Spain guarantees right to 1 megabyte broadband connection
Following the example of Finland, the Spanish government says that beginning 2011, everyone in Spain will have the right to buy broadband at speeds of at least 1 megabyte per second. The government recognizes that, like telephone service, broadband is now an essential part of daily life.
Any telecom operator that has a universal service contract has to provide reasonably priced broadband everywhere in Spain. At present, universal service obligations imposed on these operators include only fixed line telephony and directory service. The government is adding Internet access to the list of obligations.
I am quite shocked to read this because large parts of Spain are mountainous and sparsely populated — the Pyrenees, Basque country, the northwest around Santiago de Compostela, the Parque Nacional de Sierra Nevada in the south, also very mountainous, difficult terrain. I expect that the operators will have to deploy wireless broadband in those areas to meet the government’s mandate.
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There is no such thing as a free lunch. Why should all the people of Spain have to pay for this? The people who want internet speeds faster than that are paying for internet service twice, and the people who never wanted internet service have to pay for something they never asked for.
I would say that “food” is far more necessary to modern living, and yet, people seem to get that just fine without the government coming in and mandating that grocery stores sell food to everyone at “reasonable” prices. It’s free markets, not government confiscation of wealth, that get people the things they want efficiently and fairly, without anyone paying too much or too little through their bills or their taxes in any combination.
Who’s talking about free? The government did not guarantee free service, only the availability of broadband.
Don’t the people of Spain already pay for roads and the new high-speed train (the AVE)? Spain is on track to becoming the country with the greatest number of high-speed rail kilometers. If all people pay for is what they use, there would not be any roads in the Pyrenees and precious few in Asturias. Spain would be a backwater.
There is a huge difference between the market for broadband service (today) and food. Because Spain has been ruled by the incumbent, Telefonica, for decades, it has been difficult for new entrants in the market. Telefonica has disproportionate market power and the European Commission has pointed this out more than once. The Spanish government wants to ensure that, like food, people have a lot of options for broadband service.
The government wants competition, which is good for the people, but not for Telefonica. So by subsidizing the rollout of high speed broadband networks and ensuring that those networks are open to all ISPs at reasonable prices, the ISPs can turn around the deliver service to Spanish residents and businesses. They compete with one another for the people’s business. This is the reason why the EU is moving towards “structural separation” – separating out the physical broadband network from the services so that the company who owns the physical network does not hog it and exclude all the others who deliver services.
Finally, in your analogy about food: in the US, fast food is “cheap”, artificially so, not necessarily because of the free market but because of government subsidies for corn syrup and other stuff. We have already seen the disastrous effects of private companies doing anything they way without government regulation — in the banking industry. The so-called “free market” in banking was not free at all. It was and is dominated by a few market players. There’s not a lot of competition and it’s only getting worse. The banks are getting bigger. The best thing to do would be for the government to break them up and force them all to compete. I like competition. It’s a shame that other people don’t.
You say ‘At present, universal service obligations imposed on these operators include only fixed line telephony and directory service’
Well, I live 3km outside a town (San Roque, Cadiz)and I can’t have a fixed line phone. The council won’t allow telefonica to erect lines; and although an underground ONO line passes 300m from our entrance, ONO does recognise our country address. So your statement is not accurate, no doubt inadvertently.
In act, here is what ono says:
Lamentamos informarte que actualmente la dirección que nos has dado no nos permite ofrecerle ningún combinado
I should have said ‘ONO does not recognise our address’
Brian, technically and legally it isn’t easy to give coverage to every house outside a town.
Spiker, I know it’s not yet technically possible, so it is therefore not correct to say, (quote from above) “Any telecom operator that has a universal service contract has to provide reasonably priced broadband everywhere in Spain.”