Hacker News Reader

Comment by simplotek | Hacker News Reader

> You do NOT want to return to that.

I'm not sure your assessment is reasonable. You're putting up a strawman by claiming that the only way to have shared infrastructure is to have an abusive monopoly that stifles innovation and screws consumers over. This is false. It's quite possible to have a single infrastructure provider that does it's job, such as a consortium of telcos shipping in to deploy and run shared infrastructure. There are plenty of examples of those types of initiatives in other areas, such as shared ATM networks, which provide a far better service than "everyone for themselves" deployments.

View on HN

It's quite possible to have a single infrastructure provider that does it's job

I don’t doubt it. But do you have any examples of this having ever happened? Every case I’m aware of has gone much like the person your replying to describes.

For example, I moved to England and spent the better part of ten years trying to get British Telecom to install a working telephone and internet connection at a house in the center of a large town. They’d send a truck out a few times a year to fix the same line fault, which consisted of having a guy climb a pole, unplug somebody else’s house from the “good” connection, and plug them into one of the bad ones. Presumably that neighbor would get the truck to come back at some point, starting the cycle again.

There are no other providers. Or rather, the other providers all subcontract from BT, so you eventually get the same truck to come out. But now you’ve added another layer of pain to the equation.

If there were a second option, they would get all the business. But there is not, so you’re stuck with what you’re given.

> But do you have any examples of this having ever happened?

Yes, there are whole Wikipedia lists of this having ever happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbank_network

This is no rocket science. I mean, even utilities grids in open markets work like this, for stuff like power and even gas. Nowadays even railway networks in Europe are decoupled from operators. Why do people still cling to old monopoly tales?

Because there is a huge infrastructure dependent on old money continuing. They own the financial, the judicial, the media, and the educational institutions, and they insure no other viable alternatives to the mainstream economy they control is even taught as a viable alternative.

Demand for power and gas—or banking services—doesn’t scale by orders of magnitude every few years.

The FTTH networks in Scandinavia are more than 20 years old now. The UK fiber plans were abandoned what, 30 years ago? Demand for bandwidth grows faster, yes, but it's not like you can't lay a larger pipe to begin with...

But just imagine. All of the incumbent providers use shared 1gb fiber. That’s what you get. You can pick your provider, but it’s all the same fiber infrastructure.

Some scrappy company comes in saying they can offer 10gb fiber for the same price or less, but it takes an infrastructure upgrade. The consortium of incumbents shoot down the idea because it will “cause problems” or whatever. So they’re never forced to spend money to upgrade the shared tech, and your service never improves.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com