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Tauzin-Dingell Up for Vote Soon
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Just received this letter from my ISP, one of the oldest in existence. A study here lays out the basics on the bill and why it's a bad idea. The bill retracts the telecommunications act of '96 which forces the phone giants to share the nation's phone lines (which are in public trust). Looks like it's time to write those pesky congressmen again." Too late to write. Call. Tauzin-Dingell, up for vote on Wednesday, would eliminate all the requirements on the four remaining Baby Bells to play fair with competing telecom providers. "Sure Covad, you can co-locate your DSL equipment in our switching offices - our deregulated rate is only $10,000/day/piece of equipment." It's instant death for all DSL providers except Verizon, SBC, Qwest and BellSouth.
DSL is a kludge, in George Gilder's words "the equivalent of the Pony Express engineering winged horses". It's time to build new fiber-to-the-home nets. Some thoughts on that:
1) Use these in the homes, assuming folks still want to use their 100BaseT copper gear.
2) One could let existing ISPs plug into the "local" net to provide "long distance" Internet service, as well as the usual email/Usenet/personal web pages and customer support. Someone like Earthlink might go for that?
2b) Or just buy the usual backbone feed from the usual suspects.
3) Free peering for local traffic with any networks you can run a cable to, like your local university.
4) Any recommendations for switches and core routers? Ought to be able to turn individual ports on and off from remote.
5) High density developments, like the condo complex I live in, seem like a good place to start. I just don't know how to run the cable with minimum mess. Anyhow, start with the easy targets to build a solid customer base, then let the neighbors beg for network extensions.
Works in theory. If I ever finish reading the obligatory O'Reilly book maybe I'll take a shot at it, but I'd rather a real network engineer did the work. I'm getting tired of waiting, though. It's not like the existing telcos are going to get a clue. 100Mbps fiber-to-the-home with 1Gbps backbone (upgrading to 10Gbps when the gear is ready and semi-economical) seems very doable, just a lot of grunt work.
Also seems like IP multicast would be a neat distribution means for 20Mbps HDTV datastreams, but that can wait.
But why would they want to give up a monopoly on selling 30-mile connections at 20 cents/minute for an opportunity to sell 2000-mile connections at 6 cents/minute?
Because at the time the big price war on long distance hadn't started yet. Most of the profit was in the long distance service - which they were locked out of - and they were stuck with the low-profit local infrastructure monopoly.
So it seemed like a good trade at the time.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
4. When the ILEC goes to install a new DSL line for one of their OWN customers, and there aren't enough good pair in the cable, their installers have been known to just steal the pair from a working line. Amazingly enough, it's usually a CLEC's line.
So the CLEC gets a trouble call. And has to debug it. And when they figure out the line's gone dead, they report it to the ILEC, which sends a lineman out to fix it. And there are STILL no spare high-quality pair in the cable. So the ILEC lineman steals ANOTHER in-use pair to replace the first stolen one. (Guess whether it's from the ILEC or a CLEC.)
Loop forever.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Visit the U.S. House representative list. Find your representative, and call. When I call, I usally do the following:
Basically, what you're trying for is to come across as a reasonable voter who has an opinion. Your call will be logged, and your rep will get a report that 5 people called today urging him (or her) to vote against a bill, and 1 person called urging him to support another bill, etc. If enough people voice disapproval of the rep's planned vote, he may investigate further. If he doesn't know much about the issue, he may just go with the suggestion of the 20 people who bothered to call.
Currently many telco's are not making much of a profit. Many of those guys like Verizon, SBC etc.. are not investing in new technology even though they are some of the more healthy telco's out there. This effort is spurred by the FCC to try to encourage regional bells to spend more money and help pull the telecom industry out of depression. Unfortunately the real problem is NOT in regional bells, it is in the wireless and other larger telco providers like AT&T. They are laden with debt and will drag down the telecom industry for the next few years. Such is the hangover of too much spending. Alan
Here, Here, or Here, To do something about the bill. Try all 3. It can't hurt, and might do some good. If you want to hand write a letter (they are treated very differently in Washington, ie. read by someone who matters, not JUST form letter replies like e-mails) the bill is H.R. 1542.
Tell them it sucks. Do research and say it intelligently, but they have a monopoly SPONSORED by the state. The state therefore needs to be the ones regulating them. It's simple. Lay it out. Write a letter (by HAND!) and say these things.
