Re: Email hosting (was: ATTBI/Comcast rant)
... There's no correction here ... Then please explain to me why almost every single DSL company has gone out of business. This is certainly not authoritative but I've heard that, despite the ruling that ordered the telcos to allow their competitors (CLECs ?) access to their COs, many DSL providers routinely found that access denied or impeded such that they were obliged to waste time and money on hiring lawyers and filing grievances, with the result that many of the smaller ones (which otherwise had a half-decent chance of making a go of it) went under. Didn't the FCC recently announce that the telcos might no longer be required to provide such access? Sweet deal! ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: Email hosting (was: ATTBI/Comcast rant)
This is certainly not authoritative but I've heard that, despite the ruling that ordered the telcos to allow their competitors (CLECs ?) access to their COs, many DSL providers routinely found that access denied or impeded such that they were obliged to waste time and money on hiring lawyers and filing grievances, with the result that many of the smaller ones (which otherwise had a half-decent chance of making a go of it) went under. That's why most dsl providers just resell Verizon's DSL lines. I asked my buddy at MV about it, this is also usually what Earthlink does --- What most providers of DSL do, is wholesale from a fabric provider. Usually it is barely worth it as the fabric providers are also selling directly to the public too. So the price they sell to you is just a little below what they sell it at. That, in a nutshell, is why the fabric providers have problems. For example, if a fabric provider (whether it is verizon, choice-one, or anyone else) is selling to the public at $49.95 for an entry level DSL line. They may be selling to ISPs at something like $29.00 per line. A large company then ends up putting a line on the bill that says DSL is $49.95 but the bill actually goes up by $54.95 because there are about $5.00 in taxes on the line but the customer never sees a special entry, instead the normal taxes that they're paying go up. A customer won't notice it because things like telephone bills are usually the same each and every month. The ISP then has to pay $29.00 for the line, plus the same $5.00 in taxes, making the cost of the line $34.00. Now, the ISP must turn around and try to sell this line that they're paying $34.00 at a competitve price, say $49.00 meaning that they make $15.00 per line. They're then supposed to make that $15 cover all the ISP costs, billing, support, bandwidth, servers, personel, etc.. Oh, and the ISP can pass the tax along, but it won't remain hidden making the end user think that the large company is cheaper; especially as the large company can afford to give away a free modem and installation (even though they charge the ISP $125 for the modem and $60 for installation -- which at a profit of $15.00 takes over a year to recoup). Sorry, do I sound tainted? ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: Email hosting (was: ATTBI/Comcast rant)
On Thu, 23 Jan 2003, at 8:38am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think we would all appreciate *some* form of competition in the high-speed ISP market. Just for the record, let me reiterate that (1) I'm no fan of any monopoly, (2) I hate Verizon (nee Bell Atlantic nee NYNEX nee New England Telephone) more than most people here will ever know, (3) I think there does need to be more competition in this and several other markets, (4) I'm sure both Verizon and Comcast aren't bending over backwards to keep their rates low. Hopefully, this will be my last message in this thread. :-) -- Ben Scott [EMAIL PROTECTED] | The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do | | not represent the views or policy of any other person or organization. | | All information is provided without warranty of any kind. | ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: Email hosting (was: ATTBI/Comcast rant)
In a message dated: Thu, 23 Jan 2003 08:58:11 EST [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: Hopefully, this will be my last message in this thread. :-) I hope so too :) -- Seeya, Paul -- Key fingerprint = 1660 FECC 5D21 D286 F853 E808 BB07 9239 53F1 28EE It may look like I'm just sitting here doing nothing, but I'm really actively waiting for all my problems to go away. If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right! ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: Email hosting (was: ATTBI/Comcast rant)
Yeah, I agree with Ben. The market is correcting itself. I'm paying $99 a month for SDSL, and I don't even get that high a speed: 144kbps up and down. However, I don't have the onerous restrictions that Verizon and other providers slap on their customers and I have a static IP, great for hosting web and email. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: Email hosting (was: ATTBI/Comcast rant)
