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The Bells, The Bells, Only The Bells
"Where's the competition?"
asks James Glassman of Tech Central Station. Almost five years after the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which was supposed to open up competition for the "last mile," megacorporations like Verizon and SBC still have a stranglehold and their would-be competition is gasping for air. What went wrong in the local loop? And what's to come?
And the service in general is atrocious. There are constant circuit problems which leads to modem hangups and "busy signals". The lines here are all rotting, and I repeatedly called them and demanded they fix our lines so that our phone doesn't ring whenever someone else's on the block rings. Ever pick up a phone and hear four or five conversations simultaneously at the same volume? It might as well have been a party line.
The actual repair people are friendly, though, and they do a quick, efficient, and effective job. But that's like saying your doctor is good at keeping you struggling to survive at the last months of your life while he misdiagnosed your cancer two years ago. Those lines should have been dug up and replaced a decade ago; this is a coastal area exposed to constant salty ground water and Version thinks lines will still last 25 years. Hahaha!
DSL? Ha! They cram that advertising down your throat on every channel but they don't offer it here...or in neighboring towns. Verision just gives you that "within the next six months" response if you ask them about it.
On top of that, "short distance" calling is something like 20 cents a minute! Thank God we're allowed to get that service cheaper from AT&T now. I wish there was competition at the local level; I don't know many, if anybody, who are impressed with Verison. I hear complaints from people who lease T-lines from them on the level of, "Man, it took Verison two weeks to fix our T-1." Hardly what I would call a "dedicated" service.
[Disclaimer, I am a Sprint employee]
I don't know. That's standard practice among most wireless providers and I wouldn't be suprised if Sprint would lease bandwidth to other companies, but if they don't I'd suspect it's due to incompatibilities more than stuffiness. Remember, PCS is a different technology than traditional wireless or even digital wireless. It may not be possible. I'm not privy to all that, but I do know from some recent meetings on Sprint's strategic goals for the near future that they intend to use wireless towers to get beyond the "last mile" problem.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
Where's the evidence that it's due to deregulation? In fact, where's the evidence that the industry was even deregulated to begin with? The fact was that it was not deregulated. It was only opened up for potential competition. The PUC is still firmly in place. The monopoly rights of the utilities was taken away, the regulation was not.
There are many problems with the current power "shortage". But I don't see any of these problems arising from too many power providers. Quite the opposite. There are too few providers and even fewer producers. The California population keeps on growing while the power produced keeps on shrinking. It's next to impossible to get government (read 'regulated') approval to create a new power plant. In the meantime the older plants are starting to fall apart. The industry wants to build a huge plant in San Jose but politics is stopping it. They also want to create dozens of mini plants but they can't do that either. We really need nuclear plants to avoid the pollution of gas/coal plants, but even suggesting it is political suicide here.
The potential competitors of PG&E and Edison would have to be nuts to enter the California market. Which is why the only alternatives you see are resellers of out-of-state surplus (as if they would have any in the middle of winter) and tiny environmental producers like wind or solar. Power production needs a huge economy of scale backed by an army of lawyers. What we really need is inexpensive point production, like microplants or personal fuel cells.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The only thing deregulation enables is for people to resell the existing services. It doesn't create any incentive to build new infrastructure, that's not what they teach in business schools these days. They teach how to make money without actually owning anything resembling "old economy" capital.
Hence, there's scores of "new" telco companies that don't have any capital (leased lines and switching from the telco), any facilities (see above), any personnel ("fixing" is part of the lease), or anything else there. They're all virtual businesses whose only means of support is consumers too dumb to realize they can buy the same services from the "old" phone company for less.
Until the FCC makes great strides in making last-mile infrastructure development a desirable business (or Stanford, Harvard, and MIT B-schools decide that the old economy is "in" again), we won't see anything revolutionary in fix-wire telecomms for a long time to come.
We're trying to offer ADSL which Verizon also offers. Verizon provides us with ADSL as part of a deal with the FTC. Verizon sells ADSL to the userbase with free installation, free equipment, and a low rate (close to $50).
