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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: potpourri (Re: Clearwire May Block VoIP Competitors )
On Thu, 31 Mar 2005, Paul Vixie wrote: Being a Swedish cellphone subscriber, I cannot roam at all between the Swedish providers. If you are an user from outside Sweden, you can roam with them all. Three parallell networks trying to cover a country the size of california but with only 9 million people in it, and generally they're not allowed to use each others infrastructure. Silly.to that end, i've wondered why the US doesn't join other industrialized nations in regulating cellular roaming agreements and tower spacing and coverage. in the parts of sweden with a density less than 10 people per square kilometer, cell phones work. in similar parts of the US, they don't. The best coverage in the less populated parts of Sweden is still with an analogue 450MHz based system from the 80ties that is going to be shut down soon. But I do agree, the whole US market would be better off with more regulation in all areas actually. There is no need for a lot of parallell networks really, in theory you only need one, especially in parts that are less populated. So the local loop is regulated in Sweden and a lot of the swedish population can choose from 3-4 different DSL providers, all competing with price and speed. Current best price for 8M/1M adsl is $35 excluding tax. Of this the phone company gets $8 for the shared copper used in the local loop. Wholesale of bandwidth and capacity and dark fiber works well, everybody buys from everybody at decent prices. The capital municipality runs its own fiber business where anyone can rent fiber for approx $200 per month and kilometer of fiber (cost per kilometer goes down as distance goes up). The PTT is competing with the same prices, they have to. Telia (the PTT) is even one of the first to aggressively offer digital broadcast TV over broadband to compete with the cable companies. Comparing to other countries where the municipalities aren't involved in infrastructure, fiber in Sweden is cheap. When the municipality puts down other infrastructure such as heating and cooling pipes, paving roads etc, they also put in fiber. Doesn't cost much more when you're doing work anyway. The important thing of course is that they have to sell to everybody, otherwise you run into problems. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: [email protected]
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