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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?'."
Don't they have ISP fees much like we do, whom probably pay the phone company for using their "pipes"?
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
The comment is interesting, but an empty threat. The *customer* is paying for the pipes. The companies that the customer contacts are not using the broadband pipe except on behalf of the customer: any downstream transmitted across that pipe is paid for by the customer. As a specific example, I can pay for various downstream speeds with my cable company and DSL is ordered with a speed for upstream and downstream. That price breakdown makes it clear that the broadband payment I'm making is for both upstream and downstream, otherwise why would my upstream remain constant but my downstream increase if I throw more money at the cable company?
On the other side of the fence the "Internet Upstarts" are paying for *their* pipes as well. Even the pipes "in the middle" are indirectly paid for, although that process can sometimes breakdown (as Level3 and Cogent are proving). It isn't like there is some magic way to get access from point A to point B "for free". The costs are just bundled in your access bills. What ticks off a telecom is that the prices for packets are so darn *cheap*. It makes land line voice look expensive, which is driving the adoption of VOIP.
If they decide that paying for your pipes (both directions) doesn't give you access to the services you want, the only option is to impose filtering. If they decide to filter, block or otherwise prevent the customer from unhindered access to Internet products they will be in violation of the common carrier provisions. Which is fine if they want to then make a stab at blocking *all* bad stuff the Internet contains. However, I suspect that's not where they want to be, as without common carrier status they become liable for anything they *fail* to block.
Frankly, all this comment proves is that they are desperate for revenue and yet know they can't raise rates on telephone services (thanks to regulation) so they are flailing around for anything they can think of. Legal probably sent him a "memo" right after that comment got back to them though, as I'm pretty sure *they* understand the ramification of the implied threat.
Sig under construction since 1998.
Better yet, why should we continue to subsidize a dying business? First, you bitch when municpalities try to install subsidized internet for the masses, then you bitch when people try to use a monopoly connection to eliminate your services.
Stop whining and change your dying business model.
More
Whoa, wait a minute there. The customer has *already* paid to 'use the pipes'. I pay a monthly fee for internet access - why should I or Google, or Vonage have to pay extra to use the pipe for whatever I want?
Problem is that they're already paying for the use of the lines. What do you think your monthly ISP fee is doing?
Seems he now wants to be paid twice.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
This isn't 1905 and as long as I have a few choices Ma Bell won't be one of them. I've got cable... if they blow it I can go satellite, Power, Fiber, and worst case scenario I'll become an activist to set up a community Coop ISP.
Ma Bell is to late in coming back to the game!
I
Unless i'm on the wrong tariff, there's nothing "FREE" about the £19.99 I throw at my cable provider each month.
The institutional amnesia is very convenient.
Look for a delightful lesson in political theater and twisted rhetoric to come.
I appreciate that I've been getting all this broadband for free all this time. Oh, wait, I pay a monthly fee for that. Hmm, perhaps I can pay that fee to someone else who won't be so restrictive? Where is that number for Speakeasy...
The gentleman seems to have an odd understanding of how this all works. Google pays him to get to me, and I pay him to get to Google. The second that changes, I'll pay someone else who doesn't feel that it's a privledge to get my business.
What a moron.
What the hell does he mean by people using his "pipes" for free? I pay every month for my access. And I'm not paying for wires strung to my house, I'm paying for bandwidth, for the ability to get packets in and out of my router. Nothing free here, I paid for it.
Yes, there's someone on the other end making money on this and the greedy bastard thinks he should get "his share". Does he want that to apply to every transaction?
I called and ordered a pizza for delivery last night. Do they get a cut?
I checked my bank balance and paid a couple bills this weekend. Do they get a transaction fee?
I do work from home some days. Do I need to give them a portion of my pay when I do that?
Your man here runs a phone company. His customers pay him for voice service, and also he gets paid by broadband providers for the right to run internet connections over the same line (or possibly he sells broadband himself - I don't know exactly how it's done in this particular case).