I'm a concientious
Well this surfaces again,
Being from the great State of Louisiana and having attended the same University of congressman Tauzin, and whose father went to the same U with him(Pop has got some funny stories about how the Senator was refused from fraternity parties and wore suits to class, all of this in the 60's).
TO understand why Tauzin came up with this you need to know a little local history.
Billy Tauzin came up with idea in the late 90's just when the dot com boom was at a frenzy. Internet in Louisiana was getting pretty big. I was working for a small ISP called Fastband when it happened. You might remember us, Fastband Global Cast. We were an ISP who also were one of the earlier content providers for online music broadcasting.
Bell in Louisiana had just realized that internet was big money and our loop costs for our points of presence become outrageous, and couple this with our bandwidth costs from UUNET and Qwest it was hard to survive in the dial up game. Bell was a little late to gate into the ISP market....
Louisiana had several large ISP's. The largest being Communique in New Orleans. Bell started offering their services, at a higher cost and lousy customer service. Not enough ISP experience. And people in my neck of the woods stick to what they know, a lotta brand loyalty. In the south we live by the motto if aint broke do not fix it.
So, Bell realizing it could not break into the market that easily got into Tauzin's pockets. He immediately released the proposal and all ISPS in the state signed a petition much like that ISP's. All looked good. Billy was defeated...
But the bad news. Communique the largest ISP in the state, the company with the most to lose, sold out. They were bought out by Verio. Who could care less because they are so large. Communique also provide most of the bandwidth to smaller ISPS in the area and when Verio bought them out they raised the prices on the little guys to get the customers.
But it gets better. I sold out and joined the ranks of the unwashed at Verio. Actually, in those days we had damn good prices and service. Everything worked. Before all support moved to the NOC in Dallas.
BUT I always wondered why Bell never messed with Verio. Sure we used them for many things but they could of taken our business.... Because one day I found out that 80 percent of Bells Webhosting(AT the time) was on Verios servers at Hiway. AND Bell only allowed Verio to resell DSL access in the New Orleans area for a short time when it first become availible.
This is a little long. Moral of the story is that Louisiana lost out to the Telcos due to a Big ISP, a corrupt senator, and just being in the wrong place in the wrong time. The Bells view this as a success and Tauzin who likes his office in Washington and no doubt some official and unofficial perks from the telcos is taking his little proposal on the road.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
The point of the bill, as I read it, is to put high-speed Internet access on a par with telephone service, in that it should be available to everyone. The bill requires that high-speed access be available through every bell central office, or CO, within five years; and it requires that every loop from that CO, regardless of distance, be capable of providing high-speed service at the customer's request. If the loop cannot support high-speed access, then the telco must use other technology to deliver the service.
Inter-connection between ISPs and the Bells are changed in nature, but still required. Existing agreements will run their course; new agreements will require that the fee charged to ISPs for access to the loop be the same that the telco charges itself. The Bells must still allow ISPs to inter-connect with them.
Perhaps it is best to think of the new arrangements as being akin to the way long-distance telephone service is handled. Today, when you signup for a telephone you can choose your long-distance carrier and change it at will. When/if this bill passes, it seems that the intent is for you to do the same with your ISP.
One last point that should be clarified: the bill does not trash the unbundling portions of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. It simply says that it doesn't allow for using those unbundled components for anything other than telephone service; consequently, it reverses the interpretations put forward by the FCC that has led to the hodge-podge, bankrupt, trail-and-error solutions to high-speed access we've seen to date.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
Here's some excerpts from Rep. Billy Tauzin on his telecom bill in a WashingtonPost.com web chat. I'm not sure he really knows what he's talking about.
Pasadena, Tex.: Why are you trying to kill competition for local, regional and national Internet Service Providers by giving the Bells the right to be a monopoly? As a representative from Louisiana, you will be hurting your own Louisiana ISPs. Competition is what makes the American Dream work, when you get rid of it, we might as well be in Russia in the Cold War!
