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FCC Considers Deregulation of DSL
Phlatline_ATL writes "In an article on ArsTechnica, they explore the FCC's current consideration to reclassify DSL as an information service and as such would no longer require the telcos to lease out their lines. This seems like it would effectively make the telcos the exclusive DSL broadband providers." From the article: " So after six months to a year it would be goodbye Earthlink and Speakeasy, hello SBC DSL monopoly (in the case of Chicago, where I live). So the telcos would get what they want, which is no competition while the consumers get screwed. But it's perfectly logical under the FCC's definition of broadband competition, where they want cable to compete with DSL--and hopefully IP over power lines and WiMax down the road."
They're not the cheapest, but their staff is the most knowledgable I have seen, and they're definately the most Linux-friendly.
The more people that switch away from SBC the more money the competition has to fight this stuff.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Clearly SpeakEasy and Earthlink don't know how to properly bribe officials to keep themselves in business. It's their own fault, really.
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This seems like one of those grand opportunities, like the building of the U.S. highway system, where the government could step in and provide universal internet access. Such a move would make it possible for people out in the countryside to get broadband and access to high speed internet services.
The current problem is that the vastness of America means that private companies don't find it cost effective to hook up Ma and Pa Kent out in the sticks. But under a government system, those people would get the service.
A lot of people don't want to pay for that, I'm sure. However, if you consider that the reason you have your broadband is because it just happens that you are lucky enough to live in a densely populated area. People who run farms and are otherwise far away from the crowds of cities simply can't generate enough demand to make it worth the broadband companies' while to hook them up.
This deregulation is the opposite direction that the FCC should be taking. There are certain things that the government ought to provide, or ought to subsidize in large amounts, and one subset of those is basic utilities. The Internet is one of the utilities that will be key in the future of our country. It makes sense that we get a jump on it now and wire (figuratively speaking. Wireless would work as well) the whole country up.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
I wonder if their hope extends to hoping that broadband-over-power-lines magically doesn't spam the radio spectrum with interference. Last we heard, it did...
Mind the Gap
Isn't that like saying only one company is allowed to make pencils, and another to make pens, and those two companies will compete? They fight with the marker company and the crayon company too?
Is this what competition now is?
I agree. The same rules should apply to phone companies and to cable companies. The notion that the phone company is a "utility" but the cable company provides a "service" is outdated.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Maybe because my tax dollars subsidized the construction of that infrastructure? Maybe because land owned by the government was used to put up the poles for that infrastructure? Maybe because the government told me I had to let the telecoms dig a trench through my front yard to lay cables? There's nothing wrong with letting a company profit from infrastructure they built... but when that infrastructure was largely supported by the government, then the government has the choice of whether it wants to let others use the wires. If the telecoms don't like it, the government can always deny them the priveledge to use public land to run cables.
The infrastructure built by the Bells was heavily subsidized by... your tax dollars.
Would another company be allowed to build poles and run lines right next the current lines?
McLeod has Fiber running 150 feet from my house along County Rd 46. I don't have access to those lines and they are likely sharing the "public space".
So why are they being treated differently? If we are going to regulate/deregulate due to public space I want access to that Fiber.
Didn't the phone companies get a lot of help from the government in building their infrastructure? Such as being able to put lines across people's property and in public right of ways, etc?
What?
What is wrong is that the ILEC's (SBC, Verizon, etc) have had 100+ years as a protected monopoly to build their networks on the backs of their captive customer base.
CLEC's and other DSL providers have had since the 1996 Telecom Act to try to build a business in the face of the 800 lb gorilla.
It is silly to act like the ILEC's have been successful by building a business just like anyone else does. They haven't. They had the enormous advantage of being the only game in town for a long, long time.
What we need is structural separation.
Break each Babay Bell into two units.
One being a regulated company that owns the outside plant. It would be required to sell access to everyone equally at requlated, cost-based rates.
Take the switching and retail side of the company and put it into another, un-regulated unit. This company would buy loops from the regulated company just like every other CLEC does.
Of course this is pie in the sky.
The Baby Bell's have far too much lobbying power for this to ever happen.
Recovering the cost of installing and maintaining the infrastructure is a separate problem from providing a service on that infrastructure.
It's BS from the telcos when they say if they had to compete with other companies in thr DSL space they couldn't be profitable, or would have no incentive to put in fiber. Just like any business, the cost of the infrastructure would be passed on to the consumer, regardless of the company that supplied the service. The truth is that the telcos are not interested in competing because they would not be able to set their own premium fees for basic service.
Not all of the telcos are standing still, though...to their credit, Verizon has gone ahead with switching to fiber (which in itself shows that the comment about the barrier for switching to fiber is a lie). In my area that means we WILL finally have true competition between cable and DSL. I look forward to it.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Don't you think that telcos might like third parties? It's easy money. They don't have to support end users, and so they get a fixed fee every month for very little continued effort.
