Comment by direwolf20
17 hours ago
You don't want a tier 1 carrier as your ISP because they are severely limited in connectivity — they only connect to paying customers and other tier 1s. They are to be used as a last resort by the tier 2 ISPs, who provide good packet routing by selecting the best routes from among several backbones.
Never thought I'd see this play out in practice, especially with a consumer ISP. Normally this comes up with server hosting, not consumer ISPs.
> You don't want a tier 1 carrier as your ISP
The best part about ISPs, is that usually who have very few choices, sometimes only one! Where I grew up, we had the choice of "broadband" (via antennas between an island and mainland) with one ISP, or modem with any telephone company. Eventually, proper cables where put, and we had a choice between 6 different operators.
Where I live now, I only have 3 options for ISPs with fiber, even though I live right outside a huge metropolitan area.
ISP “choice” is mostly a meme, yeah.
But depending on local rules, you can sometimes route around the monopoly: trench your own last-mile (at least on private land), do a neighborhood co-op, connect buildings, etc. It’s sometimes expensive and you’ll hit permits/right-of-way bureaucracy, but it’s totally doable if you’ve got a few (rich) friends or a business willing to back it.
“the conduit is full” is often just BS and a super convenient excuse for incumbents to block competition indefinitely.
Romania is a good example of what happens when lots of small operators aggressively wire dense apartment blocks: brutal competition, low barrier to entry, and suddenly everyone has insane internet.
If digging is blocked, wireless works too. Point-to-point links, WISP stuff, even satellite. The main thing is: you don’t necessarily need your local ISP as your upstream, you just need a path out.
> Romania is a good example of what happens when lots of small operators aggressively wire dense apartment blocks: brutal competition, low barrier to entry, and suddenly everyone has insane internet.
And it propagated to Spain thanks to the Romanian DIGI playing their strong bets for a while. I've had the access to the cheapest while also best-uptime-service option because of them on the two places I've lived in the city. They're still deploying as much as they can and meanwhile they offer VULA access where they don't have (In Spain thanks to the NEBA regulation, biggest ISPs are obligated to ease local access for any other operator) own infrastucture.
So it's available also at my parents' as well since a few months ago (Internet access still contracted with another company which honoured the low price offered back then which was subject to some conditions, and even having risen prices as much as three or four times, they've respected them for staying clients). I didn't see the need for the switch, but wouldn't had given much thought to it.
> ISP “choice” is mostly a meme, yeah.
I think Australia's model works really well – the last mile is (with occasional exceptions) owned by a government-owned ISP, NBNCo. But NBNCo is purely a wholesaler, and they only provide service from the premises to the local telephone exchange. There are dozens of competing retail ISPs, and they own the connection from the local exchange onwards. So if one of them is screwing you over, you can switch to another. And if you have a fibre connection, you can even split your fibre connection over multiple retail ISPs–you can sign up for new one as a trial without cancelling the old one, and then reverting back is literally just swapping an Ethernet cable to a different port.
I'm surprised more countries haven't copied it.
I think Germany has something equivalent to local loop unbundling, but obviously, DT still provides shitty loops because they are shitty at all aspects of their business.
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The day when T-Mobile NL (nowadays known as 'Odido') started routing all traffic via DTAG to 'save costs', and latency increased because in NL you were routed via Frankfurt. And after complaints they actually insisted on this. Then the company got bought by investors, who immediately changed this back, and also changed the name of the company.