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SCOTUS Rules Incumbent Telcos Must Share Network Access At Cost
schwit1 writes with news, as reported by Bloomberg, which will likely have bearing on (like it or not) regulation of peering among Internet carriers: "Established local telephone companies including AT&T Inc. must share disputed parts of their networks with competitors at cost, the US Supreme Court ruled. The unanimous ruling backs the position taken by the Federal Communications Commission in a fight stemming from the 1996 law that injected competition into the local telephone business. The law requires so-called incumbent local carriers, whose ranks also include Verizon Communications Inc. and CenturyLink Inc., to share their facilities with rivals."
Enable competition and break the local monopolies of the cable companies. Expand this to include cable providers!
The ruling was a victory for Talk America Inc. in its fight with AT&T’s Michigan Bell Telephone unit. The case centered on so-called entrance facilities -- the wires or cables that connect the networks of two carriers. AT&T argued unsuccessfully that those lines aren’t covered by the 1996 law.
There, now you've read the entire article
If you lose 9-0 at the Supreme Court that means you pretty much had no case.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
They'll find other ways to screw you. If your service is interrupted and you're using Verizon lines but aren't a Verizon customer, your work order goes to the bottom of the pile. If the pile isn't large, they'll still leave some cushion room in case a flood of calls come in from their own customers. And they won't move you up when that flood doesn't arrive.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Verizon was handed an infrastructure paid for by years of taxes and government granted monopolies, if they can't make a profit with that kind of setup then they deserve to lose.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Except all those cars are bought with tax payer money.
Yes, they do look silly.
A business has more interest than just the hardware and infrastructure. They is also support, customer service, national availability, etc... There are many ways in which Verizon could remain the better option for a company to pick, they just don't get to be the only option.
If your analysis was correct, Verizon wouldn't be able to compete and would be losing massive amounts of money and be fighting for survival. Seeing as the are instead making huge profits, something pretty much has to be wrong with your arguments.
As an actual telecom attorney, I'd just like to clarify that this ruling applies very narrowly to the use of entrance facilities (wires running into telco offices) for the purpose of interconnection. The dispute centered on an order from the FCC that excluded these facilities from regulation under one part of the 1996 Telecommunications Act that requires unbundled access to network elements that are necessary for competing service providers and would impair their ability to provide service if they were denied access. A separate section of the Act requires telcos to provide cost-based access to network facilities for the purpose of interconnection. AT&T claimed that the order meant that they did not have to provide access to entrance facilities under either statutory provision. A competing provider, took them to court over it, the FCC filed a brief stating that AT&T was required to provide the facilities for the purpose of interconnection, and the Supreme Court endorsed the FCC view. That's it. This opinion does not expand the rights of competitors to unbundled access to incumbent networks in any general sense.
Don't forget to include the part about the car dealership being able to park their cars on private property anywhere in the county - the first 10-12 feet of "right of way" along the road doesn't really belong to you any more, though you're obligated to pay taxes for it and to maintain it. In my parents' community, the local cable company was granted eminent domain by the city government to run buried cable services *anywhere* on private property, at the cable company's discretion (i.e. to cost-shift installation expenses onto the private land owner with no compensation.) So there's a five foot strip of land across their back yard they're prohibited from using (no fences, no outbuildings, no digging) because of the cable install. The city treats it like a municipal utility, when in fact it is *very* not.
She was forced to compete against other companies reselling Verizon's own hardware/infrastructure cheaper than Verizon could because Verizon had more overhead as a larger company.
The problem with this argument is that overhead tends to shrink as companies grow in size as a percentage of net income. This is why Walmart has cheaper prices than Joe's General Store. Walmart's overhead, as a percentage, is far lower than Joe's.
To say that Verizon has more overhead than third parties is completely misleading. Third party overhead, as a percentage, was far more expensive on a per-service basis. True, Verizon may have had higher percentage overhead on advertising, but that is also part of their ability to out-compete a third party, even if a third party is at a lower cost. Verizon also has a much more well staffed service center. But this is a completely different "service" they can offer, but a third party could not. If a third party tried to compete with a support service center, their percentage of overhead would have been outrageously higher than Verizon.
Verizon nor AT&T are not "screwed" by selling their lines at cost any more than Walmart is screwed by Joe for selling the exact same products. Joe's overhead, as a percentage, and confined to "services" he offers is costlier. And second, Walmart can offer more "services" (more lanes, more selection, more locations, etc) than Joe ever could, and should Joe try to compete in those services, his costs will be a higher percentage than Walmart.
This makes complete economic sense, where-as your post does not. Because, if you were right, it would make no sense for Verizon or AT&T to want to purchase other providers or grow in any way. If it is more economically burdening to grow, then they would fight tooth and nail not to grow. Walmart and Costco wouldn't exist, nor would national brands. In fact, even the general store probably wouldn't exist in such a system.
But that's simply not how the economics work. While your libertarian leaning ideals may be well placed, your economic reasoning for them falls apart. Because, in fact, as a percentage, Verizon can sell its own services cheaper than a third party (at cost), because nowhere in the equation are they getting a free ride.
I8-D
>Do my statements look silly now?
It is generally accepted by everyone that economies of scale translate into less overhead (less administration per 1000 workers, etc). Smaller companies have higher relative overhead.
This is the argument given /every single time/ for mergers and acquisitions.
If Verizon's relative overhead is larger than that of smaller companines, it's a sure sign that Verizon's overhead is bloated.
So yes, your arguments are silly from any sane economic perspective.