On Wed, 22 Jan 2003, Hewitt Tech stated in their Email: hewitt From: Hewitt Tech [EMAIL PROTECTED] hewitt To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] hewitt Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2003 19:26:40 -0500 hewitt Subject: Re: Email hosting (was: ATTBI/Comcast rant) hewitt hewitt Ah yes, but why, after a pile of telecommunications companies hewitt went bankrupt laying thousands of miles of buried fibre-optics hewitt cables are we still talking about dial-up connections? What hewitt *does* it cost to deliver high speed? For that matter, I think hewitt copper/fibre is passé. It should be possible to use wireless hewitt and it ought to be dirt cheap. When Mediaone delivered hewitt cable-modem service in our area they thought they'd be doing hewitt well if they got a 3% penetration. One of their techs told me hewitt that in fact they were achieving 17% and higher depending on hewitt the town they were operating in. I know there has been a big hewitt improvement in the speed of connections over the last few hewitt years but we're not exactly using 110 baud modems anymore are hewitt we? Should I expect to pay $100k for a shiny 2.8 gig P4 hewitt computer? Ah the good old days, not! Oh yeah - I remember buying an ATT 8MHz 8086 PC, twin floppies, no HDU, mono (green) monitor, 640KB RAM, and I paid twice what I just paid for a shiny new Athlon with 512MB DDR memory (another 64MB on video card), 60GB HDU, CD-burner, 19 flat-panel... but I have to admit, I still have that old 8086 ;) hewitt hewitt -Alex hewitt hewitt P.S. What we're seeing here is a consolidation of providers hewitt who can get away with high prices because they are monopolies. hewitt Verizon hasn't exactly pushed DSL and most of the companies hewitt that depended on them to provide the lines were driven out of hewitt business. These guys really aren't competing. I saw a hewitt discussion on the Libranet mailing list recently where some hewitt Canadians were relating the cost of DSL and cable-modem in hewitt their areas. They were paying about 1/3 of what we pay. This is beginning to sound like a broken record! First it was prescription drugs - up north the senior citizens have buses which transport them to Canada to fill their prescriptions (some companies are even opening up store fronts to eliminate the trip), and now it's the hi-tech world. While I agree with Ben on how drastic the cuts have been for higher speed connections, it's not like the telco's are constantly paying out funds to totally upgrade their systems. Once a community is wired/rewired (be it phone or cable), it's wired. There are repairs associated with the new equipment, and the usual upgrades from some central point to the world, but the initial outlay of funds to wire the community, the lion's share of the costs, is done. And I thought the break-up of MA-BELL was supposed to increase competition and decrease prices... ;) dlr hewitt hewitt - Original Message - hewitt From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] hewitt To: Greater NH Linux User Group [EMAIL PROTECTED] hewitt Sent: Wednesday, January 22, 2003 7:00 PM hewitt Subject: Re: Email hosting (was: ATTBI/Comcast rant) [... snip ...] -- Linux: Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste. -- As seen on the 'net -- ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: Email hosting (was: ATTBI/Comcast rant)
Derek Martin said: Bleah... As technology improves and becomes more readily available, the prices should be going DOWN, not up. As of my last bill, my broadband connection now costs almost double what it did a year ago ($60.99 vs. $35/mo). That's absurd. Inflation is currently about 0%, and the technology is more widely available. Prices are going up because of an utter lack of competition. There's no incentive to keep them low. It's that simple. There's a guy in Chelmsford suing. He says rates have gone up 6% while inflation is 3%. -- --- Tom Buskey ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: Email hosting (was: ATTBI/Comcast rant)
On Thu, 2003-01-23 at 09:37, Jason Stephenson wrote: Yeah, I agree with Ben. The market is correcting itself. I'm paying $99 a month for SDSL, and I don't even get that high a speed: 144kbps up and down. However, I don't have the onerous restrictions that Verizon and other providers slap on their customers and I have a static IP, great for hosting web and email. Ugh, I get 768/768 ADSL for $85/month with no restrictions and as many static IPs as I need within reason (I currently use 4) ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: Email hosting (was: ATTBI/Comcast rant)
Actually, I do both. I have registered a couple of domain names and one is hosted. I also decided that the bigfoot service for $9.95/quarter was reasonable and I've already asked our online friends to use my bigfoot address. I was just curious about who was using what and for how much. As much as I like high speed access I'm not willing to pay increasingly large monthly fees for progressively poor service. I have also read in a couple of places that ATT was in the process of putting in bandwidth restrictions. As luck would have it I have friends/relatives who love their downloaded music and I can piggyback on their service occasionally to get patches/service packs etc.. -Alex - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Greater NH Linux User Group [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, January 