From a consumer perspective, a fixed internet service is just that, something that connects their home/workplace to other internet service consumers and content providers

Hmm Consumer vs Provider – there are two separate things happening here – Content and Connectivity – in the voice world, Calls and Dialtone

As far as internet service provision is concerned, in the most basic sense, it is just about providing that “broadband dial-tone”, the ability to connect to other nodes on the internet at a certain rate and/or level of quality (which may be defined as “bulk/best efforts” or have some specific committed service level eg MLPS or speed eg CIR)

This is important element of Fibrestream’s objective to operate FtEH on a wholesale, on-local-net, dumb-pipe basis and leave the content and off-local-net global IP connectivity to third party vendors (subject to the proviso that should there be market failure Fibrestream might have to step in)

What started these musings was the following link:

http://www.offta.org.uk/updates/otaupdate20081205.htm

“Next Generation Access (NGA) – OTA2 continues to monitor the development of NGA. A major area of concern is around the development of a trading model which enables the inclusion of disparate geographically dispersed networks in offering service to national service providers.”

On second reading the question remain in my mind “what exactly is a national service provider” in the sense of a raw internet connection, when/if these islands of mutually-owned FttH decide to interconnect directly with each other..

Afterall the internet is simply a network of networks and a network happens when 2 or more nodes can connect and communicate

BT has engineered a situation in the UK today whereby literal next-door neighbours wishing to communicate directly with each other via ADSL have their connection routed to a remote peering point that may be 100s of miles away, introducing delays and quality of service degradation, when the data path could be engineered to relay via the local telephone exchange/CO

- a “broadband local call”, whereas with now-gen broadband, every connection is de facto long-distance.

If each mutual FtEH Island agrees to peer with its…. peers! then that seems to me to be the trading model right there that OTA is concerned about.

“You move my bits, I’ll move yours and we’ll all benefit” – doesn’t sound like there’s so much room for national internet service providers in that model.

- this seems to be an inevitable result of everyone having symmetric FtEH connectivity that brings data-centre levels of performance into every home.