AT&T, T-Mobile Embrace ‘Open Access’ Fiber After Years Of Opposition
from the financially-incentivized-to-see-the-light dept
Two years ago, Techdirt’s Copia Institute released a report discussing how open access fiber networks were a potential path toward boosting fiber competition in the United States. Such networks, sometimes community owned, involve collaboratively building a centralized fiber infrastructure that multiple competitors can come in and compete over.
In instances where this has been successfully achieved — like Utah’s Utopia or in Ammon, Idaho — users sometimes have the option of dozens of different fiber ISPs, which in some cases can be switched between with just a few clicks on a web portal. The projects lower the cost of market entry. The competition drives down prices, improves service quality, and generally results in better broadband access.
Understandably big ISPs like Comcast and AT&T didn’t much like that, and spent years fighting such projects knowing they threatened their regional dominance. But now some executives at AT&T and T-Mobile appear to have seen the light, with both companies striking new deals to build or participate in such open access networks:
“Once staunch opponents of open access, Tier 1 Internet Service Providers are now entering a space that, in the United States, has been pioneered by local governments two decades ago.
In the last year-and-a-half, AT&T has embraced open access through its Gigapower joint venture with BlackRock, the world’s largest money manager with $10 trillion assets under management.”
In this case BlackRock is building the network, and AT&T would be the “anchor tenant” (the first ISP to sign up for service). The about face for AT&T is fairly significant; the company went from fighting such network vehemently, to their CEO making the rounds talking up the benefits of open access.
The approach always made sense financially and developmentally; AT&T and larger ISPs simply opposed it because they didn’t want anything disrupting their regional telecom monopolies or duopolies, which allow them to price gouge captive customers trapped in markets without competition. AT&T’s opposition was particularly venomous when community-owned networks (municipals, cooperatives) were involved.
What changed these companies minds? They’re lining up to potentially obtain more than $45 billion in broadband subsidies currently looming thanks to 2021 infrastructure bill legislation. That money isn’t expected to start flowing in earnest until next year. The bullishness is great to see, but it will be interesting to see if it remains intact once AT&T (a company with a long history of making promises it doesn’t deliver on) has nabbed their desired cut of taxpayer funds.
Filed Under: bead, broadband, competition, fiber, high speed internet, infrastructure bill, open access, telecom
Companies: at&t, blackrock, t-mobile
Comments on “AT&T, T-Mobile Embrace ‘Open Access’ Fiber After Years Of Opposition”
Yeah, I have my extreme doubts. Who wants to bet that they’ll half-ass the deployment of these networks too? Or that they’ll deploy them and then pull out of the deal once they’ve gotten a big chunk of that 45b?
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Don’t think you’ll find many people arguing against you on that one.
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The usual trick is to give unfair preference to the “anchor tenant”. You can buy service from a third-party provider, but, you know, sometimes someone “accidentally” disconnects a fibre, and tickets from the third-party providers don’t get handled quickly. Maybe those providers have unreasonable tariffs, such that they can’t realistically offer unlimited service but the anchors can. Or the third-party wholesale rate is more than the advertised first-party retail rate, which is the current situation with Bell fibre in Canada. Such shenanigans are why the U.K.’s regulator eventually demanded full “functional separation” between B.T. and OpenReach.
If we REALLY knew what we were doing in the US, we would have fibre to the home and allow anyone to use it
If we really knew what we were doing, we would have fibre to every home, and allow anyone to run over it.
There is no need to have EXCLUSIVE USE of any fiber optic cable to the home.
The cool thing about fiber is you can MULTIPLE services over the same fibre, just by using a different wavelength of light.
So you could have one fibre, carrying internet from multiple providers, tv from multiple providers, phone from multiple providers etc..
It is 100% possible and doable if there was a little effort.
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10G-PON uses different wavelengths from GPON, which means a 10G subscriber won’t be slowed down by GPON subscribers on their node. RFoG also uses a different wavelength. But I’m not sure an ISP can just arbitrarily choose the wavelengths for each service, such that one could subscribe to multiple 10G ISPs, for example.
I’m also not sure it particularly matters. Multi-fibre cables are cheap enough to run to each subscriber, much as houses and apartments were usually provisioned with 2 telephone pairs per dwelling. In both cases, most people will never need it. (Why would they? If they have fast unlimited internet service, they can use that to connect to whatever other services they’ll need. If they want redundancy, they probably don’t want to use fibres with common routing.)
They’ve announced back in 2022:
Since they haven’t announced something big since then, this may look like they try to prospect for find some new markets but still waiting for a bunch of federal investments to start connecting anything.
Clearly, it’s not the BlackRock’s $10T assets that will be used to building fiber infrastructure.
Works for me
I’m an American but live in Italy. Many things do not run very smoothly here, but internet tends to be quite good. Each neighborhood here has a carrier that installs the fiber and runs it. They can be your provider or you might select another. We pay under 20 usd or month for 800mbps down. It has been very reliable.
I’ve seen this structure multiple times. First up, the ISP contributes its expertise in proscribing the network components and the investment company contributes the money to roll out the network.
Once the network has been built out, the ISP buys the network from the investment company so they only have one month/quarter with bad results and the investment company has more money than they put up.
Oh, and the `open’ claim is long forgotten by that point.
Hold on a minute. Shouldn’t that money be going to Blackrock? Why does AT&T get a big slice if they’re just the service provider and not the implementor/hardware provider?