22, 2003 4:49 PM Subject: Email hosting (was: ATTBI/Comcast rant) On Wed, 22 Jan 2003, at 4:32pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: P.S. Which opens up the discusson - what do you do if you want a permanent email address? Pay for it. You can register your own domain. That is a fairly safe way to do things. As long as you pay the bills, it is fairly unlikely you will ever lose the domain. Many registrars now even offer basic email forwarding services with your DNS registration. Alternatively, you can pay for an email address hosted by a third-party. I have an email address through iName.com (now Mail.com) that I pay some trivial yearly fee for. My theory is that a company that specializes in such services is unlikely to decide to alienate their entire customer base. Of course, if they simply go out of business, I still lose the address. Major services like Yahoo now offer email accounts as well. They are even more unlikely to change their domain name. -- Ben Scott [EMAIL PROTECTED] | The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do | | not represent the views or policy of any other person or organization. | | All information is provided without warranty of any kind. | ___ 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
RE: Email hosting (was: ATTBI/Comcast rant)
It continues to amaze me how short people's memories are. It was not long ago at all that an Internet feed of the speed you get from a cable ISP would cost you thousands of dollars per month. Not that I am in any way defending the ATT/Comcast monopoly; I just don't understand how anyone can see a 3000% price reduction in the space of five years and wonder why service suffers. Did cheap, reliable, fast Internet access get added to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness when I wasn't looking? :-) It really depends on where you are.. Up here in the north east with super shitty old phone lines on the poles that is true, but out west you could get 128 ISDN line for the same price as a normal phone line.. That's not to shabby for 1995ish. I think the problem is that people feel it's like the drug dealer who gives you the first hit for free. I'm sure I speak for most people that have high speed access None of us want to go back to dial up.. EVER ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
RE: Email hosting (was: ATTBI/Comcast rant)
Ah yes, but why, after a pile of telecommunications companies went bankrupt laying thousands of miles of buried fibre-optics cables are we still talking about dial-up connections? What *does* it cost to deliver high speed? For that matter, I think copper/fibre is passé. It should be possible to use wireless and it ought to be dirt cheap. When Mediaone delivered cable-modem service in our area they thought they'd be doing well if they got a 3% penetration. One of their techs told me that in fact they were achieving 17% and higher depending on the town they were operating in. I know there has been a big improvement in the speed of connections over the last few years but we're not exactly using 110 baud modems anymore are we? Should I expect to pay $100k for a shiny 2.8 gig P4 computer? Ah the good old days, not! I agree, they are totally screwing everybody.. ATT does one thing right with the telephone over cable.. They give you ALL the features (3 way calling/caller ID/call forwarding/etc) with the cost of the service.. Why? Because it's IN the switch.. It costs them NOTHING extra to enable those features.. So why does Verizon make you pay for it? It's like when they charge (and still do in some areas) for touch tone dialing.. It's crazy.. The lines are there, they should use them. Sure, there's the extra cost of the equipment on each end (routers, switches, fibre gizmos) but the real expense is running all the fiber and that's all done. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
Re: Email hosting (was: ATTBI/Comcast rant)
On Wed, 22 Jan 2003, at 8:42pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: As of my last bill, my broadband connection now costs almost double what it did a year ago ($60.99 vs. $35/mo). That's absurd. There's no incentive to keep them low. It's that simple. If it's so simple, why don't you go start a DSL company and make yourself rich? Prices are going up because the market is correcting itself to represent the true cost of delivering the services. Frankly, I think $60/month is still low. All those carriers offering DSL at $50/month were pricing themselves right out of business. And that's exactly what happened. An associate of mine had their electric meter, an old mechanical model, seize up. The power company saw their usage as zero for several months, resulting in some very low power bills. Of course, the power company eventually realized what was going on, replaced the meter, and now they have to pay for their electricity again. They didn't go to the power company and say, Hey, you were giving it away for a couple months, why do I have to pay for it again? The same principle applies here. -- Ben Scott [EMAIL PROTECTED] | The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do | | not represent the views or policy of any other person or organization. | | All information is provided without warranty of any kind. | ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
