Re: [WISPA] Broadband Baloney? An FCC Commissioner's take onBroadband..
Clint Ricker wrote: I'd agree on the doctors; however, distance learning is a pathetic substitute for on-site teachers. Good teaching is more about inspiring the person to want to learn rather than the passing on of information--technology won't solve what is essentially a problem created by us placing educational funding as a fairly low budget priority. Distance learning is not about K-8, it's about Adult Ed, Continued Ed, or Specialized Ed. Forced wholesale access of the physical layer / network layer does absolutely nothing to increase availability and, in fact, actually hurts availabilty. You are incorrect there. The plant company would need to keep building out to increase revenue. The Application side would want that as well. I think you missed my point here. My point is that forcing telcos to resell their network layer does absolutely nothing to connect additional people. If I resell ATT DSL to someone on ATT's network, they could have just as easily gotten it from ATT. So you think that CLEC's and ISP's have never actually brought the Internet or a new service to anyone? That's striking. Yes the footprint does not grow, but certainly the penetration does. And without the revenue from the rented network, how would anyone build new facilities? Dynamic T1 and Integrated T1 were CLEC inventions. VoIP didn't come to the masses from the ILEC's and neither did DSL or dial-up. ATT is doing ADSL2 (although you won't get any more usable bandwidth than currently available). I think the bigger question is why aren't more CLECs rolling out ADSL2? Why did COVAD wait 5 years to start? Why do they gripe and moan about how the FCC is killing the innovative part of the industry instead of actually implementing innovative technologies? 15Mb/s DSL would have been interesting 5 years ago. Given massive fiber rollouts and the upcoming DOCSIS 3 rollouts from the cable companies, 15Mb/s DSL will be too little, too late. ADSL2+ equipment just became reasonable - that's why it wasn't around 5 years ago. ATT is reselling Covad ADSL2 in its out of region areas. The 6MB product in-region is sort of ADSL2. I'm not saying that these aren't decent business models, btw, and can't make people some dough. But, national policy is not structured around making sure that an extra couple of CLECs or NSPs are cash positive... running the same old tired copper to the same old customers does not increase broadband penetration. National policy! HA! It's about Innovation and Competition. Would we have DSL today if not for Covad/Northpoint/Rhythms? DSL was invented in Bell Labs in 1965! RBOC's did not want to cannibalize their $1500 T1 revenue. (Then they went the exact opposite way). Metro-E over copper is, by and large, a disappointing technology (getting good quality copper is too difficult by and large). In some sense as well, copper just needs to die and be replaced by a better medium (ie fiber or at least cable HFC plants). That's not what I am seeing. Isn't it? Copper needs to die as a physical medium...it's expensive to maintain and is severely handicapped. I'm perhaps backtracking a bit on my bandwidth points earlier, but we have reached pretty close to the limit to what you can shove over a pair of copper. While we have sufficient bandwidth for the time being, I believe, copper won't be able to deliver the needed bandwidth for 10 years down the road... Actually, the copper needs to stay where it is. Add fiber, but if anything, the copper should be sold off to a CLEC, instead of dismantling it. It cannot be rebuilt. Does it hurt the ILEC? Heh...probably not all that much. But, are CLECs really helping the consumer? I tend to argue no, by and large...why IS CLEC market share so small? Why are independent ISPs have so little market share? Clint, I could spend days on this. For you even to ask this, . it almost feels like you are trolling (or do I hear the clinking of ice?) CLECs have killed themselves because they tended to think in quarterly and yearly terms for P/L and investment. The cable companies and the ILECS tend to think longer term and so have been able to win out in the long term. NSPs pay ~$30/month to resell DSL service; $3,600 over ten years to provide DSL service to a residence. That's enough money to start financing a fiber buildout, and that's just some crummy DSL service. Owning the physical infrastructure makes a huge difference, something that CLECs, by and large, never learned, and just kept on paying huge chunks of money to the ILEC rather than building their own network and making themselves sufficient (in a lot of cases, it isn't feasible, since you do have to have a certain market penetration for it to be worthwhile.). By and large, most CLEC's are run by Bell-head idiots. Most will be entering BK in the next 18 months. But even the ones who built network - L3,
Re: [WISPA] Broadband Baloney? An FCC Commissioner's take onBroadband..
