[bruce511]

I'm not in the US, but in my country the fibre-provider and the ISP are unrelated companies. There are multiple fibre companies (typically an area is served by one or another of them although my area has two) and of course a couple dozen ISPs that do the ISP part.

This model works -really- well. ISPs compete on price, and service. Fibre folks do the physical stuff. Fibre companies are incentivised to get rolled out in an area first. ISPs can scale up without having to raise huge capital. And the roadside only gets dug up once (mostly the fibre is buried, although some makes use of existing pole infrastructure. )

It's one of those (rare?) cases where good regulation, and a free market collide, and the result us that everyone has fibre.

I say this not to gloat, but rather to show that it can be beneficial to separate access from service for best customer service.

[1] my first ISP went under. I switched to a new ISP within an hour after the cause of the outage was understood.

[2] a couple of outages have been ascribed to the fibre provider, the ISP escalates those for me, and have been rectified within the hour.

Who knew competition could lead to such good customer service...

[1123581321]

This model is called open access fiber in the US and is how fiber is currently being rapidly built in small and medium cities, and some rural areas. It’s a significant change from a few years ago. Usually the fiber operator signs a telco as an “anchor tenant” for the city for mutual financial stability and then one or more other ISPs compete. Typical offerings are between 300/300 and 8 gigs(!) with 1 and 2 gig priced reasonably.

Physically, they’re negotiating the dig with the appropriate government body and then doing it all at once. Cables are buried by roads. The ISPs connect the network to the individual homes when the home signs up. Large apartments and office buildings have the dig done in advance and are usually restricted to one ISP tenant that the network operator chooses to service those locations/accounts.

Both the fiber operators and the ISPs are raising money to expand faster, in addition to the public money available, because the capital risk of this model is low, as you said.

[sofixa]

Similarly, but I think slightly better, in France anyone can run fibre to connect to homes, and they can have exclusivity over it for some time, but afterwards are forced to share it with competitors on fixed prices. Why I think it's better is that due to the limited exclusivity, and the fact that most people won't switch providers if prices are similar, you know you'll probably keep a decent chunk of the people who sign up during the exclusive period. Therefore you're incentivised to put in new fibre connecting more people.

[CogitoCogito]

Yeah everywhere I’ve lived outside the US does something similar and it always works much better than in the US.

> It's one of those (rare?) cases where good regulation, and a free market collide, and the result us that everyone has fibre.

I’d argue that good (and certainly not nonexistent) regulation is a necessity of a well-functioning, efficient market.

[BLKNSLVR]

I'd guess from your description and alias that you're Australian.

Man it took some work to get the model up and running though didn't it? Great idea from one party, totally politically destroyed soon afterwards when the other party got into power, and then slowly, over the course of a decade and a half, has almost reached the original vision.

Inspired this book: https://www.amazon.com.au/Frustrated-State-terrible-deterrin...

[philjohn]

It's the same in the UK for the most part.

OpenReach (which was "split off" from BT) puts the infrastructure in place, and OFCOM (our telecoms regulator) defines the price they can charge to ISP's for a connection - so you have a raft of ISP's who compete on price or service.

There are other infra providers though, Virgin Media (DOCSIS Cable) cover some of the country, CityFibre are doing a massive expansion (I now have all three available at my property), Hyperoptic (mostly focuses on apartments).

And then there's Hull ... which is a special case that never became amalgamated to BT back in the day and instead is served by Kingston Communications.

For the most part it works well, but heavy regulations is anethema to some over the US side of the pond and therefore YMMV.

[Scoundreller]

Canada has a similar thing where incumbents have to open up their networks under some cost+markup algorithm.

It worked well for independent ISPs for a while.

But nowadays nobody questions it when that cost accounting went all Hollywood. Now incumbent’s subsidiaries run at a “loss” and sell never ending promo packages for less than they lease the lines out at. That’s just good competition, right? Nothing bad can happen.

Now most of the independent providers have been gobbled up by incumbents (sometimes selling service in other incumbents’ territory so we have the options of Satan-North, satan-west, satan-east and Satan-south). Yay?

[mathieuh]

If anything there needs to be more regulation in the UK, I don't understand why every year I have to go through the song and dance of calling up my ISP at the time, saying "it's too expensive I'm going to leave", and getting them to put the price down.

It seems like a lot of these companies' revenue relies on people being too lazy or ill-informed to do this so you end up paying way more than you need to be.

