George Gilder on Telecommunications Policy

Codeine writes "The Testimony of Mr. George Gilder to the Telecommunications Policy: A Look Ahead hearing held by the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation strongly supports the idea [of] mandated 'open access' to the logical layers of the network, and it is embodied in a new legislative proposal by MCI, A Horizontal Leap Forward: Formulating a New Public Policy Framework Based on the Network Layers Model. The success of the layered model in the LAN environment, migrated to the WAN."

Comments

Re:Call me a Socialist....

[HBI]

Then the government is either going to have to lay the lines itself, or pay someone to do them. No one will do it on their own if they aren't going to own them.

Sitting here in 2004 with tons of unused fiber laid cross-country already, you may find it easy to say that, but when I was sitting there in 1994 wanting to get connectivity for 160 offices across the US, I was damn glad that wasn't the case.

Companies like the original WilTel (who were originally natural gas and oil providers who laid the fiber in the right-of-way of existing pipelines (SPRINT did the same thing with railroad right-of-ways) made it possible to have high speed digital connectivity at a time when the government regulated monopoly of RBOCs and their artifically drawn LATA boundaries made supposed 'public' lines completely unavailable. Yes, this all happened because of the AT&T breakup. Still, we'd be glad to have an ISDN connection right now if private industry hadn't filled the need.

Then again, you might be talking about the last mile, as the article was. Once again - why lay the infrastructure if you aren't going to own it? No one will. If you are going to wait for the government to do it, you are going to be waiting a long, long time.

The fundamental problem is that the existing copper local loop is 'good enough' to provide some access. Therefore, there is no drive for the government granted monopoly of local telephone providers - technically the owners of the local loop - to improve it. In this case, the granting of monopoly powers works against us - but it is still necessary to provide service on the local loop and at the CO.

There is no real solution to the problem that doesn't involve losing something. Pick 2 out of 3 - service, speed, low price. Most people aren't willing to compromise on #3 or #1, that's why you have shitty lines.