Verizon sells ADSL to us for almost that same rate when it comes down to each user. We in turn have to charge a higher rate and must also eat the costs of installation and setup to try to even come close to staying competitive.
In turn, Verizon fucks up billing constantly (bills us for people who aren't our own customers), provides a crappy as hell service (ie, goes out for days at a time with no warning -- we've resorted to making dialup accounts part of the package). When the service goes down, users call US. Our answer is always "Verizon has it's fingers stuck in it's ass and we have to wait for them to unfuck themselves. Sorry but there's nothing we can do at all."
Many DSL providers have folded in the NYC area. Verizon gives the illusion that they're letting competitors onto their network, but it's so expensive that we can't compete with what they are selling directly to the potential userbase.
Cell phones have been stunted in the US for years because everyone here has a case of Microsoft-envy. They all want to set and own standards, and use them to lock out the comptetition.
So far nobody has been able to set a clear standard and accomplish this, and nobody is willing to deploy the future without having a lock-in. Therefore we're still waiting for what Europe has had for years.
There has been quite a bit of talk about end-to-end on Slashdot, recently. The Internet only happened the way it did BECAUSE IT WAS NOT DONE BY FOR-PROFIT INSTITUTIONS. Had the Internet been done for-profit originally, it would not be end-to-end. It would probably resemble The Source, or the old Compuserve, the old Prodigy, or the old AOL. The ones of those who didn't adapt to the Internet aren't with us, any more. This is the same phenomena at work as with wireless, and even high-speed wired communications. Beyond that, those same forces are at work trying to undermine the open end-to-end Internet we have, today.
Either:
We have some corporations in us and other places that don't understand the free market,
Or:
The free market really isn't the solution to all the world's problems. Perhaps the free market is really like a big hammer, looking at the world like a bunch of nails. But then, we really don't want more government, either...
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I didn't say wireless won't improve. Competition from both ends says wireless capacity will improve just as wired capacity will improve... but by it's very nature, currently at least, wired capacity is just an order of magnitude greater than wireless, unless some developments are occuring/have occurred that I am unaware of.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Well no, AT&T's right and you're wrong, but it's not entirely obvious why, so I'll explain.
The ILECs (incumbent telcos) used to have a legally-sanctioned monopoly on phone service. Cable companies did only broadcast TV. The cable companies generally did NOT have legal monopolies, but it's economically hard for a second cable operator to enter a town that already has one. RCN, Knology and a few others are trying.
Now, cable companies are allowed to enter the phone and cable-modem businesses. But in those fields, they are the *second* provider, the competitor, since the ILEC had the wire first and had it on a monopoly basis. The rule in this country is that competitive entrants can charge whatever they please, because they're not monopolies -- they're challenging them and need to establish a business model.
So when a cable company provides ISP service over its plant, it is acting purely as a new competitor -- five years ago, only the phone company was there. If you change the rules and regulate the cable companies' provision of ISP service, then you're a) entering the scary domain of regulating ISPs, and/or b) applying rate regulation to a competitive new entrant, which in so doing dries up capital for new entrants faster than an Arizona summer day.
The cable companies should learn that the ISPs are their friends, and they should be competing with the phone companies for the wire business. They've not figured it all out yet, but AT&T is going down that road. They are not going to renew existing exclusivity deals with @Home. Regulating it, hwoever, is the ILECs trick for keeping the cable companies to the TV business and out of their hair. Legally, DSL providers (LECs) are regulated common carriers open to all ISPs at a posted price; cable companies are not common carriers.
Well, no. Competitors are startups, and they have to pick potentially-profitable businesses. As it stands, few CLECs break even, so if you required CLECs to go everywhere at once, they'd
a) need infinite capital to start,
b) have no chance at making a profit,
c) removing their access to capital.
There are specialist CLECs focusing on smaller towns. But they were not the first ones out there, and it'll take a while before the boonies get competition. The big telcos generally charge CLECs more for access to wires in non-urban areas, too, which doesn't help.
