Tuesday 11 January 2011

wholesale dilemma (and solution)

Who wants wholesale access to our community fibre networks?
  1. government want to see wholesale access offered if there's public money spent on their construction
  2. ISPs believe they have a right to offer services on networks where there is a monopoly operator (irresepective of who paid for it)
  3. consumers want a "choice" of ISPs
Sounds reasonable but the downside is that to engineer wholesale access can result in an inferior technical solution.  The standard wholesale architecture sees IP packets to and from a subscriber "tunnelled" to the serving ISP which can be quite some distance away.  Packets can't be processed (routed) at the Digital Village Pump.