Slashdot Log In
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.
from the grass-roots-muni-wifi dept.
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."
Related Stories
Firehose:Canadian ISP co-op shows upside of line sharing by Anonymous Coward
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Canadian ISP Co-Op Shows Upside of Line Sharing
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 85 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Frustrated with options in the US (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Frustrated with options in the US (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday October 24, @11:51AM)
"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.
that *is* a free market problem (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Frustrated with options in the US (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.sophiafieldphotography.com/)
Cheers.
You are more than welcome to run your own cable (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.mightyware.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday November 08, @10:18PM)
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.
Re:You are more than welcome to run your own cable (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:Frustrated with options in the US (Score:5, Insightful)
I am sick of everyone pretending there is a free market. There isn't
Getting results (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Bell/Rogers doing WiMax (Score:2)
(http://www.compwizrd.com/)
Questionable business skills (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://plan99.net/~mike/)
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.
Wippies (Score:1)
How Do They Make Money? (Score:2)
(http://inglorion.net/ | Last Journal: Thursday October 06 2005, @07:17AM)
Sounds great for the consumers, but how does the company generate revenue? They will still have to pay the bills.
Slimserver? (Score:2)
Clueless americans... (Score:1, Flamebait)
(http://205.205.253.95/Crackster | Last Journal: Wednesday September 22 2004, @09:57PM)
Not Profitable (Score:1)
Re:Must Be Great.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Must Be Great.... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/my/logout)
Re:free lunch (Score:3, Informative)
(Last Journal: Saturday June 12 2004, @09:43PM)
Re:free lunch (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.agileadvice.com/)
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's incorrect at an economic level. Heck, externalization of resource extraction and waste is a great "Free Lunch" that business has been getting for centuries. This attitude I often hear expressed is just a load of Ayn-Rand readin', chicago-school of business nonsense. Private industry (and I mostly work for banks, mind you) are no more efficient because, contrary to so-called market discipline theories, larger companies are not held to account on any terms but short term quarterly profits. Often, due to asymmetry of information, they are not so held for years. (Enron) Sure they fall, but at great cost to society. And large companies that have near monopolies exhibit exactly the same bureaucratic paralysis as governments, and are, in my experience, often worse, though not always. Certainly the Bells (and their heirs) do. They are usually completely outmoded by small and mid-size profit-making or not-for-profit ventures. Oh, and the ISP from the article? Small member-corporation. (i.e. members are shareholders).
Nothing wrong with capitalism in moderation, but there's a lot wrong with capitalist ideological demagoguery, just as with socialism. I'm for a complete ban on -isms.
Re:free lunch (Score:1)
Re:free lunch (Score:1, Flamebait)
(http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars)
Yup
and there is no such thing as a free internet connection.
My neighbours WiFi disagrees with you.
Economies of scale apply as well, and I doubt this model is easily scalable.
Well, if the government sanctions it...
Less regulation and more privatization is the way to go, not socialized internet.
Is it this easy to piss of a Republican?
Re:free lunch (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:free lunch (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday November 07 2006, @05:52AM)