Clint Ricker wrote: And without the revenue from the rented network, how would anyone build new facilities? Revenue from the services sold on the network through retail options, as has always been the case... Dynamic T1 and Integrated T1 were CLEC inventions. VoIP didn't come to the masses from the ILEC's and neither did DSL or dial-up. CLEC style VoIP is not really all that interesting--in the end, it is all to often POTS over IP and leaves out much of what is potentially interesting on VoIP. Not every CLEC and I have to wonder if you are just looking at the big National Idiots like Paetec-USLEC, FDN-Nuvox, and TWTC-Xspedius. Those guys are going to be facing BK with their mounting debt and shrinking revenues. It's the regional players like Cbeyond, CavTel, and a few others. You can't make sweeping remarks, because the industry is not really an industry at all but a collection of people tied to the idea of being an ISP. Agreed...but that was 1998-2002. What have they done for us lately? Again it depends on who you look at. Birch and McLeod not a F$^$%ing thing ever. But some others like Hunt Telecom, Vern in VT and some others different story. I'm honestly not trolling here, although, given the forum, it definitely comes across that way. Definitely, back in the 1990's and early 2000's, CLECs drove costs down and drove in new services that Bell had little interest in offering. That was 5 years ago, though. By and large, the bells are usually fairly competitive price wise in the business market and by far the best value out there in the residential / SOHO market. Now, it is largely the cable/telco competition that is keeping prices down, not the CLECs... The Bells are only competitively priced where they face competition. Their local and LD rates have climbed up about 6% nationally since consolidation, which explains some of the huge 61% profit increase at ATT. In ATM, MPLS, Private Line, and some other Special Access stuff, they are plainly priced for 1999. No competition. Why is Metro E priced so low in Metro's? Competition from the CLEC's like L3 and TWTC and Cable. I worked for several years at an ISP that did the whole BellSouth DSL NSP stuff. The FISPA list, etc...continually trashed BellSouth DSL service and their poor customer service, and so forth, and espoused the the glories of independent ISPs, which I largely agreed with until one day when I setup a friends self-install DSL kit from BellSouth. It was a very slick automated installation procedure that was _much_ better than what we were doing. Actually then, some of the fault is your very own. You may not have owned NEGIA but you worked there and could have contributed to the Value Add and keeping ahead of th ewave, especially after experiencing the FastAccess. The Independent ISP community did _way_ too much talking about their own value and their own great customer service while, by and large, doing very little to actually improve workflows, improve the customer experience (in terms of ease of turn up) and way too little time / effort spent actually selling and marketing. Simply put, by 2005 the telco offering by and large was, for most people, a better product. Again, this isn't a universal indictment, but a lot of their problems were self-inflicted and not the result of FCC meddling. Too much talk, too little action... Because the ones doing MOST of the complaining are complaining instead of selling and working ON their biz. The quiet ones are too busy selling and talking to customers to get on any lists. Way, way too much time was and is still spent blaming the government and the evil ILECs and too little time / effort spent actually selling, improving business operations, and reinvesting in better infrastructure / services. FISPA and AISPA and other associations are partially to blame. All problems were ILEC based and FCC pointers. Remember how Tom and I were constantly pointing out that there were niches to win - and it wasn't by selling on price? Portal. Community. Hand holding. Simple bill. Training. Classes. Lunch n Learn. Demos. Outreach. Tons of ways to take the advantage. Honestly, would you say that (insert independent ISP reselling ILEC DSL service) has a better DSL offering than (insert ILEC)? By and large, I wouldn't... I think DSL is a crap product overall. New Edge, Covad, ILEC - doesn't matter. My personal experience is that it is over-priced crap - even when it is cheaper than cable. Mine constantly blinks sending my ATA in to a tizzy. Most of that is the market...L3, WilTel, and GX screwed themselves over by throwing billions of dollars into an incredibly overbuilt market (carrier fiber networks). Paying $ to run even more fiber from Chicago to New York when there is already way too much is a MUCH different market than last mile. The good thing with last mile access is that there is a very
Re: [WISPA] Broadband Baloney? An FCC Commissioner's take onBroadband..
