The shower of reality.
Today is a national holiday in Germany, so I'm reading the press review while having breakfast. And of course, because of my work, the eye fell on an article. It concerns the telcos and the phenomenon that is affecting them, or the disintegration.
The article is this:
I know very well what populism says about "consumer associations", which are those companies born to pay a salary to the founders. But the problem exists, because the telcos are selling their own infrastructure.
And I could continue in the USA. What happen? It happens that the telcos have broken their balls to maintain the various Youtube, Facebook & co, at their expense.
Many of you, I believe, have Facebook. Facebook moves petabytes and petabytes of data, without paying a penny for the access network, which is the most expensive part.
Let's take an example: tomorrow youtube passes ALL the videos to a more expensive codec, with more resolution and more bandwidth. This requires a further effort from the telco access network, as is obvious. The telcos, in order not to be overtaken by the competition, will invest to improve the network. And then you can see your Youtube in the new format.
Who will the proceeds of all this investment go to? to youtube. Certainly not at the telcos.
Question: how long did you think a business in which Tizio DOES NOT invest, Caio invests, and all the profits go to Tizio but not Caio could last?
It is as if a container monopolist comes along and tells the railways that he wants to transport the containers for free, and also wants to transport more: asking the railway company to invest further, but without making any money. What would happen, in a short time?
Obvious: it would happen that the railway company would stop dealing with containers, doing only passenger traffic.
That's what's happening. The telcos are selling their infrastructure to funds, which will then unbundle it and perhaps sell it piecemeal. And I know, because they're already working on it.
And I know they're working on it because I work on it too. Access network unbundling is big business today.
So imagine what happens if Netflix arrives and decides to raise the resolution of its films, or Facebook invents the metaverse for you and says it wants less latency, that is, fiber everywhere. And I'm not talking about the world of e-sports.
Sure, there is the promise that using a disaggregated network you can do edge computing and put instances of the metaverse or CDNs directly into the CO, minimizing latency. The 5G network, so to speak, is already a disaggregated architecture, thanks to ORAN and other things that I don't want to describe in detail.
But the problem remains. Who pays for these investments? pay facebook? Pay for Netflix?
No. The telcos have to pay, and in the past the European legislator also came to regulate prices, removing roaming costs and artificially lowering prices, and as if that weren't enough, a bunch of idealistic assholes said no, Facebook has the right to the popular price band, and made net neutrality.
Result: the telcos no longer want to maintain the access network, and concentrate on the carrier part. FIG.
It is no coincidence that, apart from some happy islands where development is paid for by the government (ie by users, in the form of taxpayers), neither bandwidth nor latency nor coverage are making significant progress.
You cannot appear before a board of directors saying you want to invest billions if you do not explain to the board how these billions will be repaid. Investments have to pay off, or they don't.
For a few years it was done, and some CDA bought the story that you invest and then recover on VAS services, Value Added Service. But now they don't buy it anymore, because it is well known that EVERY VAS of today is in the hands of GAFAM.
Tataaaaaaaa.
A kind of oligopoly of equipment manufacturers fits into this. The usual Nokia, Ericsson, Juniper, Cisco, etc etc. Who sell devices as if they were space science (when the technology they use is modest, and largely open source for the software part – not updated -) and continue to announce news as if they were the thing that will make us all beautiful , rich, tall and blond.
For the uninitiated: 5G is already obsolete. Far from its full adoption, 6G is coming. And it will make you all beautiful and rich and tall and blonde long before you realize that 5G does only half of what 4G promised you.
So, while the telcos are fainting to implement 5G without having a shred of service that can be implemented in order to have a return on investment, soon they will begin to siphon your balls with 6G, which will make you all beautiful, and rich, and tall and blonde and it will also make your pea bigger, doing what 4G promised you, and 50% of what 5G promised you, (but promises, you know).
