On Sat, 25 Feb 2006, Jamie Baddeley wrote:
I guess the need to dimension the network and manage how that is used is a fair need. But 148:1 or xxx:1 or whatever it actually is, is the point worth pressing.
On the Internet, everyone is a customer. Perhaps a standard needs to be agreed?
One only wants to involve the government where one _has_ to do so. Otherwise, let the market decide it. For example, If the copper was unbundled in this country, ISPs could provision at whatever contention level they wishes. Bobs Bait Shop, Fried Chicken, and ISP could install some small DSLAMS at whatever exchanges covered whatever regions he wanted to service, and then he could pay a provider to connect those DSLAMs back to his network core .. at whatever speed (and therefore contention ratio) he felt appropriate for his service levels. Frame Relay, say, might be enough for Bob and his customers. Middlin' ISP could go to Vector and buy some ethernet backhaul at very reasonable prices (little shoutout there to my friends at Vector. Hi guys!) And UltraGlobalOmniISP may require Quantum Teleported Infinite Improbability Modules to provide connectivity for their vast userbase. (Note: QTII Modules - coming 2007, from Juniper Networks). So yeah, there's no need to regulate this back-end contention ratio stuff, the market would sort it out ON A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD. The position we're in here is that the market CANNOT sort it out, at least on a macro scale. The only way at the moment is to treat it as damage and route around it - start laying your own FTTH infrastucture. Which is a monumental task, even for a vast international Telco like TelstraClear. And it may, in fact, be impossible to do and still get meaningful economic returns on in a reasonable time frame. And THAT is the only reason that one needs to involve the government - it's too imbalanced to correct by normal means, and it's involving something like data connectivity which these days is almost as much a part of the national infrastructure as power and water. A reminder, by the way that UBS is meant to be _an alternative to unbundling_. We don't get direct access to the copper, instead we get a bitstream. Except the UBS services being offered, with their data caps, contention ratio, shitty upstream rates, etc etc etc .. are simply not an alternative to unbundling. They're a wholesale product. A wholesale product wearing a cardboard sign that says "I am an alternative to unbundling, and not a wholesale product, that's for sure." There are so many other alternative service types that I wish DSL had available - decoupled international and national data charges, speed alterations when a data limit it is (instead of extra charges), symmetrical DSL services, combinations of all of these and more, etc. And as I've previously stated on many occasions, the real downside to all of this to the NZ public is not crappy web access, or slow web access, or expensive web access .. it's the _opportunity cost_ of all the cool stuff that right now is not being built or made available because the broadband infrastructure is not present. Please note that the previous statements are personal opinion, unrelated to the opinions of my lovely and delightful employer (ICONZ Ltd) who're very supportive when people read stuff I've written on this list and then threaten to sue. JSR