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Canadian ISP Co-Op Shows Upside of Line Sharing

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Fri Oct 12, 2007 09:38 PM
from the grass-roots-muni-wifi dept.
Communications The Internet
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."
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  • Frustrated with options in the US (Score:5, Insightful)

    by timeOday (582209) on Friday October 12 2007, @09:50PM (#20962887)
    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.
    • ^ Not a big free market believer

      "sick of everybody pretending the free market is at work so everything is great. It isn't."

      The problem in this case is not the free market itself, but rather that the average person has no idea what most of the stuff means. It's getting better, and we're seeing the beginning of the end for the market-speak in the internet area (the recent unlimited capped internet being the big thing now), but for the most part the average consumer has no idea what the applicable difference is between a 100 mb/s and 300 mb/s line is (they do know that one is 3x faster, but not how that will affect them and whether it's worth it). Because of that ignorance the providers are able to keep all the important information secret, because the majority cares more about whether they'll have the internet and be able to send e-mails rather than what they can expect their upload and download rates to be and what the caps are on their internet use. Once those are seen as important by the majority (read: once the majority is at least technologically sufficient, if not proficient) they'll start being advertised.

      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.
      • And I just realized my first sentence looks like something else, it's supposed to be an arrow pointing to my name, not to the parent. Sorry bout that. I was just trying to get the point across that I don't normally defend the free market, as I think there should be a decent amount of regulation (especially in cases like this where the general population is ignorant to what's important)

      • that *is* a free market problem (Score:4, Insightful)

        by m2943 (1140797) on Saturday October 13 2007, @02:00AM (#20963999)
        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.

        • So exactly how bad will your economy have to tank before you admit the current system is counter productive?

          It's not about how bad the economy will tank. It is about when the American media will spoon feed this point of view to the public so they can start considering it. Now that is closer to flamebait. The parent poster asks some very legitimate and challenging questions so I am not surprised that some people would rather try and censor them (moderation is kind of censorship since most people do not browse at -1)

    • Re:Frustrated with options in the US (Score:4, Insightful)

      by localman (111171) on Friday October 12 2007, @10:17PM (#20963057) Homepage
      Amen to that. I love the market. I believe in the market. But the maket does not solve all problems. So let's elevate the conversation away from finger pointings of "socialist" and "fascist" and start discussing when it is appropriate to regulate and when it isn't. And we can even revisit it from time to time. Right now, my sense is that the broadband market is a mess, there is no real competition, and regulation is needed to push things in a better direction. If you disagree, fine, but you should have a better argument than "the market is teh best!".

      Cheers.
    • 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.
      • Very funny.
      • 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

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by tjstork (137384)
          n 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:

          That's actually not really true. Fiber, coax and phone cabling are all communications services, and they do compete against each other. The local governments provide a spot where these cables can go, but its up to the carrier to actually m
      • Modded as insightful??? Funny, yes, insightful... you've got to be kidding me.

        Hasn't at least ONE person here ever read Lessig's book The future of ideas?

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by PJ6 (1151747)
        Pure free markets do not work without regulation; the law of increasing returns make them very much like the board game Monopoly, where eventually one person has all the money. Regulation is just like the rules that make a game like football interesting to watch, where the best players and the best teams are given the opportunity to shine. Modern rhetoric about "the economy" often asserts that simply maximizing profits to business is for the greater good, and this is just not true; the greater good, maximi
      • My goodness you're right, I'm not rich enough and consumers aren't getting screwed enough.

        I'll make a business plan where people buy into me and I get subsidies from the government to provide a service... I'll get paid at both ends!

        I'll use clever buy in prices and lies to get people to get my service! But who will I get to help me keep people buying this inferior service when they find out? My competition! And they can buy me out and get even bigger!

        Thanks Free market! You gave me EXACTLY what I was
        • My goodness you're right, I'm not rich enough and consumers aren't getting screwed enough.

