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Kentucky Telephone Companies Pushing For Option To End Basic Service
An anonymous reader writes "There is a bill pending in the Kentucky State Senate that would eliminate almost all Public Service Commission oversight over local phone companies. Written by AT&T lobbyists, SB135 is being pushed by the phone companies as a 'modernization' of rules. It would keep the PSC from investigating phone service on its own and eliminate rules concerning price discrimination, price increases, required published rates, and performance objectives. It also will prevent any state agency from imposing net neutrality, and will enable phone companies to use the fact that there are cell phones to refuse to run a land line. The text of the bill is available online."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2BfqDUPL1I
I can see allowing them to do all that, as soon as they are no longer the only choice in town, oh and all the subsidies that the government paid for installing the lines need to be paid back as well.
This sounds like a fine idea. But since they're truly free of regulatory shackles, they should have no problem paying whatever market rate the city wishes to charge them to rent the space under the streets that their lines run through.
But they really are sore losers.
FTFA
“This is one of the reasons we (wanted to buy) T-Mobile, so we could build out the wireless spectrum and offer higher speeds and higher quality coverage to all of Kentucky, including Harlan County," Rateike said.
Right. I'm sure that was on the first page of the Powerpoint shown to the FCC.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
If connecting GMRS and MURS stations to the phone system were legal, this would be an easier problem to solve. People in rural areas could set up wireless services for themselves, essentially creating their own cooperative cell phone networks.
Not that the telcos want to change those regulations.
Palm trees and 8
Anyone see anything wrong with this picture?
If you need any evidence why privatizing government services is a bad idea this is it.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Right now it's illegal for anyone to run phone cable in ATT or verizon's territory. they have government backed monopolies of these areas. Sure, they are forced to share bandwidth with other providers but those providers have no control over the cable or the prices charged for using it.
Open it up so that other companies are allowed to run cable. They might now run cable... no one will be forcing them to do it. But they'll have the option and maybe if ATT acts badly that will give a rival company an incentive to step in and offer a superior service at a lower price.
All these old grandfathered monopolies need to die. Throw holy water in their eyes, jam a fist full of garlic in their mouths, and drive a wooden stake through their hearts.
If they competed without these rules they'd never even consider this sort of nonsense. Their competitors would eat them alive... probably with fave beans
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
This is the fate of the US phone system. Once there are fewer than a basic minimum number of subscribers it will become extremely unprofitable to even maintain the wires that have connected the country for 80+ years. You can assume that the wires will not be maintained out of charity.
Best be getting a cell phone is what that means. Oh, your rural area is underserved by cell towers? Too bad, that. Better move to the city where service is better.
Did you not think flight from landline service would have consequences? It sure does, and it is really going to suck for some people. Aren't you glad you dropped your land line ages ago?
There is no way the government can somehow force the telephone companies to maintain service at a huge loss. They aren't going to do it. And that means the end of the universal nature of the US phone system. This is a direct outgrowth of people dropping land line (regulated) service for an unregulated cell phone service.
Fuck you too, AT&T!
I'm normally a peaceful guy, but this one calls for a flogging (at the polls).
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I really don't understand why people aren't taking this into their own hands. Why limit yourself to wireless or nothing at all? Lay fiber. It really is not hard. Rural communities must have people who know how to move dirt. Commercially that's the most expensive part. I'm sure you'll find a bunch of geeks who would love to learn by doing the rest, except the dirt moving bit. Phone service is trivial once you have steady and fast internet access. That's what VoIP is for.
Given that Kentucky sends to the Senate TWO of the WORST IDIOTS, it would appear likely that Kentucky will probably just end up screwing itself ... if the same kind of people are also in their legislature.
Business, especially big business, simply cannot be trusted and needs government supervision. Fox. Hen house.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Hold the phone, Alexander Graham, what the fuck are "AT&T lobbyists" doing writing laws? Am I the only one whose gore rises whenever our legislators vote on laws that are written by the companies the government is supposed to regulate?
The US gov't is tasked with regulating business just as surely and as constitutionally as it is tasked with protecting national security. So where are the congressional hearings about why industry lobbyists are writing laws?
Right here on Slashdot, we've got a user, and early adopter, who is a New Hampshire legislator. A member of the lower house of the N.H. congress, and he's a big fan of ALEC, which is an acronym that stands for "19 billionaires who lobby for their own rich asses" or something like that. It probably actually stands for "American Legislation Exchange Committee for Family Prosperity and Progress into the Victorious Future", but if I go to their website to get the actual meaning of the acronym I'm liable to throw another 24" LED monitor ($179 at Tiger Direct) against the fucking wall and my wife swore she wasn't going to help me clean it up if I did that again.
