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Canadian ISP Co-Op Shows Upside of Line Sharing
Golden Gael writes "The FCC got rid of mandatory line sharing in the US a few years ago, but it's alive and kicking in Canada, and an interesting article at Ars Technica looks at what can happen when there's vibrant broadband competition. 'Wireless Nomad does things a little differently. The company is subscriber-owned, volunteer-run, and open-source friendly. It offers a neutral Internet connection with no bandwidth caps or throttling, and it makes a point of creating wireless access points at the end of each DSL connection that can be used, for free, by the public. Bell Canada this is not.' The ISP has some ambitious plans for the future, including getting involved in WiMAX."
I live in a city of over half a million people. Last night I spent about 40 minutes trying to find out what my broadband options are. Nobody is upfront; it was incredibly difficult to determine even how much each service will cost after the teaser rates expire, especially if you don't want bundled local telephone or cable TV. Next, try to determine what DSL speed you'll get at your house, or what the upstream bandwidth for cable is. You can't. Just lots of stupid marketing fluff and "congratulations! Satellite Internet is available in your area!" type garbage. In the end I gave up, it didn't look like I have any real option besides what I have now - Comcast (which is good but too expensive, especially since I don't really want cable TV any more). I am sick of everybody pretending the free market is at work so everything is great. It isn't.
First the dollar and now this?! Is Canada the new America?
Seagoon: Shut up Eccles!
Eccles: Shut up Eccles!
Before anyone comes in screaming that this isn't how the "free" market is supposed to work, how bad governement intervention is, etc. etc., let me point out the following:
In Canada, the biggest telco, by far, Bell Canada, was for a very long time a state sanctioned monopoly and thus recieved tons of public funds to help build its infrastructure (not unlike the situation in the US). Due to this fact, the CRTC (the Canadian equivalent of the FCC, but usually with a clue), forces Bell to allow access to its lines to competitors, as mentionned in the article.
Results? While the particular company Ars focused on isn't a resounding success (even if it has cool ideas), there's tons of others that are. Example: unlimited, uncapped DSL, which would cost me 45$ with Bell, cost me 28$ with one of its competitors because Bell has to lease them the line for 22$/month (a price point at which they still make a profit, I feel it must be pointed out).
And it's not just competition on prices and service level, it's customer service too. Anyone that had to deal with a telco before, at one point or another, pretty certainly wanted to go on a shooting spree. The company I deal with? Pick up the phone and someone (in Canada!) will answer, straight away, 24h a day... none of that "please press 1-3-2-6... please wait... we're receiving an unusual volume of call... waiting time is 17 minutes... your call is important to us" bullshit.
So, basically, go mandatory line-sharing! Anyone wanna bet that it's never going to happen in the States? ;P
There is no such thing as a free lunch, and there is no such thing as a free internet connection. Economies of scale apply as well, and I doubt this model is easily scalable. Less regulation and more privatization is the way to go, not socialized internet.
I am sick of everybody pretending the free market is at work so everything is great. It isn't.
The whole point of the free market is, if you do not like the way companies provide a good or a service, you are more than welcome to secure your own investors, get your own right of way, run your own cable, and sell your own broadband.
This is my sig.
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Bell and Rogers are SLOWLY rolling out WiMax off their Cell towers. They're supposed to have most of the population in Canada covered in the next few years, though I highly doubt that, seeing as they're going to be trying to service areas that still have people stuck on 4-party lines, let alone having Cell towers in the area.
...invade our country and change our regime! Our citizens are too stupid to fix our country, and I don't want to move, so you're going to have to expand in to our territory and bring all of your sanity with you! Wouldn't it be fantastic to see our president having to face a parliament every day?! You Canadians require a simple math test to claim lotteries (so that it becomes a game of skill instead of a game of chance, right?), and I'm thinking we should require a simple geopolitical test for our highest offices. I'm ready...to be Canadian! Let's welcome our new smart and sane overlords from the great white north!
Look at any map. We've been on top of the US since day one!
Be relentless!
