by all their customers. That's probably about ten cents or so.
> What happens if Comcast decides that Hulu Plus will be free with their broadband?
Right now Comcast cable TV is pretty close to free with their broadband, is that any different?
Overall Europe and NZ seem to have better broadband available at better prices than the USA. They also dont have net neutrality so you can't say that NN is definitely good.
Good point. ISPs do not want to be dumb pipes because frankly there's no money in that. Every ISP is looking at the lucrative media market, bundling their own services.
Had a convo in my CS class about it today. Literally a room full of 19-20 something males, many who are avid gamers, or want to make tech it into a job... I was the only one who had anything to say about nn. People really don't know.
The GOP has been captured by corporate special interests and is also caught up in a mindless "repeal all the regulations" hysteria.
This is total speculation, but I'm guessing that the rank-and-file of that party might have a different opinion if they understood and considered the specific issue in isolation.
It's not about what the people want, because the U.S. is no longer a democratic country. When more people start admitting that and seeing that way, then they'll be ready to change that at the detriment of everything else. It's the biggest issue that affects all the other issues, but some still believe if you support this change at the detriment of everything else then you're a "purist" or a "single issue candidate". Of course, usually the people who call you those names are also the ones who benefit from the current system.
Context is important here. Please see the previous post (above mine) referencing "what the people want" which I infer to be referencing the democratic concept of "majority rule" which we do not have in the US.
"It's not about what the people want, because the U.S. is no longer a democratic country." ... I feel that this statement is logically faulty unless the "democratic" portion implies a pure democracy.
It's a mess, but really most people at home have no clue what net neutrality is. No one is going to lose their Congressional seat because of their NN position, so they don't care.
As someone who takes care to read as much as possible on both sides, that's not the case.
Liberals and progressives, generally, are universally for net neutrality.
Chamber of Commerce conservatives, libertarians, and if-the-left-is-for-it-I'm -against-it conservatives oppose it. The rest of the right is almost universally for it and many want to take it further and apply similar principles to platforms like twitter.
Given that many of the readers here have never (knowingly) encountered someone with such a position, it might be a good time for you to elaborate on why you want NN regulations repealed, and expose HN readers to that viewpoint.
But I will highlight a few key points I've made recently,
1) Racism and death threats against Ajit Pai and his family are not acceptable. At all. Users making/upvoting death threats should be handled with zero tolerance and reported to authorities. NN supporters around the web are doxing Pai and harassing him at his home. Simply pointing this out on HN results in invisibility powers. Sickening.
2) Verizon throttles Netflix? Not NN. Netflix throttles Verizon customers? NN. This offends my sense of fairness. The biggest supporters of NN (Apple, Google, Amazon, Netflix, etc) are complete hypocrites. NN should apply to them too, or not at all.
3) The ISP owns the network, they can manage it how they want. If you want to manage the network, then you can buy your own network. My general belief is the government should not be legislating how we manage network traffic on our own networks.
4) People LIKE zero rating. T-Mobile Binge On is proof of that. Zero rating is not NN. NN supporters are arguing that zero rating is unfair to their startup no one ever heard of. From this vantage point, NN becomes a subsidy for small startups at the expense of the general population that wants unlimited video streaming on their mobile network.
5) Forcing cable companies into BGP peering agreements, at cable company expense, to provide a fast lane to direct competitors in video entertainment businesses... that's just "WOW. I can't even." It certainly won't end well for cable customers. That expense will be passed down to the consumer.
I know most people here hate ISPs/Cable Companies/Phone companies. But they deserve more respect and profits than they get. The FANG companies are making incredible amounts of money and its a bit unfair that the broadband providers have to provide easy access between users and the FANGs by law. Esp as they're the ones doing the hard work of fixing your cable in the snow, paying local taxes.
My ideal would be repeal of net neutrality - but with UK style competition of ISP services where an independent 3rd party owns the pipes and ISPs compete with whatever packages they want.
How is it unfair ? They are in a totally different business.
ISPs are providing a service to their users: the internet. Their users pay for internet access (not just a certain subset) and they decide that they want to use the bandwidth for Youtube or Facebook. 5mbps on a "cable in the snow" is 5mbps regardless if it's coming from Youtube or Netflix or some indie company.