I don't get it - it seems like it would be pretty simple to sign up for phone service for a short period of time, long enough to get a bank account or loan.
Such an address is going to be just as valid as the address you give when you're getting a mobile phone...
The Sprint ION services run over DSL, and are starting wide rollouts in all major metropolitan cities.
While Sprint may not be a small local player aiming for some local loop action, they never the less rely on the ability to tap the local loop of the big behemoths to implement ION for customers.
There are also handfulls of third party DSL providers in most large cities, which are in the same boat.
Anyway, the article seemed a bit overboard on its interpretation of what is occuring...
Yeah, I've heard about that one, from someone who's been there and seen it.
From what I understand, California can't use the same system, or use it as efficiently due to the geography.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
[disclaimer, I am an employee of Sprint]
The article basically says that since the Baby Bells (SBC and Verizon) own the physical "last mile" lines, they are keeping a stranglehold on the possibilities of competition for local service. These companies are still getting to enter the long-distance service buisness, which they weren't supposed to do until they opened up their lines to competitors, by sucking up to politicians.
How is Sprint facing this? Wireless. Screw the physical infrastructure of the last-mile lines. Sprint basically gave the baby Bells the finger and started building digital wireless towers everywhere they can. Pretty soon you'll be able to buy a wireless broadband modem and hit a PCS tower with a digital signal without touching a bit of Bell property. Since the wires are all owned by someone who won't share and has no interest in letting Sprint in, Sprint is doing what has been proven to work in markets where the physical infrastructure doesn't exist. Make it wireless.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
Just look at what happened in San Francisco. AT&T actually said that not allowing open access to their cable lines would increase competition, while allowing it would decrease competition. That's completely backwards, and they knew it, too! But that didn't matter, the local government listened to them, and ruled against open-access, allowing SF cable telecommunications to become an AT&T-owned monopoly.
The word "competition" has been hijacked by lobbyists, and is now used to refer to situations where the exact opposite of a competitive market exists. Too bad most of the public hasn't caught on yet. They still believe it when corporate lackeys tell them passing a law that allows a single company to buy up every radio station in sight will somehow "increase competition". Ugh.
Free Hans!
Since you do work for Sprint - does Sprint have any plans to make these 'wireless towers' connections available to other companies that want to compete with Sprint?
I don't work for Sprint, but it's *very* unlikely that Sprint will allow other to use their "wireless towers" (or Radio Base Stations as they are more commonly known) Sprint (along with several other companies) paid lots of money a few years ago to purchase the rights to 5 or 15MHz of bandwidth in the PCS range.
They could rent out/loan the bandwidth that they purchased to others to use. It's not very likely, though, because current 2G CDMA standards for data transfer can use up to 8 CDMA "Channels" (very different from GSM channel...and I don't think 8 channel useage has ever been implemented for data connections), and in a Wireless Local Loop setup, Radio Base Stations can handle about 35-40 "channels" (IIRC) per sector depending on enviromental conditions, so in populated areas, Sprint will need all of the bandwith they can get!
Doh!
Okay. I'll consider.
Okay, I'm done considering now.
NO!....
The problem, as I see it, is that if Government Inc. is giving you the line, they also have the right to tell you what you can put on it (either in terms or hardware or the types of data), perhaps look at the data any time they want, and, unlike other large corporations, they've got people with guns to enforce their will.
Do we really want the same corporation that gave us the DMCA providing us with our internet access? How long before the lines had to be monitored to "Protect The Children®"?
(I may be wrong about this, but as I recall, the US Post Office has more of a monopoly than some may realize - I believe it's literally illegal to use a private courier [e.g. UPS or Federal Express] for your regular mail! Do we even want to risk any chance of this happening to ISP's?)
