In a message written on Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 12:20:37PM -0500, Steve Schultze wrote: > Congress went so far as to force ILECs (the incumbents) to lease their lines > to competitors for awhile, with the idea that it would lead the competitors > to build out their own "facilities-based" lines. Even with those incentives, > line-based competition failed to materialize to any substantial degree.
They did, I had my $300 T1 for a while years ago, and Covad/Megapath et all did a very good business buying the local lines (as UNE)'s and selling DSL services over them. While I don't think the model was the success I had hoped for, I think it was a success. However through a series of steps the iLEC's have effectively shut these folks out of the market. They lobbied, and won, that Fiber is not part of the requirements. Want to buy UNE "FIOS" fiber? Verizon won't sell it, the government won't make them. The AT&T's of the world went and installed "FTTN" (Fiber to the Node), where a node serves a small neighborhood. This allows them to be less than 1m from the house and offer up to 24Mbps DSL. The other providers sued saying they need space in the nodes, and lost. So Covad gets to be in the CO, with 20kft of copper, while AT&T gets to be in the node with 3kft of copper to the user. So from about 1996 to 2000 we had competition. They then figured out how to rig the system so there is no effective competition, and so far the government has been A-Ok with that. > The exclusivity for cable providers went away with the Cable Television > Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992, which you can read about in > the Background section of the FCC's 2007 Order Implementation of Section > 621(a)(1) (the first of two orders that sought to further remove local > control over many aspects of the franchising process): > > http://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2007/03/21/E7-5119/implementation-of-section-621a1-of-the-cable-communications-policy-act-of-1984-as-amended-by-the#p-21 And yet, I don't know of any location in the US with two cable operators. You see, these rules weren't changed to provide for a second cable TV plant to be put in the ground, even in the FCC knew that cost too much. Rather, if you read carefully the problem was that Verizon, AT&T, and Bell South (all mentioned by name in the article) wanted to deliver video over FIOS/DSL. Most areas had coverage rules, to be a cable provider you had to pass 95%+ of the houses or such, and these folks didn't meet many of the local rules and went to the government for help. So the government did the minimum to get folks who already had infrastructure in the ground the rules to use it to provide this service. The result is not competition, but a government sponsored duopoliy. This didn't bring more players to the table, it just let those already at the table offer a full set of overlapping services. Likely a good step, but not the same as getting new entrants into the market. -- Leo Bicknell - bickn...@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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