We have a new FCC on board that is busy meddling in every sector of the communications market, save one. That one item is the choke hold of the duopoly and is the single largest growth limited in the US economy after the taxes and federal debt. Yes,  I’m about to rant on the virtues of a strongly enforced unbundlind of the local loop again.

While the rest of the world is preparing for 4G mobile wireless to augument its fatter fixed line access, in many major American cites, 4G will meet or surpass the fixed line capacity. The reason is the lack of investment from a telco /cable duopoly that has no real competition.

In France, the last mile is open to any competitor and no matter what you hear fromthe duopoly suits and thoer fed lap dogs, all of the players in that competitive market are making money. The real eye openier is how much the average French househould gets for far less than we spend here:

French broadband providers like Free.fr, Numericable, and SFR have just one offer. It costs €30/$45, and for that you get everything:

• Cable and DSL internet at 20-30Mbps (and DOCSIS3 or fiber at 100Mbps in some towns)
• Free telephony to 100 nations (mostly to fixed lines; calling mobiles costs more)
• HDTV with a HD-DVR

(Some ISPs like Numericable and France Telecom/Orange have offers for €20 for Internet + telephony, or Internet + TV, but the majority of customers choose a €30 pack.)

This isn’t all you get. More is included, like free access to WiFi hotspots, music jukeboxes, computer games, your own personal television channel for live TV, etc. We’ll touch upon these innovations in more depth below.

The pioneer of this business model was Free.fr. Led by its maverick CEO Xavier Niel, it introduced the plus simple model in 2002 into what was then considered a lagging broadband market. Now Free is the second largest ISP in the country, it is profitable (with 4 million subscribers), and it boasts extremely low churn rates below 0.01 percent a month. One could almost say that Free’s subscribers only give up their subscription upon death or moving outside of the service area. (Ars Technica)

If the new FCC chair really wants to make a difference in broadband, he’ll work to reinstate local loop unbundling in the United States.  No stimulus pork, broadband maps or net neutrality laws needed. In a truly competitive market, the bad business practices of the duopoly will change instantly. Of course that also require  less central planning and control in Washington DC. No one really believes the FCC or our current Congress and President is interested in that. Far easier to draw very expensive maps and put a shiny new “net neutrality” clown suit on the inadequate system we already have.

It’s been more than a year since I brought the idea forward that we need to establish a 1 gigabit symmetric connection as the new gold standard for consumer broadband. Cable Modem inventor Rouzbeh Yassin seems to be in agreement with this idea, although he’s trying to push the envelope on coax cable to get the job done. If you are burying cable today, only fiber makes sense looking ahead to the future.

As Comcast begins rolling out DOCSIS 3.0-based “wideband” services that provide up to 50 Mbps, he is already anticipating Gigabit-per-second broadband connections that deliver more than 20 times that. Yassini, founder and CEO of YAS Broadband Ventures, which engages in consulting, research and investments, spoke recently with Multichannel News technology editor Todd Spangler (Multichannel News)

Why do we need a gigabit? It’s a Field of Dreams scenario. If the pipe exists, it will be filled, creating nearly unlimited opportunities to enrich our lives as well as creating a conduit for abundant economic growth.

The time has come to quit looking to traditional service providers like the cable /  telecom duopoly to build for the future. Federal government policy is still stuck in the 1960’s and is unlikely to produce any advances with a new “connected” administration beyond more regulations for the incumbent providers. Those of us who can see beyond what we have today need to work locally and create the new connected world ourselves. Call it the mother of all open source projects.

If you are a regular reader, you already know that I think a new net neutrality law is likely to give us the opposite of what it claims.  You simply can’t make a duopoly behave. The real problem is the last mile, and it belongs to us - both in the wireline and wireless mode of delivery, yet we have laws and regulations that have given control of it to one or two companies in most localities. If we need any new national laws, we need to reinforce the right for all comers to access public right of ways.

Looking deeper into the real danger of net neutrality legislation, I would like to call your attention to a piece from Timothy B. Lee at the Cato Institute. Yes he’s a staunch libertarian, but so are the very founding principles of our internet (and yes, it also belongs to US).

New regulations inevitably come with unintended consequences. Indeed, today’s network neutrality debate is strikingly similar to the debate that produced the first modern regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission. Unfortunately, rather than protecting consumers from the railroads, the ICC protected the railroads from competition by erecting new barriers to entry in the surface transportation marketplace. Other 20th-century regulatory agencies also limited competition in the industries they regulated. Like these older regulatory regimes, network neutrality regulations are likely not to achieve their intended aims. Given the need for more competition in the broadband marketplace, policymakers should be especially wary of enacting regulations that could become a barrier to entry for new broadband firms. (cato.org)