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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."
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: the Baby Bells are dying.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Baby Bell community when Slashdot confirmed that the Baby Bells are sucky crybabies. Market share has dropped yet again, even with the government sanctioned monopoly. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that the Baby Bells have lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. The Baby Bells are collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent "Unsucky Crybaby Tests".
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Baby Bell's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Baby Bell faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for the Baby Bells because the Baby Bells are dying. Things are looking very bad for the Baby Bell. Their offices are dark, the tomb-like sepulchral atmosphere is all that remains. The Baby Bells continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
The Baby Bell DSL development team is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house. All major surveys show that the Baby Bell have steadily declined in market share. The Baby Bells are very sick and their long term survival prospects are very dim. If the Baby Bells are to survive at all it will be among telephony dilettante dabblers and hangers-on. The Baby Bells continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save them at this point in time. For all practical purposes, the Baby Bells are dead.
Fact: the Baby Bells are dying
Trolling is a art,
doozer writes:
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.
Doozer - what do you do for a living - work for a government office (or are you still a person in training at school)? Perhaps you can give me an example of a government agency that runs:
- efficiently
- under budget
- on time
- is customer-service focused
OK, outside of the IRS and the dept. of motor vehicles, who can you name? (grin)
I've never had a government office experience where I came away amazed at how good of a job they did.
In our part of the country, we have some local municipalities trying to offer broadband Internet.
Their trick? Charge twice as much for the other monopoly services to subsidize it, hire FDH (fat dumb and happy) employees that are high on self-esteem but low on competence (hey, everyone deserves a job and the government will give them one), and fulfill every other social program objective outside of providing good service at a good price while covering the cost of the service without borrowing the money from elsewhere.
$45/month broadband, fed by a single T1 to the community (that is shared across about 2000 subscribers and businesses). At 9pm, thruput is about 30-60 Kbps. Wow... dialup.
My customers in a town south of this one pay $30/month and are guaranteed 256 up and down. And get this... I'm not skimming four million bucks out of a cross-subsidy and jacking up the city's water and electric bills by double what other community rates are. How is this possible? Worse yet, I make money and they are looking at needing another loan to subsidize their boondoggle broadband network.
As soon as it's left up to
a corporation todo, they're going to not provide services to the customers that are expensive.
That's simply wrong. My company services what the elitists would call "fly over country." My smallest market is a town with a 220 population. I'm delivering a 12 Mbps backbone to them. Yea, they don't make very much money, but they're loyal customers and we break even.
Why? Because thats the point of a corporation. They want to make a profit.
Look, I know I'll never put an end to this misnomer, but maybe I can help you out. Take your personal finances. You go to work and bring in $1500 take home in your paycheck. You have bills that totals $1400. Uh oh... you ran a profit!
So for the next few months, spend $3500 per pay period and bring in only $1000 (tell your boss he's paying you too much). Now what do you do?
Why should a company be any different?
Private corporations are not the ideal method of provided uniform services, because not
everyone can be served at uniform cost.
Because not everyone wears a uniform with a swastika...er... sorry! (kidding). Not everyone is uniform. Some of my customers are businesses with hundreds of employees needing 6 Mbps or more. Should I charge everyone $2500 a month to be uniform?
Interestingly, I have a flat price for my residential customers that is indifferent of how easy or hard their installation is. Some take 15 minutes for an install - new PC with current OS operated by someone with a clue - and others take 6 hours of struggling with Win95, DLL-hell, etc.
Funny... I'm providing uniform service without uniform cost.
The sooner we realize this, and stop trying to privatize everything, we'll be better off
Please do reply. I've yet to find a successful person (in any endeavor of life outside crime) that thinks this way. Most who do are college students living off of someone elses money and their opinions don't matter anyway.
*scoove*