It literally takes two minutes on the phone sometimes.

[throwaway2037]

This is probably a function of the marketplace. Honestly, it is difficult to differentiate yourself as a modern ISP, except price. Most normies are using Gmail or the equivalent instead of POP3/IMAP from their ISP. As a result, ISP has cut-throat pricing that is probably heavily loss-leading. Then they jack up prices and how people are sticky -- don't leave. This outcome still seems better than shitty combined telco.

[sgt101]

There was a "cable 2" future where content bundles were going to drive differentiation, but then we got Netflix, Disney and Amazon so that went out of the window. I must admit I can't see any future for consumer ISP's apart from the one that you describe.

[throwaway2037]

What country? It would helpful to know so we can dig into the details. I can assure you they don't separate themselves (soft+hard) out of the goodness of their hearts. Telco loves a monopoly where they can get it. I am sure it was wise regulations -- which the US lacks on this matter. Also, national broadband projects in NZ + AU + SE have been fairly successful. Basically, the gov't pays to build the network, then leases parts of it to ISP who compete.

[theblazehen]

I'm from South Africa, and we have the same kind of separation here

[aednichols]

Excuse my ignorance, but at that point what does the ISP actually do other than send bills to customers and pay invoices for fiber plant and upstream bandwidth?

[watson]

The ISP sets up rack-cabinets full of equipment in central buildings where the “last mile” fiber terminates, close to the neighborhoods that they service. Each ISP that provides service to the area needs to have their own equipment there. This is how they differentiate and how one ISP can do 1Gbps while another might be able to do 2Gbps. Simply because they have installed different equipment. The fiber itself can of course support much more

[bruce511]

Thats likely true in some places, here though there's no local ISP hardware. (I expect they're in national data centres level).

[butlerm]

It is possible for telcos to provide point to point or point to multipoint layer 2 permanent virtual circuits (PVCs) from customers to providers or branch offices to home offices, and it used to be common. Frame relay and ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) were quite popular technologies for that.

In many if not most areas in the United States DSL (digital subscriber loop) based Internet access was originally delivered over PVCs established through a layer 2 ATM network. There were interesting problems with that so PPP or PPP over Ethernet is more common these days, even when the telco no longer really lets anyone compete with them in the provision of broadband Internet access services at layer 3 over the network they maintain thanks to a rather convenient federal court decision.

Layer 2 mostly Ethernet access over VLANs (virtual local area networks) to a chosen provider does live on in certain mostly municipally owned multi-provider networks though, and in some countries that is normal, although usually with the incumbent telco or ILEC (incumbent local exchange company) installing and maintaining the last mile to homes and businesses rather than a municipal operator as in some parts of the United States. Either way more than one provider can provide layer 3 Internet service on the same physical facilities that way, with layer 2 (e.g. switched Ethernet) virtual lans or virtual circuits operated by one company or municipality.

[bruce511]

Basically the ISP is doing the soft networking stuff, (DHCP etc), customer support (maning the phones), connecting routes, billing and so on. Think "software". The fibre guys are "hardware".

In my setup I don't think the ISP has any local hardware - they're all national, and run on the hardware provided by the fibre guys.

[monocasa]

Peer in the internet.

[js2]

The U.S. sorta did this in the copper days: the local/incumbent phone company owned the copper from the home to the CO (central office) and then phone service could be handled by either the ILEC or CLEC. And you could dial-in to whatever ISP you wanted. This was intended to provide some amount of competition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_local_exchange_car...

https://www.bandwidth.com/glossary/competitive-local-exchang...

But once you could get voice & data from either the telco or the cable company, this all went out the window.

[happymellon]

We sort of do this in the UK.

British Telecom own Open Reach who provide infrastructure for the country.

There is cable, for a second option in cities, and there are some regional fibre networks that provide a second infrastructure option, but for the most part Open Reach is the only option.

I had massive issues with my line, I had engineers come out and we were able to test the cables and show that there was a fault between my house and the exchange. I don't have a relationship with Open Reach so I had to rely on my ISP opening tickets and it disappearing into a black hole.

After 6 months of basically not being able to use it I had to switch to BT and magically I was able to get an engineer come out and it's all good.

Fuck BT, and the conflict of interest system where the infrastructure is managed by someone who also provides the service.

Luckily an Alt Network is laying fibre outside and should hopefully be able to supply service in the next 6 months and I'll be dropping BT infrastructure as soon as possible.

