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DSL Amidst Phone Wars
DrewCapu writes "The SF Chronicle has an article which talks about the battles between SBC and AT&T & MCI over supposed unfair practices concerning DSL and switching phone companies. All sides have their own spin on it. Can't we all just get along? Things have been heating up ever since SBC got closer to offering LD in CA."
Yep.
:-)
I have SBC DSL here in Santa Rosa, 60 miles north of SF.
I like them, MUCH quicker phone support than the local ISP I used to have. Their business practices are nowhere nearly as sleazy as MCI who lie like dogs, try to switch you without permission and play games with their rates.
I would happily allow a total monopoly over DSL, wireless and landline as long as everything works and is a reasonable price. All I care about is good uptime connectivity at a decent price and SBC provides it, they can screw the living daylights out of everyone else as long as *I* can logon at 1.5 mbps
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
and of course the gov't subsidies most phone companies recieved (in direct payments and via grants of monopoly status) to run those lines doesn't entitle the tax payers that funded them to anything.
I moved to in with two of my not so computer savvy friends, who insisted on the microsoft name, well, after struggeling with delayed shipping, and a whole list of other hassels, we got it hooked up, but, the my computer doesn't get a -REAL- ip address, my modem gets the IP, then it does NAT/firewall, but with a 255.255.255.252 subnet, so it will only assign one computer, which pisses me off to no end, after less than 20 minutes of fitzing around and RTFM'ing i call MSN, i can't turn the feature off, they apologize, i arrange to have my ISP switched, call back in 20 minutes and cancel service, good thing there wasn't a contract, whew! i still have to pay $50 for internet for less than a day, i'm irked
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
> and of course the gov't subsidies most phone
> companies recieved (in direct payments and via
> grants of monopoly status) to run those lines
> doesn't entitle the tax payers that funded them
> to anything.
Why should they receive either subsidies or protection of their monopolies?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Why do I need a voice line in order to get DSL service in the first place? I don't want a voice line and I can't be the only one.
Because of this, anyone who wants DSL must also pay (Verizon, in Los Angeles) $26/month for a voice line they have no intention of using.
Is it like that everywhere or just here?
In my mind, this is all an anachronism - you have cable-TV, phone and electric wiring going out to every household in pretty much all of the civilized world these days. Is it just me, or doesn't this strike you as being two companies in the wire business too many?
;-)
In many places in the world, you can today choose your provider of electrons to power your gadgets, but you typically have a lot less options when it comes to wires that provide a little more structure to the very same electrons (beyond the 50/60 Hz).
It would seem to me that in the future, we'll see a local "wiring company" that pretty much only provides the wires (electric and data), while power generation, cable-TV, telephony, Internet will all be provided by separate companies. (I hope the last three will actually be rolled into one service, but never mind that.)
I'm personally just waiting for the cell phone providers to wake up and realize that if they were to drop their outrageous charges for air time in the cells covering people's homes (call it the "home area"), then a lot of people would completely give up on the concept of land line phones and opt for just having personal mobile phones.
It would kill the market for cordless phones, though.
I originally had Ameritech (now SBC) DSL installed at both the office and home. 1.5M sDSL @ the office and 768/168K aDSL @ home.
Garbage service and _reliability_. Lasted a month at the office before being replaced with a T1 with another provider.
Kept it at home as it was the _only_ choice in town. Was. Due to ongoing poor service and a sudden speed to 384/128K for no apparent reason -- yet their billing and website for me have is at the already gotten 768K speed.
They asked me if somebody else in the neighborhood recently got DSL. I hung up the phone laughing...
Current trend in this area is 5Ghz wireless with the ISP currently _easily_ giving you 2Mbs/768K bandwidth for the same cost.
This is my _only_ option as I refuse to get a phone line to try and get DSL with another provider. They all say SBC *requires* a POTS line even though I do have my backup/voice ISDN line with them. Not for long -- that's going to ANYBODY else for that service due to their games.
Not to mention I'm in charge of the office lines covering a couple of T1's, PRI's and a few dozen POTS and BRI lines peppered about. All about to be changed to other providers over their DSL games.
Obviously I'm not the only one... How ironic.
So how many lines to you expect to be run? I'd hate to have my yard or the city streets dug up any more than they already are!
Really... just think how many local providers there are.
Why don't they just separate the local-loop provider from the local service, DSL, and long distance carriers? This company would just sell lines to other phone companies and would make all of its revenue that way. It is the only part of phone service which makes sense to be a monopoly.
Then local providers and long distance providers could compete on fair ground and there wouldn't be any conflicts of interest, forced sales, or screwed over customers.
That line of reasoning works until you hit the brick wall of history. One company (a federally supported monopoly) ran the copper wires into your home (if you live in the US). That one company, supported by the government, invested that capital. Then, in 1986, the government broke that monopoly apart. So all of a sudden, the copper wires connecting you to the network were owned by "Baby Bells" and your long distance service was controlled by the company that formerly owned those splinter companies.
Fast forward to 1996...the Internet's taking off and competition is nada in the telecom sector. In typical knee-jerk reaction mode (largely due to campaign contributions), we get the Telecom Bill which mandates that local providers will open their networks to competitors and long distance providers will open their networks to competitors.
The catfight begins. And while these companies fight and lobby, it is the consumer that suffers.
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
My own personal SF Bay Area DSL horror story:
I went with Earthlink, who (in my area) gets their DSL service through Covad.
I had fine service for a long time. Then, one day, it stopped working. Completely. Dead line.
After many calls in to Earthlink, I finally got them to escalate it to the network level (and then, to Covad). I get a phone message saying "my problem has been fixed." It isn't fixed. It hasn't changed at all. Repeat process.
Eventually I am told that my line tests to the same levels it was at when Covad first turned it up. In other words, there's nothing wrong. Earthlink would not roll a truck to see what was wrong -- it wasn't worth the expense to them. When I asked what I should do -- "Do I cancel my Earthlink and get cable?" -- they said that, yes, that was an option, or I could investigate their satellite service. BTW, because I had been a customer for so long (over a year), there would "of course" be no cancellation charge on my "service."
I was about to go completely fscking ballistic when one guy at the Earthlink NOC made a little suggestion. I decided to take his advice.
I took my DSL modem out to my demarc box in the side yard with an extension cord and a "red box" cable (basically, a phone cable with the red and green pair stripped and attached to alligator clips). I plugged the modem into each pair at the box and cycled the power, until I got a circuit that looped up. Sure enough, my DSL line was, in fact, active.
What was the trouble? The wires had been cut.
I'm not kidding here -- the ends of the red and green wires were absolutely clean, and they were about an inch shorter than the other wires in the cable. It was quite plain that somebody had snipped them. I pulled out a wire tool, stripped the ends, tied them down to the pair I traced back to my DSL jack, went back into the house, and plugged in the DSL. Voila! It looped up right away. I "dialed out" with my PPPoE username/password, and I was online again at full speed, as if nothing had ever happened.
Thinking about this, I realized that my DSL outage had coincided with my new upstairs neighbors moving in. They would have ordered new phones with SBC Pac Bell. A little too much of a fscking coincidence for my likes.
I asked a few people about it, and a couple of them told me they'd heard the same thing: SBC techs don't like seeing Covad lines in the field, and they're fond of disabling them -- apparently, to achieve the same results I got (Covad, Earthlink, or whomever else telling the customer that they'd have to switch service.)
Of course, this is all hearsay (from me to you).
Breakfast served all day!
oh and like a previous poster said, we here in Japan have total phone competition. Everybody owns the line to their house. Of course that means you had to buy it, but it then is yours, forever. You can sell it on the open market to whoever you want. I don't have to buy from the Telco either, just get a clean on from the want ads. Then sign up for local, long distance, ADSL etc. as for the historical versus new cost of running wires, how about new subdivisions? they are built and wired all the time. Here in the kansai region of Japan we the electric co. strung up fiber on its poles all over, so we have fiber outside the house, just pay installation ($300) and about $50 month for 100mbps. Or choose from about 20 DSL providers, (NTT, KDDI, Sony, the two railway companys that run fibre backbones down beside their tracks,) oh, and one more thing, YahooBB does IP phone for free to other Yahoo subcribers, all Japan for \7/3min. or \2.5/min. to the US.