
FCC sides with Google Fiber over Comcast with new pro-competition rule - ricw
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/fcc-gives-google-fiber-and-new-isps-faster-access-to-utility-poles/
======
cjhanks
Politics aside, of course.

The administration continues to act in removing Federal jurisdiction and
regulations from being used as a tool to prevent startup organizations from
entering established markets.

This case is a success in that it removes significant incumbent advantages.
Let's hope poor behavior and sloppy work (breaking connections too frequently)
doesn't become common. And shame on the incumbents using regulations for
financial gain.

~~~
afpx
Is this really a good example of a success? I see it as one incumbent battling
another incumbent over literally billions of dollars of future ad revenue. To
me, a good example would be a true startup (fewer than 15 people, less than
$5M revenue) getting the FCC to side with them without spending millions.

~~~
exelius
Likewise — and people often miss this angle — Comcast is a bit of an upstart
itself in comparison to the two major incumbents, AT&T and Verizon. The two
basically hold a duopoly on nationwide last-mile access, and they are using
all their political power to prevent Comcast from becoming large enough to
challenge them as a National last-mile telecom (they currently only offer
service in something like 40% of the households in the US).

The prime case-in-point is the TimeWarner Cable merger that was scuttled —
such a merger would have made Comcast effectively national, and a serious
competitor to the old Bells. Meanwhile AT&T purchased DirecTV less than a year
later (a deal worth more than the TWC acquisition in both dollars and
customers) and the whole thing got rushed through quickly.

Do you think we would still have wired home Internet connections without
Comcast? I know they’re a terrible company to be a customer of (what telecom
isn’t though?) but when you look at the larger picture, they’re constantly
stymied by the FCC from getting “too big” — meanwhile, their two biggest
competitors are 2-4x larger on a revenue basis. Verizon and AT&T would drop
their residential landline business in a heartbeat if Comcast weren’t around
driving demand for it — the way Comcast’s tech architecture works makes it
cheaper for them to serve the residential market than AT&T or Verizon will
ever be able to do with wired connections.

~~~
snowwrestler
> The two basically hold a duopoly on nationwide last-mile access

This is obviously not true since neither Verizon nor AT&T operate hardline
access nationwide. Even if you mean copper phone wires specifically, you're
leaving out CenturyLink.

Copper phone lines are of course the slowest last mile hardlines. Coax is far
superior, and cable ISPs are growing relative to DSL--where the choices are
Comcast vs Verizon DSL (for example), Comcast has higher market share.

[https://www.tellusventure.com/blog/cable-gains-subs-as-
consu...](https://www.tellusventure.com/blog/cable-gains-subs-as-consumers-
flee-dsl/)

Verizon FiOS competes directly with Comcast, but is offered in only about 20
metropolitan areas--and even then, incompletely. (FiOS is available in DC but
not in Alexandria, which is right across the river.) Verizon stopped growing
their FiOS footprint years ago.

> Verizon and AT&T would drop their residential landline business in a
> heartbeat if Comcast weren’t around driving demand for it

Verizon and AT&T (and CenturyLink) are required by law to provide residential
telephone landlines to anyone who asks for it. What does that have to do with
last-mile broadband?

------
Judson
Interesting to see this decision today, as I was just speaking with my Google
Fiber tech about their Nashville rollout.

Apparently there was so much heel dragging pole access, they ended up laying
their fiber in tiny channels cut into the road.

As an aside, I also heard the channels weren't cut deep enough initially, so
they were forced to go back and redo part of the work after much of it was
considered complete.

------
collinf
Is Google Fiber still expanding? Last I heard it was pretty much cut.

~~~
scarface74
I don’t think Google Fiber is expanding, but it did spur the rest of the ISPs.

