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Google Fiber's Latest FCC Filing: Comcast's Nightmare Come To Life
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from BGR: What's every incumbent ISP's worst nightmare? If we had to guess, it looks something like the filing that Google just made with the Federal Communications Commission. As The Wall Street Journal reports, Google this week told the FCC that reclassifying broadband providers under Title II of the Telecommunications Act would have a big side benefit for Google Fiber because it would give Google Fiber the same access to utility poles and other key infrastructure currently enjoyed by Comcast, AT&T and other big-name ISPs.
Why not just run one fiber, ditch all the copper, terminate it at the local POP and then allow various vendors access to that fiber and compete for my business?
More like every internet users dreams come true!!
... it can only be good for us...
So this reclassification is needed to allow them to do what they should already be allowed to do?
Why does the law prevent this competition in the first place?
Similar: why does Comcast have access to utility poles without the Title II classification?
This law exists mainly so conditions could be placed on service providers that forced them to serve areas that would not be profitable for them. It started with phone, electric, and TV services but the phone and Cable TV operators found ways to expand their business by offering data communications over the same lines they already had access to.
This meant they could effectively use their privilege of serving an entire population center and the already installed infrastructure to deliver something that would cost other significantly more to otherwise do. The bonus was that while they could dual use the lines (say voice and data like with DSL or Cable TV and Data like Comcast) their competitors could only deliver data communications because a condition for them servicing the unprofitable portions of an area was exclusive access to the profitable portions for a period of time. In many places, that period of time is still in effect.
How much does it cost to wire up a town for high speed internet access? Why would a company invest that unless they were confident they'd get a profit? That's why the town offers a special deal and access that the ISP otherwise has no right to.
You think anybody should be allowed to use whatever city infrastructure they like?
Not that I actually want to defend the mess that is the current system. Perhaps the obvious solution is to allow cities to put in their own ISP structure, but then that's government using it's advantage of force to compete unfairly with private business, which is the reasonable argument for some states to prevent such competition.
Socialist solutions to ISP infrastructure work, but the US tends to have a difficult time with the idea that everyone should be forced to pay for what private companies are already providing to people voluntarily paying for what they actually use.
If the US decides to treat broadband as utility infrastructure, taxes come into the equation, which is money taken by the threat of force, which is completely the opposite of what people like about capitalism. It is a reasonable expectation that it will destroy a private industry and the innovation that is driven by the motive of profit, which is no small trade off in an industry which is rapidly changing.
I actually think that the ISP industry needs to be more strictly regulated by legislation, but it won't take many mistakes to end up with a worse problem than the one we have.
It was probably a rule in place so didn't have anyone putting lines up on the poles and cause problems. Either putting up to much wire, crippling competitors lines, etc.
ISP's don't have access to right of ways, but telcom and cable do. It just so happens that most ISPs are also telcom or cable. But if you want to just be a fiber ISP and not get into the huge regulated mess of providing "cable" or telephone services, then you're out of luck.
Why does anyone have to be classified, by the government, as a provider, under title, yada yada?
Poles, conduits, rights-of-way should belong to the local authority, managed and maintained by the lowest bidding contractor. Anyone or any company then has the right to use, for any commercial or non-commercial purpose, said infrastructure to run their cable or fiber, upon payment of a reasonable fee to cover the upkeep.
I am not a fan of eminent domain, but if the incumbent says "We installed these poles, they belong to us" then they should be bought out.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
âoeIf Title II gives Google pole access, then it might really rock the world with broadband access.â Then what are there 987 archaic rule sections of Title II good for?
Back in the 80s and 90s lots of smaller cable companies lobbied local governments and were granted easement access to install their poles, wires, and equipment. Many poles belonged to various utility companies and Ma Bell and access was also negotiated with them. This is a very long process with lots and lots of red tape.
Bigger companies like Comcast bought these smaller companies primarily for these rights. Anywhere smaller companies overlapped the wires were pulled off of poles to prevent any chance of a competitor gaining easy access to these rights. Any new competitor would now need to start from the very beginning like the smaller companies did in the 80s and 90s in obtaining access.
In my city we had a choice of Dimension Cable and Cable America in the 80s and 90s. Both of these smaller companies did all of the busy work for Cox which gobbled both of them up and dismantled the redundant perfectly good infrastructure of Cable America.
Comcast did this on a much larger scale.
Comcast has their cable monopoly that allows them to use the poles as part of the contact with the cities they are in. They use this as a means to prevent competition through graft and exclusive contracts...Title II would prevent cities from blocking right of way access to competition like Google.
You know what, at this point I don't care if Google vows to sell every single bit of traffic I send through them, or changes the business vow to "Do Evil Whenever Possible", I want Google Fiber regardless of the cost to any freedoms or privacy I may enjoy now.
I had fiber years ago and have missed it ever since, living under the Rule Of Comcast... so I don't care what happens anymore, just let Google consume all network providers everywhere.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Any new competitor would now need to start from the very beginning like the smaller companies did in the 80s and 90s in obtaining access.
