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by fragmede
2239 days ago
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Mandatory line sharing is an interesting idea. We've tried it before, back in the DSL era (2000s). Not saying we shouldn't try it again, but it only sorta worked. Whether instructions came down from ATT corporate offices or were malice, or incompetence, on the part of locally contracted installing technicians; the shared boxes were the worst of the commons. If a neighbor got from a rival DSL provider, your Internet was liable to go out until your ISP was able to get a truck out to fix the damage to your connection that the competition's technicians did. Those laws are still around, but unfortunately, (A)DSL tops out at single-digit megabits. An upgrade from dial-up, but not competitive with todays broadband market for those with other options. |
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Pricing was a big issue in the past --- where the 'wholesale' per-line tariff charged to the competitive carrier was more than the retail price charged to incumbent customers.
I think, in most cases, new install breaks other user types of issues are related to poor records of which line is used by which customer; that happens within the incumbent as well though (when I got ADSL2 installed, one of my neighbor's connections went out, and pretty soon there were three AT&T trucks on the street to work everything out). That particular issue could probably be solved by allowing the incumbent to manage all the installs and monitoring for install-time customer steering.
The federal mandate no longer covers line sharing, it only covers line leasing for copper telephone service; wherever your premises is directly connected to, if there's space for competitive equipment, the incumbent must make it available. Of course, most telephone companies have moved customers to remote terminals for better speeds, and there's no room for competitive equipment in the remote terminals; and a lot of telephone companies are replacing copper networks with optical networks, and those aren't covered either. The whole concept got submarined by the insistence that it apply to telephone networks and not cable or other "new technology" networks, and then deciding not to apply it anywhere in light of court cases that applying to one and not the other was unfair.