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Baby Bells Promise Broadband Stagnation
twitter writes "According to this NYT article the Baby Bells will not be developing their 'high-speed networks' despite their recently granted DSL monopoly because they were not granted local phone monopolies. 'Here is a lot of crying crybaby reaction to the decision.' says Mr. Powell."
Here's a look at the Bells' work to tax VoIP in a similar move to the ones they made in the early days of DSL. The eventual goal of moves like this would be to push non-Bells out of VoIP so they can then have yet another monopoly.
I've heard too many cases where cities and counties are taking matters into their own hands. Just like city cable, take over your control of broadband and build it out yourself. Screw the phone companies.
I've been dealing with the Baby Bells' general stagnation for quite a while now.
DSL is still not available in my area, and I live near two major California cities. You'd think that with all the major universities and Silicon Valley in California that they'd have little trouble creating good quality DSL home subscriber lines. But, alas, they have yet to deliver.
I really wish cable modems weren't my only option because they have outages a lot from what I hear, but it's my only choice. Hey, it's either that or a dial-up modem.
What would you do?
Join my Slashdot clan
Background: 28/M/Bi-Sexual; Owner of a Linux company; MBA Harvard 2003; B.S. Comp Sci MIT 2000
Who's got the political agendas here?
"I believe the order we adopted last week achieves a principled, balanced approach," said Mr. Martin, who has close ties to the White House.
And what exactly is *that* supposed to mean? Nobody said anything about the White House.
The critics of the compromise included some congressmen who have been among the most outspoken advocates for the so-called Baby Bells
Sounds like someone doesn't care for "big business".
The five members of the Federal Communications Commission defended their new telephone and broadband policy in front of a Congressional hearing today, but they conceded that their compromise proposal, which requires the regional Bell companies to continue to share their phone lines with competitors, left no one happy and was not certain to pump up the flailing telecommunications sector in the near term.
I'd like to see a direct quote, please. It's not very often that someone in the government admits they fucked up. If they actually *stated* that the compromise didn't really accomplish anything and just made things worse, then why the hell did they push it through?
Sorry...but the needle on my BS-meter is pinned right now. I have no love for the Baby Bells, but this article just reeks of poor journalism. I'd like to know what really happened, other than some moderately-amusing flamebait comment from Michael Powell.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
It always works this way. Companies create a niche that revolutionizes the world, then, after a while, monopolize it for their own profit. Enough people complain and the government either creates its own crown corporation, nationalizes it, or strongly regulates it. This works for a time, too. But after a while, government is deemed too bureaucratic, slow and 'behind the times', so it is privatized/legislation is eased, and it starts all over again.
Unless the government process is altered, that pendulum will never stop.
Who here (or anywhere) is surprised at this?
Form a coop, lease some resellable bandwidth like a Fractional-T1, slap wireless nodes everywhere. "Mesh" networks seem to be the latest buzzword. Use them to route around the broken segment -- aka "phone company".
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
If another stable technically advanced country like Canada or Australia or New Zealand or the UK would like a lot of sophisticated IT talent, get your telcos to offer good network services and set up an American-targeted H1-B-type visa program targeted at American talent.
You'll be able to pick and choose and will soon have a nice fat booming economy.
We're pissed about the limits on research being imposed by the asshats in office now anyway, so there's an opportunity here for the taking.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
This is exactly why they should've never deregulated DSL in the first place. They're just holding broadband hostage until they can get back full monopoly power over an area. Even if they are granted total monopoly power, it won't have an effect on increasing broadband service. All it'll do is make everything more expensive.
I just signed up with Earthlink because BellSouth's ISP's TOS are far too irritating and limiting and because their customer support is far, far more knowledgeable. (Just ask people who work for BellSouth's DSLAM; they'll tell you. Bellsouth's Broadband Support doesn't do any diagnostic work first.) It's bad enough that they'll probably be driven out of business, forcing me to have to deal with inferior service, but we'll probably see jacked up prices at no noticeable benefit. Based on the way they currently treat their customers, I sure as heck don't see an end to bandwidth caps and increased service coming down the pipe.
