Tag: competitive-trade issues

Article

What a fight for broadband tells us about democracy | GigaOM

My Comments

A situation that is repeating itself in many US towns and communities that don’t have proper broadband is the desire for these towns to benefit from the broadband service. They will typically use tactics like a wired or wireless broadband Internet service funded by the local government, perhaps in partnership with a telecommunications firm. It can even encompass the provision of full infrastructure by local interests for annexation by a local telecommunications carrier in order to hasten the provision of real Internet service.

But established telecommunications and cable-TV firms like Comcast who have wireline monopoly over these areas fear the arrival of these competitive elements. They have established requirements on towns who want to set up such services to run referenda about such services and run highly-funded campaigns against these services when they come to the vote.

This situation creates a breeding ground for redlining and an anticompetitive trade environment for Internet and other advanced telecommunications services. The redlining can occur based on perceived “lack of profitability” for communities even though the community will benefit economically through access to advanced telecommunications.

At the moment, the Federal Communications Commission are in the throes of reforming the Universal Service Fund which financially offsets universal-service obligations for basic telephony service through the USA. Here, they want to encompass broadband Internet and cable-TV services in this mix and local communities should also lobby the FCC on this issue.

The FCC could also work better by allowing European-style competition regimes like local-loop unbundling for ADSL or mandated access to pits, ducts and poles for cable and fibre-optic service. This ends up favouring the customers through what I have observed in France and the UK.

As well, the Federal Trade Commission could be allowed to be involved in issues concerning anticompetitive behaviour in telecommunications-service provisioning. This can allow for antitrust aspects to be investigated as well as other standards concerning telecommunications service.

But I would see this more likely occurring under a Democrat administration rather than a Republican administration which favours the big corporations and anticompetitive trading. As well, where there is lively competition, there is a greater chance for people to take up the technology and a greater chance for innovation.

Article

Telstra split ‘won’t fix monopoly’ as rivals fear reform will fail | The Australian

My comments

A lively competitive market

When I think of a competitive broadband infrastructure, it needs to be lively and competitive with many different wholesale and retail Internet service providers. Here, I would rather see the competition occur more on value than on who offers the cheapest service.

What can happen if the competitive market focuses on who offers the cheapest service is that companies can cut corners to achieve this goal. This can lead to situations that are consumer-hostile like poor customer service, rigidly-enforced terms of service that don’t allow scope for human variation and budget-tier services that don’t offer what customers need.

The proposed Telstra split

This proposed wholesale-retail breakup of Telstra could sound very much like what is happening with British Telecom in the UK. At the moment, BT are running a retail arm as well as a wholesale-infrastructure arm called Openreach.

In the case of the Telstra split, the infrastructure would be managed by a monopoly which is the National Broadband Network while there is a “wholesale” group and a “retail” group. There will be issues like preferential tariff sheets for the Telstra service as well as something yet undiscussed.

Telstra as the baseline telecommunications provider

This is the provision of the baseline telephone and Internet service. It encompasses the maintenance of public payphones; the definition and provision of the standard telephone line; the provision of the national emergency telephone services, as well as communications needs for the social sector. It can also include covering for communications through natural and other disasters. At the moment, Telstra’s discretionary mobile and Internet services prop up their role as this baseline telephony provider.

What I would also like to see is an improvement in how the baseline telecommunications service is provided and funded for. This could involve the use of tenders to determine the provision of parts of the baseline telecommunication service as well as the creation and management of universal-service funds that subsidise the provision of these services. This avoids the need for a service provider to jack up the price of discretionary services to cover the costs associated with the baseline services.

Wireline infrastructure competition

One driver for real competition is the ability to supply competing wireline infrastructure. This typically comes in the form of sub-loop unbundling where an ADSL service can be provided through the use of equipment installed between the customer’s door and the exchange and the customer’s line connected to that equipment. In an FTTH fibre-optic setup, this would be in the form of extra fibre-optic lines controlled by competing interests run to the customer’s door; a practice that is taking place in France.

