[AusNOG] Fwd: [Internet Australia - members] Net neutrality

[Mark Newton]

On 24 Nov 2015, at 20:14, "paul+ausnog at oxygennetworks.com.au" <paul+ausnog at oxygennetworks.com.au> wrote:

> I think maybe we need to look at other models which are working and determine where the issue lies.

We already know where the issue lies.

> Is it backhaul congestion ?
> Is it backhaul cost ?

This is the nub of it.

There are a very small number of network operators in Australia who operate their own access network.

The ones that don't buy access to Telstra's and Optus' and NBN's access networks, and label the bundle of services they end up with as "last mile."

It isn't last mile, not by a long shot. But everyone loves to pretend they run their own ISP networks, so they call it "last mile" and grouse about the cost.

Internally, these access aggregation networks aren't much different from the Internet: they have a relatively small number of POPs, interconnected to larger aggregation POPs using wavelengths on commodity fiber;  They have NNI links which look, for all intents and purposes, like a peering edge, and UNI links which are the actual last mile, and a core/distribution layer connecting all the bits together.

These networks, which are constructed basically the same way that the Internet is constructed, are priced per megabit at a level that's between 20 and 100 times more expensively than the actual Internet, even when they are comprised of components that have already been fully amortized and which no longer attract maintenance costs.

They are so phenomenally expensive that they totally dominate the cost model for Internet access provision in Australia.

This is basically the only country in the world that sells fixed-line broadband with quotas, which is a usage based pricing model where revenue scales with utilization to find the provision of infrastructure. You ISPs should be swimming in oceans of cash, but you aren't because you give virtually all of your spare money to Telstra, Optus, and NBNCo to run outsourced access networks, badly.

And you people, victims of Stockholm Syndrome that you are, are led into stupid net neutrality debates instead of sitting down and actually fixing the problem.

The NZ'ers gave it a pretty good effort with UFB, which has a different cost model. The Brits deaggregated theirs a decade ago. The Americans and French never had a wholesale model like ours to begin with.

We're a special unique little snowflake.

Everyone knows how to fix it, but the people who need it fixed (you) can't get themselves organized, and the people who can fix it are economically incentivized to not get it fixed.

The NBN makes this a political issue, not a commercial one. There is no inherent need for NBN to be profitable, that's a pure political decision. If any of you were remotely capable of engaging with the political process it'd have been fixed by now, we'd see politicians you've successfully lobbied causing political pain for Fifield for making his NBN expensive enough to ruin the promise of successful online business in Australia, demanding that the CVC model be abolished.

But is anyone in Canberra making that point? Nope. Sound of crickets.

Australia does not have a trans-Pacific congestion problem, or an intercapital congestion problem, or (if you folks know how to design things) an intra-POP congestion problem.

The congestion that (well-managed) Australian ISPs suffer is at the point of aggregation between their network and their wholesale aggregation supplier's NNI, which is priced to extortion, and always has been.

Fix that, create abundance where there is currently a permanent discretionary shortage, and the entire network neutrality issue becomes irrelevant.

   - mark



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