Throttled? Buy your own fibre!
A recently released report details the idea that consumers may be better off if they own their own fibre.
The CBC story has some more details. Of course the funniest part of the CBC stories are always the quotes from Bell defender Mark Goldberg:
“I can buy a water heater for a couple hundred bucks from Home Depot but I don’t want the problem of it,” says telecommunications industry consultant Mark Goldberg. “If I rent it, it’s not my problem.”
It’s the TUBES Mark! The TUBES! If you rent them then when they get clogged up it’s not your problem!
Maybe, rather than having enough capacity, the water company should “throttle” the flow to certain people depending on what they are using the water for?
And do people still rent water heaters? That’s an idea straight out of the 70s… Which probably explains why Mark is so comfortable with it. Why buy something when you can pay many more times it’s actual cost to rent it and get crappy service as a bonus!
By the way, I shouldn’t make it sound like I think this experiment will work. It won’t. Not because people won’t be interested but because they will still be stuck buying connectivity from the same providers! Just because you own your own fibre, even in a community network you still have to connect it to the internet and since Canada has no real competition, they will probably end up with Bell or one of the cable companies as their provider and what is the point of that?
Update (I posted these comments on the CBC Story): For anyone posting saying “I’m in!”, you haven’t read the story. The service doesn’t exist and will not exist because even if you own your own fibre you still have to buy internet service from someone and guess what? The ONLY providers are Rogers and Bell who will ensure it is priced so prohibitively it will never be competitive.
The only hope is to allow foreign competitors into Canada. Back in the 90s when Canada first relaxed it’s foreign ownership rules for telecom companies there was a big investment in Canada by U.S. companies and Canada jumped ahead in telecommunications as the incumbents were forced to compete.
The foreign companies thought the ownership rules would continue to be relaxed but it didn’t happen and they gave up and sold their investments to the incumbents. So now we sit with companies who have figured out it’s much cheaper to throttle than to add capacity.
