[133943] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Some truth about Comcast - WikiLeaks style
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Leo Bicknell)
Mon Dec 20 14:16:38 2010
Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2010 11:16:30 -0800
From: Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org>
To: NANOG list <nanog@nanog.org>
Mail-Followup-To: NANOG list <nanog@nanog.org>
In-Reply-To: <37D0927A-0BD4-430C-9552-70D90808B81D@princeton.edu>
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In a message written on Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 12:20:37PM -0500, Steve Schult=
ze wrote:
> Congress went so far as to force ILECs (the incumbents) to lease their li=
nes to competitors for awhile, with the idea that it would lead the competi=
tors to build out their own "facilities-based" lines. Even with those ince=
ntives, line-based competition failed to materialize to any substantial deg=
ree. =20
They did, I had my $300 T1 for a while years ago, and Covad/Megapath
et all did a very good business buying the local lines (as UNE)'s
and selling DSL services over them. While I don't think the model
was the success I had hoped for, I think it was a success.
However through a series of steps the iLEC's have effectively shut
these folks out of the market. They lobbied, and won, that Fiber
is not part of the requirements. Want to buy UNE "FIOS" fiber?
Verizon won't sell it, the government won't make them. The AT&T's
of the world went and installed "FTTN" (Fiber to the Node), where
a node serves a small neighborhood. This allows them to be less
than 1m from the house and offer up to 24Mbps DSL. The other
providers sued saying they need space in the nodes, and lost. So
Covad gets to be in the CO, with 20kft of copper, while AT&T gets
to be in the node with 3kft of copper to the user.
So from about 1996 to 2000 we had competition. They then figured out
how to rig the system so there is no effective competition, and so far
the government has been A-Ok with that.
> The exclusivity for cable providers went away with the Cable Television C=
onsumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992, which you can read about in=
the Background section of the FCC's 2007 Order Implementation of Section 6=
21(a)(1) (the first of two orders that sought to further remove local contr=
ol over many aspects of the franchising process):
>=20
> http://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2007/03/21/E7-5119/implementation=
-of-section-621a1-of-the-cable-communications-policy-act-of-1984-as-amended=
-by-the#p-21
And yet, I don't know of any location in the US with two cable
operators. You see, these rules weren't changed to provide for a
second cable TV plant to be put in the ground, even in the FCC knew
that cost too much. Rather, if you read carefully the problem was
that Verizon, AT&T, and Bell South (all mentioned by name in the
article) wanted to deliver video over FIOS/DSL. Most areas had
coverage rules, to be a cable provider you had to pass 95%+ of the
houses or such, and these folks didn't meet many of the local rules
and went to the government for help.
So the government did the minimum to get folks who already had
infrastructure in the ground the rules to use it to provide this
service.
The result is not competition, but a government sponsored duopoliy.
This didn't bring more players to the table, it just let those already
at the table offer a full set of overlapping services. Likely a good
step, but not the same as getting new entrants into the market.
--
Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440
PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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