For that matter, it may be worth examining what is going on in the UK and France where there was incumbent “PTT” telephone carriers but have now become lively competitive Internet-service markets. This includes how the tariff charts yielded “best-value” plans for retail telecommunications service as well as enabling factors for this level of competition. such as telecommunications legislation and regulations. It would also cover access to established physical telecommunications infrastructure in public areas like poles and pits; as well as creation and use of new infrastructure.

Conclusion

What I would like to see is that our telecommunications ministers and departments talk with their peers in both those countries ie OFCOM in the UK and ARCEP in France so they can know what was achieved for competitive telecommunications.

The Beatles come to iTunes at last | Circuit Breaker – CNET News

My Comments

Ever since the Beatles have come to iTunes, I have had some concerns about this exclusivity practice. What I fear will happen is that iTunes and EMI will take advantage of the fact that the Fab Four have become a major turning point in popular music and work out ways to gouge the customers.

My first question is whether Apple will extend the exclusive-sale contract beyond the initial year as agreed and when will competing download outlets be able to sell this music after the initial year? This also includes that issue that I had heard about of late where EMI made it possible for iTunes to charge extra to the Australian market for the same material.

My second question is whether the material will be available through iTunes Plus as unprotected MP3 files or as digitally-constrained files that only work with iTunes and the iPod / iPhone / iPad hardware families? There has been a lot of concern about Apple’s digital-rights-management management constraining playback of content from competing devices like DLNA-compliant home networks for example. What I would like to see for the Beatles music is that the content is as MP3 files that are able to be played on competing smartphones and personal media players or via the DLNA home media network even through the period of exclusivity.

I would still be very careful about any period where highly-valued media is made exclusive to one distribution platform over other competing platforms and check for issues like useability on competing devices before committing to it. As well, I am looking forward to the day when competing online music stores can sell the Beatles discography.

Articles – The Age

Buy or beware – competitors gear up to do battle with NBN

No NBN price war, despite competition

My Comments

There have been some recent articles about next-generation broadband services appearing in or being planned for particular locales in Australia that compete with the government-backed National Broadband Network.

UK and France offering competitive broadband service

Two countries, namely the UK and France, have established the idea of competitive next-generation broadband after their success with achieving competitive ADSL broadband Internet service. This is because the governments in these countries have worked ahead by establishing a mandatory competitive telecommunications regime including encouragement of local-loop and sub-loop unbundling. They have even ben cited by the European Commission as examples when it comes to broadband-Internet service being competitive and affordable for most people.  

In France, the government have encouraged competitive fibre-to-the-premises service in the form of two methods. The first method is for one or more providers to share infrastructure, especially that which goes “to the door”, while the second method permits a provider or provider coalition to have their own fibre infrastructure “to the door”. That same country also encourages unbundled local-loop ADSL provisioning or “degroupage” in order to see competitive ADSL broadband service.

In the UK, the government is encouraging Unbundled local-loop ADSL provisioning and there are companies who are setting up or planning local next-generation broadband infrastructure in certain cities, towns and villages. These setups, which are based on either fibre-to-the-cabinet with VDSL copper runs or fibre-to-the-premises technoligy, are even being done as a way of giving rural households access to real broadband even though Openreach, the UK company in charge of the wired telecommunications infrastructure, are taking their time to provide this service. As well, Openreach is slowly rolling out a next-generation broadband network that will work on either fibre-to-the-cabinet or fibre-to-the-premises technology.

The Australian next-generation broadband direction

In Australia, regular wireline broadband is provided through one of two methods. Cable-modem broadband is provided by Telstra or Optus in the major capital cities or through TransACT in Canberra or Neighborhood Cable in Geelong, Ballarat or Mildura. These companies own their own cable infrastructure “to the door”. ADSL infrastructure is provided by different retail providers who either resell Telstra ADSL service or through Optus who either may resell Telstra service or use local-loop unbundling. Recently, some other ADSL providers are selling retail ADSL broadband in a “local-loop unbundled” manner with a few offering “naked ADSL” service which doesn’t provide classic landline telephony on the same line.

