From: theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk   
      
   Lawrence D'Oliveiro  wrote:   
   > On 12 Aug 2025 13:36:15 +0100 (BST), Theo wrote:   
   >   
   > > To move into broadband they couldn't have had a national service like   
   > > they did with dialup, they needed the phone company to install DSL   
   > > modems or fiber in your particular area.   
   >   
   > The way it worked here in NZ was, during the last-but-one Labour   
   > Government under Helen Clark, they passed a law forcing Telecom, the-then   
   > owner of the copper network, to “unbundle the local loop”. That meant it   
   > had to allow third-party equipment into neighbourhood junction boxes on an   
   > equal basis to its own Internet service, so they could make use of the   
   > existing copper lines into people’s houses to offer whatever services the   
   > residents wanted.   
   >   
   > That was the “big bang” for broadband in NZ. That has worked well for   
   > about the last 20 years, and now we are finally getting rid of all that   
   > copper, and moving everyone to fibre. And the governance structure has   
   > been a bit more carefully thought out this time: the owner-operator of the   
   > physical fibre network has from the beginning been kept separate from the   
   > service providers who actually use it to connect customers. This is to   
   > ensure fair competition and avoid conflicts of interest.   
      
   BT in the UK did that, and it reduced costs for big ISPs to terminate on   
   their equipment in your telephone exchange and run their own backhaul.  But   
   you had to wait until their installed their kit in your specific exchange,   
   and there are a lot of exchanges that were never going to be worthwhile   
   (mine serves ~1000 people).   
      
   There was another offering from BT that was more or less a VPN between your   
   DSL modem and the ISP's datacentre.  That meant you needed essentially zero   
   capital investment to start an ISP - just rent a server and run a VPN   
   endpoint on it, routing customer traffic to the internet.  You had to pay BT   
   a big chunk for the local loop and for backhaul, but those were all costs   
   that scaled as you gained customers.   
      
   The infrastructure bit was separated from the retail bit of BT as 'Openreach'   
   with a Chinese wall between them, but BT Retail is still the biggest and   
   slickest Openreach customer (and expensive to boot).   
      
   Now we seem to be heading for the US model, where hundreds of tiny ISPs are   
   installing fibre in whatever patch of territory they can stake out before   
   the big guns (BT and others) get around to replacing their copper with   
   fibre.  Some of those ISPs are wholesaling and some are trying to be   
   vertically integrated, but many are struggling.  Eventually a gravitational   
   crunch is going to cause a lot of mergers.  Like the hundreds of tiny   
   railway companies in the 1840s, they may go bust but hopefully we'll end up   
   with a useful network out of it.   
      
   Theo   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)