-- Forwarded message -- From: Clint Ricker [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2007 14:40:19 -0400 Subject: Re: [WISPA] Broadband Baloney? An FCC Commissioner's take onBroadband.. I think you missed my point here. My point is that forcing telcos to resell their network layer does absolutely nothing to connect additional people. If I resell ATT DSL to someone on ATT's network, they could have just as easily gotten it from ATT. So you think that CLEC's and ISP's have never actually brought the Internet or a new service to anyone? That's striking. Yes the footprint does not grow, but certainly the penetration does. Back when the Internet was new, they were great for this because they generally had better customer relationships with the customers. These days, Internet is commodity--in almost every case, if they didn't get it from the ISP or CLEC, they would get it from the cable company or telco. And without the revenue from the rented network, how would anyone build new facilities? Revenue from the services sold on the network through retail options, as has always been the case... Dynamic T1 and Integrated T1 were CLEC inventions. VoIP didn't come to the masses from the ILEC's and neither did DSL or dial-up. CLEC style VoIP is not really all that interesting--in the end, it is all to often POTS over IP and leaves out much of what is potentially interesting on VoIP. Definitely, without the CLEC competition, Internet access would have evolved in a much different manner. However, I'm more arguing that the CLECs are more or less irrelevant today (from any sort of policy standpoint)--most of the market forces really do come down to telco/cable in the metro areas and wireless in rural markets. The CLECs were the forerunners in a lot of areas--but, by and large, their era of innovation is long over. I'm not saying that these aren't decent business models, btw, and can't make people some dough. But, national policy is not structured around making sure that an extra couple of CLECs or NSPs are cash positive... running the same old tired copper to the same old customers does not increase broadband penetration. National policy! HA! It's about Innovation and Competition. In which case, the CLECs only have themselves to blame :) Would we have DSL today if not for Covad/Northpoint/Rhythms? DSL was invented in Bell Labs in 1965! RBOC's did not want to cannibalize their $1500 T1 revenue. (Then they went the exact opposite way). Agreed...but that was 1998-2002. What have they done for us lately? Does it hurt the ILEC? Heh...probably not all that much. But, are CLECs really helping the consumer? I tend to argue no, by and large...why IS CLEC market share so small? Why are independent ISPs have so little market share? Clint, I could spend days on this. For you even to ask this, . it almost feels like you are trolling (or do I hear the clinking of ice?) I'm honestly not trolling here, although, given the forum, it definitely comes across that way. Definitely, back in the 1990's and early 2000's, CLECs drove costs down and drove in new services that Bell had little interest in offering. That was 5 years ago, though. By and large, the bells are usually fairly competitive price wise in the business market and by far the best value out there in the residential / SOHO market. Now, it is largely the cable/telco competition that is keeping prices down, not the CLECs... I worked for several years at an ISP that did the whole BellSouth DSL NSP stuff. The FISPA list, etc...continually trashed BellSouth DSL service and their poor customer service, and so forth, and espoused the the glories of independent ISPs, which I largely agreed with until one day when I setup a friends self-install DSL kit from BellSouth. It was a very slick automated installation procedure that was _much_ better than what we were doing. The Independent ISP community did _way_ too much talking about their own value and their own great customer service while, by and large, doing very little to actually improve workflows, improve the customer experience (in terms of ease of turn up) and way too little time / effort spent actually selling and marketing. Simply put, by 2005 the telco offering by and large was, for most people, a better product. Again, this isn't a universal indictment, but a lot of their problems were self-inflicted and not the result of FCC meddling. Too much talk, too little action... Way, way too much time was and is still spent blaming the government and the evil ILECs and too little time / effort spent actually selling, improving business operations, and reinvesting in better infrastructure / services. In the end, the market share for the CLECs and independents is small because more consumers chose to go with someone else. Some of the better-run ones that actually do have a compelling product
Re: [WISPA] Broadband Baloney? An FCC Commissioner's take onBroadband..
