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SCOTUS To Hear Small ISPs' Case Against AT&T
snydeq writes "The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear an antitrust case that alleges AT&T squeezed out small ISPs by charging too much for wholesale access to its phone network. The case, originally brought to US District Court in 2003, had been appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. But AT&T requested the case be heard by the Supreme Court on the grounds that prior conflicting appeals court decisions in this area should be resolved at that level. As part of the case, the Supreme Court will likely also ascertain whether AT&T could be held to violate antitrust law without setting its retail prices below its own cost."
... what, no takers?
Where I'm from that would be most unpleasant, not mention unsanitary!!
War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.- Shelley
Hail Ye SCOTUS
Swift to save
habeas corpus,
ISP codpiece, and:
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
There's a theory that people can read words correctly just as long as the first and last letters are correct.
On that basis.. anybody else read the headline as "Scouts To Hear Small ISPs' Case Against AT&T"?
IANA US Citizen, so I only have a limited understanding of how you handle things over there. But I think things like a telephone network should not be privately owned. Shouldn't the US government have invested in laying telephone and network infrastructure, and then lease it out to telco's? Then there could have nice fair competition, which would be good for the customer, right? What happened down here in Belgium, is that the government used to own the telephone network, but then partly privatized the phone national company, which now owns the entire network and sells access to smaller companies (similar to the situation described in TFS). Down the line, it's us customers who get overcharged and get really crappy DSL lines.
+1 Funny Signature
That might be because they [were/are] a [monopoly/oligopoly] whose network was largely built at public expense and 'their cost' is a calculated 'average cost' when the rest of the world gets measured by marginal costs...
Remember that the world of RBOCs has a sky of a completely different color.
I know they never had boat loads of cash, but during their heyday, the big independent ISPs should have invested a lot of money into buying their own lines. Hindsight is 20/20, but if they had spent their money wisely, they could have bought up a lot of cheap dark fiber the way that Google did a little while back. Then, they'd have had a lot of their own infrastructure to play with.
Telecom Immunity
Granted it's not passed the Senate yet, but you can bet your sweet patootie it will, and should SCOTUS miraculously find in favor of the ISPs some slick lawyer will find a way to make it apply here.
After all, those small ISPs were probably run by terrorists, or sympathetic to them, or .... something.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
I misread it as a porn-related article.
Thanks to Stephen Colbert for explaining the AT&T breakup and re-merger in this video.
...really just another opportunity for Hemos to refer to them as "The Supremes".
There were a few years where I had DSL from Flashcom (now defunct). Every time AT&T did any kind of servicing for any of the telephones on the street, they would unplug our DSL connection and blame it on Flashcom. After they did it a few times too many, we would watch for their trucks, and complain before they left to force them to put it back. The only way to get them to stop was to get a line that was shared between DSL and POTS voice. Apparently, they check phone lines for a dial tone before they unplug them, and since Flashcom's DSL lines weren't also phone lines, they didn't have dial tones.
Incompetence, malice, or malice cleverly disguised as incompetence? In any case, it's wrong to give a misbehaving private company exclusive access to vital public infrastructure.
A.) We need to start building service tunnels, even if only one street per city at first.
B.) We need to start building a mesh network of wireless nodes that are then owned by nobody at all. (Make a node out of a cantenna, an old PDA, and a solar panel, duct tape it to the side of building, walk away. Maybe even make tiny nodes and stick them under the seats of city buses.)
C.) Eventually we need to look at the technologies made better by the N Prize and start bloody well launching our own damn satellite network.
I, for one, do NOT welcome our new familiar overlords and am working on a regular basis to route around them. How about you?
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
The ISP I worked for just recently folded up due to AT&T's DSL pricing structure. The writing had been on the wall for years, but we hung on as long as we could.
Back in '99 Ameritech was our ILEC, and as they were preparing to roll out their DSL network they actually said that they wouldn't be competing in the DSL market themselves, but would instead do the wholesale side and have other ISPs do the internet services side. That was probably BS, but it didn't matter anyway because they were shortly bought by SBC.
SBC dragged their feet for years, with a very limited initial roll-out in our area. As of now there are still a number of remote terminals in our LATA that haven't been equipped with RDSLAMS, and it seems never will. SBC used their deployment schedule as a bargaining chip against the states that were doing things they didn't like, such as allowing communities to deploy their own telecom infrastructure.
Now AT&T is rolling out their new U-Verse fiber to the neighborhood service. Competing ISPs have no way to get this much faster service wholesale, and AT&T is actively pushing people to convert from their DSL to U-Verse. Our speculation is that no further DSL DSLAMS or RDSLAMS will be rolled out, and that their DSL network and support will continue to degrade. Their answer to any customer that complains will be to switch to U-Verse.
