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FCC Leaves Broadband Alone
DaPhreaker writes "As reported by The Industry Standard in this article. The F.C.C has decided to take a hands off approach on the broadband market. " While I would advocate opening the lines up, I think the FCC may have adopted the best position for the next six months - let things sort themselves out more, especially in light of the rising battle between DSL and cable.
If they want whats best for the consumer, shouldn't they allow multiple cable companies to serve's our homes?
oh FP
Hello! I am Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die
To claim that a laissez-faire attitude towards Broadband doesn't in fact create fundamental shifts in the regulatory structure of network access is ludicrous.
One of the prime factors of the Internet's ascent over the past few years has been the tens of thousands of people who chose to start up their own small businesses(guess what--not everything's a startup!) and provide Internet service to people.
While AOL was falling over itself just to pick up the phone, those thousands of people gave personal, real, one on one service to people all across the country--the world, for that matter.
Those of us in the open source world would do well to remember not all development comes from college students--ISPs fund development of critical infrastructure that's used today on an every day basis to keep things running.
I don't know what kind of delusion the FCC is under that AT&T will give up and divest itself of its broadband operations if it is forced to provide copper services to other ISPs. I do know that thousands of ISPs going out of business because the FCC believed the threats of the country's most powerful phone company(of course, being chased heavily by that UUNet/PsiNet/WorldCom/MCI/Sprint behemoth; who needs trusts when you have mergers?) smacks of injustice.
Nobody wants to regulate the net, meanwhile the entire concept behind failing to regulate the net is that self-regulation will occur. Self-regulation is presumed mainly in competitive environments where the failure of one party to "play by the rules" leads to a loss in market share to the gain of a competitor. ADSL and Cable companies are similar enough in corporate structure that both are likely to violate the same concepts that self regulation would be likely to solve.
Thus, the war on self regulation takes its shape as a demand for freedom. Whose freedom, of course, has been muddled substatially.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
> I can think of a few:
> o Standards and interoperability
> o Fair access
> o Monopoly prevention
I can think of a few reasons the government shouldn't regulate these industries. Funny thing is, they're the same reasons you give in favor.
Standards and interoperability:
The market will decide, by weight of demand, what technology will best serve the most people, and at the least cost. Everybody might not get an OC-192, but broadband will eventually make it to everyone.
Fair access:
I don't know what you mean here. Fair access, as in all people from all social strata may access the internet? It's that way *now*, if you can pay the price of admission (which is getting lower every single day).
Monopoly prevention:
Kinda like the phone companies, which are a government-enforced monopoly? I can't, for instance, have a different carrier than SWBell for my land-based phone lines (and DSL) because SWBell has the phone franchise from the government here. As a result, I pay $75/mo. for my land line. Competition in this arena would undoubtedly make this charge go way, way down.
--Corey
Not only will they not deserve liberty or safety, Mr. Franklin, they will be DENIED both!
This makes me extremely pleased.
The fundamental problem right now concerning high speed access is simply:
We can't get anyone to sell it to us!
In my area, which is far from the Boonies, we are not even scheduled to get anything until at least 2002. Regulations would slow this process down even further!
While one medium gaining a larger share of the marketplace is a valid concern... we should get the technology out first! Your average consumer is not going to give a rat's ass whether they are using DSL, cable or whatever... they are going to jump onto the first one available to them (aas long as it is a reasonable price). I believe there will be plenty of competition between the different mediums to keep prices down and to spur further innovations.
Listen folks, the Republican congress is no friend of the consumer. They only care about aggrandizing big business. Remember, these are the folks who de-regulated the cable industries. We all know how well that's gone. Poor customer service. Rampant increase in cost in comparison to inflationary costs and investment in infrastructure.
My cable company went from having 2 plans (basic or expanded) to a "tier" structure giving consumers 3 options. This was done, according to the cable folks, so that customers would only pay for the channels they actually wanted to view. The customers who wanted fewer channels would not have to subsidize other views, they told us.
Here's how it really works. The cable companies have shifted a good majority of the cable channels that used to be part of the basic service to the top tier. This is all done under the guise of giving you, the consumer, more choice. More money out of your pocket. Cable companies don't offer a la carte programming. When asked why not, they never give a reason. Local sports programming that used to be included as part of basic service is now part of the top tier service.
Opening up broadband will not weaken the cable companies any more than opening up the phone system to independent carriers weakened the local telephone monopolies. It's called competition. Not too many people in business want to compete anymore. And we all lose out.
I decided to opt of the cable service. Unfortunately, I won't have that luxury with broadband.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
While I agree that de-regulation has improved competition from the break-up of monopolistic groups, such as the AT&T breakup in 1984, and that the hands-off approach helps in many ways, I see one problem:
The FCC also decided to take a complete hands-off approach to cellular phone standards. Each company was allowed to create or support whatever they wanted, and as a result we have PCS, GSM, and a host of other incompatible standards. The Europeans, who are usually much more pro-standards" than we are, are now years ahead of the US in cellular technology...because they were able to agree on using GSM.
I have no problem with having the broadband market open, but it would be nice if there was a STANDARD so that I could take my broadband box/TV/whatever to some other state and sign up with a different company without having to worry that the damn thing won't work because my box uses FOO, but my new provider only supports BAR.
Ich suche die Leidenschaft, die keine Leiden schafft.
- Since the cable company has an exclusive on the local broadband market, the customer can expect to see useless "services" layered into their bill.
