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Verizon's Solution to Terrorism: Eliminate Verizon Competitors
The New York Times has an article about Verizon lobbying for rate increases and to remove all requirements that Verizon provide telecom services to competitors, claiming that being a large, sluggish monopoly is somehow advantageous in responding to disasters, although Verizon hasn't managed to restore phone and data service in large areas of Manhattan yet. In a related story, an association of small ISPs has surveyed its members and come to the revelation that the Bells are stifling competition.
It doesn't mean that Verizon is right in wanting to squash all competition, but there are things called natural monopolies.
Your electric company is one. Water services.
I don't know what anyone else in the US is going through, but here in NJ, the electric company (PSE&G - Park, Sleep, Eat, & Go Home) for all their faults, works. My electricity is reliable as can be. And when it does fail, they're out here _immediately_ to fix it!
Natural monopolies, as long as there's oversight and consumer protection, can work.
In fact, sometimes it's BETTER to have a monopoly than not. Look at the mess in California's power when they tried to introduce competition.
Letting companies like Microsoft (which is NOT a natural monopoly) run around, are bad. They're just an unchecked bully.
Anyway, back to my point... I don't think Verizon being the only game in town is necessarily a bad thing... as long as they're kept in check, rates are kept reasonable, customer service is a MUST, and they provide the services required.
And they may have a point --- if all the equipment in the facilities were theirs, they could certainly have it back up and running quicker than following some silly FCC rules & procedures for working with other companies....
You know, three years ago when the U.S. was economically prosperous and business was booming, we could afford to attack our best corporate performers with regulation. But right now, our economy sucks. People are being laid off all over the place.
Now is not the time to stifle the natural monopolies. Face it. It's inefficient to run more than one line to every house in America so that the consumer can decide which jack to plug their phone into. Phones lines, electric lines, gas lines - these all dictate a natural monopoly. Verizon is just one of them.
Sure, there's some confusion right now because more & more new things are coming into your house over that twisted pair of copper. It may take people a long time to accept that soon a single company will own everything that comes through that wire - your long distance & local calls, your videoconferencing, television, 3-d imaging, the news, the weather, your Operating System patches, your personal documents and consumer profile - but the consumer has shown a remarkable ability to adjust.
Seriously, relax and go with the flow.
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
Verizon is just looking out for Verizon. The only monies they generate are in the areas where they leverage their monopoly. All the remaining areas where they have these grandiose dreams of ASP, and hosting, or whatever, are ALL losers. They are too old, and too slow to compete with other tech companies.
Pay a visit to their tech/data center in Tampa, it's like visiting a nursing home.
How do I know? I work there.
Awesome!
I work for a small clec and the survey comes as no surprise to me. I may be paranoid but it always seems like Sprint is trying to screw us. If something goes down and we enter a trouble ticket on it they just say something to the effect of "Well there's nothing wrong on our end." If we pursue the matter further they say "Well, we looked and it must be you." By some mystery of nature after they "look" what ever outage has occured will start working again. We have to request that they hook up customers so we can provide dsl service. Half of the time they record the work as done and when we go to setup the customer on site it's not. Of course if we request they fix any of these things they just look, it magically starts working and we get charged. It makes us look like idiots to our customers when it's really a situation that is out of our control.
Anyway...
That said, it is an enormous undertaking rebuilding around several large central offices that were simply obliterated. In the bad-old-days where there was mother AT&T, this kind of mess would have brought people from all over the country in to fill the gap in raw bodies. We're left with the impression that this particular disaster was nearly 100% covered by Verizon people. Would calling for help to other operating companies have expidited the return to service?
All that said, at the beginning of deregulation was a proposal (squashed by lobbying) that central offices become 'open facilities' and all the copper in the street also become 'open'. Then these facilities would be serviced by a separate regulated monopoly which would level the playing field between the big, the small and the miscellaneous. Then outages like 9/11 would be dealt with by the 'open network operating company' as well as all those firms that provide dial tones.
I think it is probably time to revisit this as the ONOO would have sufficient scale to deal with network failures while still keeping real compition alive.
-- Multics
P.S. I have customers in Verizon and Ameritech/SBC. Give me Verizon *every* time. Ameritech genuinely sucks -- there are now times that simple things simply can't be done because there is no one left with the knowledge of how the damn system works.
Now is especially the time to defend a US citizen's basic freedoms, of which purchasing in a free market (controlled neither by the government nor by an oppressive marketer) is one.
I'm sorry--I don't recall any protections against "oppressive marketers" in the Constitution. I do recall a bill of rights, which includes an amendment reading "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." Among those rights retained by the people, is the right to start a business, buy and sell as you please, and not be punished by the government for being successful. A century and a half bad laws, and two centuries of supreme court corruption, do not change the meaning of the constitution.
If you have a problem with my views, REPLY, don't moderate!
But not for phone...for internet.
We were perfectly satisfied with Mindspring, except for some odd reason, every 5 minutes, we would have a 30-second period of null activity. This started occuring a few weeks after we got their service. After a few months, our connection just died. After a week, BellSouth admitted to rerouting our lines to their servers instead of Mindspring's, claiming we had asked them to. We tried twice to have the lines rerouted to Mindspring, and each time, they rejected the request without notifying anyone.
Finally, we were able to talk to BellSouth's local VP. He told us it would take a week to stop it from pointing to their servers, and another to point it back to Mindspring. Now, we aren't stupid. We know that it's simply a keystroke or two they need to enter into their computer, but their almost refusal to change us back finally made us just give up and accept their service.
Oh, and while we didn't have service, I used a friend's BellSouth service, since I figured they owed me anyways for the hassle they were putting us through. I still had the odd 30-second null activity. Oddly enough, within five minutes of signing up with BellSouth service, this went away, and all that they had done was simply give us an account.
No comment.
Last year I had the bad misfortune of moving to a new house while Verizon was on strike. It took approx. one month to get my telephone service turned on, all the while James Earl Jones was on TV commercials all day long trying to get me to buy Verizon DSL. Did I mention I was out of work and really needed a telephone so I could hear back from prospective employers? I had to go out and buy a cell phone.
Of course, water, gas, and electric took all of one day to get turned on. No problem there.
http://www.newnetworks.com/FINALISPSURVEY2001.htm
First off, nowhere in the article does it state how large the sample size is. Without knowing that you really can't know if this is a large enough sample size to be considered population size.
Secondly, how the heck did they figure 6.5 was a passing grade? Just pull out of their ass?
If you are going to do research, do it right.
Fucking shit.
It always seemed to me that in cases of natural monopoly the sensible thing to do would be to nationalize the service or otherwise turn it into a public utility. I'll take a public utility over a single corporation any day as one's mission is to provide a service vs. the other's goal of making dollars.