Our EA Nation member from St. Petersburg aka Petrograd, fhunter reports

We have fiber optic to the apartment buildings and six competing providers, so we can get online .

Wow! Six competing providers for the fiber optic cable.

Now that represents an enlightened society.

Other examples appreciated here.

Moi

where the free market is not free, it is a monopoly.

I don't think its particularly 'enlightened', but to relate to the above post, I thought it was really cool that when I lived in Regina, Saskatchewan in the mid-early 1990's, we were most fortunate in that we had the first cross-city installation of DSL lines in North America . Sleepy, little backwoods Regina... in 1996 I remember my computers processing speed was probably slower than my internet connection . Fun times.

Is that six competing providers of fiber, or of content carried on the fiber?

Fiber to the home is very costly to install. It means rewiring every building served with hundreds or thousands of feet of fiber through walls and floors, and installing interfaces between the fiber and user equipment. In the US, it's being slowly rolled out by Verizon. Unless users buy premium TV, telephone, and data services from Verizon, or a comparable provider, there's no way to recover costs and earn even a small profit. The entire telecom industry is watching the Verizon experiment with great interest. With the economy in a slump, far fewer people request fiber service now than might have a year or two ago. There are still not that many applications where average users would see a meaningful improvement from fiber.

The greatest users of fiber are businesses which transmit very large volumes of data, and many of these are already served by fiber networks. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 spurred a rush to build fiber networks, and hundreds of companies piled in, building often redundant networks around the country to meet anticipated demand. The demand never materialized, and the collapse of the many fiber network companies was a big part of the "dot-com" crash in 2000. The excess network capacity was consolidated by a few companies, who now hold a vast reserve of fiber lines waiting for customers.

The big communications companies also use optical switches in their networks. These have a much greater capacity than electrical switches, and have been used for years. It's very likely that many of our internet transmissions pass through optical switches at some point, and the growing volume of web traffic really requires them.

It's much easier to run fiber to new buildings under construction, but again, only extensive use of high-bandwidth applications justifies the expense. I don't know how widespread fiber is in Russia, especially outside a few big cities like St. Petersburg, or what the rationale could be. I'd like to hear more from fhunter. There's a military aspect to fiber, because it's not subject to electromagnetic disruption, as copper cable might be in a war.

Fiber networks will spread or not because of economic concerns, not "enlightenment."

I was the marketing guy on the AT&T team that developed DSL. There were several competing versions of DSL back then, and the Bell Labs guys would have at it. Regardless of version, the business case was easy to make: broadband vs. dial-up (big, clear improvement in performance and value from computers), and re-use of existing copper wires (easy to use, cheap to install). Hard to imagine there are still many places in the US where broadband is unavailable. DSL requires existing network facilities of the right type, and cable, etc., isn't everywhere.

bobover3 (imported) wrote: Sun Feb 28, 2010 11:00 pm Is that six competing providers of fiber, or of content carried on the fiber?

Ask the Petrogradian, fhunter or Russia.

I imagined the fiber optic hardware installed in his building has

six carriers competing for his business. Nice. True competition.

Not like monopolies at all.

Or did I mis understand what fhunter was expressing.

http://www.eunuch.org/vbulletin/showpos ... stcount=97

Seems to me I might have Time-Warner, Cox, etc all trying to convince me

to subscribe to their computer modems and TV Cable boxes, etc. all via the same cable, instead of just one carrier. Oh, freedom. <sigh>

moi621 (imported) wrote: Sun Feb 28, 2010 9:56 pm Our EA Nation member from St. Petersburg aka Petrograd, fhunter reports

We have fiber optic to the apartment buildings and six competing providers, so we can get online .

Wow! Six competing providers for the fiber optic cable.

Now that represents an enlightened society.

Other examples appreciated here.

Moi

where the free market is not free, it is a monopoly.

Okay, I should have been more specific.

So six providers, they are giving internet over ethernet cable.

Rybatskoe net, Alpha Telecom, Nienshantz home, Corbina, Prime net. + one or two DSL - can't remember exactly, newer looked their way.

Two providers from this list have their own fiber network (that I know for sure - one advertised that, the other one - I knew two sysadmins from it and asked directly).

Providers network here is laid like this - fiber optic to the apartment building, then cat-5 ethernet cable to the apartments. And considering the costs - investment in fiber pays off - most of the cabling is not underground - so the results of one summer thunderstorm can be disastrous.