- Access to other ISP's will be slower and/or more difficult.
- Should the phone company roll out xDSL, these mega-companies can be expected to behave like the airlines: when one of them adds a "service" or raises prices, the other will too. Customer choice will all but vanish.
The FCC should have bitten the bullet and kicked the cable companies (and the phone companies) out of the content business. Entities which supply bandwidth should not be able to tie that product to a particular brand of content; the customer should be able to go anywhere for pay content, or forego it entirely and only visit free sites. The only thing the monopoly cable/phone companies should be allowed to do is move data; everything else should be the province of independent, free-market suppliers.--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
While I am against large monopolies just as I should be, there are other factors involved with the government just opening up the cable lines. Think of this analogy. You are a farmer, and you have spent years cultivating and building up your farm. Your soil is finally nice, and you are having abundance of crops. What if the government told you that you have to let other farmers use the land with you have nutured for the last few years. Its the same principle. The cable companies have spend many years and millions and millions of dollars to upgrade there networks. Why should they have to let others use there network, if these other people have had no part in building the network in the first place. Its a free ride for these companies that are riding other the cable companies years of hard work. Nothing was stoping these other people from building large fiber networks while the cable company were upgrading theres.
Jeff Knox
The current state of broadband access is shockingly incosistent. Consider the following:
In my hometown of Hammond, IN, AT&T is offering cable Internet access, or at the very least the service is imminent. Hammond has _some_ commercial growth, but is far from being a booming metropolis. And 56k doesn't even work properly yet... we get better results not using it and connecting reliably at 28.8k!
Our infamous neighbors, Gary, are also slated to get the same AT&T cable Internet "soon". However, I can't imagine who in that city could afford the $40 a month, and the equipment is liable to get stolen the day after you get it. (I may be exaggerating, but there is a definite poverty and crime problem there)
Meanwhile, in Milwaukee, home of all things American (well, Miller beer and Harley-Davidson motorcycles anyway...) and location of Marquette, my university, AT&T simply says cable Internet is not available. That might have something to do with the fact that our cable provider is Time Warner and not TCI^H^H^HAT&T.
But, it gets worse... Road Runner cable Internet service (I hope it's faster than their Web site) is not scheduled to be launched until sometime in 2000. In fact, we don't even have digital cable yet, while at my real home we've had it for a couple of years!
It doesn't make any sense... How can a relatively insignificant place such as NW Indiana be more technically advanced than a large, important, All-American city such as Milwaukee???
Oh wait... NW Indiana is in the Greater Chicago Area(TM), even though it's across the state line, so I guess it automatically gets all the benefits that Chicago gets. My bad.
Still, I would not expect such a long delay between large cities getting these technological advancements. It doesn't make any sense!
Can we point to the FCC's complacency as a root cause of this, or are the cable companies at fault?
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Here I go again, this is basically a repost that I have posted at least 20 times about this issue but I guess I will have to keep syaing this over and over and over. Cause people still don't get it.
First thing Tau, content doesn't have jack to do with anything here, we are talking about bandwidth. I don't pay Time Warner for their pretty little pictures. I pay them for my 800kbps downloads. And secondly who paid for the copper at this point is irrelevant (sp?), the fact is cable companies control the copper. For all practical puposes it is thiers. Besides when you are talking about the grants, those didn't include switches, routers, and hubs. That came from the cable companies pockets. And that is quite a pretty penny. But even that doesn't matter because the competition that your advocating will amount to absolutely nothing.
What people don't realize here is that allowing ISPs to terminate connection across the cable companiy's copper is not going to create the competition that will effect the level of service people recieve. The cable company will still run the show when it comes to the physical layer. Understanding that, any logical person will come to the conclusion that the cable company will still have controll on your level of service, no matter who you are paying for your IP address. You will still pay the cable company for the connection, and then you will pay you ISP for the ip address. The cable company is still gonna get your cash for the bandwidth. The only competition that is taking place here is for the ip address. It would be exactly like a dialup. You have bad line noise on your phone and can't hit a 56k connection? Your ISP can't do anything about it. This will hold true in an open cable network. You have extreme latency on your neighborhood segement? Your ISP can't do anything about it. The only compititon that will effect your level of service is competition of the PHYSICAL LAYER!!!!!!!! Open access advocates are trying to fix a glass table with sledgehammer here. Wrong tool, it won't get the job done. Open acces will do nothing for anbody except shoot the consumer broadband market in the foot. I had put this with my orginal post but Hemos took it out, (I am sure most people are getting sick of me saying this but)The consumer broadband market it too young for the FEDS to be muking around with it. Case Closed, End of Story.
root@localbrain root>ps ax |grep thoughtd
He doesn't have enough time. He has about a year left in his tenure. Right now he is fighting hard for low-power radio. The radio industry says it will interfere, minority groups (the ones who could now have radio stations) say that it won't with another set of independant tests. Kennard is also fighting with congress over ownership caps. Ownership of cable, which AT&T might be violating, and network coverage, both from the CBS/Viacom and Clear Channal/AMFM mergers (That's over a 1,200 radio stations/35 TV stations in the U.S.).
Kennard is plenty busy to try and even BEGIN to tackle the Internet. Trust me, this will be a big issue. The next FCC Chairman will most likely tackle the 'Net. And, correct me if I'm wrong, the President appoints (nominates) the position. So VOTE, dammit.
+&x