[ShabbyDoo]

I've always seen local governments as the root cause of "last mile" providers' ability to turn their customers into the product. Why haven't elected officials made more stringent demands upon the companies given monopoly (or at best duopoly) rights to convey bits to and from my home?

I have a condo in Chicago and was delighted to learn that a company was offering our building last mile connectivity via microwave along with SLAs for not only bandwidth but latency as well (to which point I don't recall)! Sadly, the condo board didn't seem so enthralled. Unlike the suburbs, city folk have more options apparently.

[techsupporter]

In my experience, nothing stops a facilities provider from serving whomever they like. Video franchises--which don't apply to data service in most states--are almost always non-exclusive. For example, in Seattle, the dominant provider (Comcast) has a franchise that specifically says it is not the sole property of Comcast. Another company, Wave Broadband, also has a franchise to serve the city but only serves specific portions of it. Meanwhile, companies like Condo Internet are free to provide gigabit service to whomever they like, so they serve only the buildings that are the most profitable.

The biggest problem is that last-mile is a very, very, very expensive proposition. Ask Verizon. Their former CEO, Ivan Seidenberg, learned that the hard way. Digging up streets, attaching to poles, and plopping down equipment all costs a lot of money. It also, in the case of cabinet-sized telco equipment, can really irk the neighbors.

Ultimately, if we want real competition for more than just high-end condominiums, we need to start treating physical plant connections like roads, power lines, and water pipes: a central, neutral authority builds them for the benefit of a specific geographical area and then all comers are allowed to use them. (No, HOAs, building your own coax network and then having some cut-rate third-tier ISP become the exclusive owner of those wires doesn't count. That's not competition, either.)

[knodi123]

With regards to netflix, it's not always the last mile that's the problem.

Specifically, Netflix's ISP has an agreement with your ISP, which says essentially "You know what? We send and receive a lot of data. How about I won't charge you for your data travelling across my network, and you don't charge me for my data on your network." But then Netflix's ISP transmits enormous amounts of bandwidth, and your ISP doesn't really get to take an equal advantage of that reciprocal deal.

It's actually about peering agreements between ISPs. Your ISP wants Netflix's ISP to foot the bill for the fact that their reciprocal agreement is statistically just one-sided.

[dm2]

The customers of the ISPs are the ones who obtain value and demand fast delivery of Netflix. The bandwidth from Netflix is something that can't really be avoided so it is advantageous for both the ISP and Netflix for the ISPs for cache the content and use Netflix's Open Connect CDN or whatever it's called.

The the ISPs don't deliver and throttle Netflix's bandwidth and it's noticeable to the customer then hopefully the customer has the option of going to another ISP.

[jedbrown]

A friend of mine lives in a large apartment building next to the Loop in Chicago. The building was unable to negotiate a competitive plan so they went with satellite. Clearly the local market has failed when satellite offers a better package.