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Regional Bells Blocking Broadband Competition
Tim Doran writes "USA Today has a story today describing regulatory moves by the regional Bell companies meant to stifle competition in broadband. Of course, nobody plays the regulators like the ILECs, and they're using their massive fiber builds as leverage against the regulators. They're even running interference on municipalities who are trying to build their own fiber networks!"
When I was back home in Kansas City over Christmas, my uncle-in-law, who is a lawyer for the city of North Kansas City, was telling us about how Time Warner Cable was sueing the city because they were trying to put in their own cable broadband lines.
We're familiar with that type of game here in the Fox Valley area west of Chicago. We had three communities try to pull together to get municipal broadband through and it was fought tooth and nail by SBC. It is pretty pathetic that we are still waiting for complete broadband services out here given that Fermilab is in Batavia (one of the three cities). SBC resorted to scary, misleading ads and other dirty tricks and managed to keep the plan suppressed.
Personally, I think municipal networks (GMING springs to mind) are the way to go. I don't like the idea of private companies, with minimal to no accountability to anyone (except maybe the top 5 richest shareholders not on the board), having absolute control over who can do what.
True, Governments tend to abuse authority as much as anyone else, but at least you can vote them out of office. They also have a bit more ready cash to play with than most corporations, making the idea of ten gigabit pipes to the home a possibility. (So much so that Japan is planning exactly that.)
As it stands, most private ISPs are a bunch of incompetents who profit largely by backstabbing other private ISPs. (I can't think of any ISPs I've used, over time, that I actually liked for the quality of service.)
The main reason multicasting isn't deployed is because they don't know how to bill people for it. The fact that they don't bill any other protocol doesn't enter into the picture. IPv6 has never made much headway, not because it's not needed or wanted (since when have users not wanted things that automagically configured themselves and worked out of the box, wholly mobile and utterly transparently?) but because it IS automatic, mobile, etc, making the whole "ISP Experience" irrelevent and actually a disincentive.
In the end, ISPs don't want competition. Competition means smaller profits, especially as the number of USians going online has flattened off sharply. They want a homogenius, uniform, consistant monopoly. And if you're going to have that anyway, why not have someone like DARPA or NIST run the damn thing, so at least you know someone technically competent is running the show?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Is that they have built their networks on our dime. They would have you believe that they built these huge networks out of their own pocket and that they took a huge risk in doing so.
The truth is that these infrastructures were built by government and given to them for maintainence. Perhaps not literally, but certainly financially. The phone company does not have emminent domain rights to my property to erect poles (snicker) or dig a trench, but for that power allowed them by the government. If they had to pay anything, it was small, and it didn't matter anyway, since they were nurtured by guaranteed profits by Public Service Commissions.
To have these guys behave in this way now disgusts me. There are 'real' companies taking 'real' risks these days without any guarantees of success or profit and they end up paying through the nose for communications lawyers just to get the chance to compete. I don't know if you have had to deal with a baby bell trouble ticket recently, but it wouldn't be hard to beat them in service.
The way I see it, the baby bells are only winning this race because we gave them a 75 year headstart.
They don't deliver phone service cheaply. Tell me that $25 a month for a phone that never actually gets used is cheap.
Community supported broadband projects, like the one mentioned for the Louisiana town are a FANTASTIC deal for the town, if they can swing it. If the city finances it as a 20-year bond, and charges everyone in the city $15 a month, they can deliver fibre to the home. The Iowa Communications Network delivers fibre to every county in a very rural state. It cost $350,000,000 to build, and has a cost of $20,000,000 per year to run. There are about 3 million people living in Iowa, so it comes to $120 per person for a startup cost, and less than $10 per year continual cost. If you amortize the $120 over 20 years, then it's exceptionally dirt cheap really fast internet for everyone. And the bell network doesn't take it's profit and give it to shareholders in another state.
...partly because of things like this that Qwest pulled. They were able to offer DSL piggybacking over the phone line, while we had to order an unbundled loop circuit (which cost money up front we had to charge the customer), then send out a tech to wire the circuit at the customer premise. When you compared pricing, customers would see a $99 setup fee from us for the circuit, modem, and sending a tech out to do an install, while Qwest would "waive" all but $.99
This is not to mention things like swiping the UBLs to for voice lines (hey, there's no dialtone, it must be a free line -- oops, down goes someone's DSL for a week), and circuits showing too high insert loss/bridge taps/whatever and then turning around and offering the customer their own DSL within a week of requesting the information from Qwest. It got so we would simply check the distance from the C.O. and if it looked okay and there were people in the neighborhood that had service we would send out a tech to do our own test.
Their actions might not have been on purpose, but the regional Bells show gross indifference if not utter contempt for CLECs.
Not taking shit from the Bell co. and their attempt to monopolize broadband.
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We need communities to follow her example. Broadband shopping is not like buying a car. It's an investment in infrastructure just like roads and electric plants. This is what the 'RIGHT WINGERS' don't want you to know. They reply with propoganda that government will only hurt broadband when in fact most monopolies of this countries have been private companies.
I see the Bill Gates , Carnegies , Rockefellers and other criminal monopolists as an excellent analogy to whats going on here.
They are trying to crush competition ! They don't want poor folk to get broadband because it cuts into profit margin !
What's even funnier is that the government created the first network
And even funnier is that the phone company hated the internet because it cut into their long distance business. Now they say they care about the consumer. BULLSHIT !
The state does not have an "unfair" advantage over a business.
The state must answer to the entire electorate and a business must only answer to a few major shareholders.
The state does not enjoy "limited liability", a corporation does.
The state must comply with freedom of information requests etc etc from virtually anybody for any reason (or no reason), a business need only comply with such requests when it is being accused of commiting a criminal act and a court orders it.
the foregoing show that the State has many unfair disadvantages AGAINST IT.
This relates to the current situation in that if a city decides to invest taxpayer money in a fiber network and then give it away for free, or make it part of the tax burden, they would be practicing predatory pricing, unfairly using their position of privledge to take away a market for a company such as Bell South and profiting from that privledge. Much like monopolies do to lesser competitors today.
As far as predatory pricing goes, the state does not do this with the goal of bankrupting anyone, or profiting from it, but with the goal of providing a public service. Private firms which practice predatory pricing, will raise their prices as soon as their competition is driven out, and this is contrary to the public good.
Predatory pricing is not immoral by any capitalist ethic and there is no reason the state should protect businesses from predatory pricing unless it serves the PUBLIC good. It is not for the benefit of the business to limit or ban predatory pricing of monopolies, it is purely for the PUBLIC good.
A republic or democracy does not need to engage in predatory pricing to get rid of the competition. The State is free to simply outlaw that service being offered privately. This is the sovereign right of the people.
If the state wanted to outlaw a private business and provide that service directly (like healthcare in Canada), then a state has the right to do so.
Businesses have NO RIGHT to be free from state competition or even state interferance. And every business knew this prior to investing a single penny.
The argument of limitless funds is invalid.
The state does not have limitless funds. It merely has A LOT of funds. And nothing in capitalist ethic says that you have a right to be protected against a competitor with more capital assets.
This argument is rejected by neoliberals when under-developed countries try to impose protectionist policies because foreign investors have such large capital assets (essentially limitless) that they have an "unfair" advantage over locals that can not compete, but the same neoliberals cry about "unfair" competition when a state tries to provide a service to its own people because the state has essentially limitless capital assets.
Except the situation is not the same. In 1 case the wealthier party is motivated by public good, and in the other the wealthier party doesn't give a shit about the public and will skip town if the public gets too unruly.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.