Hi Bob,
thanks for the interesting discussion, I am learning a lot! I am
unsure whether the following is too direct
On Oct 8, 2023, at 18:37, Robert McMahon <[email protected]>
wrote:
Hi Sebastian,
The U.S. of late isn't very good with regulatory that motivates
investment into essential comm infrastructure. It seems to go the
other way, regulatory triggers under investment, a tragedy of the
commons.
[SM] My personal take on "tragedy of the commons" is that this is an
unfortunate framing that tries to muddy the waters. What "tragedy of
the commons" boils down to in insufficient or insufficiently enforced
regulation. The tragic part is that we theoretically already know how
to avoid that...
The RBOCs eventually did overbuild. They used wireless and went to
contract carriage, and special access rate regulation has been
removed.
[SM] Clearly sub-optimal regulation at play here that leaves obvious
lucrative alternate pathways outside of the regulated component... the
solution clearly would have been to put wireless under regulation as
well (either immediately or as a pre-declared response to insufficient
fiwed wire access plant maintenance and built-out). Then again easy to
say now...
The cable cos did HFC and have always been contract carriage.
[SM] At least in Germany without good justification, once an access
network is large enough to stymie growth of competitors by sheer size
it needs to be put under regulations (assuming we actually desire
competition in the internet access market*). Letting such players
escape regulation is doubly problematic:
a) it results in anti-competitive market consolidation in the hands of
those players.
b) it puts the other (incumbent) players subject to regulatory action
at a clear disadvantage.
*) IMHO we will never get meaningful infrastructure competition in the
access network though, too few players to land us anyway outside of
monopoly/oligopoly regime...
And they are upgrading today.
The tech companies providing content & services are doing fine too and
have enough power to work things out with the ISPs directly.
[SM] Yes and no, few ISPs if any are willing to try to strong arm
Google/Facebook/Apple/... but smaller players do fall pray to
sufficiently large ISPs playing games to sell access to their
eye-balls (see e.g. the carefully and competently managed
under-peering Deutsche Telekom (DT) does with the other T1-ISPs to
"encourage" all content providers to also buy direct access t the
Deutsche Telekom, technically billed as "transit", but far above
alternative transit that few content providers will use this nominal
transit to reach anything but Telekom eye-balls, but I digress.
However DT did not invent that technique but learned from AT&T and
Verizon*).
*) Only a few ISPs can really pull this off, as you need to be
essentially transit-free yourself, otherwise your own Transit provider
will allow others to reach you over typically not congested links. But
as SwissCom and Deutsche Telekom demonstrated in the past, if you then
collude with your Transit provider you might still be able to play
such games. Side-note in Germany DT is forced by law to allow
resellers on its copper plant so end-customers unhappy with DT's
peering policy can actually change ISP and some do, but not enough to
hinder DT from trying this approach.
In addition DT together with other European ex-monopoly telecoms
lobbies the EU commission hard to force big tech to pay for access
network build out in Germany... Now, I do have sympathies for
appropriately taxing big tech in those countries they generate
revenue, but not to line the coffers of telecoms for a service they
were already paid for by their end-customers.
The undeserved areas do need support.
[SM] I fully agree! We should give all regions and access links the
same equitable starting point to participate in the digital society.
The BEAD monies may help. I think these areas shouldn't be relegated
to DSL.
[SM] My take here is that FTTH is inevitable as the next step sooner
or later. But for today's needs DSL would do just fine... except for
rural areas moving outdoor DSLAMs close enough to the customers to
allow acceptable access capacity is likely almost as expensive (if not
more expensive due to the active DSLAM tech) as not stopping with the
fiber at the potential outdoor DSLAM location, but putting it all the
way to the end-customers.
However dark fibers in the ground are only half the problem, we still
should allow for meaningful competition over these fibers in offering
internet access services, as one thig we know about the free market
is, it works better the more different players we have on the supply
and demand side. (For internet access the demand side is not the
problem, but the supply side is where we need to take steps to get
over what Rosenworcel described as only 20% of US households have
actual choice of broadband ISPs).
Regards
Sebastian
P.S.: I am sure that in essence we pretty much agree, we differ a bit
in how we want to reach the goal, but that allows for a healthy
discussion.
Bob
On Oct 8, 2023, at 2:38 AM, Sebastian Moeller <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Bob,
On 8 October 2023 00:13:07 CEST, rjmcmahon via Nnagain
<[email protected]> wrote:
Everybody abandoned my local loop. Twisted pair from multiple decades
ago into antiquated, windowless COs with punch blocks, with no space
nor latency advantage for colocated content & compute, seems to have
killed it off.
