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Comment by crotchfire | Hacker News Reader

Lemme guess, you're in the Netherlands.

You folks have awesome internet because you force the local loop to be unbundled. Every country should do this. However, almost none do (except yours, and a few counties within the US state of Washington). Nobody with bundled local loops will get pricing+performance like this; please don't raise peoples' expectations.

Instead, point them to the root cause (local loop bundling), because nothing else is going to help them. You'll just make them jealous and distract them from the one change that can actually improve their situation.

Calling your provider and saying "€25/mo for 10Gbit symmetric!!!!" is not going to change anything.

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> Lemme guess, you're in the Netherlands.

No, Spain using Digi, which is a Romanian company. 10Gbit is only available in cities where Digi has their own fiber/equipment. When you’re in an area where the fiber is shared it’s 1Gbit max for same price.

> You folks have awesome internet because you force the local loop to be unbundled.

I don’t know what this means (although I can maybe guess). Can you explain it for sake of clarity?

> Nobody with bundled local loops will get pricing+performance like this; please don't raise peoples' expectations.

10Gbit sure, it’s not available everywhere. However, symmetric gigabit fiber is standard in many countries in Europe and elsewhere. Typically with 5+ major providers and local ISPs to choose from.

I lived in the US for a long time. I had to suffer the sub-par quality of cable, arbitrary price hikes and random downtime from shitty cable tech. You should absolutely raise your expectations. Complacency will do nothing but entrench the abysmal situation.

I don’t know what this means (although I can maybe guess). Can you explain it for sake of clarity?

Basically it means that whoever owns the "last mile" can't sell it only directly to the customer as part of a larger (bundled) product like "internet access." They have to sell access to that last mile of fiber or copper "unbundled" from anything else (such as "internet access"), and they have to offer it to other ISPs. This is how it has been for ~25 years in NL, and people there understand how important it is.

By forcing the monopoly (local loop) to be a separate company from everything else it makes it totally obvious when there are ridiculous shenanighans. Like, if local-loop company X has only one ISP customer Y, that's an obvious red flag. Also since they are separate companies regulators can subpoena the contracts, communications, and payments which flow between the two companies.

It's essentially the internet version of what the US did to voice telephony after we broke up our telephone monopoly back in the 1970s: no single company was allowed to do both local loop and long distance.

Currently the Netherlands has this for local-loop fiber, and a few counties in the US State of Washington have it due to the odd fact that their local-loop fiber is owned by the electric utility (not the phone or cable companies). It is an awesome system.

Here's the Dutch cases:

- copper (2000): https://www.acm.nl/en/publications/publication/9225/KPN-is-r...

- fiber (2015): https://www.acm.nl/en/publications/publication/15093/KPN-mus...

General background info:

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit-stream_access

Thanks.

> and they have to offer it to other ISP

Key point yes. That’s how it is or at least seems to be in many countries.

Societies MUST decouple infrastructure, platforms etc from service providers. Doesn’t matter if private or public. If you don’t, you always end up with shit.

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