--
BMO
That's the point *they* didn't pay for it, WE did.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
hell yeah. fuck verizon
Fuck you and your straw man.
The network will exist and function well regardless of the fate of Verizon et al. because there are vast numbers of rate payers that will pay for service. It just may not be capable of floating a powerful, vertically integrated company and its army of lobbyists and Hollywood power brokers.. It would, instead, exist among smaller, less powerful and more focused organizations that make their money by competing for rate payers, rather than exclusive media contracts, collusion and tax manipulation.
Our nation has been through this multiple times now. Eventually you get monopolies. Whether though well intentioned public policy or lawful aggregation in the market, you end up with huge beasts haunting the halls of power for their own benefit, if not survival.
You break them up. You define geographic or market boundaries and you slice them up. The natural boundaries for network operators are geography AND product; there is no need or benefit to a vertically integrated COMCASTDISNEYBELLSOUTHTIMEWARNERUNIVERSALAT&T monster. Let the content producers make content and the network operators sell bits. Common carrier.
Obvious, simple and correct. Politically feasible? Not with numpties like you walking around.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Well, it's interesting to note that here in Canada, we have the exact opposite - the big telecommunications companies pretty much have free reign except for some small legal matters.
E.g., the FCC mandates that consumers must have choice in set top boxes, so CableCARD was created. Sure it's iffy, but at least you guys get to have "premium" PVRs like TiVo, Moxi, Windows Media Center, etc fully working with digital cable. Here we have to put up with cableco provided boxes that only work with that cableco. They won't activate any equipment you didn't buy from them even if it's identical.
Point 2 - UBB. The CRTC rule that jacked up DSL rates was changed from (cost+%) to (retail price-%). So if the incumbent sold DSL for $20/month and it cost them $10 to provide, instead of the ISP paying say, $12/month and providing service with the remaining $8 (the way it was), the rules changed so the ISP must pay say $18 (10% off retail) for the line. That's why TekSavvy had to jack up prices.
Hell, the only provider that seemed to have done a decent thing was Shaw by announcing new limits and plans that even include an unlimited service. Probably because they were bleeding customers and feared the government might end up stepping in with regulation. Bell and Rogers though... bleh.
Free market, indeed. Sometimes I wish our CRTC had balls like the FCC.
Full disclosure: I work for a major telco, but want to keep my job, so I'm posting AC.
If your service is interrupted and you're using Verizon lines but aren't a Verizon customer, your work order goes to the bottom of the pile. If the pile isn't large, they'll still leave some cushion room in case a flood of calls come in from their own customers. And they won't move you up when that flood doesn't arrive.
This is incorrect.
How a trouble ticket is handled depends entirely upon how the customer opened the ticket. It also depends on what level of service they requested at the outset, and how often they call to escalate the ticket.
If your circuit is taking errors every couple of hours, but you call it in as down hard? We're going to resolve the ticket as "No Trouble Found", because the automated testing will have completed faster than the problem could be found. This can also happen if the circuit is taking enough errors to take it down for you, but not enough to impede the automated testing to the CPE.
And of course, if you call in a ticket as taking massive errors, or even better, down hard, but then don't give us test release?
Then yes. Your ticket will get degraded to a pri-2, put on customer time and go into the holding bucket until you call in with a test release. To be fair, if the circuit is actually dead, most of the techs will ignore the "do not test" and test anyway to find the source of the trouble.
So opening a ticket with the correct trouble description, giving us test release, and providing us with access hours, local contacts and phone numbers will go a very, very, VERY long way to getting your service restored. (God, I wish I had a penny for every time I had to waste 30 minutes to track down a local contact. I'd be rich as Croesus.)
Also, bear in mind, yours isn't the only circuit in the world. We've got LOTS of other circuits that are down, and they all need our attention. And as with anything in this world, squeaky wheels get greased faster than quiet ones. This is why we have escalations. If you are diligent and call in every hour to escalate your ticket, I promise you, it WILL get seen to. In the case of DS3 or above circuits, that usually happens pretty fast already, because DS3s can carry 28 T1 circuits, or a mix of T1 and DS0 circuits. That means a dead DS3 can have 28 or MORE very angry customers.
Trust me. We try to move on those as fast as possible.
Higher than DS3 means either one of the Tellabs or Alcatels shit the bed, and believe me, they do it a lot. Or worse, we've got a fibercut out there somewhere. Now we're talking hundreds of customers, all with tickets, all escalating, all pissed off.
Of course, this all depends on where the circuit goes. Just because you bought it through us, doesn't mean it follows our lines all the way to your building. It probably goes through a local exchange carrier, or LEC. If that happens, now WE are at the mercy of the LEC, and all we can do is the same thing YOU do, and keep escalating. And if you thought hold times were bad when YOU call in for an update, hold times for us means putting the phone on speaker for at least half an hour or more. *cough*att*COUGH*frntier*
If you're an ISP, then chances are very good that you'll be supplying service to local emergency services. Police, fire, EMS or state government, even federal government. If that's the case, then those circuits will have a Telecommunications Service Priority, or TSP code. This translates to "Fix Me First!". TSP circuits over-ride all others. A LEC must dispatch on a TSP, regardless of overtime concerns or union regulations. The only thing that trumps TSP is safety, and calling a halt to repairs because of safety will mean an investigation later on, so it'd better be genuine.
TSP is also hereditary. If your piddly little DS0 has a TSP-2 rating, then the shared T1, and that shared T1's DS3 also carry the TSP-2 rating. We see this a lot with railroa