I meant to send this to the list, sorry you'll see it twice Travis ;^) -Alex
----- Original Message ----- From: "Hewitt Tech" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Travis Roy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, January 22, 2003 10:04 PM Subject: Re: Email hosting (was: ATTBI/Comcast rant) I recall reading an article in the Globe that suggested at least a couple of reasons that DSL resellers went under. Specifically Harvard Net complained that they would sell DSL to a customer and put an order in with Verizon. Verizon would then wait two months and say "Gee, we don't have the right equipment for that line and no can do". Needless to say, the Harvard Net people were left with egg all over their face and a very angry non-customer. The other issue was the problem of lot's of venture capital looking for a very short term payback. The phone company has amortized their gear literally for decades. Various studies have shown that Ma Bell and the power utilities consistently pay their employees much better than the rest of private industry. That's because as a monopoly their pricing is not closely related to their costs. In Canada, various provincial governments pump money into infrastructure including telecommunications in hopes of attracting employers. They've been somewhat successful but I'm not going to argue that their system is better/worse than the American system. The Canadians have universal health care for ~9 % of GDP while the American health care system at last estimate (about two years ago) was costing around 15% of GDP and rising. The American system has 47 million Americans with little or no health coverage. Taxes in Canada run around 50% when all is said and done. In America taxes have been running around 35-40% but I suspect that the American system is becoming unbalanced with a few fabulously wealthy people and lot's of poor or nearly poor people who are progressively doing worse. I think there needs to be some kind of balance and it needs to be achieved politically. When politics breaks down you get the former Soviet Union. Russia hasn't got an effective revenue collection system and so the place is run more or less with the government acting like the mafia. See? I solved the whole thing! ;^) -Alex P.S. One other problem with this discussion - we really don't have access to the books for the companies in the telecommunications business. We don't know specifically what their revenues are (although AT&T is supposed to have 2.5 million cable-modem customers) and we don't know their true costs. So yes, we know it's expensive to put in commercial grade comm gear but at $50+/month per customer I'd expect them to be making pretty good money if they amortize the expenses over say a 5 year period of time. The on-going costs are replacing broken equipment (I still have my Lan City cable-modem after almost 3 years) and support personnel costs (no idea how many they have and how much they cost). ----- Original Message ----- From: "Travis Roy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, January 22, 2003 9:36 PM Subject: RE: Email hosting (was: ATTBI/Comcast rant) > On Wed, 22 Jan 2003, at 9:04pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > ... There's no "correction" here ... > > Then please explain to me why almost every single DSL > company has gone out of business. Because they're still need Verizon to set up the line for them.. They were very smart to do the following: 1) Be slow 2) Screw up JUST enough 3) just to much They did those to get people to hopefully switch to Verizon DSL, or at least ditch who they were with. And almost every? Please.. Covad is around, as is speakeasy and Earthlink. There's smaller places like MV, DirecTV's DSL service got dumped to push their two way sat service. If I go to dslreports there's still a ton of companies listed... The reason they stuck around.. They either built up their service slow (MV), they already had a good chunk of money (Earthlink) or they were a good alternitive to Verizon (Covad/Speakeasy). I found Vitts to be overpriced for the service they offered, and they came out of nowhere and magically had a ton of VC money to throw around.. They had the look and feel of a HUGE company. Speakeasy was around at the same time but not many people heard of them.. Who's out of business and who's still around? _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