This childish behavior is nothing but extortion. I hope that another administration can get into office before the FCC runs the consumer Internet into the ground.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
But I digress; The real point here is the simple mathematics. If they build more DSL capacity, they have to resell more DSL capacity, and they lose more money. Thank you, FCC. First you made it so that most people couldn't get DSL because you imposed nasty penalties for downtime. This led to pacific bell shortening their supported range from 17,000 feet to 14,000 feet. I don't know the formula for measuring area assuming that every wire was straight which it isn't, but that's a serious drop in coverage. Now, you continue to force them to resell capacity, which leads to further inability for people to get DSL. Without all this overregulation, Pacific Bell would have been able to implement "Fasttrack" DSL (Now called Project Pronto, it's the DSL on fiber infrastructure project which was supposed to put DSL in every pac bell home by 2002) already and everyone would be able to get DSL. THAT would be the point to start talking about forcing them to resell capacity, not now, and certainly not when you forced the issue in the first place.
Then again, since when does the FCC act in the interest of the american people? They act only in their own best interest. It behooves them to keep control of everything they can, and they do.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The only way we are going to get broadband across the board is if the government mandates
it, and takes it upon themselves to install and run it. As soon as it's left up to
a corporation todo, they're going to not provide services to the customers that are expensive.
Why? Because thats the point of a corporation. They want to make a profit. Period.
I think they can make a profit. Right now, locally, I can get Satellite broadband from DirecTV, I can get Cablemodem from the "local" cable company (who is the only co. I trust less than the phone company) or I can get (and have) DSL from a "local" ISP. (fairly local, anyway.. one of the small ones that got medium sized, but stayed here and did not get absorbed.)
I wont go Satellite, because I want two way broadband.. I like to run game servers.. I wont go cablemodem, cause, well, I already HAVE directv and am contracted into it.. so DSL is pretty much my only answer right now.
However.. I suspect if the phone company offered DSL locally, in this way "You buy the modem for 49.95 (making them a profit on the modem) and pay 9.95 a month for the DSL service" they would make a HELL of a lot more money than Covad is currently making in my area billing me 49.95 a month for my DSL.
Its a matter of how many * income. The thing now is that at 50 bucks, people dont want to shell out the cash, but at 9.95 that beats the hell out of AOL, and give REAL internet to people.
I know I would jump on it.. and I sure would encourage everyone I know to jump on it as well.
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
"The only way we are going to get broadband across the board is if the government mandates
it, and takes it upon themselves to install and run it."
How did Canada do it? I don't think their system is government mandated, but I don't know enough to say for sure either way.
Maybe we should look at how Canada operates their telecomms to help us decide how to run ours? Broadband has been readily available there for a very long time. We should consider looking into the hows and why's of canada.
I have come to the conclusion that the most beneficial situation would be for the local government to own the actual cable plant for its municipality. With current technology the gov't could easily create a situation where competition occurs because *everyone* has equal access to the cable plant. If one company can deliver a service over the last mile then all can.
The only other option would be to forcefully divest the monopolies of their cable plants ala the breakup of the Bell empire in '84. The cable plant operators would then have an incentive to sell access to as many people as possible. In fact this option may be best as some services (ptp T1 for example) don't really need any hardware connected to them other than what would naturally exist to operate the network.
I really get the feeling that phone companies don't actually want anything to do with DSL. A friend mentioned that Phone Companies tend to like virtual circuits so they impose the totally unnecessarry and (at least in the beginning) buggy-as-hell PPP Over Ethernet instead of just running it as a bridge.
I've helped a few folks get their DSL connections running and in every case, the phone companies have managed to seriously screw something up.
I had one guy ask them to put it on the line he used for modem and fax, (cuz the wiring for that was already in his office), but when I got to his house they had put it on the wrong line - I had to rearrange a bunch of his inside wiring to get things set the way he wanted it.
Another time, the Phone Co had not bothered to test the person's line to make sure it didn't have any bridging or repeaters in it. (I'm not an expert on DSL, but I understand that the line needs to be clear of repeaters and other active components or the DSL doesn't work right) it took a couple weeks after their supposed "on" date to get an appointment to have a tech clear the line.
My own experience was one of frustration as the installer (this was early on - back when they wouldn't LET you do your own install) refused to proceed when he saw I was running NT4.0 instead of Win 9x.