He has now noticed that some people are using the broadband connection instead of the voice service. There go his profitable long-distance and international charges! He charges a nontrivial amount per minute for a call to Tokyo, but these people are rolling it all into their modest monthly broadband fee! Aargh!
The words 'buggy whip manufacturer' spring immediately to mind.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
What do you mean, their own demise? Google is one of the things that make the internet more useful and more attractive to people.
Oh, wait, you mean that a useful and attractive internet means people are going to not sign up for SBC broadband! Of course, how silly of me that I didn't see your impeccable logic for what it is immediately!
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
.. why google has been buying tons of dark fiber in the past couple of years.
Heh, I thought the exact same thing when I saw this. The guys at google aren't stupid, ya know...
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
... I will leave you and go to a provider where my stuff _will_ work?
This stupidity will die when the board of directors of the first company that tries this fires the CEO for the inevitable backlash.
How much scarier if the government blocked these services to protect their phone monopoly money? Thank goodness the US telecom market is mostly private...
In context, he is talking about VOIP.
In effect, SBC is providing the means by which VOIP providers are competing with SBC's phone line business. That's what bother him.
But he has to understand, if SBC is going to offer generic internet service, they have to tolerate customers using it for whatever they want. What Whitacre and his ilk would like is to regulate what customers can do with the service. This would start with shutting out competition and progress to charging for each protocol, port, destination, etc..
We have to preserve the common carrier principle in internet access.
She is going to come in, claim to fix all those nasty problems with the internet, and get money to do so.
People will pay to have a 'cleaner','smarter' internet, and she will have a contract that basically lets her control anything comeing into or out of the computer.
These people are really good at this game. They will stand in front of congress and lie, they will cheat, they increase there rates and call it a tax so people will think it's cause of the government.
SHe's a bitch, she is smart, and she has no morals. Don't turn your back on ma bell, she'll put a shiv in it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Hmmm. I guess I missed that implication. I agree that that is idiotic; I as a customer have specificly paid for the ability for google to send me bits. Ergo, the pipe is already paid for. If he doesn't feel that the ISP rates are sufficient to cover his costs, he should feel free to raise his rates and get eaten alive in the market.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
since the American people subsidized them through TAXES and SURCHARGES WE FUCKING PAID. How about we, The People, take back the part of those pipes WE paid for and then you, "the corporations"*, can pay The People for using OUR pipes that you're making money off of. That way we, The People, can choose who WE want to be in control of the pipes. Just so long as Google stamps out an iron-clad privacy policy where they don't frigging data mine everything on the pipes I'd give all my pipes to them in exchange for fast access (something along the lines of 10mb/10mb would be nice) and the ability to host my own servers.
*Please note that corporations are lower-case and should be treated as such. They should not hold the same status legally as The People (we're mentioned in the Constitution, not them). Period. I'm all for the "American Dream" but not at the total expense of We, The People.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
Let me get this right. The CEO of a very powerfull company said "but I ain't going", where the correct way would be "but I am not going"? Damn, CEO and still cannot speak proper English. Pretty scary.
Wow after comments like these I can almost feel the next article coming on about how far the US is lagging behind the rest of the world on broadband.
Pretty much sounds like it: trying to defend a business with an out of date business model by attempting to 'regulate' rather than trying to compete and give their customers what they want.
It may take a few years but unless he changes business tactics his company will slowly die, just as the dinosaurs did when conditions changed and they did not adapt fast enough.
Clearly this is a man who is comfortable with the idea of monopolies being granted to him (and not his competitors) and uncomfortable (even angry) about anyone figuring out how to compete with him. My read on this is that, given a choice between innovation and staying in a monopoly world where he is king he'll choose the latter.
Welcome Back Ma Bell, we haven't missed you!
--LWM
Exactly.
Next thing you know, some county somewhere is going to charge Amtrak for driving through without paying.