          So what's your stupid alternative. Hey, let's get a bunch of preachers to go and talk about civic action and community and the need for collective action to solve some problem, rile everybody up, and then, what will you get? A government agency stuffed with a bunch of incompetent buddies of all these preachers, and when absolutely nothing works, you'll wind up with everyone in that organization saying, "geez, we need

        • Re:You are more than welcome to run your own cable (Score:4, Interesting)

          by sxpert (139117) on Saturday October 13 2007, @02:43AM (#20964095)
          there's no more government run service in France. France Telecom has been a private company for a while now.

          however, the market is heavily regulated to enhance competition, with mandatory local loop unbundling, regulated data backhaul prices for areas not yet unbundled, and regulated prices and availability for CO to CO fiber links for unbundler companies

          all this competition is imposed on France Telecom as they were the incumbent that inherited the entire original PSTN.

          Now that the 3 major ISPs are starting to set up FTTx, they are already regulated for fiber sharing at several locations along the path, notably at the building and Optical CO level

          and we get to pay 30 eur a month for uncapped service, including voip and tv over DSL
          • And those rules needs to be enforced by the government, aggressively, and that's what we did in FRance, and, surprise! it works.

            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 m

            • mountains of cash for capitalists close to the gov't.

              This isn't "capitalism", this is "corruption". And that's true wherever it's happening.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by tjstork (137384)
          Only to be crushed by being undersold until you go bankrupt, then watch in horror as the prices go back up.

          I think these problems are more in your head than they are anything else. Your whole argument is so much fear mongering to mask a political agenda... "we can't compete, so therefor, let's get the government to do everything for us." That's as silly as it is not true, because, people have competed, and, if you do have the government steal the lines that a company laid down, you'll only be creating a si

          • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

            by poopdeville (841677)
            Comcast was founded in 1963. It doubled in size after an acquisition in 1986, and then again in 2001, when they bought AT&T's cable service division.

            Verizon was founded in 1983 as the Bell Atlantic Corporation. An AT&T spinoff.

            Yes, there are lots of competitive newcomers in the market.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kwark (512736)
          But this is exactly what has happened in my neighbourhood.

          The "just do it yourself" mentality left me with a fiberoptic connection limited to 100Mbps up and down for the incredible high price of 39EUR per month.

          This happened after the former telecom monopolist and other established broadband companies failed to show any interest to create such a network (and why would they, since the already have some sort of intrastructure?).
    • There is a site that will list your options (for the US) and any recent prices/promotions:
      White Fence [whitefence.com]

      My wife found it while we were searching for our utility options at our new house.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by timeOday (582209)
        Again, some services listed there look interesting, but there is no way to tell what the service will end up costing or how fast they will be. The DSL services are all "up to XXX kbps," meaning I could end up with who knows what depending on the quality and length of wiring to my home. And the prices quoted don't include "taxes and governmental surcharges, if any." Well, are there any? Oh, and "ISP service required." So what are my options and the prices for that? You can't find out without putting in
        • That sucks. Our company guarantees you're at most 600m from a DSLAM, so you can get HDTV over our IPTV service. If we say 10mbps, that's what you get.
          • similar here with Sasktel. they keep the loop length at less than 900m. once they finish rolling out VSDL2 in the major centres, they'll like to go shortening that to improve bandwidth.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by zzatz (965857)
        White Fence shows the options that they were paid to show. For my address, they did not show the cable company that covers half the county, or any third party DSL provider. Including the one I am using right now. There are at least a half dozen other DSL providers, several wireless companies, and as previously mentioned, the cable company that has covered this area for more than a decade. None are shown. Only $GIANT_TELCO and satellite TV are shown. I'm sure that the fact that only competitors to cable are

        • Broadbandreports.com does a much better job listing Internet access providers.

          Here's what I get when I go to dslreports.com and click "Broadband prequalification process (what can I get?)"

          Closed until further notice

          Prequalification APIs from the major telcos are unavailable to third parties unless they are also allowed to spam or direct-market you merely for enquiring after availability. If you only check the majors, you are missing out on whether local ISPs may be offering equivalent or better servic

    • Re:Frustrated with options in the US (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2007, @10:33PM (#20963149)

      I am sick of everybody pretending the free market is at work so everything is great. It isn't.


