Letters to the Editor
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End corporate subsidies, pipeline monopolies?
How many dollars in corporate subsidies does a company like AT&T get? "What they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it." Your pipes, Whitacre? How long have you been CEO of AT&T?
You have a corporation like Comcast that can use its influence to keep cable monopolies in regions of Philadelphia, block RCN from laying fiber optics in Philadelphia, and receive $20-30 million in tax abatements (I think) to build a skyscraper in Philadelphia.
Admittedly, this is partly a political problem where voters should be able to vote the councilmembers allowing this insanity out of office. But if a company like Comcast, which gets so much from governments, were to claim (perhaps it does already), as AT&T does, that somehow its network is its alone, in the sense that it alone paid for it, using no one else's money, it would be incorrect.
And P.S.: Let's work toward ways to ensure a smooth transition away from corporate personhood and towards human-focused and humane corporate policies.
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Internet2.
"As [Internet2] developed, though, all of our research and practical experience supported the conclusion that it was far more cost effective to simply provide more bandwidth."
If AT&T is truly worried about how it is going to justify the expense of laying fiber, why don't they charge for using more bandwidth? Let every start and stop point have a certain level of bandwidth included with their connection fee, then bump it up when that level of bandwidth is exceeded. Compare to cell phones giving 400 minutes per month with the phone, then charging a per minute fee for excess. That seems like the egalitarian solution to their worry about how to recoup their costs.
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It's a utility.
If Whiteacre doesn't want to be in utilities, then why is he at a phone company?
The big 3 really ought to respond to this with their own wireless network.
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DSL? Who buys that?
If the phone company wants to gouge people for DSL service, I say let them. The phone co's were at least 10 years late in delivering DSL. They crippled the technology in order to charge more for T1 and ISDN services. They STILL haven't worked out all the technical bugs so that people unfortunate to get it are subject to months and months of delay followed by months and months of technical glitches. The max speed of retail DSL is less than 40% of the max speed you can get from cable. Cable runs better, it runs faster, it has better customer service and they can provision your service in days.
So if your phone company wants to further cripple their own service, let them. Like all the other retail services the phone company ever marketed it will die a small death before it ever starts.
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Baloney about "our lines" from AT&T
AT&T seems to forget that they already get subsidized by us "consumers" by all the right-of-ways their lines are on. They didn't have to buy that land to run their lines, the government paid with out tax dollars for that line. Why would someone want to pay for high-speed service and yet only get whatever crap is willing to pay for preferred access, and the stuff they really want to bring through the internet come through slowly? I don't think it'd be long before customers started complaining that what they want isn't coming through at the speeds they're paying to receive. That, in my view, is fraud.
--Ron
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The US is already backwards and low tech
Wht stop our falling behind now? If the government cared about the US and the internet they would allow municiple broadband wireless. As it is we have to go through monopolies to get slow service.
The US doesn't get the good cars, the good cell phones, or the good internet connections. Things are going to get worse before they get better.
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Comments on comments
- Re: DSL vs Cable, remember that the speed of cable depends on how many people are using it. DSL runs directly to your house; cable runs to a group of houses in your neighborhood. The cable pipe is bigger, but the more people use it, the slower it runs.
- Re: Why don't they limit your bandwidth, most likely that's because the amount of work they'd have to do to have performance management running on everybody's line is cost-prohibitive. What they'll probably do instead is configure the same kinds of lines for all people, then throttle down the ones who don't pay. In addition to that, they may put DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) on top, and then shove data using certain types of packets into faster queues (read: the HOV lane).
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Wake up people!
How is it that this extremely important article gets barely a whisper of feedback on Salon? There is no issue more important to the future of the Internet and freedom itself than net neutrality!
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Got to Love Their Balls
"What disturbs them is that we're building network capacity to be able to accommodate ourselves with a very high-quality product, and the Googles won't be able to deliver the same quality."
So in effect AT&T wants to create a vertical monopoly in which they give their own content for sale priority over other vendor's content. While the current Republican controlled government is not likely to get in their way, a future congress will put a stop to their plans. The interesting thing is that AT&T sees one of the largest oppurtunities in streaming on demand video and if there is anything a telecom should know its that nothing comes between an American consumer and his favorit show. You can spy on him, you can lie to him, but you better not mess with his shows or there will be hell to pay.
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what would Hillary do?
The FCC is currently allowing a duopoly to exist between the dominant phone companies and the dominant cable companies, which they believe should create competition. But it doesn't. It creates a duopoly. Prices have not fallen in the US for broadband. Service has not increased. Speed of delivery and badwidth has not grown. And it's not going to.
Japan undertook the building of a massive government-directed, but private-sector built high speed network that covers most of its country, both urban and rural. The Council on Foreign Relations published a good summary of the American duopoly and the forward-thinking policy decisions that had to be made and rolled out by the Japanese to install its network:
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050501faessay84311/thomas-bleha/down-to-the-wire.html
Japanese consumers pay less than Americans currently do for broadband and enjoy far higher bandwidth speeds. Nationwide programs in Japan are usually more "socialist" in nature and don't face the kind of political opposition they do in this country. The Japanese saw that an entirely wired country with exceptionally high speed access in homes and offices (and an extensively used extant wireless infrastructure) would ensure their country was primed for the future and for massive future economic benefit in efficiencies and technologies--to be created and determined by its citizens.
The benefits we are enjoying in this country under the current broadband arrangement come to us in the form of the service we already have and dividends to shareholders on a retail product being sold under a government sanctioned duopoly. Is it worth more to us as a nation to have the current telecom and cable structure fall, but to be able to take the benefit not in dividends, but in lower monthly telecom expenditures and more competitive service. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that a fully wired America where the federal government takes the lead in establishing a network that doesn't prejudge conent is a country that will have a "competitive edge" and an economic tool in the world economy that would put our current beliefs in telecommunications behind us.
What's odd is that the private sector/publicly-traded corporate structure that did so well building the telecommunications infrastructure in our country, is the same structure that is now going to inhibit its growth and by extension our country's future position in the world of work and services and access. Smaller countries and third world countries have far greater capabilities to establish blazing fast networks and reap the economic benefits that will accrue to them than we will. If Washington continues down its current path...