Common carriers become the barrier to network upgrades. Always. Without fail. Monopolies are a bad idea, whether state or privately owned.
Let me give you 2 examples.
In australia we had Telstra (Formerly Telecom, Formerly Auspost). Testra would resell carriers ADSL services, and they stank. The carriers couldn't justify price increases to upgrade their networks and the whole thing stagnated.
We had a market review, and Telstra was legislatively forced to sell ULL instead. So the non monopolist is now placing their own hardware in Telstra exchanges, which they can upgrade. Which they did. Once they could sell an upgrade (ADSL2+) they could also price in the cost of upgrading peering and transit. We had a huge increase in network speeds. We later forgot this lesson and created the NBN. NBNCo does not sell ULL, and the pennies that ISPs can charge on top of it are causing stagnation again.
ULL works way better than common carrier. In singapore the government just runs glass. They have competition between carriers to provide faster GPON. 2gig 10gig 100gig whatever. Its just a hardware upgrade away.
10 years from now Australia will realise it screwed up with NBNCo. Again. But they wont as easily be able to go to ULL as they did in the past. NBN's fibre isn't built for it. We will have to tear out splitters and install glass.
The actual result is worse than you suggest. A carrier had to take the government/NBNCo to court to get permission to build residential fibre in apartment buildings over the monopoly. We have NBNCo strategically overbuilding other fibre providers and shutting them down (Its an offence to compete with the NBN on the order of importing a couple million bucks of cocaine). Its an absolute handbrake on competition and network upgrades. Innovation is only happening in the gaps left behind by the common carrier.
Oh wait ... the reason that freeway is always clogged is they are ripping it up, doubling it's width. And now I think about it, hasn't the NBN recently upgraded their max speeds from 100 Mb/s, to 250Mb/s, and now to 1Gb/s. And isn't the NBN currently ripping out the FttN, replacing it woth FttP, at no cost to the cusytomer? Sounds like a major upgrade to me. And wasn't the reason we got the NBN that Telstra point blank refused to replace the monopoly copper infrastructure with fibre?
If I didn't know better, I'd be think the major policy mistake Australia made in Telecom was the liberals to selling off Telstra. In a competitive market when a new technology came along a telecom is forced to upgrade because their a competitors would use the new technology to steal their customers. That works fabulously for 5G, where there is competition. But when the Libs sold Telstra it was a monopoly. Telstra just refused to upgrade the copper. The Libs thought they could fix that though legislation, but what happened instead is Telstra fought the legalisation tooth and nail and we ended up in the absurd situation of having buildings full of federal court judges and lawyers fighting to get reasonable ULL access. In the end Tesltra did give permission to change the equipment at the ends of the wires. But replacing the wires themselves - never. That was their golden goose. No one was permitted to replace them with a new technology.
Desperate to make the obvious move to fibre, the Libs then offered Telstra, the Optus, then anybody money to build a new fibre network - but they all refused to do so unless the government effectively guaranteed monopoly ownership over the new network.
Sorry, what was your point again? Oh, that's right, public ownership shared natural monopolies like wires, roads, water mains is bad. The thing I missed is why a private rent extracting monopoly beholden to no one except the profit seeking share holders owning those things is better.
"Things don't improve without competition" sounds like a fairy tale somebody tells themselves to justify a position. People like nice things. They don't need competition to motive them to work towards those things. Granted competition usually speeds things up, but it "nothing improves without competition" clearly wrong. There are too many counter examples.
Which is just as well, because the things we are discussing here are prone to forming natural monopolies. Roads, water, the telephone service, electricity supply - the thing they have in common is you will have one supplier, and you can't change to a different one. There is no competition. So the discussion wasn't about "should there be competition or not", because there is no choice. The discussion was about "who should own a monopoly - people you elect, or people whose only primary interest is extracting money out of their assets (which happen to be you)". You seem arguing for private ownership, and then using competition as the justification - when there is no competition.