The Labor Party had started action on the National Broadband Network which is to be a fibre-to-the-premises network covering most metropolitan, regional and rural areas of Australia with wireless and satellite technology to cover the rest. It was also intended to be a replacement for the copper telephone network that is managed by Telstra and there was the idea for Telstra to decommission this copper network and hand it over to the National Broadhand Network authority. This is in a similar manner to how the Openreach entity has come about when it came to provisioning wireline telephone and broadhand service in the UK. Lately, there was a key issue raised about the service being delivered on an “opt-out” arrangement with customers being charged AUD$300 if they don’t have their property connected to the NBN during the actual rollout and want to continue with their classic phone service at their property after the copper network is decommissioned.

TransACT and Neighborhood Cable are offering National Broadband Network their infrastructure at a price that suits them or they will run a competing next-generation broadband service in their operating areas. As well, i3 Group are working with the Brisbane municipal government to set up a fibre-to-the-premises next-generation broadband service in inner-north Brisbane and intend to run it as a competing service if National Broadband Network set up infrastructure there.

At the moment, the main markets to watch when it comes to next-generation broadband are the metropolitan Sydney and Melbourne areas because of them being population centres in Australia. It will be interesting to see whether companies or local governments will set up next-generation broadband infrastructure there in competition to National Broadband Network.

Questions to be answered

One main question that is to be answered is whether it will be feasible for competing infrastructure providers to set up shop alongside the NBN especially in major markets. This includes whether a building landlord or body corporate can have control over the provision of infrastructure for competing service providers.

Another question is whether IP-based broadcasting and voice / video telephony will be controlled on the NBN so as to prevent access to the network by competing IP-based telephony and TV providers. This may be a game changer when it comes to the provision of subscription TV through Australia because it could open up a pathway for retail operators and others to offer competing or complementary multi-channel TV services. It may also affect IP-based telephony providers like Skype or “virtual-network operators” who don’t own their own infrastructure locally but want to provide competing or complementary telephony services.

Conclusion

If there is a desire to see competitive next-generation broadband service in Australia, there will have to be rules and regulations set up to ensure this kind of competition and if the government is serious about this, they should look at what France and the UK are doing to achieve the competitive broadband market there.

 Broadband pricing in US and Europe falls • The Register

My comments

This article talks of a highly-competitive broadband Internet-service that exists in the US and Europe, with this aided and abetted by the provision of lower-cost prepaid mobile broadband services with generous usage caps and the provision of multiple-play services by the ISPs. In some countries like the UK and France, this would be augmented by telecommunications competition regulations that “have teeth” and the willingness for telecommunications regulators like OFCOM (UK) and ARCEP (France) to enforce these regulations.

In the case of multiple-play (triple-play) services, the ISPs can make up for the low-cost Internet through highly-differentiated telephone and pay-TV packages as well as selling or leasing-out hardware for these services.

But there are some other factors worth considering here. One would be that the cost of a regular cable or ADSL fixed-line service would be going downhill because most of the countries are rolling out fibre-optic-based “next-generation broadband”. Here, users who are technologically “switched on” would head to these services and the ADSL services would then be freed up and sold to most people who have regular broadband needs at a “dime-a-dozen”. It would then make the “modest-bandwidth” services become less valuable to the ISPs and these would be sold as “entry-level” services while existing customers would be shifted up to the higher-bandwidth services.

