"Businesses will lie to customers and regulators as much as they're allowed to get away with because it's good for profits."

Either the customer or regulator needs to hold companies to account. In an industry that is a natural monopoly like last-mile internet delivery, then regulators need to step in and work hard to structure the market such that it actually functions properly, with as much competition as possible.

In Australia this had the government own the wires, which rented the capacity to companies, that sold internet service to consumers. An actual functioning market with competition, instead of one company owning all the wires for a town/city/state, refusing to rent them to anyone else, and charging sky high rates.

Natural Monopoly?

Theres a natural Pit and Pipe monopoly, but ISPs are hardly bound to it. The Pit and Pipe asset is a gift from the federal government to Telstra, who sold it to NBN for a steal. There are multiple fibre companies in a lot of our pits. PIPE, Vocus, Optus. They are prevented by legislation from diverting any of that asset towards residential users. The only exception where theres any kind of competition at all, was TPG taking NBN to court over apartment buildings, otherwise its illegal to overbuild NBN. The penalty is quite hefty too.

In fact NBN is being directed to overbuild other fibre providers. NBN says, we arent coming to this community. Community organises their own fibre. NBN says hey we actually do want to be in this market now. Now its a legal grey area as to whether the existing provider can continue their rollout.

Thats before we get into fixed wireless. I spent 99% of the NBN "debate" with a 300M residential fixed wireless service. Shady operators give it a bad name, but a well engineered wireless link is a godsend.

We had a functional market in this country. It was ULL. Legislation forced Telstra (through gritted teeth) to sell ULL copper instead of reselling their services. It lead to the largest sharpest increase in internet speeds in this country. The ULL model allows providers to provide their own hardware and upgrade it as demand requires. It removes a middle man from their logical networks. Why we trashed this model for an NBN cost recovery makes no sense. Singapore rents glass, it was a big undertaking and it has been extremely successful. Companies competing to be the first to roll out 5/10/100 gig services.

Any discussion in this area needs to acknowledge it is illegal for me to rent pit and run a fibre cable into a residential dwelling thats already serviced by the NBN. There's nothing natural about it.

Yup - in NZ the infrastrucutre and the provider were separated as part of the nation-wide fibre-to-the-door rollout.

I switched provider the other week, after the old one discontinued a discount. All I had to do was sign up with the new provider and provide the connection number. They organised everything else and my old provider _refunded_ me for part of an unused pro-rata month.

Suspicously easy.

And how much did the Liberals and Murdoch media hate that?

I got my FTTH connection a full ten years later than I would have if they hadn't fucked with the original plan. I can't forgive them for that. It's not even personal, it was holding back the progress of the entire country.

The behaviour of Optus and Telstra at the time dictated that the only way to do it properly was to have it done by the government. And they were right, because it was 'for Australia', not for private companies' shareholders.

Please, lets not hold Australia up as any kind of bastion of internet wonderfulness.

Didn't they end up taxing competitors who didn't use the government owned network?

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