No, it wouldn't be like back then at all. Back then, they didn't have to fight a huge company with lots of money for lobbying and lawyers.
use SNAP headers or similar to handle billing, etc. but you know, it just looks like providers want every drop of the gravy themselves.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I have mixed feelings about Google Fiber (I strongly believe that open-access municipal fiber networks are the better option) but I consider this a tremendous New Year's present that utterly decimates the misguided viewpoint that common carrier rules will impede such projects. Every free-market preaching tool that has said "The next Google FIber won't happen with Title II!" Can now procede to eat crow.
It would be the death of those Comcast termites.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Federal law states that:
"A utility shall provide a cable television system or any telecommunications carrier with nondiscriminatory access to any pole, duct, conduit, or right-of-way owned or controlled by it." (47 USC 224)
Comcast has this right by virtue of being a "cable television system". The major phone companies have it because they are "telecommunications carriers". But facilities based ISPs like Google Fiber are currently (and incorrectly) classified as neither so they are out of luck until sanity finishes kicking in at the FCC.
WOW, or Way Out West.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Meanwhile in civilized world (Europe): Poland/Warsaw, Regulatory body prevented UPC Cablecom, European cable giant, from completely taking over local competitor. UPC was forced to sell hardware infrastructure gained in the merge, and obligated to lease it for at least 12 months after the sale.
"In May 2013 Netia acquired from UPC Polska a part of former Aster cable operator’s network, which was classified for resale according to the decision of the President of the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) as of September 5, 2011 approving the acquisition of Aster cable operator by UPC Polska. Netia purchased from UPC Polska and UPC Poland Holding BV 100% of shares in Centrina Sp. z o.o. and Dianthus Sp. z o.o., which own cable networks in Warsaw and Krakow reaching a total of 446,000 homes passed. The transaction has been treated as a purchase of network assets and related liabilities with a net valuation of PLN 5.8m. Simultaneously, UPC Polska concluded with Centrina and Dianthus a 12-month network rental agreement in order to ensure service continuity to its customers during a transition period. Total consideration payable to Netia Group for this network rental amounts to PLN 4.5m. Moreover, Netia will receive discounts on certain ongoing commercial agreements between the Netia Group and UPC Polska. These discounts are estimated to amount to PLN 16.4m and will be recognized as they are received."
Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) - sounds pretty alien to all USians, doesnt it? :)
Result: 300Mbit/s internet is $17/month. 300Mbit internet + A la carte TV (YES, about $1.5 per 1-17 channel bundles you can freely pick from, 170 channels in total) starts at $20/month.
http://giga-kablowka.pl/
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
We already tried that. There was one set of communication lines, and various companies had access to them, at rates set by the government. Somebody had to maintain the infrastructure of course, and their rates and profit margins were heavily regulated. The company managing the infrastructure was called Bell.
Under that model, calls could cost a dollar per minute. We then tried a different model, and immediately rates went to 10 cents per minute. Later, we now have four different companies providing competing coverage, redundant towers covering the same area, and I pay $25 for unlimited calls and unlimited* data.
Your proposal makes perfect sense on a planet with no humans, only perfectly logical machines, or Vulcans. It's been tried here on earth many, many times in various ways and it always fails when there is actual human nature involved. Humans are greedy and lazy.
When the various wireless companies compete, meaning they each try to provide better service in a particular area (meaning putting towers in the same area), their greed offsets their laziness. In order to get my money they need to provide better service than the other three companies, and/or a better price. Without that, you end up with "we're the phone company, we don't care".
Again, what you suggest SOUNDS logical, and would probably work if it weren't for humans. It never works in this world though, unfortunately.
Yes, the... what? 5000? 10,000? people that have Google Fiber will be very excited about this. lol
It's all well and good to install fiber in some of the easiest areas in the country to service. But almost all of those places already had multiple choices for ISPs. When Google starts rolling out fiber in rural Idaho, where the need really is, then it'll be interesting. But I have a feeling that'll never happen.
While i hate federal involvement as much as the next guy, clearly something needs to be done to stop what is going on now.
The entire purpose of public property is for public use, it if wasn't we would be communists. To try to deny access to anyone to public property is a violation of equal protection. Anyone and everyone that wants to start a public utility of whatever sort they want should have equal access to public property as anyone else does. Exclusive agreements for public property access have been struck down every single time someone tries to enforce them because they aren't legal. Any "franchise" agreement that has terms limiting it to a single utility are illegal on their face and those terms will never be allowed to be enforced.
Most places have one cable provider. There were supposed to be two per market. Due in no small part to the cost of running cables over existing infrastructure. It's expensive and nobody else thought it was worth the investment so far. But none of them were Google.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I encourage you to wean yourself from the superfluous use of 'literally'. You used it twice in as many sentences but it adds nothing. Its absence would not change the meaning of your words in any way.
