Is Broadband a Utility? A Right? A Luxury? → Re: A Right!

And here's an idea:

why not make the infrastructure semi public- ie a municipality could sign a contract with a private company to foot the bill for building a fiber network in the city (this way the taxpayer wouldnt have to foot the bill, which would be one of my many major objections). The private company would not provide service itself, but would only be allowed to sell bandwidth and interconnect/ rackspace rights. For example, it could sell bandwidth on a size/distance metric, ie "one cent per megabite kilometer" or similar, on all traffic in the network. Other companies could come in and serve as ISPs, connecting the fiber network to the outside internet, providing a DNS server, customer service, etc. Different companies could provide VoIP and IPTV services.

The key is that there wouldnt be a conflict of interest between the people managing the network and those providing service on the network. The network would be contractually obligated to let anyone compete, and would likewise be contractually obligated to keep their prices at a certain rate (ie "3% a year" or "with inflation"). They would make these concessions in order to get access to the neighborhood- only the city really has the authority to be thrashing up roads and laying lines from house to house, the city could give the authority carefully to the company that was paying for all the infrastructure.

I think that would be a great setup and a great compromise between being able to bridge the problems imposed with building a network and making sure service on it is fair.

This is not unlike what some CLECs were proposing after the Telecom Act of '96 started to get bogged down--the ILECs would be just wholesale facility providers, and all retail would be through separate retail enterprises--and the ILECs would have to treat all other retailers the same as they treated their affiliate.

As a proposal, it was a non-starter following the FCC's turn away from forcing competition following Reed Hundt's replacement by William Kennard in the Chairmanship. It had (and still has) good arguments in favor, but is doomed in the current environment where the whining Baby Bells claim that any lack of a monopoly on their part is a "disincentive to investment".

Philosophically, this proposal is sort of like saying that a motor vehicle transport system is a vital need--so the governmental units will use private industries to build backbone (roads) and the actual "transport" will be done by others using more-or-less standardized transport vehicles....

calvoiper