Keynesian Economics where the Governement regulates as needed
Unfortunately now the government regulates as lobbied and not necessarily as needed. What is THIS model called?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Phooey.
Your cable bill has tripled? Are you getting more channels than you used to? Why don't you switch to satellite if you're unhappy? Or, wait a couple of years for the telephone company to start providing TV.
The Savings and Loan crash was mainly because the federal government wasn't charging enough for the FSLIC insurance -- normally you pay more for insurance on high-risk activities.
The old airlines have been in trouble because they're having trouble competing in a deregulated environment. Southwest, among others, is doing pretty well. The reason that they're bailed out is that the Congress is too lilly-livered to actually allow competition to work and let the weak players die off. If the business model is so bad, why are there so many new players?
Deregulation does cause upheaval, no doubt about it. But, markets work better than regulators do.
No company is going to be able to install the nationwide infrastructure that the telcos have -- it would be a multi-trillion-dollar investment if it was even possible given the amount of disruption to everyday life (digging up streets, etc.) that would be required. It was built piece by piece during the monopoly era, funded by a combination of tax money and monopoly profits, over a period of 90 years. The only way to participate in the DSL market is through the existing infrastructure.
To anyone who thinks Bell Telephone was a benign monopoly, well, you're wrong. I remember all too well the days when you had one choice of long distance carrier -- AT&T -- and you paid whatever they felt like charging. I remember when a 3-minute call to a town 15 miles away cost $1.63 (my parents made sure I'd remember). I remember when you were legally prohibited from owning a telephone; you had to rent them from the phone company, and since they had a monopoly there, too, they had no reason to offer anything more than desk, wall, and "princess" styles, and a handful of colors (about 5), so they didn't. I remember when long distance calls were something you made on special occasions, birthdays and holidays, not how you chatted with your friends for hours. I remember when they required you to get permission before connecting so much as an answering machine, and argued that allowing people to plug in their own hardware would cause the entire national phone network to collapse. (funny, it's still there) The Bell monopoly was never benevolent.
It is just mind-blowing that the federal government is redefining "competition" as "closing down multiple profitable companies competing in a given market and turning that market over to a single monopoly."
The power company owns the poles (and hates it when people call them telephone poles). Nothing is stopping a company from leasing pole space from the power company to run lines to compete with the phone and cable providers except the extreme cost.
Actually in most cases the poles are owned by the power company or a 3rd party who leases them to both.
And if you wanted to come in and run your own lines, they'd probably let you. Just pay the same everyone else pays.
I'm betting dollars to doughnuts that the ToS on FIOS prohibits you from running servers of any kind, making it extirely useless to guys like me who don't want to just be a passive "consumer" of internet content. The thing that annoys me the most with major ISPs is that they treat Internet access like TV or Newspapers or other big Media. The company provides, you consume. "Consumer" produced content is a joke, don't even think about it, you like your company, stop thinking on your own, dammit!
It wasn't abcnews.com that made the internet great, it was the thousands of enthusiasts doing their own thing that made it great, but now we have what seems to be an active campain on part of the ISPs it dissuade people from doing their own think and experimenting a little.
Bah, I'm ranting again.
I read the internet for the articles.
Not to mention that other companies would not be allowed to lay their own infrastructure by the local governments. And if a local government did allow it, the local telco would be all over them with lawsuits.
6
If cable wasn't already established along with the telephone infrastructure, we would not have cable today. They snuck in when they weren't seen as a threat. As it is, the telcos are suing governments who allow wireless setups.
http://www.muniwireless.com/archives/municipal/48
I use a DSL service that I love. They give me 1.5mbit/384kbit. Maybe it's not blazing speed, but it's fast enough. Ping times are low. The great things: I can run servers on my system. I get a static IP. And I get amazing support.
Exhibit A: I called them up because an installation had gone wrong and I couldn't get online. Wanted to know whose fault it was. Turned out I hadn't released the DHCP properly, and it was waiting to time out, so they reset it on their end - and then I realized I hadn't written down any mirrors for my BSD distribution I was trying to get working, and didn't have any other working computers. So they tracked down a BSD distribution site for me and gave me the URL.
Exhibit B: They have semi-supported IPv6 tunnels (in that the service is available, but is not *officially* supported - unofficially, it is supported.)
Exhibit C: They have a server-side firewall to block incoming ports that tend to be problematical. It's configurable by the end-user. Yes, I have some control over *their firewall* on their end. (One of the options is "off entirely", for the curious.)
How much of that would be preserved with Verizon? Fuck all.