The Digital Sorceress
You mean they are going to try to squeeze every last penny out of us before they innovate. As far as I know the limited range of DSL means that it is only really avalible near city centers, which is a good region for wireless (weither it be based on lasers or radiowaves) which is developing rapidly. For instance in Aspen you can use Rockywave to get your internet access from anywhere in the coverage area (not just near your house). Personally, I'ld love this service over DSL, Satalite, or Cablemodem even if it was somewhat slower (which I don't think it is) because I wouldn't have to re-wire my house or buy a wireless home network. I could also take my laptop to the park and surf from there (should the need arise).
FYI the copper wires were put down using taxpayer money, but I think that the phone companies have paid for a (nearly) all of their fiber optic cables. Certainly that is what the advertising 5-10 years ago would have had us believe.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
I certianly hope the "bells" drag their feet and dont do anything.
There are many MANY more innovative and bright companies that will benifit from the Bell's management stupidity. Cable companies are going to be the first to put them out of business (if you got the infrastructure in place... IP telephony for the home with a analog bridge to the outdated Bell's world isnt far behind.)
and there are tons of companies and people that are taking up the slack. Hopefully they will drag their feet long enough that someone else will slide in and replace them with something more innovative and based on new technology instead of the outdated twisted pair copper.
broadband will get to everyone eventually, and be thankful that it wont be a telephone company bringing it to you.
The ILECs have only themselves to blame for losing money on each DSL line. The terms of the original deregulation agreement were that the ILECs had to lease capacity to CLECs at the same rates as they leased them to their own broadband subsidiaries. Since they lease to their subsidiaries at below cost rates in an effort to make them appear more profitable, they are forced to offer the same artificially low price to their competitors. If they would stop whining about this situation and raise the rates for themselves as well as their competitors, maybe they wouldn't be in such a fix... but they'd rather cry to the government, hoping Uncle Sam will make the big bad Earthlinks of the world go away and leave them alone. Sean
So here's what I don't get. How much do the Bells, AOL-Time-Warners, and other people "owe" the public for the resources they use?
It seems to me that if I have to look at ugly utility polls, have land all carved up for right-of-ways, and otherwise make the infrastructure these folks depend on possible, they ought to be somewhat accountable to the public.
I'm certainly not saying I'd rather not have heat, light, and cable, but since they require such a tight intergration with the everyday life of the public, what does the public get out of it?
My parents don't have cable, but I can't count the times the linemen from TW have crashed down their driveway, tromped through my mom's garden, and generally made a mess to fix the lines which run along the back edge of the property. TW should be allowed to do this, but shouldn't they be forced to be just as accessable to the public?
The problem with your plan is that the bandwidth would have to be so oversold that you would be talking about a 100 MB daily download cap (with extra bandwidth purchaseable in, say, 100MB increments for $5/month extra). Check out all the capping stories for Slashdotters' opinion on that capping.
If I were to start a DSL ISP, I would have a few tiers of service. All services have the same ToS: anything goes that's not prohibited by law. Run your own mailserver (as long as you don't spam). Run a webserver. Register a domain. Run an IRC server. Run a gameserver. Run every P2P service known to man.
Tier One. 192 Kbps down, 32 Kbps up. Unlimited downloads, but capped uploads of 100MB/month (if the other side is outside the network... intranetwork uploads are unlimited). Connections are PPPoE. Price: $29.99/month, $10 for every 50MB or portion thereof over the limit.
Tier Two. 1024 Kbps down, 128 Kbps up. Same up/download caps but outside uploads are 500MB/month. PPPoE (with static IP optional). $44.99/month, $5 for every 100MB or portion thereof overlimit, $5/month for static IP.
Tier Three. 1536 Kbps down, 768 Kbps up. Same caps except for monthly upload is 2 GB/month. Static IP. $79.99/month, $10 for every 500 MB or portion thereof overlimit, priority routing (packets bound for or sent from your IP have extra priority at the border routers) for an additional $10/month.
and it's instant messaging... until they start to tax that as well. I spend a lot less time on the phone now that my family and friends are hooked up via cable modem or satellite.
It is the government's job to force companies to act in a legal and socially moral way through regulation and to slap down those companies that get out of line. It is the job of the people to get the government to do so in the way they want.
Of course, having said that, corporations have far more power these days in determining what goes into regulations than the people, because the lawmakers have been bribed with fat donations, and nobody ever gets slapped down for breaking the rules.
Don't get upset with the corporations for acting like greedy little piggies. Get upset with the system that allows them to get away with it, and try to change it.
I ain't evil, I'm just good looking.