This bad habit seems to have spread over the past couple years and has become as annoying as the random insertion of "like" in conversation as substitutes for commas and periods.
it'll stream on 1.5.
I like how the ISPs charge netflix to do that. Install local servers.
IIRC it was just about getting Netflix to pay the power to run the servers.
Which was not as inflammatory as I thought so I went back to checking my eggs.
so you have a landline?
who has a landline? more like landmine. get off my lawnline!
When Google starts rolling out fiber in rural Idaho, where the need really is
what?
I mean I'm pretty happy with DOCSIS 3.0, I don't see why we need to ditch the copper, I just want unlimited off-peak-hours.
There is another approach. To my knowledge, it has never been used anywhere in the world.
One monopoly could own, operate, and maintain the poles, wires and fibers. They would be a public utility and be answerable to the public service commission for tarrifs and meeting reliability and availabilty requirements. But they would not provide any consumer service at all. Their customers would be the electric power and communications companies that rent use of the facilities. Perhaps even natural gas and water distribution pipes could be included in the bundle.
It is already true that power and communications utilities outsource a lot of the line construction, operation, and maintenance of distribution to outside contractors, so the change might not be a dramatic as it sounds. It would be primarily a legal change to make these contractors public utilities, with the rights and obligations that go along with their role.
Please correct me if you know of some place where this approach has been applied.
but if Cable companies want to act like local-monopoly utilities, they need to be regulated as such.
The pole will be replaced, and the electrical power wires replaced because that's a "safety of life" situation. There's also a "hierarchy of access for repair". Power company gets first crack, because of the hazard of live wires and the fact that most people are electricity dependent (and often, the power company "owns" the pole) so it's a safety of life
Telco gets second crack, because 911 service is considered safety of life.
Cable TV companies and such like are "entertainment providers" and will get access when everyone else is done, and that doesn't mean "jury rigged temporary power line".. it means "when pole has been returned to full operational status"
Basically, all those ads with utility workers out in the storm in the middle of the night wading across the river: That's electricity utilities. "keep the lights on"
Cable TV or internet providers, particularly for residential areas? "thank you for your call. Due to unusually high call volume..." They'll send someone out on the next regular work day, and in the mean time, "We will credit your bill for 1/31st of a month's service for each period of not less than 24 hours continuous outage"
Perhaps the obvious solution is to allow cities to put in their own ISP structure, but then that's government using it's advantage of force to compete unfairly with private business, which is the reasonable argument for some states to prevent such competition.
Not necessarily. A local municipality could build out a fiber network, maintain just the last mile connections and the layer 2 switching infrastructure, and lease that infrastructure to one or more ISPs who would link to the Internet and provide TV and phone service. US cable and phone providers don't rent out their infrastructure to other ISPs like this, at least not for general consumers, so there is no private business for the local municipality to to compete with.
Another option is to break up the local cable and telco monopolies. Separate the local loop from the Internet, TV, and phone service providers and put everyone on an equal footing.
A third option is for the local governments to seize the cable plant and infrastructure under public domain laws and give the cable operators and telcos a big middle finger. Considering how bad the cable, phone, and Internet service is in my region, I can't see how it would get any worse under government control.
It depends. I had a quote for a place I used to work for about $22,000 to run fiber out to our location in an outer suburb. The ISP eventually did a project where they ran fiber down the street, and it cost us only 9 grand to tap into it. It should have been a lot less, but they ended up having to bore underground for 1/8 of a mile to get the fiber into our facility. The local power company wanted to charge an unreasonable amount of money to attach to the poles on our own property.
Correction, that should read "eminent domain"
Works fine in Japan. Look up the FLETS system.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Actually that model works very well. In many countries the internet provision is better and cheaper with more ISPs to choose from than in the US.
I live on a small island with 80000 inhabitants. We have an incumbent telecom company which owns the last mile, but they must sell that last mile wholesale. As a result, we have not one but four ISPs we can choose from at a decent price, and you can get at least 50Mbit/sec service pretty much everywhere despite the rural spread-out nature of our population.
We don't get the terrible Comcast-only situation many in the US have to deal with.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Wonder why we can't get this done for natural gas? ...the shared use of the pipelines could be monumental for energy distribution as well. All under the "utility" banner...worked pretty well for landline phones.
Yeah, the first one was left over from editing, my mistake. I meant to move it to the second for emphasis but forgot to remove the first usage - I cringed a bit when I saw that it was still there.
And I did mean 'actually true in all cases' - to my knowledge, at least, every provider that has implemented some sort of payment for better service has ended up degrading service for non-payees. Even if only passively by foregoing needed infrastructure upgrades unless somebody else foots the bill.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
You are right. It is much worse now.
I really wish cities would run fiber like they do water and sewer pipes. It does make much more sense. I'm a bit uncomfortable having government manage the data though. I'd be worried about censorship issues and such. Having private companies compete to provide data over these lines may work though.