At the same time as the U-Verse roll-out they announced they will be raising the base circuit cost to ISPs by 50%. That was the nail in the coffin for us. The rate we paid for just the individual circuit was already about what the end-user could get the full service at the same speed directly from AT&T. That was before paying for the back-haul circuits to AT&T, our backbone charges, staff, equipment, and other facilities. As a result we had to price our DSL much higher than AT&T, and although our service and support was much better than AT&T's it was extremely difficult for customers to see beyond the bottom line (though many regretted it after it was too late).
SBC / AT&T has been lobbying hard to get out of the Telecomunications Act of 1996, especially the provision that they had to provide access to their DSL service. The first blow was back around 2001 IIRC when they managed to remove DSL as a tariffed product, so they could charge competing ISPs different rates than they charged their own ISP. The next blow was when they got the FCC to classify DSL (and future internet service offerings like U-Verse) as a data service in FCC Order 05-150, which completely removed the requirement for AT&T to provide ISPs wholesale DSL products. If it was politically feasible I'm sure AT&T would turn off every competing ISPs DSL right now, and it would be (mostly) legal to do so. Instead, though, it seems they are going to slowly phase out DSL by offering a faster service that they never had to allow ISPs to use, and to make the transition faster keep bumping up the wholesale rates until all the DSL providers are forced out of business.
I wish LinkLine Communications all the luck in this case. It's clear to anyone who has dealt with SBC / AT&T wholesale DSL that AT&T is doing what they can to push out the competing ISPs who use their network. I can't say I'm optimistic that they will win, or even if they do that it will do any good. The FCC and the state governments were bought and paid for a long time ago.
I remember that when DSL was first rolling out, there were a number of factors that affected the speed that your line could be provisioned for. Not all these problems occurred on purpose but still had to be dealt with by AT&T when they allowed third party DSL providers to operate. Bridge taps, disturbers, packaging options as well as unfortunate distances from the CO all contributed to the difficulty in making a DSL line work. There was also a cute little module at the demarc that allowed them to remotely disconnect the line for testing that had to be removed before DSL would work. Sometimes not worth the trouble to AT&T for their piece of the pie. Experienced people know all these terms by now. Learning them was part of the task of making a homeowner know things previously known only to communications engineers contracting for data services with the telcos. "Provision-Speak" I call it. I know something about this having worked on the firmware for Copper Mountain DSLAMS.
I'll start by handing you a gimme and concede that for now doing this anywhere with a very high water table is simply not going to happen. Let's work a few numbers and get at least *some* idea of the money invested in this issue.
These days we've seen some pretty open discussion of what a cable company is willing to pay to get one more subscriber. Conservatively, they've been willing to pay as much as two hundred dollars per subscriber. And these days, especially with home businesses and legal or illegal sudividing within a house, one house adds up to more than one subscriber; let's call it 1.2. So, taking your numbers as a starting point, this gives us an existing value of 25 homes x 1.2 = 30 subscribers. 30 x 200 = $6,000 per block. Sewage lines are also increasingly required to be one per home. Even assuming the ever less valid assumption of only single family homes, each of those sewage lines reflects, very conservatively, another $200 of value to be maintained. So we've got another 25 x $200 = $5,000.
Let's be very conservative and assume only another $10,000 in utility line value at stake and move on to street repairs. And we'll calculate value just from that, not from, say, the cost of one preventable fire or any of the other metrics we could use. As we should be admitting by now but generally aren't paying for yet, the way we build streets ain't workin' out so well. As usual, we focus on short term minimized cost and end up having to rebuild the frackin' things way too frequently. Part of what doing this would accomplish would be providing far more stable and substantial foundations under the road. How much do people pay to redo a single driveway these days?
I could get into increased cost of stormwater treatment and management or the huge value of having better access to such services when a new house is being built but let's just say that from what I can see, there's quite a lot of value to such an approach, even in a street of the sort you describe.
Anyway, I'm not going to argue this in any more detail here. After all, there are plenty of higher density areas that could stand to be addressed before "typical" suburban streets would even be under consideration. After all, the very Chicago system you're talking about was a vast success that they're only now starting to publicly calculate the value of. (It got flooded a few years back so now it would all have to be redone and judging from the people I spoke to in Chicago in recent months, it *will* be rebuilt.) In fact there was a thread about this here on /. a few months back.
And to take this more obviously back to the subject of this thread, how much do you value your access to reasonably priced, net neutrality compliant services? 'Cause it looks to me like those are going away in many parts of the country. The current approach ain't working. What are YOU planning to do about it?
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.