In the US (and I believe in most countries), the physical layer of telephone and cable tv is by definition not a free market because the government grants the phone and cable companies monopolies. It does this because fiber, coax, and phone cabling are natural monopolies: It's in the general interest not to have every entrepeneur trying to duplicate everyone else's run of wire/fiber, and the government enforces that interest.
The free market only applies when the barriers to entry are assumed zero, or at least low; The barrier for becoming a telco that owns it's own physical transport layer is so high that it would be disastrous if more than one or two players tried.
Just thought I'd point that out. Internet here is quite pathetic, but it's not strictly a free market problem. It's more a general population problem which is amplified by having a free market environment.
No, it's not a "general population problem"; ignorance is economically rational because obtaining information has costs associated with it. Furthermore, it's part of a free market that sellers take advantage of this to charge more than they would if people had complete information.
When you balance out all these effects, it means that a regulated market can sometimes operate more efficiently than a free market. That's why regulating cell phone and cable markets may make sense.
The only "problem" with any of this is that laissez-faire free market proponents don't know their economics and propose bad economic policies.
These guys are clearly Like Us, and it's to be commended that they rolled up their sleeves and got stuck in. But from reading the article I got the impression they need to sharpen up their business skills a lot. For all the bitching you see about how evil ISPs are on Slashdot, this article demonstrates nicely why they are that way. Some good quotes:
No shit they used a lot of data. A small, new ISP run by a couple of guys that's offering unlimited data access for a flat rate? That must have attracted torrent users like bees to honey. They blame video traffic later, but everytime I talk to an ISP employee about where their bandwidth goes, the answer is always "p2p, everything else" in that order. How did they not see this coming? Did they really think existing ISPs impose caps and throttles because they were told to last time they communed with Beazulbub? I won't even comment on using credit cards to pay business costs ....
Stories like this indicate why people might think that way.I like their courage in trying to shake up the ISP market like this, but a cold, realistic assessment of why existing ISPs are the way they are would probably have helped.
In Finland Saunalahti has to offer somewhat similar deal with their Wippies project. You cannot get unlimited bandwidth but you get a free ADSL/WLAN box plus a 4GB mailbox. The rules also define you must share your internet connection through the WLAN for the first year. There is also hot spot maps, blogs and other "creative stuff" built around it.
``It offers a neutral Internet connection with no bandwidth caps or throttling, and it makes a point of creating wireless access points at the end of each DSL connection that can be used, for free, by the public.''
Sounds great for the consumers, but how does the company generate revenue? They will still have to pay the bills.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
And those rules needs to be enforced by the government, aggressively, and that's what we did in FRance, and, surprise! it works.
... and mountains of cash for capitalists close to the gov't.
Neo-liberals (to you merkins that is conservatives, neo or not) worship Adam Smith but it's like they've never read him. A working free market needs choice, information and rational, free actors. When megacorporations are allowed to abuse their monopoly to remove choice and carpet bomb the media with BS advertising, you've got a non free market right here.
That said, even the free market at its best is no panacea. Liberalising the telecom market was the best thing to do; I'm entirely opposed to doing the same to the electricity market for example. We already have the cheapest electricity or close to it, what will we gain with privatization? Oh that's right, just like UK and Germany: massive price increase
Is Canada the new America?
Well, y'all went first: You were the prototype, an alpha, if you will.
(Hmm, North American democracy, about 100 years between releases... ...makes Debian look good!)
I'm here EdgeKeep Inc.
Anybody know how well this box works as a SlimServer MP3 server?
Americans are really clueles... Titling the article "sticking it to l'homme" for a Toronto ISP is like calling an Alabama ISP "A fine nigger ISP", given how the english HATE the french.
After reading the article, it was clear that Nomad Wireless never broke even and had very little chance of turning a profit. Why should we care about this article? Nomad only has about 100 customers.
Why does UTOPIA never come up in these discussions? Japan simply prohibits or dismantles monopolies in certain areas--NTT, for example, is not allowed to offer internet service.
I live in Toronto, and it's painful to hear people cheering $28/month line "sharing" when other jurisdictions regard data infrastructure as public infrastructure and consequently offer services light(ha!)-years ahead of what's available to me.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"