In Australia, we are missing out on this because we have a series of problems:

• The role of the universal telephony service provider is on Telstra’s hands with people who buy Telstra’s discretionary services like Internet or mobile-telephony service bearing the cost of them furnishing this basic requirement through high costs or reduced download quotas.
• Reduced infrastructure-based competition between mainstream telcos for Internet and mobile-telephony service with some operators charging others a premium to use their infrastructure.
• Higher costs and reduced international-link competition that also keep the Internet costs high.

At least the broadband issue has been one of the main playing cards in the last Federal election. This could put everyone “on notice” about the providing of cost-effective Internet service across the country.

Article

E-Government-Offensive im Microsoft-Browser | news.ORF.at (Austria – German language)

My comments and brief interpretation

Judging from my basic understanding of the German language together with use of Google’s machine translation, I had “got the gist” of this situation which would be considered hostile to the European Commission’s agenda concerning Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser.

What I was reading here was that the federal government in Austria were placing heavy emphasis on Internet Explorer 8 as part of their “e-government” initiative. This was including a downloadable toolbar add-in amongst obvious page-optimisation for this browser.

Most likely, I would suspect that, like most large organisations, the Austrian government uses Internet Explorer 8 as part of their standard operating environment and they expect that most users in that country may have stuck with IE8 even during the “Browser Choice Screen” switchover. One could say that this government could get away with this practice because many public and private organisations supply iPhone client apps to make their “front-end” useable on an iPhone which may be platform-specific.

What I would like to see with this is that if the government sites become less useful or unable to fulfil their function because of the preference for a particular browser is concerned, then the sites should be organised to at least fulfil their function no matter the desktop-computer user agent.

 thinkbroadband :: European Commission introduces broadband funding guidelines

European Commission Broadband Funding Guidelines – PDF document (English) (Français) (Deutsch)

My comments and summary of this document

The European Commission’s goal in this document is to provide 100% high-speed broadband service to every European citizen – broadband to he just like regular telephone or electricity service. They are to put EUR 1.02bn to European Agricultural Fund For Rural Development with part of this money for equipping rural areas with high-speed broadband “hot and cold running Internet”. As well, member countries are pitching money towards deploying very high speed Internet services (fibre-optic Internet) into populated areas.

The activities covered in the guidelines may typically be equipment and backhaul “pipeline” to provide broadband Internet to remote population centres in the case of basic broadband provision or equipment and works to provide next-generation broadband to areas that aren’t worth it due to sparse population or poorer neighbourhoods that are less likely to pay for the service.

What to be done to qualify for State aid

New basic-broadband services

• Proper geographical analysis of Internet service in all areas to identify white and grey areas
• Open tender process for providing the State-underpinned services or infrastructure
• Most economically advantageous offer (best value for money) to be preferred for providing the service
• Technology-neutral service so that a provider can use their choice of wireline, terrestrial wireless, satellite wireless or mobile wireless technologies or provide a mix of the technologies
• Use of existing infrastructure (ducts, poles, black fibre, etc) preferred without favouring existing incumbent operators.
• Wholesale access to be preferred so that fair and equitable retail Internet access can be provided to customers from multiple providers
• Prices to be benchmarked to assess real competitiveness
• Support for a claw-back mechanism if there is over-compensation

New next-generation broadband services

Preference to pure competition such as access to ducts, black fibre or bitstream by competing operators; or support for differing topologies like point-to-point or point-to-multipoint

This could include providing for the use of trenches caused by renovation works for existing services like electricity, gas or water.

What hasn’t been covered

One major gap that exists in these guidelines, especially as far as unbundled services or next-generation broadband services is concerned is privately-owned multi-tenancy developments like shopping centres or blocks of flats.

In these places, a property owner or management committee could permit only a particular operator to lay infrastructure in their building and prohibit competing providers from laying their infrastructure in the same building. There isn’t provision for measures that preclude this kind of behaviour that denies tenants or unit owners access to infrastructurally-competitive Internet service.

Conclusion

This document should be looked at and considered by governments and telecommunications regulators when they prepare frameworks for next-generation telecommunications and Internet services.