And so on, the telcos will still have to dig their pockets and throw money away, while the usual GAFAMs are the only ones who make money. But in doing so they will buy a lot of very expensive and overrated boxes from various Nokia, Alcatel Lucent, Ericsson, Juniper, Cisco, Mavenir, etc etc (I don't remember them all).
Of course it can't work. The model is not sustainable.
For these reasons, the telcos are selling their infrastructures, or are trying to unsubscribe from them. Those who try to sell them to the state to ensure that the investments are no longer in the bill but are taxes, those who have already sold them to "funds", which will squeeze the infrastructures until they work, with a minimum of maintenance, then when an area sucks they'll sell it to some local municipal company.
In short, an unsustainable market.
I would like to say a few words about the various charlatans "of the good principles of the Net", who then act as a lobby for the GAFAMs, looting the coffers of the telcos.
The first are the imbeciles of "net neutrality", ie those who want connectivity to be paid for by Facebook at a popular price. Since Zuckerberg is poor, we need to help him because the access network is his human right, and we need to prevent him from paying as if he were rich.
Sure, they sell it as a "pro-user" thing, forgetting that a network connection has TWO ends, and on the other is Facebook. If I lower the cost of that connection, I have not only lowered it for the user, BUT ALSO for Facebook.
So, I repeat for the Pirate Party fakes who have never seen an OLT in their life and don't know the difference between GPON, XGPON, XGSPON, this simple concept:
Your connection to Facebook has TWO ends: on one end is you, on the other is Facebook. If you keep the price of the connection low, you save two euros a month, Zuckerberg earns eighty billion more a year. balls.
Moreover, you supported net neutrality by saying that it was not right for the richest to go faster on the backbones, forgetting the access network, and forgetting the fact that Hyperscalers already make the backbones themselves, and therefore go STILL faster. You just gave them the access network. Because you are stupid.
The second is the European regulator. The problem of making decisions unanimously places the EU in the bondage of small nations. Obviously, small nations are against nationalization: countries like France, Germany, Italy can nationalize much more than small ones.
And so, trouble if TIM sells the network to the state. So two things will happen:
- TIM sells the network to an American fund which then keeps it going as long as it can, without investments, and when it falls apart, it sells it to some municipal company.
- TIM dismantles the network and sells it to some municipal companies, in small pieces, so as not to fall within the scope of the European regulator. (one day he sells the Emilian access network to Hera – I will give an example that I know – another day he sells the Lombard one to Metroweb, etc).
This thing has been under discussion for months now, in Germany the StadtWerke, i.e. the municipal companies, are competing, in France there is the state but also the municipal companies are being created for this purpose, and so on.
I would like to ask the "net neutrality" fanatics if they would not have preferred Facebook to pay for the access network: I would like to understand what "net neutrality" they will have, when Metroweb (Lombardy) or Hera (Emilia Romagna) users will be, OBVIOUSLY, covered, fast and not as latent as those of Internet Calabria, (for obvious economic reasons of the territory)?
The next question you will have will be: are you a technologist, are there no technological solutions to this? Is it possible that the network still costs so much?
The answer is yes, there are technologies at stake. It's how I pay the bills, an American would say.
Well, the problem is that the access network wouldn't cost so much if there weren't a sort of cartel between manufacturers of "boxes" (BNG, Edge Routers, Spine Switches, OLTs, etc etc) which keep prices artificially high. And when Huawei caused a price drop, you found that “Huawei is spying on you”. The others obviously NOT: the MANDATORY compatibility with the LIBs (Lawful Interception Box, which are attached to EVERY fucking BNG) is there by pure chance.
The technological solution is called “Disaggregation” and it's what I do for a living. Take a device that was previously so proprietary that even the color of the box is patented, and redo it using open source and commodity hardware (normal servers, commercially available smart NICs, etc). Opensource software exists, you can find it on https://opennetworking.org/ , and it's a whole galaxy that I could talk about for days and days.
What happen?
