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by toast0 4103 days ago
> This is called competition. It's what you get with net neutrality. Since every ISP has to give you everything equally, the only way they can compete is by building better infrastructure and compete on ping time and bandwidth. This is how it should be. Allowing them to prioritize certain services for a fee (regardless of who pays) means allowing them to stagnate - in fact paying them to stagnate - which is bad for everyone.

Access to everything equally is not physically possible; if we pretend it is physically possible, it's not logistically possible: no ISP is going to peer with all networks at all peering points; and no regulator is going to compel an ISP to peer with all networks at all peering points.

Unbundling is easy to define, and easy to regulate, and offers a way to get competition where it's most effective. Unfortunately, it seems to be not easy to put in place. The basic idea with unbundling is that last mile delivery is cost intensive, and has high barriers to entry, etc: a market solution isn't going to work: instead require that the last mile providers offer wholesale access to get packets to a centralized point (or points) where other providers can deliver the connectivity to rest of the networks. This actually makes sense: once you're at a carrier hotel, you have a large number of options to interconnect; getting from a central last-mile provider building to a carrier hotel is managable, but getting from each home to a specific building is capital intensive.

1 comments

> no regulator is going to compel an ISP to peer with all networks at all peering points.

Then we need new--and more stringent--regulation.

You can't really regulate an impossible solution though.

Unbundling has a clear model that works (or is at least workable), look at the US between 1996 and 2004, or most of Europe now.

Growth in internet speeds was way faster from 2004-present than from 1996 to 2004. In 1996, my parents had 28.8 kbps dial-up. In 2001, they got 256 kbps DSL. That's 10x over 5 years. In 2006, they got 50 mbps fiber. That's 200x over 5 years. See: http://www.ieee802.org/3/ad_hoc/bwa/public/sep11/cloonan_01a....