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FCC Rules Telcos Need Not Provide Naked DSL
Devistater writes "Despite at least four states' laws to the contrary, the FCC has ruled that phone companies need not provide naked DSL service to customers, but can require bundling; for example: Voice and DSL.
FCC Commisioners Copps and Adelstein say in dissent 'In this decision, the Commission unwisely flashes the green light for broadband tying arrangements.' 'If it is [ok] to deny consumers DSL if they do not [have] analog voice service, what stops a carrier from denying broadband service to an end-user who has cut the cord and uses only a wireless phone? What prevents a carrier from refusing to provide DSL service to a savvy consumer who wants stand-alone broadband only for VoIP?'"
Free Market arguments don't apply to local phone comapies. They have monopolies in their areas and close to local governments... This is arguably a good thing, but it's not possible for another company to come in and start putting down new phone lines. No chance for competion -> free market reasoning does not apply.
--Jeff
Umm... except for the part where the carriers don't operate in a free market. Unless you haven't noticed, local service telcos are still regulated local monopolies.
Um,no. Thanks for drinking the free market koolaid. In my town, there is one city granted monopoly cable provider, and one city granted monopoly telephone provider, whom are the ONLY options for broadband. What about "city granted monopoly" is congruent with free market again?
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
I'm on SBC here in Michigan and they don't require that you have a land line to use DSL.
DSL is a god-send for me, not to mention that I refuse to go back to Comcast...which does charge you more if you just want internet service without the cable TV.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Well in most cases the telco (which is regulated) just provides the pipe. The bandwidth and services on this pipe are provided by an ISP (normally unregulated). While it is possible to provide bare DSL without the phone line, do to the regulated nature of the Telecom industry, it really isn't in the telco's best intrest. The NECA tarrif for a bare DSL line, is much higher then the tarrif for a bundled DSL line. This comes back to bite us as we look to move to DSL/Voip for second lines, we can't compete with the cable world since our hands are bound by the tariff. If we remove dialtone the price goes up, and if we keep it on the price goes up since the consumer needs to pay for the dialtone also.
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IANAL, but:
Corporations are -for better or worse- "persons" under the law. As such, they have many* of the same rights as other sorts of "persons".
Where there are many sorts of person, it is inevitable that there will be situations where one sort is advantaged over another sort. Sooner or later, by strict interepretation of law, there will be cases in which Corporate persons have rights superior to those of Human persons. Since, as a class, corporations represent concentrations of money (and therefore power) it is not plesant to extrapolate a trend from this speculation!
* comicly, (horrifyingly?) it has been needful to create another term -"natural person"- to denote real, biological Human Beings in those instances where rights are not applied to other sorts of "person".
We have this situation in the UK. You simply cannot have DSL without a phone line, and you can't compromise with a 'dial in only' one either.. it must be a proper one with all the rental cost etc. (which admittedly isn't large but pushes up the price of DSL).
Having DSL also disqualfies you from all the 'low user' rebates even though you never make calls or use the analogue line at all.
As far as 'cutting the cord' goes, that's not possible unless you're lucky enough to live in a cable area (cable is very patchy.. I've been told I may never have it even though there's a cable switch box less than 12 feet from my window... they only do the 'profitable' streets/houses).
It really *really* sucks. You really don't want to be in that sort of situation in the US... campaign against it as much as possible.
While having the ability to choose seems like a good idea, forcing companies to give you a choice inevitably leads to price structures like "$50 for a 50 channel bundle, or any channels of your choice for only $20 per channel". They blame it on something like 'costs of restructuring service' and charge you more for 3 channels than they do for 50. You're back where you started, essentially forced into buying the bundle.
Internet wouldn't be any different. "1Mbit DSL for $90, or 8Mbit for $20 if you subscribe to our $70 call plan". You have the choice not to pay for a voice line, but I bet 99% of people would keep the line and the company would wave those statistics around as proof that people don't want internet alone.
If you bothered to read the ruling and not the opinion piece, you would know that the ruling merely tells the States to butt out and stop trying to enforce rules that conflict with existing FCC unbundling rules. This rules removes the conflict between FCC and State rules.
Under the existing FCC rules, the encumbant Telco is not required to offer DSL even if your lines are capable of providing it (they do it because its profitable). BellSouth had a policy of not offering DSL if the local loop was being used by a competitive telco to provide analog voice service. Probably due to techincal and billing issues. Some states were trying forcing BellSouth to provide DSL anyway. This was illegal.
This ruling does not automatically mean that the telco will refuse to provide DSL unless you buy voice service from them. In reality, what you'll probably see is the telco providing discounts for getting both DSL and voice service from them. Like Verizon offering cost saving bundles for home and wireless.
The problem with this is that, unless I'm missing something, there is a very good technical reason for cable companies to bundle channels. At least with good ol' analog cable, the only way to restrict people to certain channels is with filters, and it just isn't feasible to put filters on someone's line so they only get channels 3, 8, 14, 23, 25, and 50.