What happens is that you can spend 50.60 thousand euros for a device that cost you half a million. Cool?
No. Because not only the big names in the "proprietary boxes" have men everywhere shoveling crap about the idea, which has also already been deployed by large telcos (but I won't name names, but experimentation is progressing everywhere), and in more 'in large private companies corruption by suppliers has endemic dimensions, which the public has never even dreamed of.
So yes, it is possible to lower costs by unbundling the access network, but the lobby of these vendors of proprietary boxes is acting on the legislator by imposing liability requirements that no one had ever felt the need for, with the express purpose of stopping unbundling.
So yes, the technological solution exists, but as happened with Linux, the pioneers will have to work a lot before penetrating the walls of Mordor. We are against both lobbies and corporate corruption. (which by law isn't even that, so don't fuck me up by saying I'm accusing people of committing crimes. It's a habitual practice).
The second important word is FWA. It is a technology that is based on the flexibility of ORAN, which is based on an already highly disaggregated model, and makes it possible to replace the last mile with a fast 5G connection, at least in urban areas (but also in the villages being experimented with as a replacement for WIMAX).
The advantage is to replace the fiber, which is expensive, deteriorates more easily than copper, and is subject to uncomfortable geopolitical situations, such as the monopoly of rare earths. (let it be clear, not even copper is so exempt from the problem).
The perplexity there is about FWA is that the millimeter frequencies of 5G are not very penetrating, therefore it is not at all obvious that everyone can use them to the maximum in indoor situations, and you really need MANY cells to cover large and dense areas, such as the Po Valley.
All this lowers costs, but the problem is that at that point GAFAM will say “hey, do you have 1Gb/s? Now let's find a way to make you waste it" . And go, download 30Mb of javascript framework just to display an icon, and go, download fonts that the system already has, and go, let's raise the resolution of the videos until you can see the chromosomes of the actors with the microscope.
Another question will be: why don't the GAFAMs make their own access network, as the datacenters and the carrier part already do?
The reasons are many.
- It costs. Google tried to make Open Fiber, and got hurt badly: not for nothing is it still limited to two American cities. The point is: on a technological level google hasn't been the best for 10 years now, and they don't have the skills to create an access network. Trust me, it's not as easy as it looks.
- The regulator. Login networks are not like social networks. You can keep Facebook down for six hours and nothing happens. If you keep the access network down beyond the state SLAs (for emergency calls) you pay penalties of hundreds of thousands of euros per zone per second. (in Germany it is per minute, but the figure is much higher than in places where it is per second). The gafam do not know how to build systems capable of ALWAYS staying on, thus guaranteeing emergency calls (police, fire brigade, ambulance, without which today it would be chaos).
- Why never? They understood that, since the telco makes you pay the bill, you don't like it. While Facebook, which is free, is nice. And with this sympathy it is possible to push the politicians to have the telcos maintain the access infrastructure needed by the GAFAMs.
So yes, since you are idealistic assholes who believe in Net Neutrality, that is, you believe that Facebook should buy the bandwidth at a popular price, you have succeeded in impoverishing the telcos you ask for investments.
What will happen'? Indeed, what is already 'happening?
It is happening/will happen that:
- you will see the telcos discarding their infrastructure by "monetizing" cells and cables.
- initially everything works as before, only that no one invests anymore (Blackrock, fuck it: they buy Verstager and use it as a succulent plant in the reception)
- Slowly, one piece at a time, the network is (s)sold to local municipal companies, in small pieces so as not to activate the European regulator.
In the end, Calabrian readers will write to me asking me if it's right that they suck while other Italian regions are faster and have better latency.
And my answer will be “enjoy net neutrality, pirate, this is par for balls”. Let me be clear: FURRY par for balls.
Because when you don't understand that "consumer" is the same word as "lagent", and you don't understand that consumer associations are just populist parties that don't run for election, it will be too late.
Meanwhile, the howler monkeys will get what they deserve.