This is the exact argument we make when speaking with legislatures, city councils and economic development councils (which by the way, mostly dislike the ILEC's methods or subtle and/or direct threats) on why SBC needs to be prevented from just ripping out regulations. The profits many of the 3 large ILEC's receive from just wholesale is mind boggling when you pull the much of the inflated front line costs out it becomes mind boggling. Many of the companies that did choose to build out, data CLEC's like Rhythms's, Covad, etc that made the investments in CO facilities because the nature of their business required it were unable to accomplish it. Do consumers actually belive their phone and broadband prices will not go up when SBC etc are not watched!?
This is the same old story and SOP for SBC. They did the same thing when their sponsored legislation was on the table in Indiana. HB 1148 and HB 1518 favored the ILEC and put forward their agenda. Same commercials ran here, "Man Using Outdated Cell phone", "PDA", etc... These were sponsored by the USTA under the guise of consumer benefits. The bottom line, regardless of which side come you come down on is this- prior to 1996, all of these publicly traded and commercial ILEC's enjoyed a monopolistic competitive advantage. So even if you level the playing field and deregulate all aspects of the telco's, they still start from a point of great advantage because their entire product and service line were built with that advanatge- no competition.
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This is the exact argument we make when speaking with legislatures, city councils and economic development councils (which by the way, mostly dislike the ILEC's methods or subtle and/or direct threats) on why SBC needs to be prevented from just ripping out regulations. The profits many of the 3 large ILEC's receive from just wholesale is mind boggling when you pull the much of the inflated front line costs out it becomes mind boggling. Many of the companies that did choose to build out, data CLEC's like Rhythms's, Covad, etc that made the investments in CO facilities because the nature of their business required it were unable to accomplish it. Do consumers actually belive their phone and broadband prices will not go up when SBC etc are not watched!?
This is the same old story and SOP for SBC. They did the same thing when their sponsored legislation was on the table in Indiana. HB 1148 and HB 1518 favored the ILEC and put forward their agenda. Same commercials ran here, "Man Using Outdated Cell phone", "PDA", etc... These were sponsored by the USTA under the guise of consumer benefits. The bottom line, regardless of which side come you come down on is this- prior to 1996, all of these publicly traded and commercial ILEC's enjoyed a monopolistic competitive advantage. So even if you level the playing field and deregulate all aspects of the telco's, they still start from a point of great advantage because their entire product and service line were built with that advanatge- no competition.