Many things should not be treated as a market; backbone is one of them. I think it's painfully obvious that we can't leave the backbone to the commercial sector.
There are inescapable selection pressures to concentrate like this for a commercial provider, which is the same thing as saying "to break the network".
Backbone should be completely public. Nationalization of existing infrastructure should apply the cost of the outages against the notional value of the infrastructure, and there should be black-letter law SLAs that apply to every Canadian citizen. (It should also destroy Bell, Telus, Rogers, and Shaw root and branch, so that there's zero institutional continuity.)
(One central server setup per not more than a million, at least three failover sites and failover tested monthly at random by a nice deputy minister showing up and cutting the power to a member of a failover network with no warning. Etc. Probably high-altitude solar aircraft in the north, at least for now.)
You get your services from size-limited customer service orgs who all pay the same access prices; you can't buy backbone access unless you're a Canadian organization able to make laws.
It wouldn't be hard to do. I doubt it will happen, alas. The necessity of resilience hasn't made it into politics yet; is being forcibly kept out.
no subject
Many things should not be treated as a market; backbone is one of them. I think it's painfully obvious that we can't leave the backbone to the commercial sector.
There are inescapable selection pressures to concentrate like this for a commercial provider, which is the same thing as saying "to break the network".
Backbone should be completely public. Nationalization of existing infrastructure should apply the cost of the outages against the notional value of the infrastructure, and there should be black-letter law SLAs that apply to every Canadian citizen. (It should also destroy Bell, Telus, Rogers, and Shaw root and branch, so that there's zero institutional continuity.)
(One central server setup per not more than a million, at least three failover sites and failover tested monthly at random by a nice deputy minister showing up and cutting the power to a member of a failover network with no warning. Etc. Probably high-altitude solar aircraft in the north, at least for now.)
You get your services from size-limited customer service orgs who all pay the same access prices; you can't buy backbone access unless you're a Canadian organization able to make laws.
It wouldn't be hard to do. I doubt it will happen, alas. The necessity of resilience hasn't made it into politics yet; is being forcibly kept out.