SBC CEO: Pay up if you want to use our pipes

acousticiris writes "If there were any delusions that Ma Bell Wasn't Back, SBC CEO Edward Witacre has cleared that up in an interview with Business Week Online. When asked about Google, Vonage and other Internet Upstarts he responded in typical Ma Bell Style: 'How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?'."

Comments

Re:Empty Threat

[Tmack]

But if there is only one (is there more?) Internet backbone

There are several "backbone" networks. The tier 1 orgs mentioned in the submission (Level3 and Cogent) are just 2 of them. Each has a network that spans a large geographic region and peers with many smaller networks and other tier 1 networks. This network of networks is the collective internet backbone. One could go away completely, and a good bit of the internet would still be around, just the customers on only 1 upstream provider would be on a network to nowhere, and would be unavailable to the world until their ISP got a link to a different tier 1. Though Level3 is playing like a monopoly, they are not, and got reminded of that with the result of their Cogent dispute.

tm

very old-school phone thinking

[jjeffries]

I work for a small CLEC/ISP...

In the circuit-switched telephony world, carriers exchange CABS (Carrier Access Billing System) records, which are redeemed for cash at the end of each month. For example, you call your Uncle Zed long-distance for one minute and are charged six cents or whatnot by your phone company for the privilage. Well, Zed's phone company will charge CABS to your phone company, and at the end of the month, Zed's phone company will get a check containing a cent or two in payment for completing your call. It's not a lot of money but the volume is very, very high, and a phone co. can make some decent cash if they terminate a lot of calls (think dialups.)

Pretty obvious now where this guy is coming from, eh? Too bad the internet doesn't work like that! The best they will be able to do at this point is to work on screwing up peering agreements in their favor.

IMHO, the big telcos will be the first with their backs up against the wall when the revolution comes.

Re:Asymmetric Threat [OT]

[squiggleslash]

FYI, symmetric is not the same as synchronous.

Synchronous means that the two bit streams (sender and receiver) are synchronized, so there's no necessity for breaking everything into bytes with start and stop bits.

Symmetric, which is what you were actually refering to (as was the GP) is where one side is capable of transmitting at a faster bit rate than the other side.

Nowadays, most serial modems simulate asynchronous operation at the RS232 port, but transmit data as LAPM packets over a synchronous connection, under V42 and its successors.

Asymmetry in modems predates V34 BTW. There were a myriad of 9600+bps modems made in the mid-eighties where one side was clearly faster than the other, as modem manufacturers adopted various proprietary ways to squeeze more and more bandwidth out of the phone lines.

In terms of ITU standards, the V23 standard (1200bps from content provider to you, 75bps back) was very popular in some parts of Europe, notably Britain where it was the basis for BT's Prestel system. Very suspectable to line noise, but it generally worked, and, being frequency modulated like V21, was cheap to implement with the techologies of the time.

Re:Somehow

[robertjw]

Most of what you discuss are just basic CYA stuff for your ISP.

• The 'offensive, embarrassing, pornographic' clause is there to save them if you start distributing kiddie porn
• The restriction on business/commercial use is to keep you from taking advantage of their system by running a server or sucking up all of their bandwidth with multiple employees
• The wifi thing is to keep you from sharing a connection with all your neighbors that don't want to pay for the service - although if you do it right I don't know how they could detect you running a router.

As far as the NAT, check out http://www.no-ip.com./ I use their free service to ssh into my home machine on a cable network without a static IP. Been doing it for over a year and haven't had any problems yet.

Bottom line is the contract, from what you relayed to us, doesn't state that they will filter any sites. It definitely doesn't appear to say that you can only access locations that have a contract with the ISP, which is what SBC is appearantly trying to do.

Re:Somehow

[gte910h]

Look at logmein.com...its not ssh, more like vnc, but it will work in your situation.