Thats the problem...most of the senate, congress, heck the whole government and their appointees do not know the difference in a piece of twine with two cans attached and a copper line with telephones attached, much less how the internet works and the physics behind it. They only know how to listen to the people that pad their or their parties back pockets. IMHO. -- Original Message -- From: Drew Lentz [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2007 08:57:57 -0500 In an article entitled Broadband Baloney in the Wall Street Journal today, Robert McDowell, a Commissioner on the FCC stated: Criticisms of our definition of broadband being too lax are already irrelevant as over 50 million subscribers are in the 1.5 to 3.0 megabits-per-second fast lane. That my friends, is EXACTLY what the problem is: 1.5 to 3mb FAST LANE Who are they trying to kid? Then he goes on to say: Today, video applications are tugging hard on America's broadband infrastructure. YouTube alone uses as much bandwidth today as the entire Internet did in 2000. Not surprisingly, our broadband adoption rate continues to increase concurrently with the proliferation of this latest killer app. He talks about how much of a push video is, even citing that it eats up a large amount of bandwidth, but is insistent on 1.5 to 3 Mb being fast? I don't get it. The article sums up why he thinks that all this talk about us lagging behind in the broadband proliferation table is Broadband Baloney.. boo I say. The fact that the WSJ would print this is baloney. Article is here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118524094434875755.html?mod=googlenews_wsj Drew Lentz [EMAIL PROTECTED] 956.878.0123 Would you like to see your advertisement here? Let the WISPA Board know your feelings about allowing advertisements on the free WISPA lists. The current Board is taking this under consideration at this time. We want to know your thoughts. -- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ --- [This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus] Dial-Up Internet service from Info-Ed, Inc. as low as $9.99/mth. Check out www.info-ed.com for information. Would you like to see your advertisement here? Let the WISPA Board know your feelings about allowing advertisements on the free WISPA lists. The current Board is taking this under consideration at this time. We want to know your thoughts. -- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] Broadband Baloney? An FCC Commissioner's take onBroadband..
Mike Hammett wrote: 3 mbit is not fast. The US IS behind other countries, there's no point in whining about it. Yes, there are very substantial reasons why our numbers don't look as good as theirs, but there's no need to skew the system to make us look better... just solve the problem. Fixed wireless is broadband. WIFI hotspots, cell phones, etc. are not broadband (maybe the cell broadband cards). The reason our numbers are climbing is because this has been a problem for some time and we're working on fixing it. It takes a lot to change things like that for the third most populous country in the world. Perhaps it should be measured per household and not per capita, I dunno. The reason why there's less competition elsewhere is because what is present is doing a good enough job! Their telcos have delivered 15 meg DSL for years, while ours don't yet offer it. That's why cable is taking on so well here. It surely isn't because anything connected to Comcast has a good price point (DSL and satellite TV are both better values). - Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com If they change the definition to 1MB, EVDO won't count and neither will IDSL and DSL Lite. The numbers of BB users in the stats will drop - the telcos will look like they have very few BB subs since about 10-20% buy Lite (depending who you believe). So the FCC will never voluntarily change the definition. BTW, in countries with deep BB penetration, the regulators are TOUGH - as in the FCC Chairman does not have Ivan and Ed's hands up his butt so he can talk like Charlie McCarthy. But ALL of that is beside the point. End of the day, YOU guys have to find, acquire and retain profitable customers. No matter what the regulatory or competitive environment looks like. - Peter @ RAD-INFO, Inc. Would you like to see your advertisement here? Let the WISPA Board know your feelings about allowing advertisements on the free WISPA lists. The current Board is taking this under consideration at this time. We want to know your thoughts. -- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] Broadband Baloney? An FCC Commissioner's take onBroadband..