How about this... We give anyone who wants to be an upstart the same access to putting fiber in the ground as SBC and see if they like that.
rant: Eliminating any monopoly in the United States of America has been impossible for some time now (see: campaign contributions). Personally, I think the telecommunications industry is one of the first that needs to be seized and freed back up.
Get paid to code OSS
He doesn't want what he says he wants, at all.
.iso download. The only difference is that the specific content is perceived as a threat to SBC's business model.
If SBC starts regulating content on their wires, then they open up a huge legal can of worms regarding liability. VOIP is just content. It's conceptually no different than a video stream or an
But that doesn't change the fact that it's content.
I sincerely doubt SBC wants to be responsible for all the content that crosses their wires. The last thing any company needs, even one as big as Ma Bell, is an endless stream of lawsuits about kiddie porn, bomb making tutorials, warez downloads, DVD rips, mp3 streams, so on and so forth.
Common carrier means common carrier, and changing the definition of common carrier would cost an asinine amount of money, even by the standards of corporate fund-slinging on Capitol Hill.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Why should they provide their customers the service they signed up for? They promised to provide access to the internet for a certain price, not to some subset of the internet that agreed to pay their extortion. If they can't make a profit, why is this Cogent's fault? Did SBC inform their customers they would be used like this? Will they be compensated for being unable to connect to work because SBC's CEO isn't getting a big enough bonus check?
My other car is a Popemobile
And how do they propose to get .com's to pay them to "use their pipes?" What can they really do? Block access to google or Vonage? I don't think so... If they tried that with me... I would immediately switch ISPs... They would not be able to pay me to stay with them...
It is such an old school business attitude... The phone companies need to realize that the days of monopoly are over... The gig is up, the cat is out of the bag... etc... VoIP works great... Vonage is so simple to use... someone's grandparents could use it...
Even if there were some widespread blocking of Vonage... it would not be hard for them to get around it... It isn't like they have to stick to standard SIP ports... Their service could easily run over port 80... If they tried to block their IP address, could they not start using IP blocks from their ISPs? And hey.. aren't the ISPs already making money on transit costs for these companies...?
This guy is a real loser... Sell your stock in SBC
After that, I'll push for cars, entertainment and space travel... They want to be free too!
Come play Moral Decay!
If their routers deliver a consistently bad QoS to all packets sent over the wire: a bit of jitter, nothing to affect bulk throughput, just the whole VoIP experience, then you can get a bad skype/google talk experience without ever having your packets sniffed.
then you sign up with the cable telco's "high quality VoIP solution", which pretends to mean better pipes upstream but really means TCP without the jitter, they get their tax.
-steve
The problem is some one has to pay for the infastructure. If the phone companies stop making money at it they will stop maintaining the phone lines and expansion will cease. This won't be per se out of meanness or greed it will be from an inability to pay people to preform the tasks and to pay for wire and materials. The only real solution is to nationalize the wires both phone and cable. No one really wants that but it may be the only solution. The small amount they get from internet usage won't pay for the infastructure. Phone rates have been dropping like a rock for years and traditional phone companies are rapidly becoming unprofitable and may be unsustainable. People forget the bad old days before competition. Back in the sevenities almost anywhere you called was long distance and an hour long call could easily cost you $5, we're not talking adjusted dollars either. The average person now spends hundreds of hours, I'm guessing between 500 and 1,000 hours, a month on long distance. At 1970s rates in adjusted dollars that was more than most people would have made a month in total income, a couple of grand a month back then was really good money and $3.65 an hour was minimum wage. Phone rates have dropped radically and keep dropping. They are likely to continue to drop so I doubt traditional phone companies can survive. Before you say Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead imagine what will happen if it gets nationalized? Corporations tend to be more efficent, radically so, than government. The far better result would be for the corporations to survive but have stiff competition. I honestly can't see this happening without regulation that will enrage customers since they will see it as protecting corporate profits. It may in fact be mostly that but it's also protecting the infastructure. Before you cry BS imagine the next time your phone line or cable line goes down there's no one there to fix it? Your VOIP phone ain't gonna work then. It's a double edged sword. I hate the phone companies and they got fat in years past but we aren't better off if they go under. The lines may have been paid for decades ago but like roads they must be maintained and eventhough the right of way is public the lines are privately owned.