Rep. Tauzin: Rather be in Pasadena than Russia any day. First, our bill will not kill the competition nor make Bell companies monopolies. If you believe that I have some great waterfront property in Russia to sell you. The truth is our bill will create the first FCC authority to hammer the Bells for any violation of their obligations to open up their local markets to competitors. The FCC currently does not have such authority except when a Bell company seeks access into the long distance market. Secondly, our bill will preserve for the competitive carriers full line sharing rights to the legacy copper networks and will additionally give local competitors rights to use the Bell companies new fiber and hybrid fiber systems for broadband competition purposes at terms and rates set not by the Bell company but by the FCC. That is as fair as it gets.
------
Silver Spring, Md.: Rep. Tauzin, I used to work for Verizon (local service) and was perpetually disgusted by how that company treated customers and other CLECs. Poor customer service, shoddy network leasing -- I've heard and seen it all. Competition is very much needed to help Verizon help itself.
Rep. Tauzin: I totally agree. Any monopoly provider as I pointed out earlier is like the single store that gives you bad products, prices, service and occasionally bad attitudes. De-monopolizing the local Bell loops remains a big part of our plans.
A better place than the crappy house.gov site is this one, with easier to navigate menus, better alerts and indexing: www.congress.org.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
I had the same problem. I actually tried to sign up for DSL from SBC (Ha! Ha!) when this occurred. The installer said that my line was right at the edge of DSL range, but that it should be okay. (The people on the other end of the radio told him not to, but he thought the line was clean, so he installed it anyway.)
... I finally hit upon someone who could figure out the situation. (Hint: Call SBC and say you got cut off while talking to a second-level tech.) Apparently the lines here are switched to a second CO for "maintenance purposes" every night for a period of 3 hours while they reboot their routers and do God-knows-what-else. The DSL went out because I was within range of the first CO (and within the normal recommended range for DSL), but not for the secondary CO. That's why the installer had been told not to install the line even though I was within range.
;)
I got DSL. Everything worked fine but for a period between 10PM-1AM every night where the DSL would go out completely. Fast forward through two weeks of tech support calls
That sort of information probably "conveniently" wasn't handed to your relative's DSL provider. In fact, the idiots at SBC ("Is your modem plugged in?") couldn't even figure it out for over 2 weeks, but their installers knew.
I'm now happy with my AT&T cable modem, which is cheaper and faster. I've also switched long distance and local toll over to Sprint's 7-cent anytime plan, which was better than what SBC offered me anyway. And once I got the NINE HUNDRED DOLLARS of charges on my account (this was for a residential DSL line that never worked!) straightened out, all was right in the world again.
Moral of the story: SBC sucks harder than AOL and Disney combined, and AT&T has gained a good many customers from people I consult with who need broadband.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
I sent the following to the fax number of my Congresscritter free of charge, I'd like you to do the same with yours. (look them up on your congresmoron's site at http://www.house.gov .) You can construct a fax number that which will relay your e-mail through the Washington, DC mail > faxgate free of charge by simply substituting your Congressidiot's fax number for the one in the following sample letter. Needless to say, the text of your letter should NOT be identical to mine.
To find your congressperson, go to http://www.house.gov/writerep/
The fax number should be somewhere on the congressperson's site entering your zip code and state will get you.
Note: substitute the 10 digit 1 + area code / phone number of your congressperson WITHOUT dashes or spaces for xxxxxxxxxx below. This is sent as a regular e-mail to the To: address.
To: remote-printer.firstname_last name/US_Congress@xxxxxxxxxx.iddd.tpc.int
Subject: HR1542
Dear [insert name of congressperson here]:
Please vote NO on HR1542. The only purpose it is intended to serve is to put independent DSL providers out of business to increase RBOC profits, and I don't see this as serving *any* legitimate policy purpose. Unlike the phone companies, I think that competition is a good thing. Your constituents need *more* choices in broadband, not fewer.
name
address
city,state,zip
(including your address is important because if they don't know you're a constituent, your fax will be tossed into the garbage)
Tech Public Policy stuff
Leeching on the back of those who spent the capital? You mean the government? Oh? you didn't know that the telephone lines were built of public land and funded by government subsidies? Do a little reasearch before you comment on things you don't know about next time.
Sheesh. If you want a truely free market, remove the Bells control of the wires and return ownership of them to the public. They were built on public land with public money, they should be publicly owned. Let the Bells compete on an even playing field and then see what the free market determines.
- Before calling, read the bill (or at least the CRS summary - see below) and know if the Congressman is sponsoring the bill.