(Addendum: While digging through the config to see what the exact state of IPv6 was, I just realized I can change my reverse DNS entry for my static IP. Through the web interface. With full official support. I love these guys.)
(sonic.net, for the curious.)
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It depends on where you live. Some places the power company owns the poles. In other places the telephone companies own them. Then there are the distribution companies. They just own the poles and right-of-ways and don't make either electricity or dial tone. Regardless of who owns them they are almost always part of a regulated utility monopoly, and therefore come under the controls of the PUC in your state, and they don't want the poles to become overloaded. Either technically or visually. There are regulations on how many cables can be on the poles or burried in the right-of-way. There are regulations on how close they can be. So, when it's all said and done, most places it is almost impossible to get cable for new technologies run, so forget competing technologies. Why in the world do you think municipal wireless initiatives are getting so much push? No cost for wiring IS a factor, but a lot of places they simply CAN'T run the wire.
It is just mind-blowing that the federal government is redefining "competition" as "closing down multiple profitable companies competing in a given market and turning that market over to a single monopoly."
So where have you been for the last six years?? In politics, conservatism literally means those with the money and power keep it. I mean how can you conserve if you never had it to begin with? That's why they repealed the estate tax, because it took away some of their hoardings.
What's sad is that this decision is perfectly in line with conservative politics, because for conservatives a successful competitive company exists to amass wealth. So for example, cola companies paying supermarkets to not give shelf space to other products is pro competitive since it allows for more profit. Similarly, open source should be pro-competive because it lowers the overhead of most everything, but to conservatives it is anti-competitive because that lowers the cost to enter markets and thus lowers the profit.
So you see clearly the problem with regulated DSL is that these resellers are eliminating profit. That's bad for competition from the perspective of the people with the wealth and power (those with something to conserve). Just remember that to a democrat good competition means lowering the prices people pay whereas to a conservative it means raising the profit of their company and investments and everything will make sense.
First off, please turn in your /. username, as this is far too rational of a post for this place.
Seriously though, you're correct, the problem which will be created by this is that the telcos who own the lines will be able to destroy all competition and then pillage their customers. If people think that Verizon DSL is bad now, wait until they don't have to compete at all.
While I don't think it will ever happen, what I would like to see is for the control of the lines and providing a service on them to be declared an anti-trust violation. As such, you would have one company which owns the lines and leases them out to companies to put services on, and everyone else would just be in the business of selling services. Unfortunatly, there is just too much inertia behind the current state of affairs for this to happen. Not to mention, technically, the telcos are responsible for the building of the network, though with some government help, and therfore do have some property claim to the lines.
That said, we're fucked, the FCC is about to hand the large telcos the collective heads of thier competition, in the DSL market, on a silver platter. And, at the same time, bend all of the US citizens over for an ass raping by the large telcos.
Yay for the FCC! Showing that they truly are the Fuck the Citizens Commision.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
Never works like that.
Double standards are part of having a shitty government. They will say, "You want to build here? Ok, we'll give each of these people $5,000 to 'git." to a big developer. If you're a startup or some average citizen, they'll say something like, "And make all those people move out? It would cost so much to fairly compensate them, and they would be resistant to moving! Those houses and folks are old, let them be."
Consequently, if I said someone was violating my copyright for a song, I'd be laughed at and no one would do anything about it. But when the RIAA says it, the fucking FBI is beating on people's doors!
You'll get access to that fiber line when they can profit from you having access to it, and more than pay for their original costs of bringing it into the area.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
The cost for one company to lay ten wires all at once may not be that much more. The cost for one company to go back nine times and add another wire is a bit higher. But the cost for ten companies to individually lay ten separate wires will be at least ten times the cost of one company laying one wire.
As the OP said, the "natural monopoly" refers to the cost of independently building a competitive service. If another startup can't spring into being, get some financing, and lay a bunch of cable to an entire service area, then you can't count on the market to magically create competition. The barrier to entry is too high to make it feasible.
The whole point of open access regulations is to try to separate out the cost of building and maintaining the plant from the rest of the service. The only reason to do so is because it's very costly to build a duplicate plant.
It may very well be that the best solution is to remove the bit transport from private ownership, and treat it as we do roads. Nobody really wants to be in the business of transporting bits, because it's a no-margin commodity. (You can't get a more indistinguishable commodity than a bit!) Network providers only build the network in order to sell you high value services, and want to control the network to block competition from offering similar services. If a third party (the government, or a bit transport company separate from service providers) owned the network with equal access to all, then the problem of the cost to build many competing networks would go away.
No one suggests that grocery store chain A should build roads to all its stores for supply trucks, while chain B should build all its own roads for the same purpose. The cost would be absurd (even though it wouldn't cost "all that much more" for chain A to build extra lanes on its road network, beyond its actual needs.) But that's the situation we have with data networks instead of road networks.