No google pays a very high rate for its broadband lines, consumers pay as well for broadband. Basic simple contracts, SBC can't change these just cause they see a new revenue source.
VoIP is the future. Why can I route an HTTP packet to Iran but not a packet with audio?
The more they fight it the stupider they look and eventually will lobby to play catchup [e.g. force the actual players to comply with stupid laws like E911]. Hey SBC, wake the fuck up, the days of $1.30 a minute to Europe are long over.
That and what of peering? You gonna charge me money to talk to a voip user who uses your ISP services? Ok, how about my ISP charge your customers money for using my ISP?
This is just more of "I don't get it, I don't want it, it shouldn't be".
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
There is software that can detect VoIP traffic and even identify the carrier. Telcos use this to *protect their networks*, but it can also be extended to protect their profits.
While it is illegal for Witacre to drop all VoIP traffic, it doesn't mean he won't be identifying this traffic and providing it with highly degraded service with added noise, especially if the call's destination is one of his clients. This way he can do his best to maintain his customer base since the average customer will believe that using VoIP is like talking through a tincan.
Sure in the end the buggywhip tech of the old Ma bell will loose out, but it will be a prolonged fight. Witacre rebuilt ATT, he's pretty shrewd. -- the guy just single-handedly overturned one of the largest anti-trust cases ever. I don't think he's going to be easy to presuade with some little "laws".
Let's charge the people using the lines, and charge the services that are provided.
Why stop there?
Bill me for stopping to pick up groceries in addition to the groceries.
Charge my credit card for browsing Amazon
While I wait in line, absorbing all that heat you'r providing (or shedding BTUs alternately) charge me an hourly rate - no fractions!
This is the very heith of idiocy. Does he realize how much dark fiber is out there? This is right up there with banks and bank tellers: I used to interact with a human teller and get my funds, or deposit the til. Now, I 'interact' with a machine - a machine that doesn't have health care, disability insurance or a retirement plan - and the bank charges me - ME! - for the privilege of said machine use.
Oh wait I forgot. Greed is a very successful business model.
kulakovich
Actually since most consumer broadband "contracts" include a clause stating that they can be changed at any time without notice, SBC probably can change those just 'cause they see a new revenue source.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Note to self: Sell all SBC and T stock. I'd wondered if T would climb to SBC valuations or vice versa. This toxic rube just answered my question fairly clearly: he has NO idea what is going on in the industry. He's like some halfwit lovechild of Michael Eisner and Darth McBride.
A hint to Mr. WitLacker: Due to overbuilding that was done by SBC and others during the dot-com years, dark fiber is still stupid cheap. Now, if you want to strip money from google, you'll have to ruin your own market among other customers, since I can imagine a dozen tricks ranging from buying up existing contracts to teaming with owners of existing contracts to upgrade endpoints to increase per-fiber bandwidth. Your own client base is in a position to compete with you if you get greedy.
Or Google can short-circuit past you by renting/leasing dark fiber and buying their own endpoints. And anywhere you've got a rock-solid monopoly, they can explore stopgaps like microwave. In a phrase, you can't put this genie back into a monopoly bottle, no matter how hard you try.
Next, I'm not sure how you plan to detect which endpoints are google's, or how you intend to increase charges to those endpoints without getting excessive on all other datapoints, given the rather ambiguous nature of data packets. But, if you are able to differentiate the data, all Google has to do is refuse to pay. Every time you block a paying customer from reaching Google, you'll be drowned in loud screams. After questioning your parentage, customers will insist someone's in of breach of contract (either you or google) and since they don't pay google for access, They'll blame you. If you try to shift the blame to google, we all *know* who'll win those legal/PR battles.
