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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?'"
... I'd like to get my party back. Trampling on State rights is definitely not. If you are still voting Republican because of their "conservatism", I'd like to ask you how your lobotomy went.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I guess most people, even most geeks, do not realize that this is really the most important technology fight we have in front of us. Cheap broadband is absolutely necessary for us to move forward.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
'what stops a carrier from denying broadband service to an end-user who has cut the cord and uses only a wireless phone?'
Nothing, that's the point.
'What prevents a carrier from refusing to provide DSL service to a savvy consumer who wants stand-alone broadband only for VoIP?'
Nothing, that's the point.
I swear, it's like you people have never even heard of monopolistic pricing and captive regulatory agencies.
The answer to... what prevents a carrier from refusing to provide DSL service to a savvy consumer who wants stand-alone broadband only for VoIP? ...
is CABLE. ain't competition great?
Does anyone care that the head of the FCC took home over $1.3million dollars in bribes from telco companies? NOOOooooo
Call it what is is powell, bribed to do what the telcos want. loser
I have 2 DSL lines that are not tied to any phone numbers. I still have my analog line, but I am researching VoIP, but not ready to jump yet. What happens to me? I wonder if they can take it away? or am I grandfathered in.
2 it's a private business providing a service
Not really, local phone are regulated monopolies. Back in the government (FCC) was supposed to ensure that they acted fairly and in the interest of consumers. Government regulations dictate, for example, that you get to pick your long distance carrier, as opposed to being required to use one selected by your local phone company. DSL should not work any differently.
--Jeff
Unfortunately, in lots of markets, you may only have one real broadband option (I am not including satellite in this comparison, mostly because of FAP) and by forcing a bundle on the consumer, the consumer is being victimized by a monopolistic, exploitative business.
Case in point, my house, I have a cable modem, and thankfully don't have cable as they don't offer HDTV channels in my market, and I'm not required to have cable to have the luxury of high speed internet.
DSL is unavailable to me currently, and given my rural nature and distance to the nearest switching station, will most likely always be unavailable to me.
I just jumped ship from QWEST, our local telco, to Vonage because their ever rising prices and lack of competition were killing me.
Thank goodness for unbundled connectivity (comcast).
Ocean is land, covered with water.
Competition. Can someone explain to me how this is different than any other situation where a company might do something unfair to its users?
Just policy based on law, and based on the mandate given them by congress.
That is to say, write your congressman if you have a beef, don't sit around whining about how much of an asshole you think Powell is.
That's like bitching about the judge who sends you up the river for selling pot, or the cop who busted. They just interpret and enforce the law, they don't write it.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Is there ANYWHERE in North America that has a true free market for broadband internet service? Aren't most places government mandated monopolies?
You can't be saying that the "free market works extraordinarily well" when there IS NO free market, and no real competition for broadband!
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
switch over to cable broadband then.
HD Trailers
Sorry but this is a dumb argument.
I have cable internet without cable tv. I do pay a surcharge for not having cable tv. same argument as yours but ooh la if there isn't a solution.
i have no phone land line, just a cell. because bell wouldn't give me dsl without a land line, i got my cell service with my cable internet provider and save money and have one bill.
As a fellow libertarian (presumably, at least financial conservative), I'd like to point out that everything *ELSE* about these carriers is regulated, so its practically a goverment service already.
An extreme example: I, the federal government, make a ruling that only Dell is allowed to sell computers. Dell immediately octuples the prices of all new computers. Your free market argument fails to apply ("people will reject it and the plan will die on the vine") because businesses and people have no practical *CHOICE* but to use computers, a well established commodity (so the actual choice is maintain older computers or go out of business / stop using computers). However, in a free market Dell wouldn't be able to octuple their prices (and if they did, results predictable by the free market would ensue).
My point is, these companies are largely using land granted through government powers (sometimes emminent domain), with massive government loans and some other federal aid I forget about right now. It is not a free market. The competition that exists mostly does so because the government put regulations to better approximate a free market- but really it isn't one.
Note that this ruling does not prevent CLECs like Covad and their ISPs, like Speakeasy.net, from providing naked DSL service. I have this service from Speakeasy. They call it OneLink and I'm no longer an explicit customer of Verizon on that line, although Speakeasy still kicks a few bucks a month back to Verizon; it is their wire and their CO I suppose.
But in the end I have all my services, including VOIP, through Speakeasy.net thanks to naked DSL.
Cable network bundling is something that your cable provider is confronted with, not just you. Content providers sell groups of channels together. This helps them launch new channels by leveraging the value of large established channels. New channels get guaranteed wide-availabilty and can get noticed by channel surfers who wouldn't otherwise hear about them. In turn, advertisers are made more comfortable about advertising on the channel, and the cost of launching it can get subsidized. Without that kind of bundling, launching a new channel would take an enourmous capital expenditure and we wouldn't have the 300+ niche networks that we have now.
Anyway, the point is that cable network bundling is a completely different ball of wax from the kind of service bundling mentioned in the article.
The 'pro-business' lobby here forgets that the cable and phone companies are usually monopolies in the area -- either by mandate or by de-facto policies.