I think my point is that there should be choice. If someone wants to pay for neutral 5mbps internet that is fine. If someone wants to buy a connection that is cheaper but throttles everything that isn't Amazon, that is fine too as long as they have a choice.
The article mentions that, "France has four major mobile and internet operators and nine low-cost offshoots. Britain has more than 50." I'd appreciate if somebody could explain something here because that doesn't seem to make any economic sense. Let's assume that France/Britain have absolutely rigid and perfectly enforced net neutrality. That means internet service providers can compete only on price/speed as everything else is supposed to be otherwise identical. 13 different companies, let alone 50? How? Users would simply pick the company with the lowest price for their desired speed. And the cheapest service is going to tend to be the largest due to economies of scale. The end result is a natural trend towards monopolization when companies are allowed to only compete on price/speed.
I mean you might decide to pass on a "low-cost" alternative in most industries as there is often an implied "low-quality" qualifier attached. But with strong net neutrality, this is not supposed to be the case. They state a speed, they state a price. Everything else is identical. So what gives? I find it disappointing that the NYT did not even bother to even consider this obvious question since it seems to cut to the core of this issue!
We don't have net neutrality, we have competition.
That is the key point, net nuetrality is a moot point because if an ISP were to do something like charge for iplayer (BBC catchup service) which was mooted a few years ago, they'd all move to a different ISP.
Because we have for the moment a roughly open market.
There are parts that are controlled by a monopoly, but thats the people who provide the last mile infrastructure. They have strict regulations saying that they must charge a fixed price for rental of the infrastructure with no obligations other than to pay for the last mile. (they can choose to be a pure virtual operator, just skinning the service, or almost entirely run its own infra, save the last bit of copper)
Also, the people that run the last mile monopoly are not the people providing backhaul. That is mostly an open market too. More open than the last mile copper at least. Linx/lonap are all coops, where you pay a membership fee, and the cost of powering your equipment, any interconnect arrangements are up to you and your peers.
In short, we have a much more open market, but with no net nuetrality.
what america needs is competition, and the seperation of last mile, ISPs and backhaul. None of which you are going to get in present times.
Excellent summary of the UK situation. It's worth noting that the reason we (arguably) don't need regulation in the form of net neutrality is because we have regulation in a form that promotes competition. So it's a question of where to regulate, not whether.
Some of Europe has tighter last mile regulation, but it’s not necessarily better. Take France, for example. France applies unbundling to copper telephone lines and fiber, but not cable. It subsidises fiber backhaul for DSL. Overall, it’s got similar fiber deployment to the US (about 10%) but overall much slower speeds (according to Akamai, 11 Mbps average in France versus 19 Mbps in the US). But there is lots of ISP competition in DSL, like there was in the US in the early 2000s. But most people don’t have access to faster cable alternatives, because subsidization of the DSL network killed competition.
> But most people don’t have access to faster cable alternatives, because subsidization of the DSL network killed competition.
> Is this better?
That's a red herring.
By your own admission this isn't caused by LLUB but by misguided subsidization. It's a deliberate choice of poor example in a pool of much better options.
It’s a direct byproduct of LLU. LLU eliminates market price signals over the most expensive part of the infrastructure.[1] That requires governments to exercise tremendous discipline in setting the wholesale price. It’s politically popular to set the price too low, but that kills investment. France tried to compensate for that through subsidies. But those, predictably, killed the unsubsidized competition.
[1] You obviously can’t let the monopoly that owns the loop freely set the wholesale price of the loop.
> Government rate setting is such a bad idea, that our oligopolies might be better. (The US has faster internet than all the big European countries: the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy.)
And it's slower than Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and many others.
You can't blanket claim that LLU and rate setting is bad simply by ignoring examples where they work much better than the alternative.
Edit:
You might also want to include consumer prices with that comparison.
I installed fiber (from the street outside) in my house in Sweden and had a pick of 18 ISPs, of which I chose 100/100 Mbit/s for $38/month.
