Maurice,
I will re-read your post contents referring to local NZ situation. Let me briefly answer your questions and the points your raised about industrial and regulatory economics.
First of all, itneresting you attack Nelle Kroes. She comes from the pro-market VVD party of the Netherlands. Such organizations in europe also happen to be pretty much against ALL monopolies - government and private sector "virtual" monopolies alike. Interesting, you attack Ms. Kroes - as the organization she gew up in is/was very close ideologically to your "ACT" in their goals - pro market, contra taxes, pro personal liberty etc... which I admire by the way, it would be something I could vote for just to give my personal credentials...
With "rent seeking behavior" - I mean the "price differential" for the "Megabit per second" in bandwidth between what a VZ offers over its FiOS and what I could obtain at a CCOI (Cogent Comm.) enabled connection point. The differnece is the rent that an ILEC like VZ can pocket. They couldn't do that if we had a COMPETITIVE situation in FTTH.
That is why solutions are needed. A government monopoly is no solution. But a private-public partnership is. The partnership builds carrier-neutral FTTH infrastructure, pays low interest, govt' back-stopped loans and recoups the principal plus interest via uniform fees charged to ALL service providers that want to use the infrastructure - on a degressive scale. This is the OPPOSITE of what a "Telecom monopoly" would do if you look it up in industrial economics. That monopoly would engage in any kind of price discrimination possible (1st degree, 2nd degree and 3rd degree ... any economic textbook explains it).
I, myself prefer private sector solutions very much. This however doesn't extent to let the local "ILEC" erect their damned toll-booth and do differential charging as they are accustomed to. Also the local ILEC tends to play the labour-blackmail game as in France or as Telstra did.
I'm glad that governments finally stood up to this. I bet it's particularly hard for a Labour government (re: Australia) to play deaf on their comm. sector trade union demands but it was time.
Infrastructure markets are tough areas and despite having many Libertarian leanings, I view sector regulation (edit: of INFRASTRUCTURE industries) as a key tool to shape the reflective industrie's evolution, otherwise we may end up with a communication duopoly (ILEC/Cable) at best and all the benefits of "competitive telecom" would be lost in the process.
10 cent per megabyte ? Goodness - you just fell into yet another ILEC trap. Otherwise you might know that FLAT RATE pricing is the norm for charing for "Internet transit". You don't pay "Megaybtes" sent but for Megabit per second in "peak capacity". The only organizations vehemently resenting this intuitive concept are the ILECs.
"Any idiot can charge captive customers a lot of money until leakage or technology change finally puts an end to it"
if it were so simple.
We all know that the solution to the fixed-line problem is FTTH. But this is costly, too costly for most business entities with short time horizons and quarterly reporting duties. This is why someone else has to step in to smooth the transition. I do not want to wait for the "bandwidth scrooge" (the ILEC) to give me more of what they want to withhold from me (bandwidth).
"Taxing citizens to deploy fiber networks ..."
hell no. I can give you numerous examples from Europe where the costs were recouped by OPERATOR fees only... (Metropolitan France, Italy, Sweden)
(Edit:)
just some of the alternative technologies you cited - imho, they are no replacement for FTTH - why ?
1) WiFi doesn't give you a guaranteed connection. WiFi Links are subject to signal impairment (think of rain, fog etc.)
2) Calling DSL a substitute for FTTH is a generous overstatement. I'm in Austria (Europe) and yes, I have TWO DSL lines here into my flat. But I'm still limited to aggregate bandwidth of around 20M/2M (down/uplink). If I were in HongKong, I would enjoy 100Mbit SYMMETRIC FTTH access for the same fee I shell out for my two DSL lines plus get IPTV on no charge.
producer rents, rent-seeking behaviour ... this is standard economic parlance - I'm not going to explain it, as this is an advanced forum here, where some kind of background info shoudl be taken for granted. Hint: there'S a dictionary (wikipedia) available for free and economic textbooks a plenty
rgrds
CROSSY |