Both phone and cable companies need to get a 'leeway' to lay cable or overhead lines across everyone's property. This isn't taken lightly, and isn't done for every company that comes-along claiming they want to do it. Furthermore, both cable and phone are essential for emergencies, and thus must have universal coverage. The idea that this is (or should be) in any form a competitive marketplace is... well, misinformed. The bottom line is, it is most efficient to have a _single_ set of cables and wires, not N sets for various hodge-podge company policies.
The problem here is that a for-profit company owns these wires. It's a farce. Really, the local governments should own the wires and contract out the work and the companies that want to 'run' the services over the wires. To do this correctly, we need a completely different legal environment that recognizes natural monopolies and makes them not-profit and as _small_ as possible to enable the _greatest_ amount of competition for auxiliary services.
But, given the current setup, strict regulation is the only answer. Regulation is, BTW, what allowed the whole open-source movement to take-off; in the 70's Ma-Bell (AT&T) wasn't allowed to sell its software, so it gave away enormous IP to the public. This is how Unix came about. The regulation was proper back then, the government realized that the phone was a monopoly, and prevented the phone company from entering other markets (using its monopoly money to distort other market places). Unfortunately, that sensibility started to disappear with the so-called "pro-business" agenda in the 80's and 90's.
The sick thing is: If you watch four or five cable channels, you'd probably wind up paying more a-la-carte.
The cable company doesn't bundle channels to get you to buy ones you don't want. They bundle channels to get a package to a price where they actually make money on the deal after all the infrastructure costs on just feeding you a fairly basic service.
If channels were pick-and-choose, for one, everyone now has to have a cable box (well, with digital, that may happen anyhow...), so zing, $5/mo/tv more, plus they have to make a certain amount of money off you, so the channels cost more-- think in terms of what the "premium" channels cost; the HBOs or Skinemaxes. Pretty much all channels would have to cost that much.
It's not so simple as "I get fifty channels for fifty bucks a month, so obviously each channel costs a buck!"
With DSL bundling, it works out similarly. There's an infrastructure cost in all the copper, and the intent was to sell it all as phone lines. I buy a phone line from Bellsloth, but I'm buying DSL from SpeedFactory. Now, if I could get unbundled DSL, then SpeedFactory would probably have to pay more to Bellsloth for the line (since Bellsloth has to recoup that cost somehow) and that comes back to me. But here's the real problem: Giving you voice communication service costs Bellsloth approximately _zero_. So if Bellsloth is going to recoup the investment on the lines they've run, they're going to have to charge Speedfactory just as much for the naked DSL line as they charge me for voice communications. And, as we know from economics, Speedfactory is going to pass that charge along to me, plus probably a small amount-- so I'm betting naked DSL would cost me _more_ than the setup I currently have.
And this way if the house burns down I can call 911...
-JDF
I'd gladly dump my phone servive, and pay a fraction of the money I would save toward better bandwidth.
The only remaining advantage of POTs is that it has its own power (when we had the blackout here in NYC, the landlines kept working).
We paid for this infrastructure held by this monopoly (or, baby monopolies), and it seems only fair that we should get better service from it (or, them).
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
Ok. The telco's arent' forced to provide DSL at all, and this does not have anything to do w/ it. Instead, it says that the telco's do not have to provide a DSL only service. Meaning, if you want DSL, they can force you to buy their standard phone service as well. Your analogies don't hold up here. You want to have DSL, but you don't want to have phone service. Both of them come over the same wires, and if you pay for DSL, you are still paying a small fee to "use" those wires. You still have to buy your cup for your coffee. A modified analogy of yours would be to say that 7-eleven has the right to force you to buy a cup of coffee if you want to buy a doughnut.
> Who pays for the copper?
Our tax dollars did when the govt gave the bells tons of money in exchange for keeping the lines a common carrier to share.
Tis a shame the phone co's never lived up to their end of the deal, and the govt backed down and let them.
This is nothing more than a tactic to prop up telco providers because their bubble is about to burst. Given the massive amount of market that cell carriers have already taken from them, large-scale VOIP on the horizon, and competing broadband options (cable for example), it is only a matter of time before their business model fails entirely.
If there's anything that governments are good at doing it's maintaining the status quo. Whether we're talking about an economy that relies too heavily on oil, or something as (seemingly) innocuous as telephone service, governments will always fight against fundamental change or market shifts because it will result in a period of instability.
There's a reason why the connectivity linking the telephone in my house to the telephone system is the same as it was five decades ago when my dad was born (hint - it has nothing to do with free-market or competition).
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
I assume he beats his wife too. WTF is this bribes stuff? Please document.
Business should be free to offer whatever the heck it wants. Consumers should be free to buy whatever the heck they want. Telephone companies have a monopoly over a particular area? In a particular area, if the cable company delivers something better, faster, and cheaper than the telephone company, then the telephone company will ultimately lose revenue, which will stimulate an improvement in the telephone company. Or get broadband through your cellphone carrier. It's not quite as fast as DSL, and not quite as cheap, but it's an alternative choice, if that's what you want.
