[ NNSquad ] Re: FiOS, U-verse, Copper, and Line Counts That Go Bump in the Night

[Stefano Quintarelli <stefano@quintarelli.it>]

> Now, at least in the FIOS case, VZ requires you to surrender the copper
> feeding your POTS, and they cut it off to prevent future use. (The
> existing copper is regulated and may be rented by COVAD, etc; but not
> the fiber. 

FYI, this is one of the reasons in europe incumbents were in favour in NGANs.
this point is now cleared. European incumbents must rent NGANs as well

this is kind of a problem that's the center of the debate nowadays. How to 
rent wholesale fibre access ?

copper replacement with fibre allows to skip the last exchange, as fibre 
access loop is longer than copper. this frees buildings that can be sold and 
that are very valuable as they're in the cities centers. a move that heavily 
indebted operators welcome; as a matter of fact, some of them have already 
sold a large number of exchanges.

but the current regulatory framework is based on the concept of "ladder of 
investments" by altnets. so the regulation includes from reselling to 
wholesale "bitstream access" to local loop unbundling (ULL) to buildout of 
own new infrastructure, trying to pursue "infrastructure competition".

laying new networks in most of Europe is much more difficult than the US. 
(generally) fibre cannot be aerial as it would damage the sightseen which is 
so important for tourism; when you dig in small street cities, densely 
populated, it may even happen that you stumble in some antique stuff and the 
digging gets stopped... (this is obviously not the case in northern countries)

it is now clear that a statewide NGAN is an unaffordble investment (there 
are many studies) by anyone else but the incumbents and that once there's a 
NGAN in place, there's no room for a competitor.

the provision of ULL in the regulation is not suitable for fibre as it would 
impose a Point to point architecture, something that is not feasible as a 
full replacement, as you would loose the benefit of dismissing buildings (so 
to the cost of the network you would need to add the missing revenue from 
selling the buildings)

operators could therefore rely on PONs (Passive Optical Network) which, by 
passivly multiplexing several users on the same fibre, would reduce the 
number of fibres travelling the cities so they would fit in most existing 
ducts and hence allow to jump one layer of exchanges in the hierarchy and 
sell them, while providing some 100Mbps or so to each user.

but PONs, as they are a shared media, do not allow for ULL, something that 
the regulation is reguiring to incumbents.

kind of a quite-a-deadlock situation (except some spots where you can have 
municipalities investing, where cost of laying fibre is low (recently built 
or rebuilt cities, we have some in Europe), where fibres can be aerial, 
where the NGAN is not built by the incumbent, where you can have a P2P 
architecture).

therefore incumbents are then in favour of "geograpchical segmentation"; say 
that in the city X there's Altnet that has a fibre NGAN , incumbents would 
like that their pro-competition asymmetric regulation which imposes them 
bitstream and ULL did not apply in these cities, as they don't have a 
bottleneck resource in the area.

In the last month an austrian court has decided that the relevant market is 
national, so geographical segmentation as stumbled in a first hurdle. This 
does not imply that it will be so in the rest of europe, there's no direct 
consequence, nevertheless imitation of such a decision, may happen.

ciao, s.