Here's Akamai's list of countries with the fastest broadband:
1 South Korea 28.6
2 Norway 23.5
3 Sweden 22.5
4 Hong Kong 21.9
5 Switzerland 21.7
6 Finland 20.5
7 Singapore 20.3
8 Japan 20.2
9 Denmark 20.1
10 United States 18.7
Our presence on this list is remarkable. If you were listing countries with the best of some other kind of infrastructure, say subways, we wouldn't even be sniffing the top 10. Nobody would look at the fact that Sweden or Denmark managed to have good subways and say "well, obviously we can do that too!" And we already know we would do a bad job implementing LLU: it was in the 1996 telecom act, and the FCC set rates too low and killed DSL in the process.
60% of Danish subscribers are with TDC, the privitized former incumbent. TDC must offer DSL access over LLU, but the two companies that do that are Telenor (the Norwegian incumbent) and Telia (the Swedish incumbent). Those three account for 80% of all subscribers. Is this better than our system?
> I installed fiber (from the street outside) in my house in Sweden and had a pick of 18 ISPs, of which I chose 100/100 Mbit/s for $38/month.
Where I live, I only have two choices for fiber, but 100/100 is $40/month, gigabit is $70-80, and two-gigabit is $150/month. Also: did you or a previous homeowner pay a one-time fee to build the fiber to your house? In the U.S., the ISP usually eats the up-front cost and recovers it in the monthly charge. Finally, U.S. prices include implicit cross subsidies (to build fiber or cable in poorer neighborhoods) that Swedish prices do not.
> Besides, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark either don't impose unbundling of cable/fiber, or set very high prices for wholesale access: http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/2-7.pdf.
I'll go with Sweden as it's the one I know closest. It doesn't... anymore, but it did for maybe 10 years from late 90s, and if Telia (the previously state owned and now privatized incumbent) which has a lot of the FTTH market would start being anti-competitive you can bet regulation will return.
> 60% of Danish subscribers are with TDC, the privitized former incumbent. TDC must offer DSL access over LLU, but the two companies that do that are Telenor (the Norwegian incumbent) and Telia (the Swedish incumbent). Those three account for 80% of all subscribers. Is this better than our system?
Yes? As long as all three has access to all customers (in the US the big ISPs have local monopolies so it's deceiving to look at them as many providers), there's at least some market forces available. But I also think DSL is kind of backwards to look at to begin with.
NN laws are barking up the wrong tree, because your ISPs control not only the last mile, planning, backhaul _and_ exchanges, they can easily demand things not possible in the UK.
Take the netflix outage in LA.
Comcast basically said, You're pushing too much stuff, pay up or we'll throttle you, and throttle they did.
Now, in a normal open market, other ISPs would step in and say "look at us, we don't throttle" and customers would switch over, making it financially impossible to throttle popular services. But you can't do that in the US as all but the most dense markets are a one ISP town.
In the UK that sort of action is suicide, the ISP would either arrange for more peering at LINX or LONAP, or better yet arrange some edge caching (open connect in netflix parlance) nearer the customers to cut down on bandwidth sloshing around the backbone (which is expensive)
We don't have NN laws in the UK, which means that mobile providers like 3 (three.co.uk) can say that watching netflix doesn't use your metered bandwidth.
so sctually what the US doesn't need is NN laws, it needs those ISP monopolies broken up and competition injected into the market.
The only realistic suggestion I have ever heard for how to break that monopoly is essentially an even more restrictive version of network neutrality: last mile providers are required to lease network capacity to anyone who wants it at reasonable and non-discriminatory rates.
How I dispise this meme. If you have real competition you don't need or want NN regulation. Monopolies are the problem and NN is a sub-optimal solution precisely because it's permanently one pen stroke away from being eradicated. If you switched the UK from a it's current competitive landscape to a monopolistic one you'd be getting greif from customers and all the businesses that would be shut out. In the US, you're only getting greif from customers and since they're not funding your next campaign you can just ignore them.
> precisely because it's permanently one pen stroke away from being eradicated
So NN is not a problem, just a temporary fix. And it doesn't limit competition (it costs nearly zero to comply). The problem are _other_ regulations. So why are some people so obsessed with removing NN?