Anyway, this ALEC, this lobbying group for these 19 rich guys (yes, it really is 19) is responsible for writing almost all the major legislation passed by every Republican-controlled state congress in the US. That's right, these guys send out boilerplate to GOP run state legislatures who plug in the name of their state where it says "Your State Name Here" on the PDF file that ALEC so helpfully sends them attached to an email with the subject line, "FWD:Pass this bill, you slimy little fuck or we'll put $5million into a primary challenge against you next election and you'll never see another envelope from us".
Anyway, this New Hampshire legislator, Seth Cohn, who thinks ALEC is just the tits tells me ALEC is just a friendly organization who advises legislators and gives them "good, clean code" to work with, as if ALEC was the teabagger equivalent of O'Reilly Publishing or the Open Source Initiative or something. Of course, these ALEC-written laws include laws to make sure blacks and poor people and students can't vote, and prisons get privatized and certain energy conglomerates get fat tax subsidies and schools change their science curriculum to teach the "controversy" that is global warming, but to this Slashdot user/New Hampshire congressperson, it's just "good code".
Lobbyists writing our laws. What could possibly go wrong?
Wait, wait, I've got something here...OK, this is something that dirty hippie, Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1816, and I'll leave you with this:
That's almost 200 years ago, from one of the dudes that invented this country. He already knew where it was going and he warned us. So when I read about "AT&T lobbyists" writing SB135, it makes me want to go out and occupy something like maybe some lobbyist's fat ass with my shoe.
You are welcome on my lawn.
We today live in an age of rampant deregulation in many large industries, and many people and politicians believe that corporations will act responsibly without regulation. But let me bring you back to a prior age, the Gilded age and the Progressive era. In post industrial revolution america there was a serious lack of workplace and corporate regulations, the most famous of these was the meatpacking industry. In "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclaire, the meat packing industry was uncovered as to its disgusting an unethical business practices, the gory details of which you can read in the well written novel.
In a round about way, many people believe that deregulation is good, and this bill is an excellent example of deregulation, and may in fact be beneficial, but history has taught us that businesses will not act responsibly, a prime example being Northern Securities, a railroad trust operating in the northern Midwest, which was busted apart by Roosevelt in 1904. The railroads in the midwest had been engaging in price discrimination for years, which had been seriously hurting midwestern farmers, and were detrimental to the nations economy, benefiting only the elite few.
I fear only that deregulation in the celular industry will benefit only the corporations and will hurt end consumers. I also fear that many influential individuals have not adequately learned many of the valuable lessons that history has taught us, especially from this deregulated time in American history.
I will admit that some of my fears amy be unfounded, there are still many protective regulations, and many of the monopolies that allowed for price discrimination that was seen cannot exist any more.
I doubt there are any lack of geeks who wouldn't love to get behind the wheel of a backhoe.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
As a citizen immigrant to Harlan County, I can speak to the lack of coverage here. Appalachian Wireless, the local major CDMA carrier, does provide a large coverage area. AT&T, the most popular wireless provider in the area, does not. Verizon does have a single tower, as does T-Mobile (though I can't understand why), though their coverage is non-existent beyond the Harlan city limits.
AT&T acquiring T-Mobile would in no way expand their service offerings to the rest of the county/surrounding area. They have absolutely no interest in improving service quality or speed, as we are extremely small potatoes when compared to their major metro customers.
The thing is that AT&T already has sufficient spectrum licensed to cover the entire mountain-riddled county, if they so desired. They have repeatedly and consistently stated that they have no intentions of expanding their current coverage zones in the county. The last tower erected for AT&T was only done so after they lost more than 2500 customers (as if that is a lot) to Appalachian Wireless.
As it stands, T-Mobile's coverage is simply a token to say that they have it, just like that of Verizon. AT&T's call quality is abysmal, their prices are too high for the services offered and their data speed is basically unusable, as they only offer overloaded, under-provisioned EDGE. At least Verizon and Appalachian Wireless offer EVDO.
If you live in Harlan County and own an AT&T iPhone, you learn to love sporadic open wireless hotspots, or you suck it up and pay AT&T for a Microcell. Right, because paying AT&T not to improve their infrastructure clearly sounds like a fair deal for the customer.
This place is often a great example of "The Land That Time Forgot."