Re: "anyone know roughly home many survivors there
by
carlhirsch
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Covad is pretty much the last national data CLEC. New Edge Networks is still around but has a much smaller footprint.
Covad is expecting to go into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection shortly, but the corporate line here is that it's for debt restructuring and continued survivability rather than liquidation.
I'm skeptical, personally. I give 70/30 odds against coming out of bankruptcy alive a year from now.
-- .
We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
I feel your pain.
by
Mustang+Matt
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Northpoint shut down in St. Louis not too long ago.
I highly recommend Savvis. They have some products that are more expensive but have superior quality and their network delay guarantees are the fastest in the world.
They have awesome uptime guarantees also. You dial the tech support number and you get a live person who usually isn't a tech support clown and actually has some knowledge about what is going on in this world.
I ended up going with a T1 from them. Had local loop fees from swbell been cheaper ($550) it would have been the cheapest T1 in existence ($995 full T1)
Disclaimer: Yes, I am a stockholder (ouch!), yes I am affiliated with the company as a customer, plus I used to work for Bridge before I went out on my own doing web development and hosting. However, in my honest opinion, I still think they have a superior service and pricing for what you get.
-- The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Re:Yet another uninformative top-level post.
by
ct
·
· Score: 3, Informative
A regional DSL provider is just a TAD less "known" than the Global presence that the industry leaders you've mentioned.
-ct
Reading a lost art
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Informative
This says that 85% of the 700 employees laid off,
are in Colorado. This means that about 595 employees in Colorado are to be terminated. The
75% refers to their total workforce, which is not all in Colorado, you idiot. So that means that the company had about 930-950 employees.
Re:What is it about DSL and wireless companies?
by
baptiste
·
· Score: 2, Informative
But, back to the plight of the DSL companies...can these companies ever formulate a business plan that actually works and makes money? Are there independent (non-phone company) DSL providers that are making a profit?
Sure they can - the same day the telcos are actually forced to open up their networks and preform the requested work on tim einstead of delaying orders for months while they try to grab all DSL customers for themselves. I mean charging a DSL ISP $30 just for the freaking line is a juoke when you cna get DSL in many places for $35-$50.
So, alas - we're still where we were in the 70's Stuck with one company providing a communication service with no hope of competitors keeping prices low.
Cable you say? Maybe - but only for residential average users. I expect that most residential users will go to cable modems and telcos will jack up prices on DSL to the point only businesses can afford it - But businesses will pay the sky high DSL prices cause its more reliable and offers higher upstream bandwidth (without congestion slowdowns) than cable modems.
I consider myself very lucky to have a small Mom & Pop telco with DSL capability who have excellent service and charge a decent rate. I've been nothing but happy with my DSL and wish the technology wouldn't be driven into the ground by greedy telcos (can we say ISDN anyone?) It Still Does Nothing since telcos keep saying I See Dollars Now:)
Rhythms shut down St. Louis DSL yesterday
by
phawley
·
· Score: 2, Informative
sad but true...thought we'd have 30 days to scramble!
Re:Free Markets, Public Works, and Monopolies
by
TheSync
·
· Score: 3, Informative
To whit, why do "natural monopolies" exist, what makes them a "natural monopoly,"
"Natural Monopolies" exist because of local governments granting monopoly franchises. Period.
Areas with competiting telecom providers (such as multiple cable companies) generally have lower prices.
The whole "natural monopoly" BS happened in the early part of the century as power companies and the Bell System got monopoly franchises through their political influence.
Re:Free Markets, Public Works, and Monopolies
by
w3woody
·
· Score: 3, Informative
IMHO, this is one of the more intelligent comments I've read on the Internet for a while.
I do think it's worth defining a "natural monopoly" here. A "natural monopoly" is any situation where, for all practical purposes, only a single solution may be implemented. For example, it would be impractical for every local phone carrier to install copper wire from the local switching box to my house--we have at least a dozen phone companies; a dozen separate wire pairs, one for each phone company would be rediculous. Or take the freeways--it would be nearly insane to have 10 private freeway toll companies build 10 parallel freeways along each freeway corridor--we would have to effectively pave the planet to allow each toll company to compete.
In situations where a common resource exists because of this sort of a "natural monopoly" is created, in my opinion it is best to place this "common resource" into the public trust--that is, to have the government run this public resource. That's because competition is impractical--the 10 freeways per freeway corridor, or the 12 cables per house makes head-to-head competition impractical.