By the by, other places do this competition thing far better than the USA. The NBN the parent was complaining about is indeed a government owned monopoly. Their asset is "the last mile". The arrangement in Australia is they are a common carrier in the strictest meaning of the term. But they are not allowed to sell to the public, that's the ISP's job. The NBN's prices are thrashed out in some back room somewhere between the ISP's and the government, in front of a set of open books. The ISP's are allowed to use other technologies like 5G and Starlink without penality, by law. As an consequence every Australian household gets to chose between 100's of ISP's, literally. Those ISP's are require by law to advertise "minimum expected speeds", and none of this "unlimited (meaning we get to define the limit)" bullshit is allowed. In other words, it's nearly a perfect competitive market.
One effect of that is there is no "net neutrality" argument here. The NBN is barred from such distinctions because it's a common carrier. The ISP's are free to do whatever they damned well please, and as a consequence you get all sorts of deals that violate net neutrality. 5G with limited downloads, but unlimited streaming from some platform is free for example. If you don't like that, say because your ISP blocks ports move to one that doesn't. You might be thinking "ahh, but moving between ISP's would be hard". But no, the law mandates churning between ISP's is free, fast, involving no more than a few minutes downtime, and requires no interaction at all with the ISP you're moving from.
Creating near a perfect competitive market in an area that is prone to forming natural monopolies does require some heavy handed government intervention. The NBN was one of the most heavy handed interventions I've seen in a while. The private operators where given every chance to build a new network on the condition it be open to all retailers (including them) at a price the government had some control over. They declined. Partially because government price control on a monopoly was too much to bear, but I think also because they thought their ownership of the copper network was too big a hurdle for even the government to overcome. The government overbuilt it with fibre. In a country that's even more spread out than USA, that was a huge undertaking. I suspect it would be impossible in the USA, where 1/2 the population allows themselves to be brainwashed by large corporates into thinking "government always bad, government always inefficient".
Yes, the government is inefficient compared to private operators in a competitive market. But the corporates who want you to think the government always runs things badly are the ones who want to take control of government owned monopolies. If you want to know what inefficiency looks like, join one as an employee. You won't get to see what's happening otherwise. The sausage is ugly, but they unlike the government are allowed to hide it from prying eyes. So they do, and tell you they are doing a wonderful job. Apparently you swallow it up.
I think you read what I posted and decided that what I said was "Private ownership is better than public"
Which is often true but not my point.
My point was that a common carrier with a legislative monopoly is always worse than anything else you can imagine.
Telstra - Bad when the government owned it, bad when it was private. We literally required legislative intervention to get ULL which was an absolute positive despite Telstra misplacing keys and refusing entry etc.
NBNCo - Bad under labors original implementation (ACCC really messed up the special access undertaking and it cant be repeated enough. Rod Simms should be fired out of a cannon into the sun. Hes the greatest villain in Australian internet history), Bad under the LNP (They fixed the market a bit, but introduced the postcode lottery and reduced competition by acquiring the HFC networks). Will not be made better by private ownership. Gets better every now and then, but requires ACCC, Ministerial and its own governance to sign off on changes. NBNCo is not the only imaginable model (private or public). Singapore, a government owned last mile monopoly, is really well done and very hard to argue with. Because they just sell glass.
You have clearly reacted to my posts from an ideological position. You see criticism of the governments terrible telco monopoly, as criticism of government action overall. (We have some pretty sweet state government fibre in Queensland for instance, they make themselves difficult to transact with but once you get in there they rock) You believe in immutable things like Natural Monopolies. The "Natural Monopoly" isn't the wire. The Natural Monopoly is the pit and pipe. And Pit and Pipe can already be shared.