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Just wanted to add a note about a new book I'm reading by Thomas Frank, editor of _The Baffler_. It's called _One Market Under God_. The book opens with a preface about the telecommunications act. Frank shows how the act, which essentially sold the airwaves to private interests, signalled a trend of anti-democratic practices which were and are now championed by the masses. Kind-of like successive mergers shouldn't really surprise us b/c the idea of providing "pro-democratic" or populist services belongs more to marketing than to design. And this marketing is pervasive! The book is kind-of an early history of nineties democracy/globalization/dotcom era, well-written. ghostoroy who lives suspiciously close to Mr. Frank
I'm not happy to know that two less regulated former Bell companies will be my only providers of cable and phone. I'd much rather see more than one cable company, and more than one set of wires competing with wirless and local phone service. The more the merrier.
Don't give me that "not economically feasible" bunk about the market not being able to support more than one provider. The market was unable to support the first company!
What went wrong is that the phone companies are used to making allot of money. At the expense of customer satisfaction and quality they try to squeeze out dimes here and there.
God forbid you ever have to deal with two phone companies at once (as I did once). I waited till 4 am (they were supposed to be there at 10pm) only to have an AT&T rep tell me that the job was done, despite not having a connection yet. I was told that US Worst would need to come out and punch down the last portion of it. So being new to all this I ended up punching it down myself with a puny screwdriver (untill I ran out of vodka that is). It all worked fine but boy did I catch hell from US Worst for touching their lines.
Are you lonely? Hate having to make decisons? Meetings, the practical alternitive to work.
I think it's the same with phone companies. People don't want the hassle of having to deal with some tiny local company run by a couple of college students that could go out of business in a week and where the maintenance and support are questionable. They know and trust the companies that are already around. The vast majority of people are going to stick with the big, old companies purely out of trust issues, IMO.
The american dream is a 'dream' because it is so incredibly difficult to attain. We live in a capital economy which eventually is dominated by super-large corporations. When you start a small company, you are swimming with sharks, and if they sense that you -may- become a threat, you are bought or eliminated. Simple as that. Its the economy we live in.
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Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Here in Minnesota, I now get my telephone services through AT&T (formally MediaOne). It comes over my cable line, and it is a good deal compared to what I was paying UFWest (now Qwest).
I don't know if they're rolling out service in many other areas, but I am pleased with the quality, and it certainly is giving Qwest some competition.
My only gripe is that once again my local telephone service is being provided by Bell. How long until they get a monopoly on local service again and need be broken up?
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. --Aristotle
The simple fact is that landlines won't exist in twenty years at all. Nowadays mobility is the key; landlines are clearly archaic.
Land lines are still relevant, at least here in the states. The company I was working for was doing some work for a car dealership a few years ago. As part of it, we all got to know most of the Big Guys(tm) there, such as the owner, CFO, etc. At the time I happened to mention while shooting the breeze how I was thinking about getting rid of my land line, because mobile phones were so much more convenient. The CFO told me flat out that yes, I could do that, as long as I didn't want to ever be approved for a loan.
Apparently money lenders here more or less require one to have a telephone number at a fixed address. I can only assume it's because they want to know there's a place you're ostensibly going to show up at eventually, so if you start having repayment "problems", someone can stop by to "encourage" you to continue making your loan payments.
So landlines aren't quite dead yet. Maybe if all the GPS-tracking of cellphones I've read about on certain mailing lists comes to be ubiquitous, landlines will be unimportant. But until then, they're still going to be necessary.
(And the day I can ditch Verizon for someone else will be one of the happiest days of my life--from the very moment I called them to activate service (when it was Bell Atlantic here), I've had nothing but problems from them, and their attitude has, in general, sucked.)
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"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
I agree. You've just pointed out one of the (many) reasons this is a bad law.
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It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Precisely. It's not as if I WANT to be reached by phone - I don't even leave mine on. :P Behaviorism in action - send me an email, you phone-using bastards!
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It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Wireless cannot compete with wired bandwidth.
Is there something in the future to fix that? I don't know. But as soon as VoIP and VideooIP start replacing POTS, I think the landlines will have a sudden advantage.
There may be a schism up ahead in which both will compete in the same space, but really, they are independent and can survive off different markets.
Landlines can be used fairly easily to provide something like T1 level speeds to the average user, where the digital network can stream both video, voice, data, etc. In the future, we can expect several times more bandwidth than that...