This isn't your grandma's ol' monopoly: for every tactic you can think of, the data infrastructure (which is what geeks like me consider the REAL internet) is creating alternatives. And every time you squeeze, you'll lose PR and goodwill and customers. You'll piss off shareholders. You'll piss off techies (ask your canine mom, Darth McBride about the wisdom of doing that). Oh, and the state public-utility regulatory commissions: act like a monopoly and various state legislatures and their consituents will shove your sorry ass deep into regulatory hell: imagine a world where the regulators deem that dark fiber will be repriced downward until it is fully utilized.
Amen, brother. Witacre is pissed because his business isn't sexy anymore. But what he doesn't understand is that, if he builds barriers between the public and google/yahoo/whatever, google/yahoo/whatever will build a bridge. And that bridge, methinks, will be wireless and omnipresent. And that bridge will mark the end of Ma Bell once and for all.
The guy who supplies a cable to your house has fixed costs and variable costs associated with supplying it.
The fixed costs are the physical line, maintenance, exchange equipment etc.
The variable costs are basically the calls, or are they? It costs them a fixed amount for the infrastructure to enable you to make calls. Once the mainly fixed costs of providing the infrastructure is met then profit starts. I know this is a simplistic description but it mostly hold water. So in effect the business is built around mainly fixed costs.
However if you take away the revenue associated with the making of calls then something has to give to meet these costs which remain largely the same.
This can either be reduced profit, reduced costs or an increase in the fixed charge.
Reducing profit is something companies are unlikely to want to do. In SBC's case their profit $1.2 billion from $10.3 billion represents 11% profit. Not bad and they can afford to lose some from that. But get much below say 6-7% and alarm bells will start ringing. Not least they won't be keen on investing speculative money on a high risk, low margin business like say next gen. ADSL.
Reducing costs. I dare say there could be some of this going on in a business of this size but after not too long they would have to reduce their infrastructure costs. And reducing infrastructure costs would eventually mean reducing service.
The third option is to move the fixed costs onto the fixed costs the customer pays. IE The line rental and the Broadband supply.
Doubtless there are other ways of looking at it but any way must address the issue of fixed costs being paid for.
This is sure to set off a firestorm of US bashing, but the first thing that came to mind when I read this quote today was the interest in the UN and/or EU in wresting "control" of the internet from the hands of the US. Is this the type of thing we would see if these other parties gained control of the root servers? Pay up or no DNS for you??
Only in that case you (as a consumer) wouldn't have the option of punishing them for this outrageous behavior with your pocketbook by switching to another provider. You would just have to a) hope that the service provider (Google, Yahoo, whomever) would pay the piper; or b) you might simply be stuck if the service/information you wanted to access was deemed unacceptable and therefore all access to it via DNS was eliminated. (Hopefully you could root out [forgive the pun, I had to do it] the IP address on your own or you would REALLY be out of luck)...
There's a lot of misinformation in these posts about Ma Bell and the network.
The prevalent theory on Slashdot is that Ma Bell gets the infrastructure paid for by government subsidy, and triple charges the users for using it (consumer + ISP + content provider). The theory seems to go on that Ma Bell just sits there raking in billions of dollars a year by doing nothing.
The fact is, the Bells put a *HUGE* amount of their own money into the ground. They run copper and fiber to approximately 100% of the houses in their areas, along with the DSL switches, fiber switches, and other pieces of expensive equipment. Just the maintenance on that investment is in the *billions* of dollars per year.
You all seem to think this investment should just be written off, and the pipes be free for everyone.
Fact is that they are NOT charging more than once for the infrastructure. The Consumer pays for the infrastructure from the intr-LATA network up to the side of their house. The ISP pays for the facilities (the OC3 or OC12 big pipe) that connects their infrastructure to the internet back-bone. The content provider pays either for the consumer network (for very small providers) or something similar to the ISP model, they are paying for a big pipe to get deliver more content.