AT&T seems to be expanding its gigabit footprint rapidly
([https://m.att.com/shopmobile/internet/gigapower/coverage-
map...](https://m.att.com/shopmobile/internet/gigapower/coverage-
map.html?referrer=&fromDesktop=true)) and not just to most affluent sections
of the metro area where I live. Comcast is trying but they are still
overpriced compared to AT&T and the upload speeds are abysmal- 35Mbps

~~~
rayiner
There is an assumption among folks in the tech community that there is no
competition between providers serving different markets-- _i.e._ what Verizon
does in Maryland cannot affect what Comcast does in Delaware. However, the
idea that Google Fiber is "spur[ring] the rest of the ISPs" to roll out
gigabit is accepted without question, even though Google Fiber serves very few
markets. Verizon, for example, upgraded FiOS to gigabit even though Google
Fiber serves no Verizon territory and has shown zero willingness to overbuild
another fiber provider, and after Google Fiber announced it was downshifting
deployment.

One of those premises has to be wrong.

~~~
toast0
It's hard for big telcos to move fast (it was hard for Google to move fast in
this area). What telcos are doing today is responding to what happened 5 years
ago. Where they're doing it is responding to what happened 6-12 months ago.

Because Google wasn't able to get traction on their construction in San Jose,
AT&T had time to do street surveys and order custom multistrand fiber with
drops for a splitter at every pole, and then get the fiber actually on the
pole before Google got much of anything done. Existing carriers can run new
cable on poles they already have access without a lot of hassle.

Otoh, Google primarily wanted to show it could be done and spur others to,
faster eyeballs without capital costs is a win. If you can't get 10mbps for
YouTube on a gigabit connection, something is clearly broken.

Edit: pole instead of poll (thanks unmonk)

~~~
ummonk
Did you mean to write "pole" instead of "poll"? (Genuine question - I'm not
sure whether "poll" is a term with some meaning in the telecom / isp
industry.)

------
GW150914
Am I just grotesquely cynical that my first thought was “Pai liked this
because it hurts AT&T and Comcast, not his paymasters at Verizon.”?

Still, good news whatever the reason. Competition is desperately needed here,
even if it’s only going to be between three or four major options.

~~~
ars
Yes, you are cynical.

Republicans simply have a different utility function. They consider
deregulation, and ease of running a business more important than enforcing
fairness via legislation.

They believe the market will do a better job than they can do. Democrats don't
trust the market to do that, and feel they can do a better job.

~~~
craftyguy
Unfortunately we have no alternatives to choose candidates from that
understand neither extremes will work, and that you actually need a mixture of
legislation/regulation in the right places, and no legistlation/regulation in
others.

~~~
rayiner
To the contrary, there is broad consensus and what people are all arguing
about is actually the mushy middle. The Republicans won on this one--the 1996
telecom act broadly deregulated the telecom industry. Most of Europe followed
suit and deregulated their telecom markets similar to how we did it in the
1996 act.

What republicans are worried about is attempts to undo the 1996 reforms. There
are people who think that rate regulation, municipal utility boards deciding
where infrastructure should be built, etc., are actually good ideas. Probably
not a majority of people even in the democrat camp, but there are enough
people who don't remember why the 1996 act was a good idea that it makes
republicans nervous.

~~~
techsupporter
> Most of Europe followed suit and deregulated their telecom markets similar
> to how we did it in the 1996 act.

But one big problem with "attempts to undo the 1996 reforms" is that Europe
kept (and expanded) linesharing and unbundled network element rules; the
United States threw out most mandatory UNE rules and never expanded them to
include companies operating networks over coax or new-build fiber optic
networks.

So now we have this farce where, in some areas, people served by DSL have the
choice of several (slow) ISPs because the copper is still technically, kinda
unbundled. But if you can't get DSL or can't get a sufficiently fast speed,
your sole choice is likely your monopoly cable provider.

~~~
rayiner
Most large European countries didn't expand unbundling to include cable and
fiber either:
[https://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/2-7.pdf](https://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/2-7.pdf).
None of the five largest EU countries (which comprise the majority of the EU
population), applied unbundling to coax. Most don't apply unbundling to fiber
either.

U.S. copper unbundling rules are weaker than the U.S., but copper is also
largely irrelevant in the U.S., because most broadband is over cable or fiber.
Unbundling matters more in Europe, but primarily because DSL is much more
common in Europe.

------
ww520
More competition is good news. Even if Google doesn't push Google Fiber hard
enough, it serves as precedence for other competitors to come in.