In my opinion these common public resources must be placed in the hands of the government or, at least, in the hands of a not-for-profit organization heavily administered by the government (as the U.S. Post Office is, for all practical purposes). That's because any natural monopoly forming around a public resource which is motivated by profit, as the Bell companies are or the California Electrical companies are--this leads to corruption. It leads to corruption because the monopolies (such as the Bells), in an effort to increase profit, can only increase it by affecting the regulatory process. (And in the case of the Baby Bells or the California Electrical companies, "affecting the regulatory process" == "bribing local officials to turn the other way.") And sometimes (as in the case of the California Electrical companies) this sort of "regulatory lobbying" can lead to disasterous results.
I'm not a socialist. I'm a died-in-the-wool capitalist. But in natural monopoly situations where competition is impractical (such as the last mile of copper to the house, or in building freeways), "Capitalism" doesn't exist. Effective capitalism can only exist when competition exists, and when new players can enter the playing field and compete.
Re:No Surprise
by
paranoic
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Actually Covad went Chapter 11, which is reorganization, they did not go out of business. Well, as of now they haven't.
Bellsouth charges Earthlink $33 per DSL line in
by
Shivetya
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Bellsouth charges Earthlink 33.00 dollars per DSL line in Atlanta, and EL charges me 49.95. I submitted a story about an idea to break up the baby bells (but alas it was rejected) http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-6818658.html? tag=tp_pr
Your going to see more and more of these resellers fail simply because when the bell's do open their networks they jack the prices so high that they don't ever have to fear that their own services unit (read ISP+) will have a problem selling overpriced product.
I wonder how long before they justify raising the rates they charge to Earthlink (Bellsouth raising rates) because of needs to improve the network.
-- *
Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Free Markets, Public Works, and Monopolies
by
FreeUser
·
· Score: 5, Informative
A colleague of mine and I were discussing this just this morning (he is a Ritym's subscriber).
Many of the DSL failures are a result, at least in part, of being jerked around by the provisioner of the last mile of wire. Here in Chicago that monopolist would be Ameritech -- notorious for deliberately delaying and mucking with the installation of competitor's DSL lines, despite a plethora of FCC regulations designed to prevent this sort of unfairness. I had personal experience with this, as did my colleague, when our DSL lines (from different providors) were provisioned.
When breaking up so-called "natural" monopolies with the intent of creating competition a very obvious oversight has been made, at least here in the United States, quite probably as a result of the rather radical anti-anything-that-remotely-smells-like-it-could-m aybe-be-considered-socialistic-by-anyone-to-the-ri ght-of-Gengis-Khan political atmosphere that has imbued the country since the early Reagan days. To whit, why do "natural monopolies" exist, what makes them a "natural monopoly," and why shouldn't the factor, or commonality, be treated as a public works project the way we do other "natural monopolies" such as roads and highways?
Take electricity, water, and telecommunications as examples. What made the electric company a natural monopoly? Not power generation, but delivery to your home... i.e. the physical wire. What made telecommunications a natural monopoly? Once again, not the intervening network and its services so much as the last mile of wire to your house. Water? Not, in most places, the water acquisition (it can come from rivers, aquafers, lakes, even the air if you can figure out how to do that economically) but rather the physical pipe to your faucet.
Instead of even considering nationalizing the infrastructure (there's another word which has fallen victim to the anti-communism hysteria of the early 80's and has remained taboo since) we have chosen instead to impliment an absurdly byzantine set of regulations prohibiting this, requireing that, and hopefully resulting in a level playing field. An approach far more favorable to error or outright corruption, and far less conducive to a level playing field and the competition such would engender than simply treating the wire like a public road, with equal access to all, would have.
I would submit that bottlenecks which create so-called natural monopolies, such as highways, the last mile(s) of telephone wire, and perhaps even the entire power grid, should be treated the same as highways, paid for and administered by government via taxes or access fees and provided to all of the competing service providors under the same terms.
The disadvantes would be the same ones we have with highways: a certain amount of government bloat, a certain amount of corruption in contracting and subcontracting, and a certain amount of government ineffeciency.
Just as with highways the advantages would far outweigh this, however: a level playing field for all competing businesses, an elimination of byzantine FCC regulations designed (and failing) to counter the monopolistic advantages under the current, wholely private, approach, an administration that is open to public scruitiny and nominally accountable to the public via our democratic process, and quite possibly economies of scale that might well offset the added overhead inherent in government administration of any project.
Monopolies are ineffecient, whether they are government or private. Where they must exist, as with roads, it makes far more sense that they be in public hands, a part of the public commons, rather than in the hands of some private Robber Barron a la' the Rhein River of two centuries ago.
