In a message written on Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 07:15:47PM +0100, Nick Hilliard wrote:
It'll never be done though. Too much to lose by creating a topology which allows you to unbundle the tail.
Only if it is your capital building the tail. Today's Internet companies are still trying to achive penetration to the 30-40% of households that are cheap to reach, and profitable as customers in commercial timescales (3-5 years). As we reach saturation in that market (less than 10 years from now, I think) they will have to look to the "unprofitable" customers as the only real source of new business. The economics then change. While it's better to have it be your asset and create a customer lock-in, when the risk is high enough it will be seen as better to have a municipality or other take on the risk even if it means unbundled competition. Phone provides the history here; telephone companies started out with only the most profitable companies. To reach the commercially unprofitable ones they turned to government, in the form of things like the Rural Electrification Act (governemnt backed loans to rural providers) and the Universal Service Fund. These government subsidies were also a _major_ driver in the argument that copper local loops should be unbundled since in a lot of cases government had paid for them, not private companies. Politically the makings of a similar situation already exist. Goverment has swung the USF funds to fuel rual broadband, strongly favoring FTTx where it makes sense. While companies like Verizon enjoy not having to share their fiber lines now, these same forces will conspire to drive unbundling in fiber, just as it did in copper. What they are getting now is simply a first mover advantage. Government at the end of the day will fund the 20-40% of America which is profitable in the long run, but not in commercial time scales. They will also fund the 10% of America which will never be profitable, no mater what. It happened with Electricity and Telephone, and I suspect the societal drivers to do the same with the Internet will be even stronger. Companies will have to accept an unbundled tail to get access to this 30-50% of the market; and while they aren't interested now, they will be very soon. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/