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 new people access to the Now, if they wanted to successfully regulate the market, force a separation of the network layer and the physical layer into two separate companies, a model that is being vaguely adopted for some muni-funded developments. The fact of the matter is that the US is doing pretty damn well at broadband deployment, and, corruption aside, most of the current administration's policies have been fairly benificial towards making broadband more widely available (with some very major exceptions). The US is fairly far down on the list statistically; however, comparing US to Japan or European markets is not an accurate comparison. Sure, there is fiber available for $25/month in many countries...can you profitably deploy fiber in Idaho at $25ARPU? Montana? Kansas? North Dakota? Is bad FCC policy to blame? Or the fact that this is a big country with a lot of empty space...something that doesn't affect most of the countries that are beating us in broadband development. Is the government policy hurting the independent ISPs? Really? Given the huge regulatory requirements that exist on the ILECs, and the relative freedom that the independents operate under, I can't really see the independent industry as being hurt by government policy. BTW, I do agree that the FCC is in the pocket of the telco's...and so on and so forth. However, most of the changes have, nevertheless, been positive changes. The industry does need less regulation, IMHO. As long as there is interconnection is manditory, there really doesn't need to be much more regulation. Don't like ATT? Build your own network...(as most of you are doing). Expand. Grow. Acquire customers...you know, compete and all that sort of good capitalistic stuff... -Clint Ricker Kentnis Technologies On 7/24/07, Peter R. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Mike Hammett wrote: 3 mbit is not fast. The US IS behind other countries, there's no point in whining about it. Yes, there are very substantial reasons why our numbers don't look as good as theirs, but there's no need to skew the system to make us look better... just solve the problem. Fixed wireless is broadband. WIFI hotspots, cell phones, etc. are not broadband (maybe the cell broadband cards). The reason our numbers are climbing is because this has been a problem for some time and we're working on fixing it. It takes a lot to change things like that for the third most populous country in the world. Perhaps it should be measured per household and not per capita, I dunno. The reason why there's less competition elsewhere is because what is present is doing a good enough job! Their telcos have delivered 15 meg DSL for years, while ours don't yet offer it. That's why cable is taking on so well here. It surely isn't because anything connected to Comcast has a good price point (DSL and satellite TV are both better values).
Re: [WISPA] Broadband Baloney? An FCC Commissioner's take onBroadband..
Peter R. wrote: Mike Hammett wrote: 3 mbit is not fast. The US IS behind other countries, there's no point in whining about it. Yes, there are very substantial reasons why our numbers don't look as good as theirs, but there's no need to skew the system to make us look better... just solve the problem. Fixed wireless is broadband. WIFI hotspots, cell phones, etc. are not broadband (maybe the cell broadband cards). The reason our numbers are climbing is because this has been a problem for some time and we're working on fixing it. It takes a lot to change things like that for the third most populous country in the world. Perhaps it should be measured per household and not per capita, I dunno. The reason why there's less competition elsewhere is because what is present is doing a good enough job! Their telcos have delivered 15 meg DSL for years, while ours don't yet offer it. That's why cable is taking on so well here. It surely isn't because anything connected to Comcast has a good price point (DSL and satellite TV are both better values). - Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com If they change the definition to 1MB, EVDO won't count and neither will IDSL and DSL Lite. The numbers of BB users in the stats will drop - the telcos will look like they have very few BB subs since about 10-20% buy Lite (depending who you believe). So the FCC will never voluntarily change the definition. BTW, in countries with deep BB penetration, the regulators are TOUGH - as in the FCC Chairman does not have Ivan and Ed's hands up his butt so he can talk like Charlie McCarthy. But ALL of that is beside the point. End of the day, YOU guys have to find, acquire and retain profitable customers. No matter what the regulatory or competitive environment looks like. - Peter @ RAD-INFO, Inc. I know it has been brought up before, but I'll bring it up again, the majority of my customers are plenty happy at 1mbit service. How do I know this? The upgrade is only $10/month to go from 380K to 2M on my system, but less than 10% of my customers have opted for the higher cost plan ($40/mo instead of $30/mo). In fact if I remove business accounts from the equation then less that 5% opt for the 2 meg plan. What is even more telling is that 15% of my customer base is unwilling to pay $5/month more to upgrade from 128K to 380K Are we ranked so low because we actually only provide service that is requested by our customers instead of over providing? I wonder of the 14 other countries above us if their consumers were given the ability to halve their ISP bill for half the speed if they would be willing to still pay the higher rate. Sam Tetherow Sandhills Wireless Would you like to see your advertisement here? Let the WISPA Board know your feelings about allowing advertisements on the free WISPA lists. The current Board is taking this under consideration at this time. We want to know your thoughts. -- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] Broadband Baloney? An FCC Commissioner's take onBroadband..