- Staff members use Thomas, a database by the Congressional Research Service, to find out what the bill actually does. Pick a few specific points from the summary (H.R. 1542 summary) that you have a problem with; be informative and able explain why the bill will harm the Congressman's constituents.
- Call the DC office, not the district office. Make sure the caller id information shows an area code that is in the Congressman's district.
- When calling, be polite and friendly. Ask to speak to the staff member that is working on the Tauzin-Dingell Broadband Deployment Act. It will probably be the staffer that works with technology or communications. Do not just start talking about the bill to whoever answers the phone, he or she is probably not the one with the answers.
- Be short and to the point. Don't expect any direct answers to questions if the answers are likely to conflict with your opinions.
- If your Congressman is one of the 112 co-sponsors of the bill, ask why. Politely.
- No matter what the outcome of the call, thank the staff member for his or her time.
CRS reports are compiled by researchers in the Library of Congress and are the main source of information for Congressional staffers. Most are available from 3rd parties; some are online. Rather dull reading, but it helps to know what information the people making the decisions are using.In case no one noticed, two weeks ago the FCC issued a Notification of Proposed Rulemaking. The FCC is seeking comments on its proposal to exempt data from the 1996 Telecommunications Act. This will give the RBOCs everything they wanted from Tauzin-Dingell and then some. No longer will the RBOCs have to offer data lines to other carriers.
It grandfathers in all the agreements already in place with the Bells for co-lo-ing and access to infrastructure, and requires the Bells to continue to offer these things on slightly different, but not ridiculous terms.
...requires the FCC to monitor and enforce the laws
...and makes special provisions for under served communities.
So we can keep Qwest, SBC, Verizon, BellSouth and whatever 2nd tier providers have survived so far, but new competition is a no-go from here on out.
It requires that everyone in the USA have access to broadband within 5 years, subject to serious penalties,
There is no guarantee that when the time comes, those penalties won't be waved, like they often are.
Oh, right. As if they do that now. How many TV station conglomerates have exceeded the quota with no enforcement action? How many DSL providers were driven out of business by the incumbents while the FCC stood by and allowed them to practically flaunt openly the open access rules?
(contrary to a very deceiving ad run locally in DC by voicesforchoices),
Moot.
Uh-huh. Look, you can believe whatever you want, but telecom bills are not high on the list of credible predictors of future performance. Look at the Telecom Act of '96, fat lotta good that did. Ask Covad if the '96 bill did what was promised, then ask yourself why this bill should be regarded any differently.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Ummm... no.
ISPs have huge fixed costs. city-wide isps are in the tens of thousands of dollars, regional isps in the millions. High fixed cost, while the cost of adding additional subscribers is quite small, you have textbook economies of scale.
Then you have the bulk discounts on bandwidth, which are *huge*. Buy your first T1, it costs 900-1kish. If you are near a NAP and need an oc-3, it only costs. hell if you're big enough you dont even need to pay for commodity bandwidth, you just do bilateral peering w/ the uunets of the world.
Also when you said "thrived", i dont know what you mean by that. If you mean "barely turning a profit thanks to razor thin margins and huge telco tariffs", then you're probably correct. Furthermore, actaully had to maintain modem POPs, pay for PRIs, call forwarding, longhaul, etc, while now for cable|dsl, all you have to do is throw in a dslam, a big router, and buy one piece of fiber to your nap.
Honestly, this whole "The bells letting other providers use their dslam" really sucks. It sucks for the bells, who are losing a ton of money on infrastructure upgrades only to have their customers goto the other LEC. It sucks for the ISPs because after paying the line charge to the main telco company, they have no room to make profit of their own.
And don't even get me started on trying to get DSL from anyone besides Ameritech around here.
if( read(this) ) { you = programmer; }
More to the point, this is of little import to the ILEC's. They all planned to roll out DSL service to all their CO's within 5 years anyways. Why wouldn't they? It's just the old Tom Sawyer trick "please don't force us to to roll out these nice lucrative services".
The "helps consumers" parts are either bait-and-switch, things that they would have done anyways, or (wait for it) provisions the ILEC lawyers are certain they can get thrown out or ignored, just like they did with the 1996 act. And it gets rid of any credible competition for good.
The closest thing to a "helps consumers" part is this:
ILEC-Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier
CLEC-Competitive Local Exchange Carrier