Wireless is currently slow, and IIRC, 3G wireless is only expected to go up to 2mbps, which is just slightly faster than current DSL pipes... DSL has been shown capable of going up to 7mbps over copper wire (IIRC), and with the simple addition of another pair of wires, you can get 14mbps... with more complex wiring, of course (4 wires, for example), you could prolly get even better bandwidth and throughput than current t3 trunks ^^
And that's not even talking about the potential of fibre-optic landlines ^^
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Here in BellSouth territory, it's common knowledge that Bell does everything in their power to derail competition.
For example, they have managed to get a stranglehold on DSL. How did they do this? Despite the fact that competitive providers have DSLAMs at the COs, Bell still has to go out and handle any "last-mile" issues. When they are required to do this for their DSL competition, it's all too common for them to be too short staffed to handle the job. Delay after delay after delay sets in. Four to six weeks pass, and the end customer STILL doesn't have DSL.
Oddly enough, should the customer get fed up and elect to choose BellSouth's "Fast Access" DSL service, a technician is somehow immediately available and dispatched. We've even had reports of Bell techs, dispatched by Covad/Netrail, telling customers that "there is a problem with your line, it's going to take a few weeks to fix. However, if you want BellSouth DSL, there are other things we can do to get it working immediately." Of course, this is NOT Bell's official policy, and they'll deny it to the ends of the earth if you call them on it.
The whole thing is a joke. The baby bells will do anything in their power to hang on to their monopolies, including breaking the law.
None.
They both have been screwed by Mercury ...
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Game over, 2000!
I live by myself.
I don't have a landline. I don't need one. I don't talk on the phone enough to warrant paying an extra $20-30/month for a landline.
Unfortunately, I can't get DSL as a result.
And Look seems to not be offering residential Ultrafast2 service anymore (which is REALLY too bad - 3Mb over sattelite, with a wireless backchannel).
we could paraphrase the answer with another question: where is the deregulation? The telco's are still regulated, and they have been using that regulation to choke out the would-be competition.
I think that if we want to have some competition and some approximation to universal access, we're going to have to do what has been done in the power company deregulation efforts around the world: separate the distribution network from the generation network. The telephone analog of this would be to split the local telco's into a distribution company, which owns the copper, and a service provider, which pays a fee for (NON-exclusive) use of the lines to provide dialtone. Then anyone could pay the same fee and get the same access.
The distribution company could be a regulated semi-monopoly; I say semi-monopoly, since we should allow cable and wireless companies to compete for the business of delivering a dialtone. The distribution companies would be able to ensure universal access in the same way we currently achieve it, by cross-subsidies.
The service companies should be quite unregulated. Anyone should be able to set up some switchgear in their garage and be a service provider. The service company which was split off from the distribution company would have the advantage of an existing customer base, plentiful capital, and a corporate culture of dedication to customer service which would ensure that startups could make headway. Cherry-picking here shouldn't be a problem, I think, since the marginal cost should be about the same for providing a dial tone to any customer.
See what I've been reading.
And BTW, because of that, it only applies in the States.
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It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
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The shareholder is always right.
The simple fact is that landlines won't exist in twenty years at all. Nowadays mobility is the key; landlines are clearly archaic. My generation her in Britain doesn't use land-lines at all - everyone has a mobile. They are cheaper and offer higher quality. When 3G liscences arrive, the competition will be annihilated.
I predict that companies such as Vodafone and Erikkson will control the infosphere in the future. They are the ones we should be watching, not 20th century corps like Verizon.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
III
Hear the loud alarum bells -
Brazen bells!
What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
In the startled ear of night
How they scream out their affright!
Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek,
Out of tune,
In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,
In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,
Leaping higher, higher, higher,
With a desperate desire,
And a resolute endeavor
Now - now to sit, or never,
By the side of the pale - faced moon.
Oh, the bells, bells, bells!
What a tale their terror tells
Of Despair!
How they clang, and clash and roar!
What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air!