Sam, I agree with your observation 100%. Given most of the oversubscription models in place in the industry, it is not even a matter of having cheapskate customers. Internet access (broadly speaking) is NOT very bandwidth intensive. Filesharing, video, etc... is bandwidth intensive. Other than that, it's all overkill. Voice? 30Kb/s per line. Web surfing? 100K once every couple of minutes. Email? A brief surge of 100K a few times a day. For most users, 256Kb/s will provide the same user experience as 100Mb/s. People pay 6Mb/s connections for the same reasons they pay for faster cars, even though the speed limit is the same for a Ford Pinto as a Ferrari. Not an entirely apt analogy, but pretty much sums it up. Honestly, I'd pay a lot more money for a connection with nearly 100% uptime and consistently low latency...you know, like a T1 :). Having a good quality broadband connection would do MUCH more for business and Internet usage than having a higher capacity connection--after all, our fear of voice over IP is not that we are going to run out of bandwidth, but that the connection is going to drop. Our reluctance to rely too heavily on Internet-based applications, be it voice, video, or office applications, is MUCH more the worry that our Internet connection will be out right when we need to access it (or receive that important call) than the worry that our tubes are too small and will get clogged. -Clint Ricker Kentnis Technologies On 7/24/07, Sam Tetherow [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Peter R. wrote: Mike Hammett wrote: 3 mbit is not fast. The US IS behind other countries, there's no point in whining about it. Yes, there are very substantial reasons why our numbers don't look as good as theirs, but there's no need to skew the system to make us look better... just solve the problem. Fixed wireless is broadband. WIFI hotspots, cell phones, etc. are not broadband (maybe the cell broadband cards). The reason our numbers are climbing is because this has been a problem for some time and we're working on fixing it. It takes a lot to change things like that for the third most populous country in the world. Perhaps it should be measured per household and not per capita, I dunno. The reason why there's less competition elsewhere is because what is present is doing a good enough job! Their telcos have delivered 15 meg DSL for years, while ours don't yet offer it. That's why cable is taking on so well here. It surely isn't because anything connected to Comcast has a good price point (DSL and satellite TV are both better values). - Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com If they change the definition to 1MB, EVDO won't count and neither will IDSL and DSL Lite. The numbers of BB users in the stats will drop - the telcos will look like they have very few BB subs since about 10-20% buy Lite (depending who you believe). So the FCC will never voluntarily change the definition. BTW, in countries with deep BB penetration, the regulators are TOUGH - as in the FCC Chairman does not have Ivan and Ed's hands up his butt so he can talk like Charlie McCarthy. But ALL of that is beside the point. End of the day, YOU guys have to find, acquire and retain profitable customers. No matter what the regulatory or competitive environment looks like. - Peter @ RAD-INFO, Inc. I know it has been brought up before, but I'll bring it up again, the majority of my customers are plenty happy at 1mbit service. How do I know this? The upgrade is only $10/month to go from 380K to 2M on my system, but less than 10% of my customers have opted for the higher cost plan ($40/mo instead of $30/mo). In fact if I remove business accounts from the equation then less that 5% opt for the 2 meg plan. What is even more telling is that 15% of my customer base is unwilling to pay $5/month more to upgrade from 128K to 380K Are we ranked so low because we actually only provide service that is requested by our customers instead of over providing? I wonder of the 14 other countries above us if their consumers were given the ability to halve their ISP bill for half the speed if they would be willing to still pay the higher rate. Sam Tetherow Sandhills Wireless Would you like to see your advertisement here? Let the WISPA Board know your feelings about allowing advertisements on the free WISPA lists. The current Board is taking this under consideration at this time. We want to know your thoughts. -- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ Would you like to see your advertisement
Re: [WISPA] Broadband Baloney? An FCC Commissioner's take onBroadband..