Finally, I would argue that a free, competetive market cannot exist when the underlying infrastructure for that market resides in the hands of a private monopoly. Indeed, it appears that a competetive market on top of such an infrastructure is difficult, perhaps impossible, to maintain even if it is highly regulated. However, as we've seen with the success of our transportation companies, airlines can compete very well with public airports and automobile companies as well as trucking companies compete very well on public highways.
Perhaps it is time we reevaluated our love affair with private ownership of nearly all our basic infrastructures and put aside our aversion to nationalization and consider the question from the point of view of how to we structure things to eliminate private monopolies and maximize competetive free markets while at the same time minimizing the need for intrusive government regulation.
Slashdot Mirror
Covad is pretty much the last national data CLEC. New Edge Networks is still around but has a much smaller footprint.
Covad is expecting to go into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection shortly, but the corporate line here is that it's for debt restructuring and continued survivability rather than liquidation.
I'm skeptical, personally. I give 70/30 odds against coming out of bankruptcy alive a year from now.
. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
Northpoint shut down in St. Louis not too long ago.
I highly recommend Savvis. They have some products that are more expensive but have superior quality and their network delay guarantees are the fastest in the world.
They have awesome uptime guarantees also. You dial the tech support number and you get a live person who usually isn't a tech support clown and actually has some knowledge about what is going on in this world.
I ended up going with a T1 from them. Had local loop fees from swbell been cheaper ($550) it would have been the cheapest T1 in existence ($995 full T1)
Disclaimer: Yes, I am a stockholder (ouch!), yes I am affiliated with the company as a customer, plus I used to work for Bridge before I went out on my own doing web development and hosting. However, in my honest opinion, I still think they have a superior service and pricing for what you get.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
A regional DSL provider is just a TAD less "known" than the Global presence that the industry leaders you've mentioned.
-ct
This says that 85% of the 700 employees laid off, are in Colorado. This means that about 595 employees in Colorado are to be terminated. The 75% refers to their total workforce, which is not all in Colorado, you idiot. So that means that the company had about 930-950 employees.
Sure they can - the same day the telcos are actually forced to open up their networks and preform the requested work on tim einstead of delaying orders for months while they try to grab all DSL customers for themselves. I mean charging a DSL ISP $30 just for the freaking line is a juoke when you cna get DSL in many places for $35-$50.
So, alas - we're still where we were in the 70's Stuck with one company providing a communication service with no hope of competitors keeping prices low.
Cable you say? Maybe - but only for residential average users. I expect that most residential users will go to cable modems and telcos will jack up prices on DSL to the point only businesses can afford it - But businesses will pay the sky high DSL prices cause its more reliable and offers higher upstream bandwidth (without congestion slowdowns) than cable modems.
I consider myself very lucky to have a small Mom & Pop telco with DSL capability who have excellent service and charge a decent rate. I've been nothing but happy with my DSL and wish the technology wouldn't be driven into the ground by greedy telcos (can we say ISDN anyone?) It Still Does Nothing since telcos keep saying I See Dollars Now :)
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
sad but true...thought we'd have 30 days to scramble!
To whit, why do "natural monopolies" exist, what makes them a "natural monopoly,"
"Natural Monopolies" exist because of local governments granting monopoly franchises. Period.
Areas with competiting telecom providers (such as multiple cable companies) generally have lower prices.
The whole "natural monopoly" BS happened in the early part of the century as power companies and the Bell System got monopoly franchises through their political influence.
IMHO, this is one of the more intelligent comments I've read on the Internet for a while.
I do think it's worth defining a "natural monopoly" here. A "natural monopoly" is any situation where, for all practical purposes, only a single solution may be implemented. For example, it would be impractical for every local phone carrier to install copper wire from the local switching box to my house--we have at least a dozen phone companies; a dozen separate wire pairs, one for each phone company would be rediculous. Or take the freeways--it would be nearly insane to have 10 private freeway toll companies build 10 parallel freeways along each freeway corridor--we would have to effectively pave the planet to allow each toll company to compete.
In situations where a common resource exists because of this sort of a "natural monopoly" is created, in my opinion it is best to place this "common resource" into the public trust--that is, to have the government run this public resource. That's because competition is impractical--the 10 freeways per freeway corridor, or the 12 cables per house makes head-to-head competition impractical.
In my opinion these common public resources must be placed in the hands of the government or, at least, in the hands of a not-for-profit organization heavily administered by the government (as the U.S. Post Office is, for all practical purposes). That's because any natural monopoly forming around a public resource which is motivated by profit, as the Bell companies are or the California Electrical companies are--this leads to corruption. It leads to corruption because the monopolies (such as the Bells), in an effort to increase profit, can only increase it by affecting the regulatory process. (And in the case of the Baby Bells or the California Electrical companies, "affecting the regulatory process" == "bribing local officials to turn the other way.") And sometimes (as in the case of the California Electrical companies) this sort of "regulatory lobbying" can lead to disasterous results.
