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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
Take cable television. I'd prefer not to waste my money on the 50 garbage channels and just pay for the several I actually watch. However, I have to pay for packages instead of an al la carte scheme.
As for telephone service. I don't have a land line. I have a cell phone and internet from my cable provider. If my internet came from Verizon through DSL, I could be forced to buy a service just to have internet.
I don't know how much the government should regulate businesses like this, but if you only have one broadband provider in your area and they want to hit you up for more services than you want, there's not much you can do about it.
I hear another court case in the offing.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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?
In general f(a+b) != f(a)+f(b).
In this particular case, a and b are services, and f is the cost function. Apply the result and you get your explanation.
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
Whose interests exactly is the FCC protecting besides big corporations? The FCC should be working in the interests of American consumers, and they are so obviously not doing this. These all-or-nothing strategies are being used by more and more megagiants like SBC and leave users with little reason to use, for example, VoIP, even though it's about three times cheaper than SBC's phone service. Thanks a whole fucking lot.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
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.
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
Most of the cost of providing phone or DSL service isn't the day-to-day operational cost; it's the cost of running the physical copper cable in the first place. I don't know if the figures are still the same, but at one point it took phone companies 5-10 years to recover their cable-laying investment on new subscribers.
When ADSL first became popular, it was cheap for a very simple reason: Everybody already had a phone line, so the marginal cost of ADSL was merely the cost of the terminating equipment. The physical link was already being paid for out of the phone bill. Take away the landline phone service, and the ADSL cost jumps sharply, since it will now have to cover the formerly "free" copper wiring.
DSL simply doesn't make economic sense without attached landline phone service.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
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!!!!
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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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
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.
They're called "Código de defesa do Consumidor", or "Consummer defense Code".And it states that no one can couple some product to another.
For example, if you're going to open a bank account the bank can't say that aquiring a credit card is a pre-requisite. Or if you're going to buy a car the reseller can't say that buying the insurance from company X is a pre-requisite.
It's indeed a very nice law... when correctly enforced. Unfortunetely our major DSL provider (Telemar) couples the service to an account on a "internet provider". This is of course nonsense, since the real conectivity provider is Telemar itself... but yet they still require such account. The worst part is that NONE of the so called "internet providers" has full Linux-compatible media content...
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
Nothing.
Why would you think that the FCC cares about the public interest anymore? That line of thought is so old school. Especially when there are corporate interests to protect. And I wouldn't expect the House or Senate leadership to help you out much here - last I heard Billy Tauzin's still cutting deals as a lobbyist for telecom interests on the side (when he's not carrying the bag for pharma or entertainment industries).
That is all.
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 powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution,
>nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States
>respectively, or to the people.
Fuck you.
Sincerely,
-FCC
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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 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.
The problem is.. The telecos, cable providers etc will of course abuse this.
Cable does already. Teleco's do already...
The FCC simply allowed them to continue their bullshit practices.
I dont want a fucking $50 verizon line just so i can have their FIBER SERVICE!!!!!!!!!!! FUCK OFF
The FCC is fucking crazy. They're in bed with big buisness. They lifted the consolidation restraints... they've CONSISTANTLY provided the corperations what they want at the expense of the user.
The FCC is fucking worthless. Maybe they can afford to be forced to pay $50 for a POTS line along with their $50 FIBER service... But MOST people cant because unlike the FCC, their pockets arent filled with the cash bribes from the telecos
Face it... this world is a waste. We have no say in shit.
Get rich, buy out the companies you hate... then laugh as you shit on the rubble of their corperate headquarters you just demolished.
That is the only way to have a say in this country.
Otherwise.. you're fucking food for the corperations to chew and spit out at will.
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.
While cable is faster than DSL, cable broadband is not universally available, nor is cable available everywhere.
This ruling isn't necessarily bad. The local cable company allows broadband without a cable subscription, but if you have a subscription, you get a large discount.
The same is/would be true for DSL if not required to be bundled. With such and such package, your DSL only costs $x amount. Without that package, it costs $xx. Most phone companies are already doing this, so this ruling is a non-issue.
Community wireless has a long way to go to be viable, sure a few cities offer it in select areas, but it's hardly universal.
Broadband via the power grid is much more likely. Every house has electricity, so the utility companies are already connected. You could have internet wherever you have an outlet. The technology is available and in use in some areas with more coming online. The only real downside is for the shortwave users. Evidently, it wrecks havock with reception.
As for the phone companies hurting in a few years because of low cable pricing, once the phone companies aren't a factor in broadband and assuming wireless or powergrid don't step up, the cable pricing won't be low, anymore. It's Econ 101.
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.
Next thing you know, they'll sue a certain aged woman for showing her boob on TV in prime time. What the world is coming to?
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.
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
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!
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
In theory yes, maintaining the physical plant is where the bulk of the costs are, but the problem is that NECA regulates the prices we can charge the ISP side of the house for that line. If it has dialtone the line is say $20, without dialtone the line is $75. Since this is a tarif and the telco's are regulated they must pay tarif rates..
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