I don't care whether the system is multiple infrastructure options, or one infrastructure and multiple services over the top but in that case my infrastructure provider should be separate from my service provider.

[sgt101]

Openreach offer 2 SLA's to ISP's, a cheap one and one that gets service. Sky, Voda and BT buy the better SLA. I have worked in these organisations and I can tell you Openreach really doesn't give a flyin f about BT Retail/EE above and beyond the customer relationship that they have with Sky or Voda. They do care less about the smaller ISP's because they spend much less with them and don't have the bosses phone number.

It doesn't matter at all if you get fibre as that only goes wrong due to physical breaks (I know this is only 99% true but it's basically true), but both Sky and BT invested a lot of money in being able to resolve copper faults so have a good capability to both identify what's needed and get appropriate action from Openreach, I don't think anyone else does.

Anyway - the Openreach infrastructure really is separately managed. BT Consumer is just another ISP now.

[happymellon]

> both Sky and BT invested a lot of money in being able to resolve copper faults so have a good capability to both identify what's needed and get appropriate action from Openreach, I don't think anyone else does.

Bullshit.

I had Zen, and we had identified exactly what the issue was quite quickly.

> the Openreach infrastructure really is separately managed. BT Consumer is just another ISP now.

Then split it off. BT cannot be trusted to be impartial, regardless of how many "former BT employees" tell us otherwise.

[sgt101]

Best get lobbying for that then!

Good luck friend.

[toast0]

> But once you could get voice & data from either the telco or the cable company, this all went out the window.

Line sharing in the US extended to DSL served from COs, but faster DSL came from remote terminals that were closer to users and didn't have space for CLEC equipment.

Under the US Telecominications Act of 1996, the FCC likely could have mandated more line sharing arrangements for cable and DSL from remote terminals, which isn't the same as fully separating wiring from service, but gets some things good enough so people have at least a chance at having an option for getting better routing or getting a static IP or ...

[merlyn]

After the Brand-X decision (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Cable_%26_Telecommuni...) all the iLECs shutdown any attempt at line sharing.

[gentleman11]

> It's one of those (rare?) cases where good regulation, and a free market collide

Free markets can’t exist without regulation. Otherwise, literal warlords take over, and if not that, monopolies and oligopolies and anticompetitive behaviour and externalities

[overstay8930]

I was a network engineer at a large Tier 1 ISP, and let me tell you it is not all that great.

Europe as a whole has a fuck ton of congestion and reliability problems because ISPs don't want to build out fiber and these fiber companies are very slow to roll out and increase capacity, because they don't have an incentive to be fast or build fiber to the same places multiple times like in the US. If anyone remembers the Hetzner-DTAG fiasco you'll know what congestion I'm talking about where unless you are directly peering with someone on an internet exchange you can forget about having a good experience.

In Europe outside of the incumbent carriers, most ISPs build a local network and just peer at an exchange while buying the crappiest and slowest IP transit link they can get, meaning most Europeans reading this could just run a speed test to a network not directly connected to your ISP and see how bad their network speeds really are to most of the internet (you also probably don't have IPv6 either). Big ISPs also have zero incentive to peer with anyone because all of those small ISPs can usually only buy Transit from them (transport is out of the question for most small ISPs in most of the continent), unlike in the US where even Comcast has to appease their customers somewhat as there's a lot of competition these days from TMO and VZ.

In the US ISPs build their own transit and transport networks, meaning large ISPs have an incentive to build fast and reliable networks with lots of capacity and redundancy so they can sell access to said networks. This doesn't happen in places like Europe where there might be a single transport network for an entire geographic area. It also means that unless you are as big as Netflix, you can pretty much assume everyone in the lower 48 will have a good experience connecting to your server since congestion is only a hyper-local thing out here, but in Europe congestion is such a big problem the EU had to step in and ask American tech companies to voluntarily lower bandwidth usage so they could keep up.

That's also why you see so much shit from those same telecoms who cry about having to upgrade their network because of said big tech companies, when in reality it was those same telecoms who sat on their asses not building fiber and not upgrading capacity.

When the pandemic hit and ISPs realized they were resting on their laurels, a lot of fiber building companies were unable to handle the request for more capacity because every other ISP in Europe is asking for the same thing, and most ISPs can't build their own fiber as they never invested in their own equipment and training as, again, the government gave that job to someone else.