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posted by martyb on Tuesday November 30 2021, @10:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the double-triple-quad-penta-hexa-keep-on-dipping-money-pot dept.

Big Tech firms should pay ISPs to upgrade networks, telcos in Europe claim:

The CEOs of 13 large European telecom companies today called on tech giants—presumably including Netflix and other big US companies—to pay for a portion of the Internet service providers' network upgrade costs. In a "joint CEO statement," the European telcos described their proposal as a "renewed effort to rebalance the relationship between global technology giants and the European digital ecosystem."

The letter makes an argument similar to one that AT&T and other US-based ISPs have made at times over the past 15 years, that tech companies delivering content over the Internet get a "free" ride and should subsidize the cost of building last-mile networks that connect homes to broadband access. These arguments generally don't mention the fact that tech giants already pay for their own Internet bandwidth costs and that Netflix and others have built their own content-delivery networks to help deliver the traffic that home-Internet customers choose to receive.


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  • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday November 30 2021, @03:35PM (3 children)

    by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday November 30 2021, @03:35PM (#1200876)

    Here in the UK, I've got a choice of 3 different physical wired networks in the street outside my house (currently deliberating whether it is worth moving from FTTC to full fibre...) and 2-3 at-least-4G (probably soon to be 5G) mobile networks. (Not to mention a dozen resellers of those services)

    Let me take a wild guess here...you live somewhere in the greater London area?

    Yes, congratulations, you have a lot more choice. We don't like our monopolies over here any more than you do.

    --

    I seem to remember that the government has *already* subsidized the telecoms to build out more infrastructure, which they mostly pocketed and went about business as usual overselling their networks and complaining it was too expensive to lay new wires.

    --
    "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by janrinok on Tuesday November 30 2021, @04:15PM

    by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 30 2021, @04:15PM (#1200890) Journal

    I live in rural France - but there are at least 4 ISPs I can choose from. The connections are unbundled - the same bits of wire can be used by any ISP.

    Now, I can't today get a fibre connection in the countryside but if I don't get a good service from my ISP I can change within 24 hours.

  • (Score: 2) by choose another one on Tuesday November 30 2021, @04:31PM

    by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 30 2021, @04:31PM (#1200895)

    Let me take a wild guess here...you live somewhere in the greater London area?

    Well I'm not (approx 200M north, small market town) but availability is similar. I can't get fttp, yet, but for physical both cable and fttc are available, as is mobile from multiple providers, 4G at least (don't have any 5G capable stuff to check that coverage).

  • (Score: 2) by theluggage on Tuesday November 30 2021, @05:51PM

    by theluggage (1797) on Tuesday November 30 2021, @05:51PM (#1200911)

    Let me take a wild guess here...you live somewhere in the greater London area?

    No. Outskirts of a Midlands city - in the top 20 but outside of the top 10 UK cities by population. Nowhere "special". The tarmac is still fresh over the Fibre option, but there has been a choice between FTTC and TV cable, plus a couple of 4G mobile networks, for years.

    This isn't about the rural broadband problem (which still exists) - but with 82% of the UK population living in urban areas (according to Google), that means that a *lot* of the UK population will have a choice of at least two physical networks (usually ADSL/FTTC or TV cable) so no ISP can afford to drop or restrict a major service.