My view:
The government provides the wire going from a CO to your house (copper or coax or whatever). Well, not the government, a non-profit corporation chartered by act of the state legislature with no shareholders, the ability to issue debt with the guarantee of the state, and directors who are appointed by the state government (in a manner that minimizes any individual government's ability to pack the board). Anyway, this corporation is charged with maintaining the last mile infrastructure. It does not offer any services (because governments are shitty at delivering services). Anybody who wants to can lay their own backbone connection (fiber, satellite, whatever) to the CO, put their equipment in the CO, and offer service to those who have the lines (service being voice telephone, cable TV, data services, etc.) has the right to serve however many customers they want, with the corporation leasing CO space and renting the lines at the same rate (the cost of maintaining the lines connecting to the CO divided by the number of lines connecting to the CO). If you and some friends want to start up a co-op ISP, you make a deal for a backbone connection, buy your equipment, pay the fees for the maintenance, and you're off. Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, etc. would be able to sell services along the line, as well. Some allowance would be main for split lines (eg you get Earthlink data, Comcast television, and Verizon voice), possibly on a one-third split.
If the local government owned the poles and charged compaines rent to hang lines on them but allowed more than 1 company to string lines, prices on cable/telephone/internet/power would plummet.
You are getting screwed on all 4, make no mistake (and two of those are basic requirements to live in the modern world).
Murphy was an optimist.
It's entirely up to them what they do with their equipment.
Actually it's not entirely up to them. They were, and in many regards still are, government regulated monopolies. Lot of effort has been put in deregulation and sparking competition in the industry and services they provide, some of them successful, some of them not because of various "special" big-money interests involved.
They are the crybabies against competition. I want competition. I don't agree with FCC's decision to allow them to be monopolies (in their respective areas) for DSL services; especially if you consider that in order to convince the FCC to make this decision in their favor, these companies "promised" in return to start upgrading their equipment and provide better and faster service.
From the article:
The committee, which is generally sympathetic to the Baby Bells, also criticized the local phone companies for their failure to invest. Several congressmen noted that the Baby Bells had received a lot of what they had asked for since the 1996 Telecommunications Act but were still not making the investments that they had promised they would make.
And now they even refuse to do that, but they get to keep the monopoly and high prices. What's their incentive to invest? There is no competition.
"""
And yet, they find it surprising that many people are dropping their Baby Bell-owned lines in favor of cellular phones and cable modem.
"""
Previous house was getting between 5-15 telemarketer calls per day, depending on where the autodialers were in the alphabet. It being illegal to telemarket cell phones (it's like a collect call, thank God!), my wife and I began seriously pondering this.
So we moved to a new house two months ago. AT&T is advertising cable modems. Call up Verizon on my cell phone -- "Can I get DSL at my new place?" "Do you have a phone number?" "Nope." "Then we can't tell." And with that -- and AT&T building a new cell tower to go with the new suburb -- AT&T sold me a new cable modem and a bigger 2-person wireless plan.
Verizon hasn't just lost a satisfied customer, they've lost a customer flat-out. And I don't have any motivation to try to explain to their customer service department how to make their managers stop being wankers. My apologies to other Verizon customers (intentional and otherwise), but you're on your own.
Meanwhile, the Cable contractor comes out to my house, looks at my setup and says "You look like a techno-savvy sort of guy, so I'm not going to inflict this spyware on you. Here's the disc if you want to do it to yourself. Your connection is now up and running." Now that's customer service!
The problem has always been the 'last mile'. The solution is simple, if unnatural for technologists, partnerships with developers. If the point at which 'interior wiring' is terminated all ends up outside the houses and at one concentrated point, any subdivision of 100-200 houses can get competitive bids for the bandwidth necessary to run their telecommunications. You buy T-1s and break them out between voice and data needs or just go all digital with sip phones and converters for anybody who wants to hook up a legacy analog device.
Combine that with legislation that permits a reasonable buyout of existing wiring up to subdivision concentrators (perhaps through eminent domain) and you've created an entirely new area of viable competition, one without any legislation, one with reasonably easy to pass eminent domain rules. In essence, it's undoing the monopoly at its most pernicious, one neighborhood at a time. Even better, eminent domain is something *local* governments do and that's the level at which grass roots activism has its best shot at prevailing.
Create neighborhood Co-ops lay fibre and connect to other co-ops. Go wireless or laser(home brew) where you cannot lay fibre. Get connections to local hosting companies and Larger tier1 vendors where possible.