Its going to hurt you, but let me put this to you. It would have been quite easy to run "NBNCo" as simply a common access arrangement to the pit and pipe. Instead of criminalising deployment of internet to residences, the government could instead subsidise underserviced areas. (which is the correct keynesian arrangement that Labor should be clamouring for if the NBN wasnt just a grab to brand the internet as something Labor did)
I cannot express to you how crazy it is, when I compile a map of fibre providers in metro areas, to see really good private fibre wholesalers holed up in private estates. It looks like a map of gerrymandered congressional districts in the USA. On one side of a fence you can get cheap blistering fast internet and on the other its gig at best with a nice big asterisk about CVC. Not to mention how many places these fibre providers already had hardware ready to go years before NBN came along. Basically, thanks to both Labor and the LNP, the best internet services in this country are available only to people who can afford brand new homes in private estates or inner city apartment buildings. Its BONKERs. Its absolutely MENTAL. My own mother lives in an estate that had 2 stages. Stage 1 was Telstra, now NBN VDSL, and 3 doors up the road when Stage 2 was built, they brought a private provider in first and I remember qualifying it for a 5 gig service 4 years ago. Its the same number of penalty units to overbuild the NBN as importing a million dollars of cocaine. And you would need to be importing vast quantities of drugs to see the NBN, any NBN, as the ideal path forward.
And whats great is you can hate the NBN but still support the government being the agent of success. They could atomise it (my preferred term as privatisation implies selling it to your mate steve and still having it be legislatively required to be shit) or ask it to simply provide pit and pipe. Or just glass. The government could do any number of sensible things, but it wont. Labor cant face up to the monster they created, and the LNP cant face up to the monster they claim to have fixed.
In select areas, some of which are currently served by third party fibre providers, who can provide up to 10G, who now will be forbidden to pipe in to new non business customer dwellings.
>And wasn't the reason we got the NBN that Telstra point blank refused to replace the monopoly copper infrastructure with fibre?
Right, a single giant telco monopoly is bad. Instead of removing the monopoly we built a new monopoly and tipped money in.
>If I didn't know better, I'd be think the major policy mistake Australia made in Telecom was the liberals to selling off Telstra.
They sold it off AND enforced ULL. Its the same thing, monopoly is forced to be better, still lagging behind competitive markets.
>In a competitive market when a new technology came along a telecom is forced to upgrade because their a competitors would use the new technology to steal their customers.
Right see my comment about the singapore model, where they just rent glass instead of a service.
>That works fabulously for 5G, where there is competition.
In the cities we had ADSL2+ competing with HFC and Fixed Wireless. The only monopoly was Telstras, who prevented people running residential fibre in their pit and pipe asset. HFC was a hack to use overhead wires because people could not use pit and pipe. That asset has been gifted to NBNCo who also have a legislative monopoly and also dont play nice.
> absurd situation of having buildings full of federal court judges and lawyers fighting to get reasonable ULL access.
Yeah there were a few instances of them fighting it. Which is another reason why monopolies are bad.
>But replacing the wires themselves - never.
Happened all the time. Actually they negotiated a shutdown due to NBNCo, certain copper services were simply stamped beyond economical repair and Telstra could choose to simply cancel services as part of the deal. I think you are upset about the customer owned piece of copper from the demarc in, which most residents would never upgrade.
>Desperate to make the obvious move to fibre, the Libs then offered Telstra, the Optus, then anybody money to build a new fibre network - but they all refused to do so unless the government effectively guaranteed monopoly ownership over the new network.
No one wants to commit to a national scale rollout of fibre. But many people are happy to roll out community and metro scale fibre. The key is open access. When you have a restricted pit and pipe asset, there can only be one provider. But funnily enough, commercial properties like housing estates and apartment buildings dont give a shit and let people come through and overbuild the NBN. TPG had to take NBN co to court and NBN withdrew rather than risking the rest of their monopoly.
>Oh, that's right, public ownership shared natural monopolies like wires, roads, water mains is bad. The thing I missed is why a private rent extracting monopoly beholden to no one except the profit seeking share holders owning those things is better.
My point is that common carrier sucks. If you instead made the pit and pipe asset the common resource, there would be little to no issue. Or just run glass like Singapore.