I'm personally not obsessed with removing NN. I was just pointing out that you don't need to have it if you have proper competition. It's not the kind of thing that simply needs to be everywhere. If you already have it, fine.
I wouldn't mind a similar thing to MVNOs for mobile networks. There are a lot of attractive offerings that run on the big networks but have different plans.
Regarding France, you do end up with a ton of options. For instance, in Paris, you have multiple DSL providers, multiple fiber providers and typically one cable provider.
The French Government laid out ton of dark fiber in the past decades across the entire country and ISPs are using it (http://www.telcite.fr/?lang=en for instance).
For France, the four major operators compete primarily on antenna coverage for mobile, and for home internet they each provide different technologies, bundles of TV channels, telephone plans, and set-top boxes. They don't really compete on speed as nowadays almost every operator just provides the max that can be offered by the technology that connects the home.
The low-cost operators usually provide about the same thing as their parent major operator, but with very reduced support, no brick-and-mortar offices you can go to when you have a problem, and less bundled services.
Judging from the Wikipedia list of UK ISPs[1], providers use a variety of different technologies, have different coverage areas, lease lines to smaller ISPs, provide different bundles with other services that they provide, and so on. Maybe one service is known to optimize for throughput, while another offers slower speeds, but also lower latency for gaming, or something. There are a lot of services besides just the internet connection that ISPs could provide to their customers (or not provide, and market themselves as the more economical option).
All major ISPs in the UK are resellers of the same fibre infrastructure, run by OpenReach[0], a subsidiary of BT (formerly the national telco, now one of the larger ISPs).
OpenReach has to provide equal access to other ISPs by law, so the playing field between them is very even.
The only major outlier is Virgin Media, who own the cable (as in cable TV) network covering some built-up bits of the county; their fibre network is entirely separate.
Openreach sells products only to ISPs, it won't deal with consumers at all. The main products it sells to ISPs are:
* ADSL last mile to a customer (in most places ASDL2+ but in some places it's plain ADSL because they never upgraded) at the maximum speed the line will do
* VDSL capped at 40Mbps down / 10Mbps up over last mile to a customer [in most but not all places, unless line is too long]
* VDSL capped at 80Mbps down / 20Mbps up [ditto]
* FTTP at 330, 500 or 1000 Mbps to the customer's premises. [ Only if there is actually a fibre, most won't have one]
* Line rental to make a physical line work with any of the above.
* Backhaul from the customer's exchange to your preferred POP where you take over the Internet access
A small ISP buys the line rental, backhaul, and one of the actual last mile packages, bundles that up with maybe some webmail and telephone support, and sells that as an Internet service for a nice margin. They need a POP somewhere vaguely sensible, with enough bandwidth to service their customers, and that's them done.
Bigger ISPs might arrange to have their own fibre at some exchanges, they don't buy backhaul from those exchanges, they pick up customer traffic themselves, but they buy everything else.
One interesting thing that you can see as a result of Openreach was that the true "line rental" cost Openreach were charging to make the line work was falling slowly over the years. But the _advertised_ line rental price had been rising enormously, because ISPs hid it in their small print. They'd say "Superfast Broadband only £5" and then in tiny print "(plus £20 pcm line rental, offer expires after 12 months, normal price £28 per month)"
BT have just this week installed fibre to my house. While most of the last mile is copper it is wrong to say "Everything is copper" particularly when you consider in a vast majority of cases now the cable from exchange to the cabinet is fibre.
> Maybe one service is known to optimize for throughput, while another offers slower speeds, but also lower latency for gaming, or something.
This isn't just reserved to UK ISPs, afaik the situation in Germany is kinda similar. Fun tidbit about the monetization of features: When ADSL just became "a thing" it introduced higher latency compared to ISDN.
Quickly people figured out that certain ISPs could toggle something on called "fastpath", which would reduce the latency quite a bit if you called the support hotline and asked for it.
Took a couple of months until one of the major ISPs (Telekom) started charging 5€ monthly extra for it on the lower speed ADSL tariffs, luckily that stopped being a thing with VDSL.