      I am sick of everyone pretending there is a free market. There isn't

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Britz (170620)
      Sorry, but internet service is a so called natural monopoly. Look it up on wikipedia or elsewhere. Natural monopolies have to be regulated. The market here only works as good as the regulation is designed. And they are still working on that. I heard that in the US (I am from Europe) they actually have some very good regulation frameworks for stuff like energy.

      So don't blame this one on that market, please.

      Thx

      A free market believer

  • Getting results (Score:5, Interesting)

    by freelance cynic (653710) on Friday October 12 2007, @10:03PM (#20962979)

    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

    • Heh. One time I called Charter Communications to get a problem with my cable resolved. I spent half an hour with their automated troubleshooter before finally getting to a real person who proceeded to walk me through the same procedures the troubleshooter did. At the end of the call I felt like I had just wasted 30 minutes of my life.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Denis Troller (1002792)
      Yep, apparently it does work.

      We've had about the same thing in France. State owned telco monopoly. Opened up to competition a few year ago.
      Today ? An ISP named free pioneered the "triple play" offers with a 30 EUR DSL offer (up to 25 Mb/s if you actually happen to dwell in the DSLAM), and all others are following.
      The same ISP is now beginning to roll out fiber in some cities for the same exact price.
      It's not all perfect (hot lines have been less than stellar, to stay the least), but it's pretty nice.

      That IS

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by p0tat03 (985078)

      Note: I do not work for these guys, nor do I get any benefit from pimping like this, I'm just a very satisfied customer.

      I'm not sure which ISP the parent post was referring to - there are a few of them. Actually, there are MANY 3rd party DSL providers in Canada, it's just that few of them are worth a damn (much like the big-boy telcos). I'm with TekSavvy [teksavvy.com] and they have been awesome for the last 8 months or so I've been with them. Fast speeds, cheap prices, 24h phone support that always gets answered by the

      • Ditto. I'm also a very satisfied TekSavvy customer. Their service is awesome. Unlimited and uncapped service. Great speeds and low pings. They offer peering through two backbone providers - one is unlimited, the other is capped at 100 GB but offers lower pings for on-line gaming. I have nothing but praise. The techs and their sales staff they know what they're talking about and are extremely pleasant. They gave me the setup instructions I needed in about 30 seconds. I haven't had to call support since I sig
    • 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)

      The AT&T of 1878 was and would remain privately financed.

      New York Sate financed construction of the Erie Canal on its own because it couldn't persuade the federal government to share in the costs of building and maintaining infrastructure.

      In 1938 there was - 1 - US public airport with a runway that could take the weight of a tran

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Bert64 (520050)
          It is much the same in most other countries too...
          You have a selection of small ISPs offering a varying range of services, some cheap, some with value-add extras, different quality of support etc.
          But most people stick to the large "one size fits all" isps who advertise day in day out on tv, their services are usually fairly cheap and cater to the average user (runs windows, downloads less than 2gb per month, doesnt use voip, doesnt play online games, doesnt know what a static ip is and certainly has no need
  • 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.
      • Eh, that's what they call it right on their WiMax page, and we have it installed at one of our facilities, since ISDN/T1/DSL wasn't available.

        I'm not too surprised they lie though, it IS bell canada after all.

  • Questionable business skills (Score:3, Interesting)

    by IamTheRealMike (537420) on Saturday October 13 2007, @02:53AM (#20964131) Homepage

    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:

    Then came the first bills. Damien and Wilton found themselves immediately in debt to the wholesaler. The DSL subscribers had an unexpected thirst for data; the Wireless Nomad administrators had not set up their pricing scheme with these kind of numbers on mind.

    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 ....

    First, it's tough. People like brand names, even for ISPs, and they don't trust small providers to stay in business or to solve their tech support problems.
    Stories like this indicate why people might think that way.

    The idea is that a wireless router a few houses down from the main DSL link could relay the signal to another router even further down the block, and so on. If this worked properly, it could reduce the needed number of DSL circuits and could lower prices for all the co-op owners. Unfortunately, this was one of those not-quite-ready-for-primetime ideas, and it failed to live up to expectations ..... [on WiMax] Obviously, throwing open a DSL link to hundreds of simultaneous users invites total meltdown, but Fox suggests keeping the distance down and charging users a few bucks a months for access.

