Companies, Government and Community Fiber Rollouts

hype7 writes "Wired is running an interesting article about a number of communities which are dissatisfied with the present communications infrastructure that they are being offered, and are deciding to do something about it. However, many of the corporates who had previously been offering services to these communities have resisted this, with Pennsylvania going so far as to draft law to prevent competition for the communications providers. What is most interesting is that in the communities where the roll outs have taken place, the incumbent providers have "dropped prices to be more competitive ... while not changing rates in areas where it continues to have a monopoly". What I don't understand is why can't a public utilities company provide a public utility if their rate payers want it? What's wrong with additional competition? And why should legislative bodies protect telecommunications monopolies?"

Comments

Re:Blame the Supreme Court as well

[OwnedByTwoCats]

Deregulation of trucking and oil began under Carter.

Reagan's deregulation included the Savings and Loan industry. That one only cost the taxpayers $700 Billion.

My experience

[einhverfr]

I live in Chelan, Washington. Our PUD has put in fiber to Chelan, and many of the other towns and cities in the county. These fiber services deliver ATM-based telephone and data services, and may eventually deliver digital TV.

For my 2Mb/s down 640Kb/s up connection and a telephone line, I pay about $53 per month. The telephone line is not Voice over IP, but is circuit-switched. ATM provides the means to transmit both the voice and data channels down the fiber.

Now, our PUD doesn't offer these services directly. They only run the fiber network. My actual telephone and internet bill come from my provider of these services (Localtel). What the PUD has actually done is open competition by allowing the customer to choose any of a number of service providers using their network. If I don't like Localtel, I can go to NW Telephone, or Panda Computers, or Modern Networking...... The list goes on.

Now, it is actually interesting. Verizon services here suck, to put it mildly. Ok. Their residential services are OK. But they don't offer any reasonable business services. No fractional T1, no PRI.... So if I am implimenting a phone switch for a customer, I am stuck with analog lines. This means I have to deal with echo cancellation and other artifacts of 4 to 2 wire conversion.

Now, if I have my customer go to fiber, some of the service providers *do* offer fractional T1, PRI, etc. services over the fiber. Now everything works great and the phone switch is cheaper, more robust, etc.

Competition is a wonderful thing.

The problem is, from a telecommunications company perspective, that they are used to being monopolies because of the fact that they own the lines. Community-owned fiber networks are a good solution to this problem, but they need to be used to stimulate competition by allowing choice of service providers.....