Our New National Broadband Plan Doesn't Address Competition? > *raises hand timidly*

reply to iansltx

Re: *raises hand timidly*

Which is better, going from zero providers in an area to one, or going from one to two, or going from two to three? I'd maintain that zero to one is where all the money should be going. We just have to define "zero." If the government defines it too loosely, they're doing too much and wasting money. I have Comcast DOCSIS 3 available to me here, and though it's not fiber it's still a decent connection, and the government didn't have to lift a finger to get Comcast to compete in this way. Heck, Qwest didn't either; they're still stuck on 5 Mbps ADSL at my place.

Again, the FCC's mandate for a National Broadband Plan goes far beyond unserved areas -- they are required by Congress to address that and more.

There's no reason why the FCC can't fix the USF and restructure the existing cable leased access requirements to allow leased channels be used for DOCSIS, creating another competitor.

This plan is about solving all sorts of problems, not just the (very important) problem of unserved areas.

How would leasing a single channel for DOCSIS work? Aside from the fact that you usually only have one or two available channels for return path in a cable system, where would the demarc be between the cable-CLEC and the MSO?

FWIW, the closest thing to this is what TWC does with Earthlink and (in some places) LocalNet. TWC apparently hands off from their backbone to Earthlink/LocalNet's at a POP, and they handle the ISP side of things, similar to how Qwest does alternate-ISP arrangements.

Line sharing is a lot easier with point-to-point connections (DSL or active fiber) than with shared connections (cable or GPON). As much as I like the idea of RCN coming in, buying 18MHz of downstream spectrum and 4MHz of upstream spectrum from Comcast and putting 60/6 broadband on it for $100, it's just too hard to do.

Good question, and I'm the wrong dude to answer it. I can however point you to a now-defunct company called Internet Ventures, Inc. and its subsidiary, Internet On-Ramp, Inc, who filed a petition with the FCC to do this exact thing in June of 1999, which was denied a year latter, but not on technical grounds. They had a plan, and if I recall correctly, there is a white paper by a tech consulting firm floating around that describes how line sharing on D1/D2 would work.

If you'll find that whitepaper I'll definitely read it. Sounds quite interesting, though with today's FTTN infrastructure, relatively small node sizes and such it would be a much more expensive proposition in all likelihood than, say, DSL/CO line sharing.