Net neutrality is just Common Carrier rules as applied to the Internet. It’s frankly a no-brainer.
Your proposal should definitely also have been done – allowing telecoms to also produce content at all is a massive conflict of interest and should never have been allowed in the first place – but it doesn’t obviate the need to also regulate the pure telecoms even after the breakup.
The thing is there are no pure telecoms anymore. There’s a company that maintains underground infrastructure and gets paid when that infrastructure is used, and is incentivised to upgrade the infrastructure because they make more money if it’s used more.
And there are thousand of companies that benefit from the infrastructure, and they can charge customers pretty much whatever they want… though it better not be an excessively high price because every ISP, even a tiny one with a single employee, can provide service nationwide at the same raw cost as a telco with tens of millions of customers.
The difference between what we have done, and net neutrality, is our system provides an open book profit motive to upgrade the network. Net Neutrality doesn’t do that.
Fundamentally there is a natural monopoly in that once every street in a suburb is connected, then why would anyone invest in digging up the footpath and gardens to run a second wired connection to every house? The original provider would have to provide awful service to justify that, and they can simply respond to a threat of a new network by improving service just enough (maybe only temporarily), for that new investor to run for the hills.
Net Neutrality stops blatant abuse. But it doesn’t encourage good behaviour. Our NBN does both.
The difference between what we have done, and net neutrality, is our system provides an open book profit motive to upgrade the network. Net Neutrality doesn’t do that.
Net Neutrality has nothing to do with network upgrades, it only relates to how traffic can be treated on the network. That’s it. If the network is insufficient, it needs to be upgraded, not reprioritized so preferred traffic is fast while everything else is slow.
I don’t know anything about NBN Co, so I’m going largely based on this Wikipedia article.
Financials:
Revenue - A$5.3 billion (2023)
Operating income - A$133 million (2023)
Net income - A$−1.1 billion (2023)
Total assets - A$37.94 billion (2023)
So they’re subsidizing by ~$1B/year, or ~20%.
There has been a significant failure of the NBN to deliver nominal performance to end users. There has been contention between RSPs and NBN on the reasons for this. Bill Morrow, then CEO of NBN, admitted in 2017 that 15% of end users received a poor service through the NBN and were ‘seriously dissatisfied’. In addition, Morrow indicated that, at July 2017, prices and performance for end users were suppressed through a ‘price war’ between RSPs.
So let’s look at prices, since surely they should be low if there’s a “price war”. Here are prices for the top ISP, Telstra (speeds in download/upload in mbps):
Basic (25/4) - A$85 - $56 USD
Essential (50/17) - A$100 - $66 USD
Premium (100/17) - A$100 (6mo promo)
Ultimate (250/22) - A$135 - $89 USD
Ultrafast (700/40) - A$170 - $112 USD
Here’s my local ISP which isn’t government owned, and all prices include all taxes:
20/10 - $40
50/25 - $55
100/50 - $70
250/125 - $100
1000/500 - $125
And we’re installing a municipal fiber network because we think that’s too high, and the new network will provide 10gbps. Larger cities near us have gigabit symmetrical for $70-ish. The only reason it’s relatively inexpensive is because the big cable companies actually have competition here. We have: DSL, cable, fiber backed Ethernet, and radio, and we’ll be installing a new fiber-to-the-home network.
So not only is NMN government subsidized, it’s also more expensive than our local service. And I’m not in some urban area, we have tens of thousands of residents, hardly a big city, and in one of the smallest states by population density in the country.
So no, I don’t think your model is working properly. I’ll take national Net Neutrality and push for local muni fiber.
Net neutrality is just Common Carrier rules as applied to the Internet. It’s frankly a no-brainer.
Your proposal should definitely also have been done – allowing telecoms to also produce content at all is a massive conflict of interest and should never have been allowed in the first place – but it doesn’t obviate the need to also regulate the pure telecoms even after the breakup.
The thing is there are no pure telecoms anymore. There’s a company that maintains underground infrastructure and gets paid when that infrastructure is used, and is incentivised to upgrade the infrastructure because they make more money if it’s used more.
And there are thousand of companies that benefit from the infrastructure, and they can charge customers pretty much whatever they want… though it better not be an excessively high price because every ISP, even a tiny one with a single employee, can provide service nationwide at the same raw cost as a telco with tens of millions of customers.
The difference between what we have done, and net neutrality, is our system provides an open book profit motive to upgrade the network. Net Neutrality doesn’t do that.
Fundamentally there is a natural monopoly in that once every street in a suburb is connected, then why would anyone invest in digging up the footpath and gardens to run a second wired connection to every house? The original provider would have to provide awful service to justify that, and they can simply respond to a threat of a new network by improving service just enough (maybe only temporarily), for that new investor to run for the hills.
Net Neutrality stops blatant abuse. But it doesn’t encourage good behaviour. Our NBN does both.
That’s just not true.
Net Neutrality has nothing to do with network upgrades, it only relates to how traffic can be treated on the network. That’s it. If the network is insufficient, it needs to be upgraded, not reprioritized so preferred traffic is fast while everything else is slow.
I don’t know anything about NBN Co, so I’m going largely based on this Wikipedia article.
Financials:
So they’re subsidizing by ~$1B/year, or ~20%.
So let’s look at prices, since surely they should be low if there’s a “price war”. Here are prices for the top ISP, Telstra (speeds in download/upload in mbps):
Here’s my local ISP which isn’t government owned, and all prices include all taxes:
And we’re installing a municipal fiber network because we think that’s too high, and the new network will provide 10gbps. Larger cities near us have gigabit symmetrical for $70-ish. The only reason it’s relatively inexpensive is because the big cable companies actually have competition here. We have: DSL, cable, fiber backed Ethernet, and radio, and we’ll be installing a new fiber-to-the-home network.
So not only is NMN government subsidized, it’s also more expensive than our local service. And I’m not in some urban area, we have tens of thousands of residents, hardly a big city, and in one of the smallest states by population density in the country.
So no, I don’t think your model is working properly. I’ll take national Net Neutrality and push for local muni fiber.