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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."
Simply put... The U.S. Telecom Act of 1999 is a joke.
You've got Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La) sitting on the Telecommunication committee with the fattest wad of unspent baby bell money in his pocket.
If it wasn't for Mr. Tauzin, I'm pretty sure that the CLEC would have a more favorable competitive environment.
Sorry, CLEC, you are going to have to setup a Political Action Committee (PAC) to counter the already swayed Telecom committee members of the House.
Until the CLEC get their collective duffus act together, Baby Bell will win this one: lock, stock and barrel.
No fine is too big for Baby Bell: it is just the cost of doing dirty business (equates with marketing budget).
I'm ashame that I voted for that fat cat. I'll contribute heavily to see him gone by next election.
Telus and Bell hate each other. Passionately.
And everybody else hates both of them. Passionately.
Speaking as someone who has to deal with Telus on a daily basis, they are "the suckiest sucks who ever sucked" (to paraphrase Homer Simpson.)
Last month, their DSL network for the entire province of Alberta was down for three weeks because their DHCP servers failed.
Think about that for a minute.. thousands of people were down for almost a month, because Telus couldn't maintain their DHCP servers..
As a note, it takes me about an hour to make a DHCP server (from a PC with a blank HD.) It took a multi-million dollar company THREE WEEKS to do the same.. granted, their servers are more complex than mine, but I have a hard time believing that it could take more than a day or two.
My experiences with Bell aren't much better.. a customer was having problems with their VPN, due to excessive dropped packets.. a traceroute clearly showed that it was a problem in Bell's network (lag increased from 20ms to over 2000ms, once the packets were three hops inside Bell's network.) Emailing the results to them got a response of "traceroute shows round-trip times, so the results don't show it's a problem with us"