Independent ISPs vs the Bells: DSL Outrage

Blowit writes: "The American ISP Association has been assisting independent ISPs with a battle to help regulate the DSL market for fair competition. Yesterday, the FCC Slapped SBC with a $100,000 fine due to "its willful violation of an order to produce information about its provisioning of DSL to ISPs." Across up in Canada, Independent Members of CAIP is also battling Bell Canada's DSL monopoly by filing a claim with the CRTC. ISPs on both sides of the border feel the DSL pinch and is looking for some relief/compensation to be able to offer competitive DSL solutions."

Comments

Would this help availablity?

[Liquor]

If somebody actually provided DSL in my area, then I would be interested in getting it. But I'm in the Canadian Bell monopoly area - and too far from the Bell switch to get DSL, at least according to their specs - 12 Km is a little to far for a unit specced as 4 Km - but I do wonder if the lines were open to competitors whether somebody elses equipment could work at that distance. Meanwhile, the only wireless network provider (for high-speed links) in my area filed for bankruptcy last year.

But the other side of the coin here is cost. Commercial DSL connections are several hundred $CDN a month - home DSL is about $CDN50, and may be why the wireless provider went under.

Just because one battle (access information) has been lost by The Phone Companys, this doesn't mean that the general DSL landscape is anywhere near changing yet.

Re:Bell Canada is not a DSL monopoly

[hearingaid]

For the foreigners: Telus is a merged company. There used to be two different telcos in Alberta and BC.

During my time in BC, I thought Telus was wonderful. However, I only dealt with them as a telco, as I was electronically deprived then. (My computers were in New Brunswick. Long story. :)

But it's also possible that the Alberta/BC Telus is a split. I know this happened with Aliant, which is the merged company of the four Atlantic province telcos. New Brunswick, which historically had a great telco (NBTel), still gets better service from Aliant than Nova Scotia customers.

Nova Scotia used to be served by MT&T, before the Aliant merger and subsequent Bell buyout. You want bad phone service, move to Halifax. Glack.

I used to lose my _dialtone_ for an hour or two, at least once every month and sometimes three or four times a week.

This is not New Technology. Dialtones have been around for a while. MT&T never quite got the knack of delivering them consistently.

It did get better when I moved out of the south end. But it didn't get completely better, ever. Haligonians still lose their dial tones sometimes. Unless they switch to getting their telephone service from the local cable co, which is what my mother did. :) (I moved to New Brunswick before this became possible.) However, in New Brunswick, the story is still very different: everybody I know there loves their telco, even though it's legally the same company.

Now, in Ontario (where I am now), the situation is deeply strange. Bell's a deranged bureaucracy: it loses things. In many ways the technology side of Bell is pretty good; they usually make things work pretty well. But in customer service and billing... hah. they're nuts.

It's not that they're unfriendly. They'll generally be nice enough to you but they mess up processing absolutely everything. Sometimes they'll process it correctly, sometimes they'll lose the billing, sometimes they'll overbill. It's very random.