------
ikiris
I'll admit, this one surprised me. I didn't expect the new admin to support
it.

~~~
zavi
Why not? Seems like a common sense rule.

~~~
pornel
Exactly.

------
safgasCVS
Go figure. Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and then

~~~
coryfklein
Color me wholly confused by this metaphor. Who's the blind squirrel; Google
Fiber, Comcast, or FCC? And what's the acorn?

------
dev_dull
> _FCC Chairman Ajit Pai rejected this argument, saying that startups are
> unnecessarily delayed when they have to wait for incumbent ISPs before
> hanging wires._

I thought I was supposed to not like this guy.

~~~
dylan604
This does seem very 180 degree different than his stance on net neutrality.
The tin foil hat wearing side of me says that Google's donations must have
been larger than Comcast's. The real world side of me can't figure out how
somebody can logically justify these two opposing views.

~~~
thephyber
> The tin foil hat wearing side of me says that Google's donations must have
> been larger than Comcast's

I'm curious: donations to whom?

The FCC doesn't have campaigns, so any "donations" aren't campaign
contributions.

~~~
TaylorAlexander
“Who are your friends? Let me know and I’ll donate to them if....”

~~~
dylan604
Exactly. "A gift was made to xxx in your name". A bag with large $$$ printed
on the side being handed over is just for the comics. In the real world,
"donations" is just a word with multiple meanings.

------
syshum
>>Verizon supported OTMR,

hmmm... The "Former" Verizon Lawyer supported Verizon's position.... I am
shocked I tell you....

------
nashashmi
This is bad. I love google fiber and see that what they are trying to do is
valid but when one utility company touches another company's facilities it
compromises the other facility and makes it vulnerable for service disruption.

But the regulation to ban or allow should not come at the Federal level. It
should be governed by the utility pole owner.

In NYC for example con Ed owns a large number of poles. And then Verizon owns
the next number of poles. Verizon and other utility companies pay ConEd based
on how high their utility is placed. If it's a Verizon pole, Verizon will put
their facility on the very top and spectrum will put their facility on the
lower part.

This means that another utility company cannot just come and move someone
else's facility around.

~~~
dkhenry
I understand where you are coming from, but you must be blind to think that
the biggest issue facing the American telecom industry is service disruption
due to competitors having too much access to the utility poles. While you are
right that this does create a bigger opportunity for small service
disruptions, the bigger issue is that even when its not disrupted service in
many area's is horrible, and expensive. While a private company might have
paid to put the poles in they should be treated like the shared limited
resource that they are, and there should be universally accepted rules on how
the current "owner" has to allow other to access it.

I will go so far as to say there is not a single citizen who will have a net
negative result of this ruling.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
This isn't a hypothetical issue. Comcast has historically been known to
"accidentally" sever competing service lines when installing their own:
[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/lawsuit-
comcast-...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/lawsuit-comcast-
sabotaged-small-isps-network-then-took-its-customers/)

Why are poles a "shared limited resource"? They're sticks of wood, companies
can either pay to put up their own, or pay to use someone else's.

~~~
AYBABTME
And then you'll have beautiful cities with nice streetscapes.

Seriously, if you don't want your street corners to look like a black
deathball or [something straight out of Stranger Things][1], you need to
consider those poles as "shared limited resource".

[1]:
[https://twitter.com/pketron/status/938097381064654848](https://twitter.com/pketron/status/938097381064654848)

~~~
rayiner
You can’t have everything. People crow about how Japan has fast fiber and why
can’t we have it too. Have you ever seen Tokyo? There are above ground
electric lines and cables everywhere. This is right downtown:
[https://www.google.com/maps/@35.7001104,139.7314866,3a,75y,1...](https://www.google.com/maps/@35.7001104,139.7314866,3a,75y,187.37h,163.45t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1swl2TCK1FRWRIke7fGd3jrw!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo1.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3Dwl2TCK1FRWRIke7fGd3jrw%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D259.41785%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656).
There’s a reason why Google targeted Fiber in places like Kansas City
first—few dense American cities habe above ground utilities, primarily due to
aesthetic concerns.