As far as I know - providers networks are separate. So each puts it's own cables and hardware. I may take a picture of this - sometimes it looks like spider's web

On the other hand - this situation with multiple providers and low prices only works in some big cities, along the axis Moscow - Saint-Petersburg and probably along the BAM. Move farther from it and - you get basically monopoly and skyrocketing prices.

As for content - we have experimental IPTV in our network.

PS. This providers are "last mile". They rent channels from bigger ones.

PPS. If there are still questions - I will try to answer them as best as I can.

Someone provided the fiber. The six competitors are content providers.

Economists recognize the existence of "natural monopolies," when it's so much more effective to have one provider that it makes no sense to do anything else. Government does this in some cases.

Telephony was another example of a natural monopoly. There were once many different phone companies, each of which had its own network and own phones. That meant that people who wanted to be able to call anyone with a phone had to have many phones - as many as ten or more, with separate wires for each one - and know which network everyone was on, so they could use the right phone to make the call. This was so inefficient that when Theodore Vail, then AT&T's chairman, approached the government with a proposal to grant AT&T a monopoly in exchange for AT&T's guarantee of Universal Service and acceptance of government regulation, the government was quick to agree. The resulting Bell System was responsible for wiring America for phones. The value it offered was that you could call anyone from any phone. Today, this seems obvious, but it was a historic innovation when it occurred.

Now, of course, electronic technology allows the invisible linking of networks, so that we can still enjoy universal service even though there are numerous independent providers. But remember that it's only a marvel of modern technology that makes this possible.

Carping about monopolies in the pre-computer age makes no sense, because only monopolies or large near-monopolies achieved the economies of scale needed for mass production, which was the chief vehicle for the unprecedented rise in living standards of working people during the century before 1970.

That computers allow us to make small-scale manufacture profitable shouldn't blind us to the immense historical importance of mass production by big businesses in raising ordinary people from their 19th century squalor.

So Russia doesn't have fiber to the home (what Verizon is doing). They have "fiber to the curb," as it's called in the industry, and then cat-5 Ethernet cable from a hub to the home. Big difference. Each home gets broadband, but not at fiber speed. The hubs act as big multiplexers. Though there may be competing providers, I can't believe each home has separate Ethernet cabling from each provider. The providers have separate local hubs, and each home may be connected to a different hub via its own fixed cabling. Nice, but not ahead of the US.

bobover3 (imported) wrote: Mon Mar 01, 2010 1:38 am Someone provided the fiber. The six competitors are content providers.

Economists recognize the existence of "natural monopolies," when it's so much more effective to have one provider that it makes no sense to do anything else. Government does this in some cases.

Telephony was another example of a natural monopoly. There were once many different phone companies, each of which had its own network and own phones. That meant that people who wanted to be able to call anyone with a phone had to have many phones - as many as ten or more, with separate wires for each one - and know which network everyone was on, so they could use the right phone to make the call. This was so inefficient that when Theodore Vail, then AT&T's chairman, approached the government with a proposal to grant AT&T a monopoly in exchange for AT&T's guarantee of Universal Service and acceptance of government regulation, the government was quick to agree. The resulting Bell System was responsible for wiring America for phones. The value it offered was that you could call anyone from any phone. Today, this seems obvious, but it was a historic innovation when it occurred.

Now, of course, electronic technology allows the invisible linking of networks, so that we can still enjoy universal service even though there are numerous independent providers. But remember that it's only a marvel of modern technology that makes this possible.

Carping about monopolies in the pre-computer age makes no sense, because only monopolies or large near-monopolies achieved the economies of scale needed for mass production, which was the chief vehicle for the unprecedented rise in living standards of working people during the century before 1970.

That computers allow us to make small-scale manufacture profitable shouldn't blind us to the immense historical importance of mass production by big businesses in raising ordinary people from their 19th century squalor.

Huh?

Whose living standards went up in the 1970's and after.

All those middle class working folk who lost the American dream of home ownership in ever increasing percentages?

The 1950's and early sixties were certainly the high water mark of single income, working middle class American folk owning their home and car and "stuff".

With the sequestering of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer, the working middle-middle has taken the hardest hit from the before time. (before 1970).

<sigh>

What do you call it when one uses false assumptions to support a wrong conclusion?

So, competitive capitalism is okay, when convenient?

bobover3 (imported) wrote: Mon Mar 01, 2010 1:47 am Though there may be competing providers, I can't believe each home has separate Ethernet cabling from each provider. The providers have separate local hubs, and each home may be connected to a different hub via its own fixed cabling. Nice, but not ahead of the US.

You'd better believe this. They use separate cabling. Most of the buildings were built before the internet age. So cat5 is installed on demand.