Jim Henry wrote: > specific. I never said nor do I believe I inferred that my > broadband sucks. I think it's great! I have 3 cable modems each > providing 8 mbs download and 1 mbps upload. Two of the 3 I have > aggregated through a twin wan port router. I love it. I don't > think it's expensive at all.
I hope this means we're back to discussing broadband. Good. Jim, how many physical lines suitable for broadband (phone, cable TV, fiber, etc.) enter your home? This can be a critical factor for achieving competition and thus lower prices for broadband. My apartment has 3 lines: phone, cable TV, and the aforementioned CAT-5 ethernet. The copper phone line belongs to the old incumbent, the national telecom, now named Telia-Sonera. In theory they are forced to open their facilities to competing DSL providers, and this works reasonably well in a city where I live, but in many smaller towns or rural areas the telco often gets away with claiming that their facilities are booked full and there is no practical way to allow competitors in. Telecom deregulation came later to Sweden than to the U.S., and our FCC is weaker. Our old incumbent is stronger, and has been able to maintain more of its old monopoly situation. This is bad, the only good solution is to avoid the phone network all together. The TV cable belongs to the cable company which also provides broadband Internet access, but doesn't allow any competition over this line, and there is no legal requirement for this. Vertical integration from the physical cable to the services offered is bad for competition. The third line, the LAN, is necessary for providing broadband in true competition with the two other lines. Unfortunately, the LAN is now owned by the ISP who installed it, so in a way this is another case of vertical integration. I would have preferred that my coop had built its own LAN and then connected two or more ISPs to the switch in the basement. But this would have required a technical insight that the coop didn't have in 1999. This is not a perfect solution, but it's one of the best that I've seen in Sweden. Maybe the best part is that it is totally independent of the old hated telco. The municipal street fiber that connects the LAN to the ISP is a monopoly, but I haven't heard that it has been mismanaged. Some smaller towns want to be service providers as well as fiber owners (vertical integration again) and this would inevitably lead to bias against other service providers. Broadband seems to work better in reasonably big cities, and worse in smaller places. So it should work better in New York City than anywhere else. -- Lars Aronsson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se -- NYCwireless - http://www.nycwireless.net/ Un/Subscribe: http://lists.nycwireless.net/mailman/listinfo/nycwireless/ Archives: http://lists.nycwireless.net/pipermail/nycwireless/