-- Tim
TKrabec Pahh
As T-1 prices drift lower and lower, won't more people just band together and share T's? The entire business community uses these lines and they are in a competitive market with lots of sellers there. They can't just jack up prices because they'd have to do it along their entire range of customers and it wouldn't stick.
Right now I can't get DSL but I can get T-1 service for $400/month. With 20 customers sharing it out, it would be well worth my while to do it, the last segment being handled wirelessly.
The privately owned Union Springs Telephone company in (dirt poor, rural) Bullock County, Alabama, recently announced an expansion of Fiber-to-home internet, cable, and phone service over the next few years.
Here's a link to a news story about it.
If a mom-n-pop telco can make a profit selling FIBER connections to one of the poorest rural counties in the US, certainly the big telcos could make a profit if they wanted. "Let's get the government to do it for us" is NOT the right answer for everything.
The requested URL
When I used to be the DSL divsion manager for a fairly large local ISP, I found some interesting things out about our "high-quality ADSL".
The amound we paid to "equally" access the ILEC's DSLAM was the same as ILEC.net paid for it, but:
- We had to funnel our traffic back out through ILEC's wholesale broadband division, at rates even higher than we paid for our other ILEC lines that serviced our dial, ISDN, Colo, and leased line customers.
- We usually had to wait 2 weeks to get a port set up for our customers, but if they called ILEC.net, they could have it up and running the next day.
- We had alot of trouble with all of the lines. Mine worked great, as they knew it was mine (I know - I pushed the provision date up). They knew the general manager's line for the same reason, but alot of our others never worked right, and they told us it was the building or the installers, but if the customer disconnected from us, and called ILEC.net, it worked great (I have tested this myself).
I know the ILECs aren't up to playing fair, as they're only in it for the money, but still...
-- R
This guy is correct. So let's just do something very simple. Give us about half of what the military have portioned off as "thier" wireless space. And then let the commodity market build the roads.
That's correct, goodbye forever to the ISP. Smart devices that route, and link, and mesh over the wireless domain. Owned and operated exclusively by the customer base. Oh and it's free. And yes, these devices are available at costs which are not at all prohibitive.
But as soon as anyone tries to license the wireless domain for commercial interest, then we as the voting public get to drop bombs on thier corperate HQ. Not mail bombs, real ones. I've had it with bumbling greed of this government, and this U.S. of A. corporate culture. Telecommunications have become too important, and we now have the capabilities to leave the ISP behind forever.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
competitve markets have price wars. funny T-1 connection prices barely changed...in how many years? a couple of decades now?
;-)
bandwidth costs money. but dark fiber doesn't compute.
for a $40 phone line, I pay over $10 in taxes (not including sales tax!)
FCC regulations to the resuce? come on, greased palms are faster than my dialup
THERE'S ONLY ONE WAY OUT FOLKS: TAKE THE AIRWAVES BACK!
Start: http://www.sputnik.com/
Think, "Communication Frogs". Think: "Lillypad Revolution".
For "When law begins to break you, it's time to break the law." -tsunami
:T:R:A:N:S:
Well, I live in Canada, and broadband, though widespread, is still not
universal.
I think the main reason Canada has better broadband peneatration is that,
compared to say, the US, people in Canada tend to be clustered closer together
(I could be wrong, but I think people in the US tend to be more spread out)
But, there are still places in Canada that don't have broadband, my parents
place is a great example: They don't have gas, cable or anyform of broadband,
even though the gasline, and cable trunk are less then a kilometer away.
Both the gas company and the cable company said that sure, we could have service,
if we dug the trench ourselves, laid the pipe/cable, and paid them to hook it up.
Even though doing so would allow them to reach about a hundred new users a few
hundred meters away.
Other DSL-providing ISPs don't necessarily need to use the high-frequency portion themselves. They merely need to be able to purchase access to the ATM cells going over that portion - my ISP doesn't have their own DSLAMs blah blah blah at the CO, they let SBC provide that portion, and they run bridged Ethernet over it.
Now, perhaps allowing other ATM-cell-stream providers use the high-frequency portion of the copper loops makes it more likely that ISPs other than the Baby Bell's own ISP or the Baby Bell's official partner ISP will be able to get access to an ATM cell stream over the local loop, but that's another matter.