Yet the ear, it fully knows,
By the twanging,
And the clanging,
How the danger ebbs and flows;
Yet the ear distinctly tells,
In the jangling,
And the wrangling,
How the danger sinks and swells,
By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells -
Of the bells -
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells -
In the clamor and the clanging of the bells!
Thank you.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
What happened? Cherry picking. The cost of putting together even a new long distance network, let alone a local network which - even given access to an existing local loop - is a complex and expensive proposition to get involved in, is astronomical. Competitors, with the exception of the cable companies, exclusively targetted big businesses and left the consumer market to token long distance services and that was it.
The assumption the US legislature made was that all telephone companies will try to serve the whole market, or see all parts of the market as having the potential for dramatic profits. That assumption, frankly, is a load of tosh.
AT&T got a monopoly in the early part of the 20th century because of a recognition on both sides that providing universal service was only an advantage to a telephone company if it owned the entire market. AT&T accepted regulation as the price for this. But while "universal service" is useful to a competitive telephone company, it is a burden to provide, and nobody wants to do it. As a result, competitive telecoms is focussed pretty much exclusively on the bodies that pay the most, ignoring the residential and small business markets.
Legislators made the mistake of thinking that the only barrier to entry in the residential market was the absense of an open local loop. But this was untrue even in 1996 - cable companies have always had the capability to operate telephone networks over their loops, and many American cable companies have experience from running exactly those types of system in the UK.
William Kennard, FCC chair, once introduced Britain's OFTEL boss of the time as proving competitive, deregulated, telecoms could work. OFTEL, of course, prove no such thing, and most of the move forward to de-regulated telephony has been the result of ideological bunk, rather than because anyone has a clear, sensible, way of making it work.
How do you fix it? There are several options. You could forget the crap and go back to heavy regulation. You could, on the other hand, remove the local loop from the telephone companies. This forces the creation of a market for the telephone companies to serve. Whether this is enough to encourage telephone companies to dip their toes in the water of residential telephony is open to question, but it's a better situation than what we have now.
What you don't do is just assume that competition will automatically develop if you "open" a market. Competition will only ever appear in markets where there is a great deal of money to be made, and the residential telephony business is not where that's at.
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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
what do you mean by that ? Isn't it obvious that capitilism is totalitarian ? Free competition just means competition between a couple companies that own 90 percent of the services, it doesn't actually mean free competition like in a sports playoff or something of that nature. using the sports analogy again, only a few teams get to get in the playoffs in capitilism, not everyone. The only time that people get outraged is when there is only one company, i.e. a monopoly. But even with anti-trust laws against a monopoly, capitalism has no problem with there being 2 companies or a small number of companies controlling and totalizing everything and everyone too. For example, coca-cola and pepsi want to totalize the world's refreshments, they want people to drink their drink over any other drink, not just over other soft drinks, and they don't care at what expense they do it.
http://www.vanillaafro.com - take me seriously and I will shoot you
Interesting...see my sig...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
AT&T lost the use of the "Bell" name in 1984. Today's AT&T is very different from the old Ma Bell. Most of the monopolist culture stuck with the RBOCs, who got the shared Bell trademark (though it's fading in some areas).
I too have AT&T Broadband/formerly-MediaOne phone service and it's quite good. AT&T still has management problems but in point of fact they're sworn blood enemies of the Bell companies, especially Bell Awful/Bell Titanic/VeriZontal. That's reason alone to wish AT&T well.
It's even more fun here in Britain. all of the last mile line is owned by British Telecom (who used to be part of the General Post Office, whose sole owner was the government. The post office and BT were split and privatised about ten years ago, BT were supposed to have allowed other providers access to the last mile of line about June this year. The current timetable is looking like being June next year, and even then, there's no space in the telephone exchanges for all the providers who want access. Therefore, who gets access will be decided on a beauty contest (i.e. whoever offers the best prospective services, which is in no way related to who can actually provide these services), with a roll of a dice settling any ties.
It would have been a lot better if the government watchdog over seeing all this actually did anything (see any days version of www.theregister.co.uk for more sarcastic details)