The Call of the Open Sidewalk

This was originally a Reddit post. As so often happens when I reread something I wrote it just seemed to get better. It would be a shame to starve this blog of such insightful commentary:

Up to four years ago the CRTC was more or less harassing the monopoly telcom companies and leaving the new ones alone. The theory was that with enough leveling the new ones would get significant market share, the CRTC could step back, and Canada would have a competitive telcom market.

It didn't really work for reasons that are not important anymore. When the government forced the CRTC to let up on the monopoly companies the obvious happened. The market went from sorta competitive to not at all competitive. The results of many years of effort were reversed in a few years.

It seems that the government was being willfully stupid in this. I guess we can only hope that they have some clever long term plan to let things get so bad that the political will will arise to actually fix things.

Simply allowing more foreign competition as the report suggests will only mean that the names of the companies will change. We don't need more competition. We need to make competition possible.

When the US government broke up AT&T back in the 80's they didn't just stop at that point. They worked to create a legal and technical environment that would allow competition. In particular they created standard interfaces on both sides of the monopoly company. On the phone side they created the phone jack. On the long distance side they enforced technical standards that allowed any company to provide long distance service. Competitive markets erupted and the cost of phone equipment and long distance fell dramatically.

Things are simpler these days. Everything is data. We need a standard interface for access to last mile infrastructure. The government should simply prohibit the connection of buildings to the curb unless the resulting infrastructure can be shared in a competitive way. We need a phone jack for the data age.

This should not only apply to fiber but to radio based connectivity. Spectrum is a limited resource. Simply giving new spectrum allocations to companies who might someday provide some sort of service is irresponsible and wasteful. Voice is just a application.

This was a response to a CBC article about a report. As so often happens with the CBC the article seemed to be all about how bad the Conservative government was. I think I have to give them this one. This was an instance of policy that made me wonder if the government was really run by space aliens bent on the destruction of the human race.

After having thought about this a bit the interface stuff seems easy. Ethernet jacks can transfer 10Gbps in an entirely standard way. Just encapsulate standard size Ethernet frames in jumbo frames with a service number. TV stuff does multicast (the local telephone company does this already for their TV service). No one cares anymore about separate phone service. There; the technical part is done. If someone like myself can come up with something that works off the top of their head then it is not a hard problem. We just need to do the political stuff. Perhaps the "We need a phone jack for the data age." statement can be used as a rallying cry.

Currently the CRTC just comes down from heaven from time to time and forces the people with stuff like fiber to the curb to allow their competitors to use the system. Without the technical standard this ends up being kind of counterproductive. It is always treated as a pollitically motivated surprise by the owners of such infrastructure. As in "surprise sex". A huge battle ensues.

Really, how hard can this be?

posted at: 23:20 | path: /politics | permanent link to this entry