On 4 Sep 2010, at 06:17, Patrik Faltstrom (pfaltstr) wrote: > On 4 sep 2010, at 07:06, "Randall Gellens" <rg+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> The idea being that a regulated or even municipal entity builds and maintains the outside plant, with any Internet provider able to use it to offer service. That way all details of the service are open to competition. > > This is what for example us happening in Sweden all over the place. Most well known project in Sweden is the City of Stockholm where STOKAB is providing dark fiber (as a product) and nothing more. > > In a similar way many villages and individual home owners dig down their own fiber. > > I am sure it happens in other parts of the world as well. http://www.openreach.com For a regulated approach. Although part of BT, Openreach owns the outside plant and is regulated separately (& more tightly) than the Wholesale and other divisions. Open access to Openreach products to any ISP/network provider, Openreach must sell to BT on exactly the same terms as it does to its other customers including release of product plans etc. If one needs more than "wires only" type access to the outside plant can be accessed through the (also) regulated Wholesale division. It leads to many ISPs differentiating themselves from each other in a variety of ways so if you want a download cap >X GB or an ISP that doesn't mess with P2P you can probably find one. Some of the ISPs don't even own any infrastructure of their own and are really just branding & billing functions. How well it works I leave as an exercise for the reader, however... http://www.samknows.com/broadband/statistics/regional has some stats on the number of distinct providers (i.e. those that operate some form of actual network rather than just reselling) with the numbers ranging from ~11 per Exchange (Central Office) on average in London to ~2 per exchange on average in Scotland. ben _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf