Slashdot Mirror
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."
I live in Alameda (near SF), and I can tell you that the article is not stretching the truth at ALL. I personally have DSL thru a small local ISP who partners with Covad, but when I moved to my new apartment, I still had to get a landline from SBC (as they've apparently cut off the likes of Covad from getting dry pairs with no phone account associated for DSL). More on topic, several of my customers have switched to other local carriers, and either had to give up DSL (for cable, which in Alameda is run by the very excellent Alameda Power & Telecom, but I digress), or keep one SBC line.
I guess having AT&T and MCI on "our" side is a good thing, though with the Yahoo!/SBC DSL crap SBC is giving out now, I don't know why anyone would want to stay with 'em.
Couldn't the same be said of SBC? I mean, if SBC continued to provide DSL service to those customers, then they too would "generate more revenue" than if they were to just hand it over to AT&T or MCI. Is it greed? Or do they just want to control our means of communication? They can't have it both ways.
If I recall, the US is the only place that still has this. What if you're someone whose main phone is a cell phone, why should one have to get a redundant land line just to simply get DSL, whether it be the main carrier or an alternative? DSL is expensive as it is (contract, connection, no dissatisfaction guarantee), but one must also pay for deposit, connection fee and service on a land line as well? This is the main reason cable has more customers: the price is lower, they don't charge connection fees, they don't make you sign a contract, they don't make you buy the modem or NIC (hell the NIC is yours to keep after service is terminated), and you sure as hell don't have to pay for simply having a signal line to connect on.
SCB here in Memphis charges $50 a month for service. They make you buy the modem, they charge a connection fee, they require a contract. This on top of having to have a land line. All of a sudden this overpriced DSL now in reality costs $82, at the very least.
I'll stick to my $30 a month cable connection.
While this tactic might seem counter-productive, serving mainly to make SBC look bad while rival services gear up to implement their own DSL offerings, it would be helpful to take a look at SBC's situation from the company's standpoint.
SBC's third quarter earning report show the company getting absolutely hammered on the earnings front, with revenues off 14 percent, down over a billion dollars from a year ago. This drop can be attributed to competition between phone services, and more importantly, the rise of alternative communications technology. While DSL subscribers are increasing steadily, the added inflow of dollars is being more than offset by the hemmorhaging in the phone services sector.
Thus it can be seen that big phone companies relying primarily on local and long distance phone service are seeing their traditional market being eroded away, and are panicking. Look for more tricks like the DSL service hostage stunt in the near future as lumbering Old Economy companies try anything to shore up their shrinking incomes.
Hopefully, companies like SBC will soon be willing to implement the kind of out-of-the-box thinking needed to restructure their companies for the (gradually...) emerging New Economy, and will leave these kind of lame tricks in the past. Until then, there's always cable.
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.
This is the idea that broke up AT&T. Whether it applies to DSL I have my doubts, but the regulation has withstood numerous challenges in court, at the agency level (FCC) and in Congress.
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.
Whoa! Let's clarify the rules -- it's a lot more subtle. More like Microsoft's monopoly than the old Bell System.
Anybody can open a local phone company nowadays. Lots of us have... but if you want to reach residential subscribers, you can't afford to pull new copper wire (old technology, very capital-intensive) to each house. That is a true "natural monopoly", which means that the cost to a competitor would be much higher than the cost to the incumbent, making competition unworkable.
However, there's no natural monopoly to various other aspects of the business. So for instance Bell competitors (CLECs) can rent the wire, at a regulated rate, and provide dialtone and/or DSL over it. Covad does this, for instance. The current regulations (which may change; the Bells are doing a full-frontal attack on them at the FCC, and chairman Powell's their lapdog) also require the Bells to rent their switches at wholesale to CLECs. So a CLEC can lease Bell copper loops and switches, and thus provide service with none of its own equipment. This is called the "UNE Platform" and is how most (though not all) non-cable residential telephone "competition" works. Note that if it's called UNE-P, the CLEC sets its own prices quite freely, vs. the declining-in-popularity so-called "total service Resale" where the CLEC is just taking a commission on Bell's regular rates. So UNE-P lets New York City and Chicago subscribers get flat rate service, without Zone charges; it powers MCI's "Neighborhood" too. Note that Bells are not required to provide DSL to CLECs as a wholesale service, so it isn't part of UNE-P.
The controversy: If SBC (or another Bell) provides the dialtone, then they will also sell their ADSL atop it. The price for residential ADSL is held down because the dialtone line is paying for the loop; SBC's own ADSL "business" gets the line for basically free. So can Covad -- they can rent the "high frequency element" of an SBC dialtone line for near zero. BUT if the SBC dialtone line is being provisioned on a UNE-P or Resale basis, so MCI or AT&T (etc.) is the end user's phone company of record, then SBC as a matter of policy chooses not to provide its DSL service. This is pure spite, not technology --the UNE-P line is identical to an SBC-service line, and the UNE-P CLEC is already paying for the loop.
The nice thing about UNE-P is that you can switch carriers without really touching anything -- it's a computer entry, of who gets billed how much by whom. But because SBC refuses to sell DSL atop UNE-P, they "lock in" voice subscribers by threatening to take away the ADSL. They're gambling that they'll make more money by keeping voice subscriber than they'll lose by having UNE-P subscribers switch to other DSL providers. And, more likely, they are just such monopolists at heart that they don't give a rat's ass about maximizing their own profit, if they can thumb their nose at a competitor.
This all has interesting antitrust connotations (no, Bells are not exempt from antitrust any more) but that will take years to play out.
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?
This is just one of their latest ploys. They're also trying to get rid of the Unbundled Network Elements that let their competitors offer local service in the first place. They're fighting tooth and nail against any competition at all.
What sickens me the most is how SBC uses the cloud of smoke to its advantage. In blazenly pays for commercials to be aired which says how they support competition in the telephone industry and they're working towards it. At the exact same time they're active sabotaging it. Remember that unfriendly, uncooperative monopoly of ten years ago? Same people. Never think for a moment that they are working in your interest. They are NOT.
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.
The washington think-tank CATO held a conference on 11/14 called "Telecom and Broadband Policy After the Market Meltdown" where they invited industry analysts to debate the effectiveness of industry and government to solve the complete fuck-up that is home broadband in our time.
here's the link to the page, scroll down for the four-part, two-day real-video webcasts. put yourself in the know.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!