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bert64 (520050)
      The ISP i use de-prioritises p2p traffic, so that anything else takes priority over it. This results in p2p running very slowly or not at all during the working day (most of their customers are business users) but very quickly over night. I just leave a p2p client running overnight and its usually finished by the morning.
    • For contrast, my ISP in Ottawa is non-profit co-op. They are rather more organised however. There are usage caps (40GB per month, which seems pretty reasonable), but the service is great, they encourage sharing your connections and costs with neighbours, and are significantly cheaper than Bell, while providing (ultimately) better service. Thus, while the particular group singled out in the article are a bit dodgy, line sharing has resulted in a number of other non-profit organisations providing cheap intern
  • ``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.
  • Anybody know how well this box works as a SlimServer [slimdevices.com] MP3 server?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Arivia (783328)
      There is a difference between arguments and aphorisms.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by israfil_kamana (262477)
      Wow. I love knee-jerk ideology. Left or right, it's so devoid of content, and so full of jingoistic jargon. "socialized internet" Jeez. I think it's lovely that you can just apply the word "socialized" to anything and make it an epithet.

      Government is inefficient not because there is something inherently wrong with government per-se, but because it's not held to account and because our electorate is lazy, apathetic, uneducated, and manipulated . TANSTAAFL is a good principle as a personal ethic, but it

    • Re:free lunch (Score:5, Interesting)

      by zzatz (965857) on Saturday October 13 2007, @12:45AM (#20963717)
      Privatization in and of itself does not provide an efficient market. Competition, not private ownership, is what provides the benefits found in modern economies. More often than not, private ownership enables competition. Sometimes it does not, sometimes it stifles competition, and results in an inefficient market.

      Utilities are classic examples of natural monopolies. To be pedantic, this sometimes takes the form of oligarchies rather than pure monopolies, but the drawbacks are the same: the suppression of competition leads to high prices, poor service, and stagnation (lack of innovation). The oligarchs may divide the business by geography, like the railroads, or by type of service. Cable and telcos do both. Cable companies divide the country into exclusive territories, sometimes trade territories, but never battle over the same region. Telcos do the same. You local telco and cable may appear to compete with each other, but it is a very limited competition. They unite against any third party entering the market. They unite to lobby against any requirement to lease lines to real competitors. They unite to throw obstacles in the path of anyone foolish enough to try to run new lines.

      If you look at true free markets, there are usually at least three strong players and several smaller ones. For example, US auto market share 2007 YTD: GM 22%, Toyota 16%, DaimlerChrysler 16%, Ford 15%, Honda 9%, and so forth. Real competition. The same picture emerges for fast food, supermarkets, gasoline, clothing, you name it.

      Where I live, the phone company and the cable company combined have more than 90% of the Internet access market. Third place is down in the statistical noise. People ask whether I use cable or DSL, as if there were only two choices. They can't comprehend that there could be a third choice.

      If there isn't a third choice, there isn't true competition. If the third largest market share isn't at least half the size of the largest, there isn't true competition. We don't have true competition for Internet access in the US. We have an oligarchy which restricts competition.

      Privatization often increases competition. Privatization sometimes replaces one monopoly with another. Privatization is neither good nor bad. Competition is good, and when private enterprise is suppressing competition, then *anything* which increases competition is better. Including regulation, or even government ownership. As bad as government can be, sometimes private business is worse. Government lacks the feedback that competition provides, but provides feedback from voters that businesses lack. Even the DMV is easier to deal with than AT&T.
      • Agreed. The free market is just another tool. Recognizing how to utilize it is important to make the best of it.

        That is why free market fundamentalists are a pain in the ass to deal with. They point to all the examples where the free market succeeded and use that to claim that the free market always is superior. Religious faith in a system can't be argued with.

        Free market has its flaws. A well known one is that of natural monopolies. It is wasteful and costly to have each competitor draw lines to each house
    • So, how's that privatized government of yours working out?

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