Thread by @PolicyAroon

Let's talk about a TRAI consultation you probably ignored.

Forget Net Neutrality for a moment. Did you know that your internet could be facing a much deeper competitive threat?

Not in your internet provider's network, but in your building society.

#Thread

Let's say you live in an apartment, like millions of other urban dwellers. This means that you live in a city, and cities have excellent broadband coverage compared to rural areas.

So you should have a wide variety of ISPs to choose from. Right?

Not really.

The Bureau of Indian Standards has rules for how every building interacts with the essential utilities it needs from the outside world.

Water, sewage, electricity.

But these utilities are provided only by your municipality, and not by private operators, like the internet is.

When your building provides you with water and electricity, and drains your sewage, it has little bargaining power in how it builds that infrastructure. The municipality is at an advantage because of strict regulations.

Not so with private internet providers.

As things stand, there are absolutely no rules that prevent your society from refusing access to some Internet providers, while allowing others.

Every Internet provider needs to install equipment in-building to reach you, and building associations can just refuse that access.

This has grave implications for competition. Building managements across the country can reach privately negotiated agreements to allow one ISP, while disallowing others.

This is already happening in India. There are entire apartment complexes 'powered' by a single ISP.

This problem becomes amplified when you consider how newer apartment complexes are built. Newer buildings have internet infrastructure within the walls of a building already, with ethernet ports in individual flats.

This means any ISP can just hook into a hub and get started.

It may seem that this would allow more, not fewer, ISPs to access your apartment.

But if there is no infrastructure cost for large ISPs, they are able to pay an exorbitant amount of money to the building management to monopolize their access to that hub.

Unlike older buildings that have no such pre-installed network infrastructure, the monopolisation process is accelerated when the entire building's hub can be easily captured by a single ISP.

This could be a large ISP like Airtel, or a small one with political connections.

On top of this, building associations often levy unfair charges on telecom operators to install equipment inside the building. This leads to many ISPs backing out of negotiations altogether with the building.

In any case, market choice is endangered, and consumers are worse off.

So what's the solution? Simply put:

- Hub neutrality: all ISPs need equal access to a building's network infrastructure.
- Fair terms; Internet is a utility. Buildings must not heavily add to the costs of internet providers, which are passed on to consumers.
- A telecom duct.

A telecom duct, like a drainage duct, allows cables from all internet providers to have a single point of entry to a building. This simplifies the mess of cables that buildings are often reluctant to deal with.

(Remember, buildings have many reasons to refuse access to ISPs)

Enter @TRAI.

Last year, TRAI issued a consultation paper to figure out how telecom companies — and their consumers — can get out of this mess.

Side-note: Even wireless telecom companies sometimes need in-building access to boost signals.

In response to this consultation, most ISPs said that they don't want to be regulated (as is usual).

TRAI went ahead and issued recommendations.

TRAI recommended to the Bureau of Indian Standards to have what is called "Common Telecom Infrastructure", which can be accessed by all providers, as an ESSENTIAL condition to issue a completion certificate for a building.

This was in January 2017.

BIS has not yet moved to implement these recommendations, one year since they were issued.

In absence of regulations, the telecom market for you will continue to be skewed, regardless of how many broadband providers operate in your area.

If you live in an apartment where you have no say in how it is run, market competition does not apply to your internet access.

Further reading:

TRAI release on in-building telecom infrastructure recommendations: trai.gov.in/sites/default/…

My piece from earlier this year on this issue for MediaNama: medianama.com/2017/10/223-tu…