Now with digital cable and the required decoder boxes, this reason probably isn't as valid any more, since theoretically they could program everyone's box to only allow the channels they've subscribed to, just like they don't let you watch HBO unless you pay extra. But not everyone has digital cable; in fact, it's probably not even a majority of customers even now, since it costs more and requires special (leased) boxes.
However, the case for bundling DSL and landline phone service isn't nearly as grey. They're totally separate services, and there's absolutely no technical reason for the baby bells to require landline service with DSL. They just want to prop up their dying landline divisions, which are being rapidly killed off by inexpensive cellular service and high taxes.
Imagine that the water company requires that to get water service, you must also get gatorade, seltzer, and prune juice service. Its impossible to fight the monopoly in this situation, as they only need to wait you out for a couple of days (hopefully you can deal without a net connection for a little while). The only thing that breaks such a monopoly is someone from outside trucking in water, which is analogous to satellite service. You only *really* need to worry when you're down to one massive provider (you have a local rather than universal monopoly, consider yourself lucky)
Or better yet, you have local residents picking up their rifles and shotguns and taking the water they need by force. In this case, it would be totally justified.
The whole point of government is to prevent anarchy and chaos such as this. When essential services need to be provided to people, it is frequently done either by the government, or by a government-granted monopoly, for reasons of efficiency and practicality (you can't very well have 10 different companies' sewer systems running underneath your subdivision). When you have a monopoly situation like this, there is no free market. This seems to be something that the Randians here just don't understand. Because there is no free market, government regulation is necessary to prevent abuses, and to ensure the public good is considered first and foremost. If your company is more concerned with corporate profits than the well-being of its customers, your company has no business providing a public service with no real competition; there's lots of other sectors of the economy you can go compete in to your heart's content without any fear of government interference. Unfortunately, these stupid companies want to have their cake and eat it too: they want no regulation or interference, but they also want to maintain a monopoly and rape their customers as much as they can without having to worry about any form of competition.
I did think of that. The local cable company (northern Baja California) requires me to purchase a TV channel package in order to get their broadband internet. So it works out just as expensive as phone+dsl.
...this could be a win for cable. Since forever, every cable operator I've worked for has been only too happy to provide cable modem only and let the customer pick DBS if they want. I can pick and choose or bundle however I like and they've always been of the mind to have this. For the phone companies to fight so hard for something that is only going to bite them in the arse with the public is grossly stupid, but I am not surprised since this is the telcos we're talking about.
Meanwhile I freely choose a service bundle from my cable company for voice, video, and data and save tons over the comparable packages that I would be forced to take or leave with the phone company. It's this sort of thing that caused me to kiss off SBC years ago and never look back.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
I wonder why it is good economic sense for a cable company but not for a phone company (who already definitely has the line there).
Because of the different regulatory environments for telephone and cable.
Telephone companies have to provide service to areas even if they aren't profitable.
Cable companies can pretty much pick and choose where they want to provide service.
Actually, corporations are legal persons and as such have some of the same independent rights that people ('natural persons') have. Corporations are protected against federal regulation that isn't allowed under the Commerce Clause. Corporations also have Due Process protections against Takings (ie. deprivation of certain property rights), and have some Equal Protection protections as well (they are treated equally as any other 'party' in a lawsuit, for example). They also have some First Amendment rights (commercial advertising has speech value that the government cannot arbitrarily regulate).
IINAL, but I am a law student.
btw--the FCC rulemaking authority over this kind of market activity certainly derives at least from Congress' power to regulate Interstate Commerce. Might be a dumb decision, but, I doubt it's illegal. (There might be some antitrust issues if the DSL companies overreach, but since these telcos are usually regulated monopolies anyway, I doubt the antitrust rules apply in the usual way.)
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But shouldn't f(a) < f(a+b) ? Assuming some nonzero b?
Right now my bill is something like $20 for a landline and $45 for DSL. If I didn't use the landline, should I still have to pay $65? Even $55 or $60 for DSL-only would be an improvment over the course of a year.
I'd be happy if they broke it down into some f(a+b+c), for some a (cost of running a line out) b (cost of providing voice over that line) and c (cost of providing high-speed data over that line.) Then I could pay f(a+c) and be perfectly happy.
Complain to the FCC here and then write your Congressional representatives (figure out who your representatives are here. If you cant take the time to figure out how to do this properly, then you must not care that much.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379225/
Check out the above documentary link on IMDB and immediately go and rent this movie (or not). I for one welcome our new(?) Corporate Overlords.
Ok, I'll bite. The Center for Public Integrity reports that FCC officials had accepted nearly $2.8 million in travel and entertainment expenses over the past eight years, mostly from the telecom and broadcast industries they regulate. This extends to Michael Powell, who seemingly maintained the status quo. Recently however the department has changed its policies and is requesting more federal funds for travel to replace what was once paid for outside of the goverment.
30 characters are fine for a s
No, in fact they are not. They have been treated as "persons" for many years based on a mistaken reading of a 19th century court rulling that did not in fact decide the issue.
Of course, they're not going to tell you that, are they?
--MarkusQ