Maurice,
First of all I share many of your reservations with government entities, municipial councils and all these alphabet soup agencies. However that is not the whole story. DonT forget the ILECs outside America were formerly part of the same government you detest so much as "PTTs". Do you think that culture changed ? I bet it didn't. Low productivity almost forces them to use their assets indefinitely. If it weren'T for the cable network threat, there still wouldn't be DSL being deployed. It's pretty clear that FTTH will reduce OSP (outside plant) costs by more than 70% (that is conservative), however organized labour inside these ILECs is running scared. ILEC management is usually torn between all sides (shareholders, regulatory agency, trade union folks etc.)
There was indeed a paradigmatic change. In the past, the reg. agencies applied "regulation for monopoly" in the last mile. Now it's moslty "regulation for competition". That is a different objective. You might not agree with the goal of managed competition. I and many others very much do. As a shareholder of a would-be competitor, I guess you are not amused by a Public-private partnership to take care about "FTTH on the cheap". Well, I as an IT consultant would love this. It all depends on your "relative position".
As a general observation to me, your mode of reasoning seems to have stopped by the year 1910 - where people still were hotly debating the powers of the FED and before the STANDARD OIL case (Rockefeller co.) "introduced" competition policy to the U.S. (as you don't see any "need" to pursue competition policy in ANY sector (I could agree it would be ill advised to pursue IBM or GM - but infrastructural sectors are a different matter).
On the issue of net neutrality - what I see from the empirics there is NO CONGESTION ! so the "congestion toll" you propose is useless. There isn't even congestion in the big backbone network (see: 10K Cogent Communications - their core utilization is at 20%) if the core isn't bumping against the ceiling, the access network won't either (as the access networks feed the core). The ILECs like to stress this issue so they could keep the pipes open to content THEY desire.
Edit: you raised the same argument that fed the (ILEC sponsored) QoS research. In fact many netizens view it as a "solution waiting for a problem". So far, no one needed QoS - guess why ? Because best effort was good enough, even for VoIP. Too bad for our phone behemoth and its doomed ATM strategy. But that story is over. The net neutrality debate can be framed as the same story, served anwew, in another disguise. (A hint: read Andrew Odlyzko's pages on measuring Internet traffic)
An old Libertarian motto is "Freedom to chose" (Milton Friedman). This is good but not good enough. Let it supplant me with "Freedom to USE"
You note - "Vector, CityLink, Velocity and others already have fiber..." Is this just some metro fiber or do they have fiber connections to the building of the subscriber or even more to the premises ? I'm not that familiar with the NZ situation...
rgrds
CROSSY |
