NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: Obama Broadband? / ITIF: "Competition to take on telecom and cable is 'misguided' idea"
>. It only means that any particular >area probably does not support more than one supplier or two >competitors. things may be different here and there based on local conditions, but as a general rule, I think that each access infrastructure (meaning the communication medium) is a natural monopoly. Duplicating (or more) the mediums that go to the home (having many copper loops, many fibres, etc) is a misallocation of investments. Imho there can be only few mediums entering the home (spectrum, twisted pair, cable, fibre) and each of them (but wireless, which is not scarce but is very limited) is a monopoly determining a limited chance of competition (more likelya tacit collusion). this is why I believe price-regulated cost-plus raw-pipe (bitstream) wholesale obligation is essential and should be a requirement to publicly funded ISPs who have jointly a Significant Market Power. (to avoid excessive margins for wholesaler, who is the monopolist) If this happens, then you will have competition by many ISPs at the user service provision level with same cost structure for all of the ISPs, something that much helps ensuring that unneccessary traffic network management, if done by an operator, will not be done by most of them. (important: The cost-plus price regulated wholesale bitstream access should exist wherever there's a bottleneck facility and imposed to joint SMPs operators otherwise the problem will move from the access portion to the backhauling, something that is frequently the casein europe) ciao, s.