Interestingly, in this model, no one is directly paying for the internet backbone. All of that is paid for via the other plans -- ie, some portion of the consumer, ISP or content provider payment is diverted to pay for that. So instead of triple charging, they are really just charging for the piece of the network the customer is using, and using part of that revenue to pay for the backbone.
Yes, Ma Bell is in business, which means she wants to make money. Its just not as unfair as this site would make aout. Also with the entrance of cable, cell phone, satellite, and VoIP, they are also not a monopoly.
Verizon has started to move their customers to fiber right to the premises, and when they do, they move your POTS line to fiber as well (although they don't tell you that very much). They're equipped to offer TV service through this same fiber, although they currently lack regulatory compliance.
Between their EVDO service and fiber, they've turned the tables on the cable companies and gone from irrelevant to the top in a space of just 2-3 years. Verizon, for all the complaints against them is actually competing and not whining. At least not yet.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Ok so I was about to post a gut response and then I went back to RTFA and thought it through again...
:)
Let's try the legacy Ma Bell perspective:
You make a phone call to Joe. You initiated the transaction but both you and Joe pay for access to the network. Even further, in the wireless phone world both you and Joe likely pay per minute for the call.
Now let's try a cable perspective:
You want subscribers who will pay a monthly access fee. To get them, you need the best available content. You MUST get networks such as ESPN, CNN, ABC, NBC, MTV, etc. into your content package. You don't charge ESPN for access to your "network"...
Similarly, newspapers:
You need subscribers. You pay content creators (reporters, comic authors, etc.) for the content necessary to attract and retain subscribers.
It seems the battle is which model does the data backbone (the Internet, if you will) fall into? Is it simply a network by which people and organizations can communicate with no guarantee or claims as to the quality of that content (a la the phone network) or are you selling end-subscriber access to a content service (a la cable TV or newspaper)?
I think for SBC the answer is "yes". It's both. They have end customers who want access to the Internet FOR the content that's there. They also have customers who just want a communications network for data. Here is another way to look at the power of the organizations involved:
Could a major Internet content/service provider (Google, CNN, Apple iTunes, Yahoo, etc.) approach a network provider (SBC, Comcast, AOL, etc.) and threaten to cut off those network's subscribers unless the network provider PAYS them for their content?
This would be the true coup de etat in the industry. When a single content or service source becomes so demanded by end consumers that it MUST be available on your network to keep those subscribers. I don't know that any website is yet that important... Maybe Windows Update could be, if anyone used it.
Come play Moral Decay!
Because they didn't offer that. They would be happy to if you're prepared to pay what that costs. We do. For 19.95 a month, you get filtered network connections, no ability to run a server dynamic IP addresses, and capped bandwidth. For 99.95 a month you get static ip's, no filters, and the ability to run anything you want. "Real" internet connections. SBC delivers exactly what you contracted for. Why is this upsetting to you. You want cheap, you get cheap, you want full pipes, you PAY for full pipes. DUH. That copper costs money, the electricity to run the system, the techs in the trucks, the poles, etc etc etc all cost money.
When you have high-bandwidth wireless freely serving everyone in Osage County Kansas, then get back to me.
Rick
In a free market system the consumer chooses what they will pay for, and the onus is on the company to make the numbers work. If they cannot, they go under.
I can't emphasize this enough--uncompetitive companies must go under for the free market to operate efficiently. Propping up an aging, uncompetitive company hurts consumers--through poor service, high prices, and slowed economic growth.
In point of fact there might not BE any way for SBC to reconcile their fixed costs and the new consumer expectations of fixed connectivity pricing. So be it--that's life.