[SM] Indeed, throughput for DSL is inversely proportional to loop
length, so providing 'acceptable' capacity requires sufficiently
short wire runs from DSLAM to CPE, and that in turn means moving
DSLAMs closer to the end users... which in a densely populated area
works well, but in a less densely populated area becomes costly fast.
And doing so will only make sense if you get enough customers on such
an 'outdoor DSLAM' so might work for the first to built out, but
becomes prohibitively unattractive for other ISP later. However
terminating the loops in the field clears up lots of spaces in the
COs... not that anybody over here moved much compute into these...
(there exist too many COs to make that an attractive proposition in
spite of all the hype about moving compute to the edge). As is a few
well connected data centers for compute seem to work well enough...
I suspect in some towns one can buy out the local loop copper with
just a promise of maintenance.
[SM] A clear sign of regulatory failure to me, maintenance of the
copper plant inherited from Bell should never have been left to the
ISPs to decide about...
The whole CLEC open the loop to competitive access seems to have
failed per costs, antiquated technology, limited colocation, an
outdated waveguide (otherwise things like CDDI would have won over Cat
5), and market reasons. The early ISPs didn't collocate, they bought
T1s and E1s and connected the TDM to statistical multiplexing - no
major investment there either.
The RBOCs, SBC (now AT&T) & and VZ went to contract carriage and
wireless largely because of the burdens of title II per regulators not
being able to create an investment into the OSPs. The 2000 blow up was
kinda real.
[SM] Again, I see no fault in title 2 here, but in letting ISPs of the
hook on maintaining their copper plant or replace it with FTTH...
She starts out by complaining about trying to place her WiFi in the
right place. That's like trying to share a flashlight. She has access
to the FCC technology group full of capable engineers. They should
have told her to install some structured wire, place more APs, set the
carrier and turn down the power.
[SM] I rather read this more as an attempt to built a report with the
audience over a shared experience and less as a problem report ;)
My wife works in the garden now using the garden AP SSID with no
issues. My daughter got her own carrier too per here Dad dedicating a
front end module for her distance learning needs. I think her story to
justify title II regulation is a bit made up.
[SM] Hmm, while covid19 lockdown wasn't the strongest example, I
agree, I see no good argument for keeping essential infrastructure
like internet access in private hands without appropriate oversight.
Especially given the numbers for braodband choice for customers,
clearly the market is not going to solve the issues at hand.
Also, communications have been essential back before the rural free
delivery of mail in 1896. Nothing new here other than hyperbole to
justify a 5 member commission acting as the single federal regulator
over 140M households and 33M businesses, almost none of which have any
idea about the complexities of the internet.
[SM] But the access network is quite different than the internet's
core, so not being experts on the core seems acceptable, no? And even
5 members is clearly superior to no oversight at all?
I'm not buying it and don't want to hand the keys to the FCC who
couldn't protect journalism nor privacy. Maybe start there, looking at
what they didn't do versus blaming contract carriage for a
distraction?
[SM] I can speak to the FCC as regulatory agency, but over here IMHO
the national regulatory agency does a decent job arbitrating between
the interests of both sides.
https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/rural-free-delivery.htm#:~:text=On%20October%201%2C%201896%2C%20rural,were%20operating%20in%2029%20states.
Bob
My understanding, though I am not 100% certain, is that the baby
bells
lobbied to have the CLEC equal access provisions revoked/gutted.
Before this, the telephone companies were required to provide access
to the "last mile" of the copper lines and the switches at wholesale
costs. Once the equal access provisions were removed, the telephone
companies started charging the small phone and DSL providers close to
the retail price for access. The CLEC DSL providers could not stay in
business when they charged a customer $35 / month for Internet
service
while the telephone company charged the DSL ISP $35 / month for
access.
---- On Sat, 07 Oct 2023 17:22:10 -0400 Dave Taht via Nnagain
wrote ---
I have a lot to unpack from this:
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-397257A1.pdf
the first two on my mind from 2005 are: "FCC adopted its first open
internet policy" and "Competitiveness" As best as I recall, (and
please correct me), this led essentially to the departure of all the
3rd party DSL providers from the field. I had found something
referencing this interpretation that I cannot find right now, but I
do
clearly remember all the DSL services you could buy from in the early
00s, and how few you can buy from now. Obviously there are many
other
possible root causes.
DSL continued to get better and evolve, but it definately suffers
from
many reports of degraded copper quality, but does an estimate exist
for how much working DSL is left?
Q0) How much DSL is in the EU?
Q1) How much DSL is left in the USA?
Q2) What form is it? (VDSL, etc?)
Did competition in DSL vanish because of or not of an FCC related
order?
--
Oct 30:
https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos
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