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by supergreg 3068 days ago
What is this superb country you live in?
3 comments

Probably UK? I have a choice of about 10 different ISPs where I live in the UK, and none of them would install anything in my house, they all use the same cable that runs to my house, it's just like changing electricity or gas providers.
We can make it a little bit more awesome. Many adressess have both a fiber and coaxial cable coming in. Making it a broad competition between fiber and coax. The (only large) cable supplier is Liberty Global, which has responded by bringing quad play products to the market at a pretty good pricepoint. T-Mobile is in as well with quadplay via fiber, plus a lot of local offerings. Say, 60 euros gets you quad play for the family, with 100Mb+, some free online content and 4GB+ mobile data.
The Netherlands.

Unfortunately, the fiber network doesn't cover the entire country yet. It was bought by the biggest telco a couple of years back and they pretty much halted expansion. Fortunately, a lot of local initiatives have started up with similar conditions.

> "It was bought by the biggest telco a couple of years back and they pretty much halted expansion."

Why did they halt expansion? Would they not make enough profit outside of denser metropolitan areas? Could such a model (whereby the government only allows construction of broadband network for companies that agree to lease out the wires to everyone) while facilitating ISP competition actually stifle deployment of new wire?

> Why did they halt expansion?

Because it's cheaper to upgrade their existing phone network to VDSL than to install new fiber. Basically, they already own a nation-wide copper phone network, the fiber network was a competitor. They bought the competitor and halted expansion so they could squeeze some more money out of their existing copper network. The official PR bullshit is that by upgrading the copper network they can offer high speed internet to more people in a shorter amount of time than by expanding the fiber network.

> Would they not make enough profit outside of denser metropolitan areas?

The denser metropolitan areas are the main areas where there is no fiber yet. It's the more rural areas that have the best fiber penetration.