It doesn't work that way with phone. The copper lines are regulated because at one time nearly every single phone system in the nation was owned by a single company which engaged in whatever practices it felt like such as telling you that you couldn't install or even buy your own phone much less do your own wiring. Imagine a mobo company telling you what peripherals and memory you were allowed to use or even requiring that you have it done by them and forbidding you from doing anything with it that they didn't like.
For this and many other reasons, Ma Bell was broken up into smaller companies, and they were regulated to the hilt. As it was fairly impossible given modern growth and other infrastructures accompanying the same to build out a parallel infrastructure by any given competitor who wanted to. IOW, running tens of hundreds of thousands of copper pairs per city on top of those already there was just not doable.
Therefore, the Regional Bell Operating Companies still held an essential monopoly for copper pair phone service.
Prior to this FCC mega-mistake of a decision, it was conceivable that you could get ILEC DSL and get phone from a CLEC just as easily as the other way around. Or do without it if you chose.
The point of the regulations was the copper was not easily overbuildable without burdensome effects on local infrastructure, quality of life, etc., and therefore a necessary national resource of sorts held by a company with a virtual monopoly on it. So they opened the lines to usage by competitors as long as certain fair fees were paid to the telcos for access and maintenance and co-locations and power and so forth.
This new rule basically encroaches on that competition regulation by saying that if one service on the pair is ordered then they can require other services with it or not give any service at all, thus essentially preventing their customers from choosing a competitor for one of those other services.
Should Video over DSL ever take off, will they get away with denying a VoDSL CLEC's services to their own telco DSL customers?
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
GOAL! GOAL! GOAL!
Did you expect the FCC to side on the position of the consumer, the tax payer? HAHAHAHAHAHAHHA SUCKER.
Damn it.. wheres that boat with the fucking tea on it... i know its around here somewhere.
Burn the FCC down.
Government doesnt overhaul itself. The people overhaul the government.... with guns.
You're absolutely correct.
However, the following question bears asking: Why should media companies be allowed to shift the burden of risk involved in starting a new channel from themselves to their customers? This seems like an economic distortion to me. It seems more reasonable that if the channel is really worth watching, the company launching it would put compelling content on it, then to drive up demand, it would launch a media marketing blitz.
There's no reason the public should have to subsidize others' risk taking.
You lay the copper once - when the housing unit is built. The investment has already been made - the phone company has to choose whether it's worth selling me naked DSL or letting an already wired pair to sit there unused while I go to cable.
Oh, please, let's not pretend actual costs and telecom have anything to do with each other. These are the guys who charged us thousands of dollars over the years for a simple telephone, because they wouldn't let you buy one at the store and plug it into their precious network.
I have to comment on this. I work in the Telecom industry and anyone who thinks that Telco's are trying to "recoup" losses associated with the copper plant is just naive. The copper plant, for the most part, was paid for when I was still in diapers and the minor costs (I say minor because compared to the initial costs involved in establishing a pstn infrastructure is far greater then the relatively small cost of adding new lines to increase coverage and capacity) are negligible when u consider that you still pay an average of 3$ a month for touch tone service, a service that was paid for before I was born. If you don't believe me call your ilec and ask. Even better ask to have it removed...that's always good for a laugh.
All this is to say that profit and share prices are the only reason behind this decision. Even up here in Canada the telco's are playing the same game. The CRTC (similar to your FCC) has passed legislation forcing ILEC's to resell their xDSL ports to CLEC's for a reduced cost, averaging around 15-30$ per port depending on the number of port they purchase. The local loop still belongs to the ILEC, and the CLEC customers still have to pay for a voice line to the incumbent, and I can assure you that even thought the CLEC pays 40-60% less for the adsl then a regular subscriber would, the ILEC still turns a handsome net profit per port by selling them to other ISP's. As for the cost involved in maintaining the PSTN.... have you ever seen the inside of a CO or Toll center....it is twist tie technology, and does not involve much upkeep. Most CO's aren't even manned, and most Telco's are still using 5ESS and DMS swtches which are so old that most still have tone generator/oscillator banks to generate the tones rather than the newer digital switching equipment which uses more modern technology. The only way they will replace anything on the copper plant is if is break entirely... otherwise they will apply whatever low cost band aid fix they can put together to avoid spending money. This whole scenario about naked dsl causing telco's loose money is completely false, and is just a way for them to squeeze more of your money out a system that has already paid for itself a hundred time over.
The Bush administration's Dept. of Justice has
announced that all is forgiven to AT&T (Ma Bell),
in keeping with the non-penalties involked against
MSFT in their anti-monopoly lawsuit.
The regional (baby) "Bell" telcos have just
announced a conference during which the telcos
are expected to plan their re-merger.
The FCC has just announced that the television
and radio media conglomerates will now be
permitted to own up to 100% of any given market.
The FCC and the FTC have just come out in a joint
declaration that dialup ISPs, WiFi-based ISPs,
and independent DSL service providers have been
issued C&D orders for their business operations.
Federal mediators are expected to offer these
independent operators up to 10 cents on the
dollar, dependent upon the number of customers
they can bring to the table.
Way to go, FCC!