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FCC Considers Opening Up US Broadband Access
An anonymous reader writes On October 14, the FCC issued a call for public comments on a study (PDF) done by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society about whether the US should require the telephone and cable companies to open their networks to competitors so that independent ISPs could begin offering broadband, much in the way it was done back in the days of dialup access. The study found that open-access in virtually every other country 'is playing a central role in current planning exercises throughout the highest performing countries,' noting: 'While Congress adopted various open access provisions in the almost unanimously-approved Telecommunications Act of 1996, the FCC decided to abandon this mode of regulation for broadband in a series of decisions in 2001 and 2002. Open access has been largely treated as a closed issue in US policy debates ever since. We find that in countries where an engaged regulator enforced open access obligations, competitors that entered using these open access facilities provided an important catalyst for the development of robust competition which, in most cases, contributed to strong broadband performance across a range of metrics.'"
Norway, Finland, Sweden & Denmark are all among the top nations in the world, for both cell phone & broadband coverage, and among the lowest prices in the world for cell phone use.
A key part of bringing this about here in Norway has been that the physical access layer ("last mile copper"/gsm cells) has to be available to competitors, with government-controlled rates.
I.e. when I got ADSL about 8 years ago, I got it from NextGenTel, a competitor to Telenor who owns my regular phone circuit.
On the GSM side we have two physical operators (Telenor and Netcom), both my kids get their cell phone service from one of many virtual operators (Tele2) which uses the Netcom infrastructure. Their monthly bills are usually so low that the operator will wait 3 months between each bill to reduce billing overhead. (I'm paying less than $10/month for each of them.)
Tele2 btw used to be based on the Telenor network, they got an even better deal (i.e. probably lower than government-mandated rates) from Netcom so overnight they simply moved everything across. My kids had to reset their phones to reconnect to the new set of towers, everything else just worked.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
Where do you get prices like that? Where I live I have a choice of either paying $50/mo, or paying $50/mo.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia