[quasarsunnix]

Is there a reason why the US has never introduced Local Loop Unbundling?

For those unfamiliar the idea is to allow various providers to use the same shared ‘last mile’ to provide competition without the need for a bunch of connections to each property.

In the countries I’ve lived in that use it, it seemed to work quite well. Lots of options with varying levels of service and competitive pricing.

I don’t think this would do much to solve the US’ issues in rural areas or areas without decent infrastructure already. But it does seem like it would help in the areas currently lacking competition as described in the article.

[ipnon]

NYC Mesh uses this approach.[0] They have "supernodes" shooting lasers across the city, which you can then receive with a dish on your roof, and these connect to an IXP. Payment is donation based, but their recommended donation is already more affordable than Spectrum (the dominant NYC ISP), and is billed per building, not per router, so becomes extremely cheap if you get your neighbors onboard. Installation is more complicated than plugging a router into a cable TV jack, but community volunteers are available to do installations. It's a remarkable example of the people taking power back into their own hands. On the subject of Spectrum I have nothing good to say.

But it stands to mention, this is in biggest metro in the United States, and an innovative tech hub at that. Rural Americans too often left in the dust in this regard. It is exasperating.

[0] https://www.nycmesh.net/

[BrandoElFollito]

On France the law requires the fiber provider to share it with other operators.

Over they lay the fiber and provide the end user connector box, there is a 3 months period during which it is not possible to give offers to allow other operators to prepare their offer.

So often you get a bundle of the main three operators, but not always.

In my case (a dense city next to Paris) Orange provided the fiber and the only offer. I had to wait one, and then two years for the other ones show up.

[oogali]

They did. But only on copper facilities.

In the United States, they are called unbundled network elements or UNEs[1][2].

The ISP (either directly or through a nationwide aggregator[3] such as Covad, NorthPoint, or Rhythms) would purchase a UNE from the phone company, aggregate the data portion into a DSLAM[4], which would pass layer 2 back to the ISP’s network interconnect (to be bridged through the ISP’s router).

This was one of the things that made the early days of DSL feel so much more competitive from an end user perspective.

However, utilities were granted an exemption[5] as part of the National Broadband Plan from needing to unbundle on greenfield deployments (e.g. fiber to the home) to allow for “return on investment” and/or faster deployments.

This exemption fueled a somewhat perverse incentive of removing copper facilities during or immediately after a fiber installation[6].

Going further, lobbyists have long argued on behalf of their utilities that unbundling wasn't necessary because an end user has access to multiple "competitive" options[7], e.g. someone fed up with their local wireline phone monopoly can switch to cellular; or someone fed up with their local cable TV monopoly can switch to satellite.

This was codified as a final ruling[8] in February of this year. This puts the nail in the coffin for UNEs, or at least their viability for providing high speed broadband.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbundled_network_element

2: https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/7521154234.pdf

3: https://www.channelfutures.com/telephony-uc-collaboration/bu...

4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_subscriber_line_access...

5: https://www.cybertelecom.org/broadband/fiber.htm

6: https://seclists.org/nanog/2012/Mar/759

7: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-367363A1.pdf

8: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/01/08/2020-25...