I'm not a socialist. I'm a died-in-the-wool capitalist. But in natural monopoly situations where competition is impractical (such as the last mile of copper to the house, or in building freeways), "Capitalism" doesn't exist. Effective capitalism can only exist when competition exists, and when new players can enter the playing field and compete.
Actually Covad went Chapter 11, which is reorganization, they did not go out of business. Well, as of now they haven't.
Bellsouth charges Earthlink 33.00 dollars per DSL line in Atlanta, and EL charges me 49.95. I submitted a story about an idea to break up the baby bells (but alas it was rejected) http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-6818658.html? tag=tp_pr
Your going to see more and more of these resellers fail simply because when the bell's do open their networks they jack the prices so high that they don't ever have to fear that their own services unit (read ISP+) will have a problem selling overpriced product.
I wonder how long before they justify raising the rates they charge to Earthlink (Bellsouth raising rates) because of needs to improve the network.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
A colleague of mine and I were discussing this just this morning (he is a Ritym's subscriber).
m aybe-be-considered-socialistic-by-anyone-to-the-ri ght-of-Gengis-Khan political atmosphere that has imbued the country since the early Reagan days. To whit, why do "natural monopolies" exist, what makes them a "natural monopoly," and why shouldn't the factor, or commonality, be treated as a public works project the way we do other "natural monopolies" such as roads and highways?
... i.e. the physical wire. What made telecommunications a natural monopoly? Once again, not the intervening network and its services so much as the last mile of wire to your house. Water? Not, in most places, the water acquisition (it can come from rivers, aquafers, lakes, even the air if you can figure out how to do that economically) but rather the physical pipe to your faucet.
Many of the DSL failures are a result, at least in part, of being jerked around by the provisioner of the last mile of wire. Here in Chicago that monopolist would be Ameritech -- notorious for deliberately delaying and mucking with the installation of competitor's DSL lines, despite a plethora of FCC regulations designed to prevent this sort of unfairness. I had personal experience with this, as did my colleague, when our DSL lines (from different providors) were provisioned.
When breaking up so-called "natural" monopolies with the intent of creating competition a very obvious oversight has been made, at least here in the United States, quite probably as a result of the rather radical anti-anything-that-remotely-smells-like-it-could-
Take electricity, water, and telecommunications as examples. What made the electric company a natural monopoly? Not power generation, but delivery to your home
Instead of even considering nationalizing the infrastructure (there's another word which has fallen victim to the anti-communism hysteria of the early 80's and has remained taboo since) we have chosen instead to impliment an absurdly byzantine set of regulations prohibiting this, requireing that, and hopefully resulting in a level playing field. An approach far more favorable to error or outright corruption, and far less conducive to a level playing field and the competition such would engender than simply treating the wire like a public road, with equal access to all, would have.
I would submit that bottlenecks which create so-called natural monopolies, such as highways, the last mile(s) of telephone wire, and perhaps even the entire power grid, should be treated the same as highways, paid for and administered by government via taxes or access fees and provided to all of the competing service providors under the same terms.
The disadvantes would be the same ones we have with highways: a certain amount of government bloat, a certain amount of corruption in contracting and subcontracting, and a certain amount of government ineffeciency.
Just as with highways the advantages would far outweigh this, however: a level playing field for all competing businesses, an elimination of byzantine FCC regulations designed (and failing) to counter the monopolistic advantages under the current, wholely private, approach, an administration that is open to public scruitiny and nominally accountable to the public via our democratic process, and quite possibly economies of scale that might well offset the added overhead inherent in government administration of any project.
Monopolies are ineffecient, whether they are government or private. Where they must exist, as with roads, it makes far more sense that they be in public hands, a part of the public commons, rather than in the hands of some private Robber Barron a la' the Rhein River of two centuries ago.
Finally, I would argue that a free, competetive market cannot exist when the underlying infrastructure for that market resides in the hands of a private monopoly. Indeed, it appears that a competetive market on top of such an infrastructure is difficult, perhaps impossible, to maintain even if it is highly regulated. However, as we've seen with the success of our transportation companies, airlines can compete very well with public airports and automobile companies as well as trucking companies compete very well on public highways.
Perhaps it is time we reevaluated our love affair with private ownership of nearly all our basic infrastructures and put aside our aversion to nationalization and consider the question from the point of view of how to we structure things to eliminate private monopolies and maximize competetive free markets while at the same time minimizing the need for intrusive government regulation.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy