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Cable Equal Access Case Goes to Supreme Court
DCTooTall writes "The FCC has ruled that Cable High-Speed Internet is an Information Service, and therefore not subject to the same equal access regulations that govern DSL. Brand-X Networks sued the FCC for equal access to the Cable Networks and won. The FCC appealed the decision and next Tuesday the case goes to the Supreme Court. The Telco's have repeatedly used the current FCC stance on Cable Broadband in their fight to get the same monopoly on DSL. This case has the potential to not only open the Cable networks to competition, but also prevent the Telco's from further attempts on limiting DSL options."
Local telephone companies (who own the wires) are required by law to sell allow other companies access to their wires (whereby the other company can supply local service) at below market costs. Sometimes around or below how much it costs them to maintain the wires as well. This way we can have competition between multiple local phone companies on the same set of wires. This was extended to DSL some years ago.
Now, Cable companies (who sometimes own the wires and sometimes don't, in my are the county officially owns the wires and we still only have one cable company) are not required to open up their cable lines to competing companies.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
In almost all cases, yes, there was some form of government subsidy, whether it be by allowing only one cable company for a given locality, or giving free right-of-way for the lines to be run, or other such consideration.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Wrong, they actually do.
Not all ISPs have to supply DSLAMs to share DSL with telcos. I work for an ISP and we sell Verizon and SBC DSL. We are charged for lineshares by both companies. With Verizon we provide them with DLCI numbers and have static IPs for our customers. With SBC, their Redback routers look at the username and route to our system based on that.
Well, time for like my 3rd comment on Slashdot ever...
I realize you were joking, but, just in case nobody knows, here's how DSL works in a nut shell.
Your typical POTS line (Plain Old Telephone System) is just an analog connection to the phone company (yes, this is a generalization). The human voice and ear can only cover certain ranges of frequencies, so there's really no point in attempting to do voice communication beyond a frequency limit. But the higher frequencies can still go across the line just fine. As such, a DSL modem just modulates the data to correspond to frequencies higher than anything that you can say or hear and puts it on the same line as your voice traffic. To further ensure that there's no overlap between your voice traffic and the data modulations, you put a low pass filter on all your analog phone lines to make sure that they can't interfere with the data portion. At the phone company, they just strip the frequencies back into two separate systems and demodulate the data to get the 1s and 0s back.
Yes, actually, I do work at a company that makes this stuff. Why do you ask?