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. -- Ben Scott [EMAIL PROTECTED] | The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do | | not represent the views or policy of any other person or organization. | | All information is provided without warranty of any kind. | ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
RE: Email hosting (was: ATTBI/Comcast rant)
I never said it was cheap ... [ then, later on in the same paragraph ] ... Cable Internet should be dirt cheap for them to provide ... Which is it? Cheap to get started from SCRATCH.. ATT already has a HUGE setup already in place reselling T's and having peers so they didn't even have to do any of that. ... but ATT didn't build up huge cash reserves by losing money. Indeed. So you expect that to change? You expect them to lose money on their new data services, just because they're such nice guys? Lose money on what? They already have big fat pipes in place, and running all that is where the real initial cost is.. They do after all own the lines it's not like they're going to charge themselves like they do for anybody else that enters the market... I'm nowhere near as familiar with CATV as I am with DSL technology, but I know that CATV is largely a one-way, broadcast technology. Even digital cable is. You can duplicate the feed in the downstream direction endlessly. You can add 10,000,000 more subscribers and all you need are more repeaters. Digital Cable is very much two way, that's how PPV works.. While it doesn't need the bandwidth (or the spectrum space) to work, it does need a very clean return to work. They needed to run all new line for digital cable to work, just as much as they did for internet service.. Also, don't forget the phone service. Providing two-way packet-switched unicast data services is a *completely different* scenario. And cable over internet is *completely different* then the way DSL works. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
RE: Email hosting (was: ATTBI/Comcast rant)
Providing two-way packet-switched unicast data services is a *completely different* scenario. It isn't. Or, it is... but the same head end does both, over the same coax. So it doesn't matter. Exactly! They needed to redo the cable plant to offer just one of the three services they do now (digital cable/telephone/internet) so the fact that they get to do all of them just by upgrading one thing works out to be a bonus for them.. Or at least makes it cost effective. Plus, like I said in an early post, in a lot of the towns they needed to be redone anyway to fix leakage because of some FCC regs so the plant would have been rebuilt regardless of the new services. That's why some smaller towns got rebuilt before larger ones next to it, because they had a more leaky cable plant put in by some mom and pop cable company back in the late 70s early 80s. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
RE: Email hosting (was: ATTBI/Comcast rant)
On Wed, 22 Jan 2003, at 9:36pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 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.. Look, Verizon may be a bunch of incompetent morons (they are), but the fact that it takes them a month to provision a line doesn't mean everyone goes out of business. It's take years for DSL to reach general availability; an additional month isn't going to make a difference. Especially when you consider the fact that, back when there were a hundred and one DSL companies, Verizon's install time for their DSL was basically indefinite. You simply couldn't get it installed. You couldn't get a static IP; you couldn't host services; they even made it difficult to send email! Believe me, Verizon DSL was no competition to the other guys. No, the reason everyone went under was that they were charing $50/month for a service that was costing them $150/month. And almost every? Please.. Covad is around, as is speakeasy and Earthlink. SpeakEasy and EarthLink are both reselling Covad. As does XO, and even ATT in places. Most any national provider is reselling Covad. They're about the only ones left. And Covad is/was in chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and their financial future is still uncertain. -- Ben Scott [EMAIL PROTECTED] | The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do | | not represent the views or policy of any other person or organization. | | All information is provided without warranty of any kind. | ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
RE: Email hosting (was: ATTBI/Comcast rant)
Look, Verizon may be a bunch of incompetent morons (they are), but the fact that it takes them a month to provision a line doesn't mean everyone goes out of business. It's take years for DSL to reach general availability; an additional month isn't going to make a difference. That's why when I was getting my MV DSL line provisioned it got pushed back a week.. TWICE so it was two weeks late.. And at the -SAME- time I got -THREE- calls from Verizon saying that they could get me up and running in 2 days.. Give me a break. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