- coverage, most important for mobile and in low density areas
- mobile data
- speed but not so much, ISPs often offer you the fastest speed available, even for low tiers
- service level
And because most landlines are triple-play, VoIP and TV service are also a deciding factor.
Some ISP also provide bundles with additional service, like subscriptions, subsidized phones and other stuff. It is fine with net neutrality as long as there is no preferential treatment when it comes to internet service, though there may be issues with product tying laws.
To counter monopolies, large ISPs are required to rent their infrastructure to other players at a reasonable price.
In the UK, there are only two or three providers actually providing last mile, and the majority of the 50 mentioned simply re-brand the BT/OpenReach product. All you need to become and ISP is a browser and some clients. Some of the larger ones have their own backbone, to an extent, but the majority simply re-brand
And it works, because OpenReach are heavily regulated by the government, in light of the fact that they have a monopoly when it comes to copper last mile infrastructure (ignoring KCOM for the sake of simplification, and they're only in Hull).
You do have LLU where internet companies put their own DSLAMs in an OpenReach exchange, once again, this is because of heavy regulation. That has become less common of late as more people move away from ADSL to VDSL, where once again OpenReach have a monopoly in the streetside DSLAMs.
The move to Fibre though is an interesting one, as we now have several options (Depending on where you live) such as GigaClear, Hyperoptic and some business only providers. There's also rural fibre in the case of B4RN and boutique wireless providers where OpenReach has failed to install a decent service.
There's also Virgin Media, who provide last mile triple play over cable, but they don't have 100% coverage.
Finally, the government has given out large block grants to local authorities to help pay for rollout of "Super" and "Ultra" fast broadband to places OpenReach initially deemed financially unviable.
The thing about competition, is it only works when any part of the equation that is a monopoly, or near monopoly, is regulated as a utility.
Nice comment, thanks. GigaClear etc are new to me. I left the UK 5 years ago, but was heavily involved in the telco business. Agree with your statement (and benefits) of heavily and fairly regulated monopolies.
>That means internet service providers can compete only on price/speed as everything else is supposed to be otherwise identical. 13 different companies, let alone 50? How? Users would simply pick the company with the lowest price for their desired speed. And the cheapest service is going to tend to be the largest due to economies of scale. The end result is a natural trend towards monopolization when companies are allowed to only compete on price/speed.
They won't be identical, because every ISP will have different peering and transit arrangements. And depending on those arrangements the access speeds for netflix/hulu/youtube will differ. Traffic that's internal to the ISP's network will always be the cheapest. Which is why an ISP can subsidize streaming services if they are hosted internally. I have had this debate with some NN supporters, and they do not seem to appreciate this basic commercial angle.
Economies of scale do not really happen for ISPs when there's strong regulation allowing for virtual operators. If you grow very large, you are expected to provide more user support, public relations, advertising, and other similar functions that just cost extra. Small virtual ISPs can operate close to the actual costs.
It's basically a two-tier market: a few expensive name brands, and lots of low-cost, low-support brands.
Back when DSL was regulated that way, it was pretty much the reverse; the big name brands wrode on being the obvious default choice with horrible user support, while the independent resellers often had stellar support (less slick advertising, but probably higher advertising cost per user, because of economies of scale.)
Well, "more user support" doesn't mean it's better, just that they need more of it. The big names have all the basic users who likely call much more even for basic things like Windows problems, while the small ones get to concentrate on relevant issues with more knowledgeable user base.
Well, here in spain the difference was that once the virtual providers came in, i could actually get technical support versus the big providers where it was next to impossible. The installation time also went from 90+ days to 5+ days, and the big providers had to improve as well.
In France, the main mobile operator Orange, offers you tethering only as an option to be additionally paid on top of your data plan. They basically monitor the connection to check if your mobile is forwarding packages and do mitm in order to display advertisement about the additional paid option.
I am French and switch operators every year (because they have those stupid offers with significantly cheaper subscription that only last 12 months and it only takes a couple of minutes to subscribe to a new one) and I have used tethering frequently with Free, Numericable, Bouygues and SFR without getting any warning or noticing any oddity in the content served.