Clint Ricker wrote: 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? STRUCTURAL SEPARATION like BT is experiencing in the UK, which would never happen here. 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). It was not FCC regulation; it was the TA96 that was tattered and torn by lobbying and litigating. The FCC SHOULD have advanced its policy and then set to forcing it. Instead it went to bed with 2 of the industries it is supposed to regulate (media telco). The FCC could easily have forced CLEC's to build out at the same time it forced the ILEC's to unbundle. Let me extrapolate this for you: In the NFL cities you would have endless construction as fiber is laid to all the MTU's. But in all other markets, not so much competition. And then you would have VZ selling off its rural ... oh, wait, they do that now because they don't want to invest the money. They make a good rate of return (as attested to by their increasing profits -- not revenues). They get USF and other funding to provide service in rural areas, but do not want to live up to the promises that they made back in 1997-1999. Do you think I care about the 15th or 21st or whatever study number? No. All I care about is the divide between us and and the rest of the world. Whether you admit it or not, economically broadband is a utility. It is the utility for home-based workers, entrepreneurs, the Creative Class, and innovation. As more and more people get PC access and get online, more and more ideas, projects, and innovation happens. I want that to happen in the US. Not in India. Not in China or Korea, but here in America. We have a shortage of doctors in America. A shortage of teachers. Some of this can be solved via broadband like tele-medicine and distance learning. Forced wholesale access of the physical layer / network layer does absolutely nothing to increase availability and, in fact, actually hurts availabilty. You are incorrect there. The plant company would need to keep building out to increase revenue. The Application side would want that as well. 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). Sure it is. CLEC's and ISP's are always stealing clients from each other and ILEC's. Sometimes they steal them from cable. But more than just the red ocean is the blue ocean when a new idea like Metro E over copper or VDSL or HPNA or BPL comes along and stretches the use of the copper and brings consumers new apps and new access. (Covad is rolling out 15MB DSL - are any ILECs? NO). The fact of the matter is that the US is doing pretty damn well at broadband deployment, and, corruption aside, most of the current administration's policies have been fairly benificial towards making broadband more widely available (with some very major exceptions). I actually don't think that more DSLAM's are being deployed. I see how often a business comes up as Unqualified, even when DSL is available in that area. That's due to CAPEX being spent to over-build DSL penetrated areas with fiber. That's not a helpful strategy. Qwest is no longer the ILEC in Omaha. That's the first MSA. VZ has asked for forbearance in 6 MSA's, due in 80 days. In 80 days, you won't be able to buy access from VZ unless they want to sell it to you. Why? The stats say cable has beat them out. And I think it is almost on purpose, so the ILEC can get out from under regulation and do what it wants. Do you think that the CLECs are actually hurting the ILECs? Or the ISP's? ISP's have less than 1% of the DSL in the US. FISPA members at one time had 3% of the BellSouth market in 2001. CLEC's in their hey day had a whopping 15% of the market (2001 I think). Not any more. The largest CLEC has less than 100,000 customers. And even with the Super CLEC's - all 3 of them - approaching $1B in revenue, their debt is 3/4 of that number and they pay more than 50% of revenue to the ILEC. How does that hurt the ILEC? They make money from CLEC's. They don't make a dime from cable. -Clint Ricker Kentnis Technologies - Peter @ RAD-INFO, Inc. Would you like to see your advertisement here? Let the WISPA Board know your feelings about allowing advertisements on the free WISPA lists. The current Board is taking this under consideration at this time. We want to know your
Re: [WISPA] Broadband Baloney? An FCC Commissioner's take onBroadband..
Clint Ricker wrote: People pay 6Mb/s connections for the same reasons they pay for faster cars, even though the speed limit is the same for a Ford Pinto as a Ferrari. Not an entirely apt analogy, but pretty much sums it up. As long as we're going with car analogies, I think a big truck or SUV comparison would be more appropriate. A lot of folks buy Jeep even though they never leave the city, but a few folks buy it because they NEED the off-road stability and the cargo capacity. To stretch the Jeep thing a bit further, many of those Jeeps now are mediocre off-road cars, or even outright BAD at that. People have been buying them for image (look I own a big jeep), not because they actually need that vehicle's unique capabilities. A lot of the Jeep product line has been re-tooled and re-marketed so that they look like awesome Jeeps but can't do what made them famous. The Internet version of that would be a PtMP tower that's a bit overloaded, and has a couple folks that use their connection for some bandwidth-intensive or packet-intensive purpose. (VOIP, peer-to-peer software, application or site hosting, doesn't matter.) Everyone else bought the image, they bought the substance, and you'd better be able to deliver. Like the folks that complain about throwing an axle in their shiny new Jeep because it can't cope with being off-road, these folks will (rightly) complain that they're not getting the Internet service they thought they would. If you say you're gonna give someone X megs of Internet, be sure you can give them that pretty consistently, all the time, or that they understand exactly what they are (and aren't) getting. Whether it's the Internet or a Jeep, the folks that need something specific really NEED it, probably know other people with similar needs, and tend to be very loud. David Smith MVN.net Would you like to see your advertisement here? Let the WISPA Board know your feelings about allowing advertisements on the free WISPA lists. The current Board is taking this under consideration at this time. We want to know your thoughts. -- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] Broadband Baloney? An FCC Commissioner's take onBroadband..
Its not approriate to start changing the definition of Broadband. 200mbps symetrical enables a specific set of core Internet based applications. Maybe we need a new word, to define Broadband capable of handling Next Generation Internet Applicationa Super Broadband? :-) I'd also argue that next generation Broadband should not be measured and defined by just transfer speed. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband - Original Message - From: Drew Lentz [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: 'WISPA General List' wireless@wispa.org Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2007 9:57 AM Subject: [WISPA] Broadband Baloney? An FCC Commissioner's take onBroadband.. In an article entitled Broadband Baloney in the Wall Street Journal today, Robert McDowell, a Commissioner on the FCC stated: Criticisms of our definition of broadband being too lax are already irrelevant as over 50 million subscribers are in the 1.5 to 3.0 megabits-per-second fast lane. That my friends, is EXACTLY what the problem is: 1.5 to 3mb FAST LANE Who are they trying to kid? Then he goes on to say: Today, video applications are tugging hard on America's broadband infrastructure. YouTube alone uses as much bandwidth today as the entire Internet did in 2000. Not surprisingly, our broadband adoption rate continues to increase concurrently with the proliferation of this latest killer app. He talks about how much of a push video is, even citing that it eats up a large amount of bandwidth, but is insistent on 1.5 to 3 Mb being fast? I don't get it. The article sums up why he thinks that all this talk about us lagging behind in the broadband proliferation table is Broadband Baloney.. boo I say. The fact that the WSJ would print this is baloney. Article is here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118524094434875755.html?mod=googlenews_wsj Drew Lentz [EMAIL PROTECTED] 956.878.0123 Would you like to see your advertisement here? Let the WISPA Board know your feelings about allowing advertisements on the free WISPA lists. The current Board is taking this under consideration at this time. We want to know your thoughts. -- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ -- Internal Virus Database is out-of-date. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.472 / