So what BT is doing in the UK?
-
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.ics-il.com
- Original Message -
From: Scottie Arnett [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: 'WISPA General List' wireless@wispa.org
Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2007 5:03 PM
Subject: RE: [WISPA] Broadband Baloney? An FCC
Commissioner'stakeonBroadband..
Scottie, exactly what regulation would you recommend?
I think the FCC had it going going in the right direction with Computer
Inquires I, II, and III. Problem was, they never enforced these! The even
took out the office in early 2000 that investigated the companies that
broke the rules.
I am thinking out loud and not actually thinking this through, but here is
my idea. Do as they started with Computer Inquires...All ILEC's and Cable
Co's should not be allowed in the ISP business. They can start their own ISP
as a separate entity, but the parent ILEC/CC will have to sell to all ISP's,
including their own at a wholesale rate for use of their transport. There
should be no cross subsidization from one to the other. Of course I am
limiting this to the ILECs/CC that have received some kind of government
subsidization (whether it be grants, tax cuts,etc...) to build out their
networks for Cable TV and telephone. For us WISP's, give us all the tax
cuts, grants, etc...that they have gave the CC and telcos. Why should we not
get subsidization when they have and refuse anyone access to their networks?
Give me a couple of million dollars and I will have my county and the next
county covered with wireless within two years and providing access to some
people that have never had anything but dial-up and about 26k dial-up at
that.
I live in an area full of Cooperatives. Cooperatives do not have to follow
many of the Tele Act of 1996 rules (rural exemptions). I live in TN where, I
actually lost count, but there are approximately 20 +/- telephone
cooperatives. So I do not and have not got to do many of the things you guys
have got to do. Now that talk all this BS about bridging the digital divide,
but they still let these cooperatives get away with monopolies and not
having to follow half the rules that the rest of the US ILEC's have to
follow. As long as this goes on, rural America may see 20 Meg speeds by the
end of the next century. We never had ISDN here until around 2001 and DSL
around 2003 and of course it was done by the co-op telcos that were given
almost every penny to do it by the USDA.
Ah, I am through with my rant. I could complain and gripe all day. I spend a
lot of time on http://www.cybertelecom.org/ and teletruth.org that goes much
deeper into the points I stated above.
-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Clint Ricker
Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2007 3:47 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; WISPA General List
Subject: Re: [WISPA] Broadband Baloney? An FCC Commissioner's
takeonBroadband..
I'll duck after this post, but I by and large tend to agree with the basis
of the article.
Scottie, exactly what regulation would you recommend?
What has regulation solved in the past 11 years? By and large, I've not
seen a single bit of FCC regulation that has had a net positive impact for
getting access to the consumer, especially post 2000 (it was probably a good
force behind making dialup Internet access widely available and affordable).
We had over 11 years of forced network unbundling for the ILECS (ie where
the ILECs are required to sell the bare copper at cost). The idea, of
course, was to help service providers get on their feet while they were
building out their own network. By and large, for a policy standpoint, it
did very little to actually increase network buildout. Almost all of the
CLECs took the easy money of reselling the Bell networks and ran, making
agreegates of billions of dollars and not really building out any network to
speak of. (Yes, there are some exceptions, but, this sums up the general
problem).
Forced wholesale access of the physical layer / network layer does
absolutely nothing to increase availability and, in fact, actually hurts
availabilty. The ISP / CLEC that is basically reselling ILEC copper is not
connecting anyone who wouldn't / couldn't have been connected via the ILEC.
However, because the ILEC is less profitable due to forced reselling, then
they can't buildout as much infrastructure (theoretically).
The only real change in FCC policy in the past 11 years (fundamentally) is
that more people actually have to provide the services that they are
selling. It's harder now to buy Bell DSL service, stick your own label on
it, and say that you're competing with Ma Bell. All in all, I think that's
a good thing.
I understand that it isn't necessarily economically efficient to have
multiple sets of copper / coax going to the same house / office building,
and that telecommunication companies often constitute a natural monopoly of
sorts. Forced selling of the network layer still doesn't get any