Also, Orange has a bit more inertia than the others (it used to be the French public phone company France Telecom), but their support page says that tethering is part of the regular mobile subscriptions.
You might not given that provider plans and bundles do change over time. Sometimes there are still restrictions and drawbacks (e.g. throttling) since providers are opaque about their services. There could be new plans that include tethering but cost more or have bandwidth caps.
The principle applies to all traffic. Current rules are far from perfect on their own and have loopholes already. Instead of repealing them, they should be extended, including outright banning anti-competitive data caps which is a pure rip off.
I hadn’t considered the impacts such a ruling would have on zero ratings schemes, the two hadn’t even connected in my mind, but now that it’s been mentioned it would clearly fall afoul of any existing regulations. There used to be a similar plan from Optus in Australia to zero rate Facebook, and there’s currently one to do the same with Spotify, but today these accompany generous data plans in general, whereas originally it was offered on very low cap plans such as the 100mb/mo plan. Curious to see how this plays out internationally in countries like Aus where this already occurs unchallenged, and whether they will now go further following the ruling in the U.S.
My account (US, MN) with Virgin Mobile is already doing this with "free" streaming music. A hand full of apps (Pandora, iHeartRadio, Slacker, 8tracks and Milk Music) don't count towards the monthly data cap.
Yep T-Mobile does this as well. There is a way for any streaming music service to put in a request to be added to the list, but I'm not sure if smaller companies get accepted or not.
Edit: There used to be, can't find the link anymore...
Outside the wireless space, the local loop is a rather strong classical mono/duo/-poly. While there may be several re-sellers, and more players at the national level, in practice for most individual homes the choices are extremely limited. Network effects (in an economic sense) are in play at the ISP level so entering the mature market as an 'independent' isn't as straightforward as it sounds. Consumer Internet is furthermore already packaged in with a TV/PSTN/Mobile bundle offer. Keeping an open Internet has definitely been a struggle in Europe. One that is under constant attack. A strong Net Neutrality stance has been the only defense, but also over here it is failing as we speak.
In Switzerland, some cities have started to break this up, and it's wonderful: Responsibility is split between the local utility and telcos. The utilities are responsible for the last mile (just as they are for power and water), and provide a fiber connection from the customer to one of several points of presence per city. Telcos rent space in these PoPs. They get to skip the expensive last mile and focus on Internet connectivity.
In places where FTTH is available, a wonderful ecosystem of mini-ISPs has sprung up, serving different niches. Some focus on integrated multi-play (Internet/TV/Phone/etc.) setups, others offer affordable quick connections without the bullshit. Choice and competition are alive and well, despite (or because?) part of the infrastructure is publicly funded.
>“From a user perspective, I don’t think it’s a problem and I think most consumers don’t think it’s an issue,” said Magnus Haglunds, a Stockholm-based independent music producer who uses the Telia service. “There are those who may have to change from Apple Music to Spotify. But then they get free surfing on Spotify.”
What kind of a sheep customer thinks, "Well I guess I'll just totally change the service I use because that's what my provider wants!" People like that need, if you'll excuse the gendered metaphor, a swift kick in the balls.
Now for the 'complicated' part. In practice it is not difficult to create a situation where everything is degraded. You just under-provision on a choke point. If you then sell alternative routes, or allow edge caches beyond the choke point, you technically didn't 'hinder' any traffic, you just provided such a lousy service to begin with that any not otherwise enabled service provider doesn't stand a chance of offering a decent experience on your network.
But just pointing to a technical situation where it is hard to write a general 'rule' that in any arbitrary case can unequivocally objectively and automatically say whether a certain criterion was fulfilled, and then saying that because it is hard or even impossible to specify the whole regulation should be scrapped, that is disingenuous. The spirit of the regulation can be perfectly fine, even though case-by-case judgement may be required to determine compliance.
Those that will say 'but you can vote with your wallet', I can see where you come from, but the reasoning is flawed. In practice telecoms is not an open market, and many households have near 0 meaningful choice. Strong economic network effects are inherent, and lasting competition has only been present under very strict regulation.