SBC/AT&T could go under tomorrow and the world would go on. Either: they would declare bankruptcy and write off debt and renegotiate union contracts, thereby lowering fixed costs, OR some other more competitive company would purchase their assets, employees, and customer lists, and provide service more efficiently. It would messy for a while, but when is any change neat, even if it's badly needed?
SBC/AT&T is welcome to do their best to get return on their investment. But the burden is on them to make it work, not on us.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
You do know which party people turn to when they want a powerful central authority to take care of them, right? You do know who promises social welfare, corporate regulation, protectionist economic policy, and universal health care, right? You do know that there was only one candidate in the last election that would make any sense as your guess, right? You do know that he lost, right?
Bush lost?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Maybe because the more compelling bandwidth-intensive apps there are, the more demand there will be for bandwidth (i.e. "your pipes")?
Vonage isn't stealing from you, they are selling your product! You can't use Vonage without a broadband connection. And if customers get used to running several apps like Vonage, they'll find that they have saturated their cheap $19.99/month DSL plan, which means they'll start wanting to bump up to the pricier plans.
Nothing sells a platform like apps, and if you're the phone company or the cable company, you're the platform. You want to encourage the growth of these apps, not shut them down.
Read my blog.
Telecom lines *should* be free. This was part of the telecommunications act nearly a decade ago. Big providers like SBC get government and municipality-granted monopolies in exchange for 'playing nice' with others.
The original reasoning behind the friendly monopoly was to prevent divergent standards in telecom from emerging and to prevent mass destruction of public property. Think about it this way...one company, one city, many streets and alleyways. Any time SBC lays new fiber, runs new lines, erects new poles, etc. the city is well aware of it. The proper forms are filled out and streets are closed/traffic redirected/people are notified.
Now imagine there are 4 telcos in your city. Each one will be on their own upgrade and repair schedule. Each one will fight for customers. Each one will be loathe to exchange with other companies' traffic. Each one will tear up streets during upgrade cycles. See the problem here? Telecom is considered important enough for city governments not to fuck with it, just like the power company. A phone, a water pipe, and power to every address is not too much to ask for.
If our government worked better, i.e. wasn't so slow and wasteful, I'd wish that we'd have government controlled telecom. We could have a national telecom policy that'd bring us fine things like fiber to the home like Japan, Korea, *insert better connected country here* does. SBC is an impediment to progress, while they're in the position to push it forward, they have to make sure to squeeze every last penny out of what they've already invested. So of course, the CEO will boldly say 'you must pay to use our lines'. The shareholders would expect nothing less. Common corporate bs here.
What would happen if they were unable to exact a charge on companies sharing their lines? To the shareholders, they're giving something away for free. To them, they're losing money on legacy hardware (i.e. the paths they provide have already been bought and paid for many times over). They fought like hell in court to prevent the telecom act, and it's easy to see why. The cable companies have the upper hand here, because the playing field is somewhat more level for them. They're not as strictly regulated and don't have to share their infrastructure with others. They still compete with each other and tear up public property occasionally but they're not as 'necessary' as SBC is. Yet. SBC has said time and again that if they had the right protection they would invest the billions required to put fiber to the curb. Verizon, in some areas, has already beaten them to the punch.
Basically to sum it all up, SBC is becoming a model for corporate greed and sloth. Just like Microsoft or any other company that gets too big, they never want to play nice and share with others for fear of losing a few bucks in the exchange.
I think you missed the point. Google and Vonage are not using SBC's lines. SBC's customers are using SBC's lines (which they have paid for) to access Google and Vonage. This is like the RIAA/Apple skirmish, it's simply that one side sees money being made and wants a cut of it.
Give it a few years, wireless will do anything your "pipes" do, moron.
And it won't be owned by you, it will be owned by Google.
