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There are examples where having one company take care of physical infrastructure (fiber network, or coaxial in cable), and providing it to anyone who then run electron or light over it, working very well to consumer advantage. One example could be Stokab, which pulled Stockholm city in Sweden some ten years ahead most other places in the planet in terms of broadband connectivity (Ethernet to home ten+ years ago, 100Mbps for 10e/month, etc).

Stokab model is utility, and it is by charter not allowed to do anything else than dark fiber.

http://www.stokab.se/Documents...

Regulation does not work. The operators who run other businesses can always cross-subsidize between their businesses, and no regulator can effectively prove that. Regulation does not force the operators to be efficient or innovative either. With no competition, they do not need to be. And screwing competition is almost always easier than making better products, when your motivation is keep your salary and bonuses rolling and you could not care less of public benefit and innovation. Even if operator is forced to sell infrastructure, they can allocate costs and work force to infrastructure department, and to make everything possible to hurt competition and keep the prices high. I have long experience on this, we launched first commercial ADSL service in Europe and run a competitive operator in relatively progressive environment. The only solution I see working (by proof of success story) is having complete separation at passive-physical boundary, such as Stokab model.

Stokab that runs the dark fiber network in Stockholm is a regular company owned by the City of Stockholm. http://www.stokab.se/templates/StandardPage.aspx?id=306/

The money the city put up to finance the fiber is an investment, not a subsidy, so Stokab earns a profit for the city when it leases the dark fiber. According to their 2007 yearly report, Stokab had a rentability of 9.6% of the total investment. So the taxpayers of Stockholm doesn't subsidy the network as such; they did put up the money, but they earn interest on them. Besides that, cheap and fast fiber internet has created a lot of jobs for the city over the years (=more money).

Notice that Stokab isn't a ISP; they only lease dark fiber (point-to-point, ring or start topologies) to companies or ISP's who supply their own equipment to light up the fiber.

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Regards

The company is owned by the city of Stockholm and is not a private business. Stokab was founded in 1994 and is owned by the company group Stockholms Stadshus AB, which is in turn owned by the City of Stockholm.

Falcon

Can't speak for the other Europeans but I can tell you how they did in Stockholm, Sweden. They set up a non-profit, municipality owned carrier, Stokab. Stokab only lays dark fiber and leases it out to the ISPs.
I pay USD 25 for my 100/100 mbit and it isn't subsidised by any taxes.

Some urban communities do have fibre properly run around them, and properly run, e.g. Stockholm, Sweden.

However, others are completely hosed, e.g. Palo Alto, California. The fibre's been there for ages, and they're still not using it properly.

The trouble is that telephone companies hate competition, and any attempt to actually compete with them will result in them throwing whatever roadblocks they can into the way.

In Stockholm, Sweden, the city ran fibre everywhere in rings around the city, and then set up Stokab A/B to run the infrastructure, and sell access to it on a non-discriminatory basis. It is important to note that this is in no way related to the Swedish telephone company, Telia which can buy transit across this fibre, but also has to compete with other telecomm companies that use this fibre.

That's how it is supposed to be done: a separate, disinterested company running and selling acess to the infrastructure, with service companies competing with each other on top of that.

The frustrating thing for me is watching the City of Palo Alto, California (a neighboring city), which also has a fibre infrastructure, but they keep arguing over what to do with it, and thus do nothing!

I hate to break it to you, but Pac*Bell is the best of the RBOC's (the baby bells), nationwide, according to my friends who run national ISPs. Be glad you don't live in NYNEX or GTE territory.

The real problem is that legacy telephone companies are so invested in voice telephony and circuit switching that packet switching is a mystery to them. They Don't "Get It." They can generally be trusted to run wires or give you a point-to-point bit-pipe (i.e. a dedicated leased line), but never ask them for a switched data service (e.g. frame relay, ATM, SMDS) because they'll always fuck it up. ISDN is a borderline case, because it looks and smells like voice to them, but it has never been tariffed (priced) correctly: ISDN calls should have the same price as voice calls.

There was an article in Wired a while ago called, The NetHeads versus The BellHeads which described some of this cluelessness, and how Internet companies are eating the RBOCs and other LECs alive.

If you're looking for xDSL service, best to go with one of the Competitive LECs, e.g. Covad, or NorthPoint, because it's a lead-pipe cinch that your RBOC will hose up the Internet part of xDSL, even if they get the basic bit-pipe right.

The City of Stockholm, Sweden got it right - they laid down dark fibre all over the city, and then set up a city-owned corporation to lease it out to all comers. This makes it easy to get really high speed data service at low prices. Right on the edge of the Silicon Valley, the City of Palo Alto, California has the same opportunity (i.e. they've laid down the dark fibre) but they're hesitating to actually use it! (idiots)