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Comment by Osiris | Hacker News Reader

Maybe we should separate infrastructure from service. A company may build the lines but cannot provide consumer services. My brother tells me that Japan is like this and service is quite good.

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Japan is ... complicated. NTT is required to offer access to its fiber, but also offers its own Internet service. The Japanese government also continues to be the majority shareholder in NTT, so NTT gets preferential treatment because the Japanese government benefits from NTT’s profitability. The Japanese government also gave direct cash subsidies to NTT for building fiber. Japan also has extremely lax rules for running fiber. If you look around Tokyo, the utilities are hanging out in the open all over the place. That makes the build much cheaper. Also, they’re Japanese so they’re good at building infrastructure.

You couldn’t replicate that in say San Francisco just by separating the infrastructure, while still requiring everything to be buried and look pretty, and requiring unprofitable neighborhoods to be served at the ISP’s expense, etc., and all of the roadblocks places like San Francisco throw up to development. All with San Francisco municipal government types overseeing everything and San Francisco NIMBYs protesting and filing lawsuits over the color of the fiber distribution hubs. It wouldn’t work.

It is interesting how this is essentially culturally and historically dependent. In Sweden we have what you say doesn’t work in SF. Much (all?) of the fibre is owned by the the municipality and many operators offer services on top. The only redundant cabling is old telephone cabling with ADSL. The whole electric network is the like that with no duplication.

In Stockholm the fiber operator (which is owned by the municipality but operated as a private company) built the network over more than a decade, based on demand and by using revenues to support further expansion. E.g. it primarily targeted businesses first. In New York, the city demanded Verizon wire up the whole city in just five years, and started a civil rights investigation because it’s verboten to wire up profitable areas first. Sweden’s approach to fiber in rural areas was to give rural people a tax credit worth up to $600 or so. In the US, instead of giving tax benefits for fiber, we put a special tax on telecom services (like it’s something bad like cigarettes or alcohol) and use that money to subsidize rural users at up to tens of thousands of dollars per subscriber. Our rural and inner city politics makes for some very bad policies when it comes to fiber deployment.

I'm surprised that in a city as big as Stockholm there's only one fiber operator... in Malmö depending on your building you'll have either Telia, Tele2, ownit, bredband2, etc etc. It's a free market free-for-all.

There are dozens of IP operators offering services over a few different infrastructures. Fibre (mainly Stokab), cable and telephone lines.

>> they’re Japanese so they’re good at building infrastructure

This argument strays into racism, or a circular argument. Either the Japanese are uniquely genetically capable of building public goods cheaply, or their continued success is a result of how they have structured their society.

If it isn’t genetic (how could it be?), this is an argument for emulating the uniquely Japanese cultural aspects that led to the success.

I’m saying that it’s a matter of culture, not policy (and certainly not genetics). You can’t replicate it just by cherry picking some of their policies. And it’s very hard to change culture.

The Japanese take pride in infrastructure and development. Americans try to figure out how to abuse environmental laws to keep it from being built. We turn every development project into a civil rights battle or a rural/urban battle. We hate paying for development with visible taxes, but love creating invisible taxes by attaching mandates as riders to projects. “You can build that apartment building, but only if you widen that public road and build a school. You can build fiber there, but only if you also build fiber in this place where it makes no economic sense.” That often makes development unattractive altogether, but that’s okay because we hate development anyway.

> Japan is ... complicated. NTT is required to offer access to its fiber, but also offers its own Internet service

Complicated to say the least. NTT doesn't just offer its own Internet service, it has three different subsidiaries all competing to offer their own Internet services

We have this in Utah and it's amazing honestly. https://www.utopiafiber.com/

Utopia can only enter cities that allow & fund it, so for most cities this not an option. Nothing like Comcast.

Singapore is a good example. Every household has two fibre pairs supplied by a single (I believe, government owned) company. ISP's can then sell service over these cables.

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