Have a nice day, dinosaur.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Whenever anyone lays down copper wire, fiber-optic or pipes, the city will charge a "right of way" for use of the land and cost of restoring the strip of land use (such as digging up and re-paving a street). For most public utilities, this "right of way" cost is lower then for other businesses that seek to get the same rights. The idea is that the public utility disrupts the land used once and then other bussinesses should tap into the public utility. So, rather than a security monitoring company laying down it's own copper wires, they get dry (without dial tone) pairs of copper from the public utility. The FCC used to acknowledge the phone company's roll as a public utility by requiring that copper pairs be provided at cost. The CEO of SBC has since convinced the FCC that a tele-co should not be treated as a public utility and be able to use practices which reduce the public access to the infrastructure that SBC has gotten to build at a discounted right-of-way cost.
So, while he argues that other businesses should be required to pay for his pipe since they are competing businesses. He also still promotes municipal discounts on right-of-way as if he still runs a public utility. And he still promotes that other bussinesses should be pushed to use his pipes instead of being able to get right-of-way at a similar cost. So, for example, to run fiber optic between two buildings in down town Chicago would cost a non-profit University ten times as much as what SBC was charged. Hence, there is incentive to go with SBC for the fiber optic link. Arrangements are made in Feb 2005 for SBC "GigaMAN" service to be put in at June of 2005. Guess what still isn't in place?
Cities need to acknowledge that SBC is neither a public utility or has the public interest in mind for sharing right of way. As a non-public utility, SBC should pay the same exact price for municipal right of way as everyone else and refund the tax payers for the con of getting discounted right of way in the past as if they would operate as a public utility.
Of course, SBC's CEO will never come out and promote that SBC should pay it's fair share for right of way, just that other businesses should have to pay their fair share to SBC while the tax payer gets robbed by a company that is not a public utility but continues demanding discounts from cities as if they are.
We already subsidized it for them with our taxes, and we're paying for service on it afterwards. The reason we subsidize is because we want it affordable afterwards. How *dare* they demand more for us to use it after we've already paid up?
It seems that this has been forgotten in the recent years and almost ALL of the business-consumer contracts are all unfairly one-sided!
Typical contract-
The business's rights:
2) We do not garantee the service. We do not garantee the service against interruptions.
3) We can change the terms of the contract at any time to any condition as we want.
The Consumer's rights:
2) The consumer has no other rights
This isn't the way it's supposed to work. There is SUPPOSED to be compensation for term changes.
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
all true, execpt for the fact that the NAT router is not his own. And I'm sure that they'd have some choice words for him trying to adjust their NAT setup.
His message specifically stated that they were not allowed to run a router of any kind.
now, about going off "half cocked?"
--- no sig to see here... move along.
The problem is, Google, et. al. already pay for their pipes, too. Nobody is getting a free ride. The end-user pays for their broadband connection (as you've pointed out), Google pays for its Internet connection (Google must have one helluva broadband bill), and the ISP's have traffic interchange agreements between them (I think it boils down to whoever passes more data has to pay - if they 'trade' an equal amount of data, then they probably don't charge each other - although I'm sure it all boils down to the individual contracts that govern peering).
The point is, this guy is a greedy jackass who is trying to make out like other companies are getting a free ride using the bandwidth I and they *already* payed for. If google, et. al have to start paying SBC for the bandwidth I already payed for, SBC better start giving me free DSL service (all this is hypothetical, as I currently use TimeWarner cable for internet access).
The one potentially hopefull thing in all this is, because of the fact that cable companies are competing with the phone companies, (and things like city-wide WiFi networks are being created) SBC doesn't really quite have the clout that its CEO seems to think it does - just imagine what would happen if SBC suddenly disallowed access to all the websites/services that people normally use the internet for, because they didn't pay this fee? All SBC's customers would probably switch ISP's pretty fast, leaving SBC wondering what happened. Simply put, SBC needs Google, Vonage, and the rest of the Internet more than the rest of the Internet needs SBC.
I still do wonder, though, what *geniuses* at the FTC have allowed the re-aggregation of all the baby bells after government spent massive amounts of money, and 10 years of litigation, trying to break them up.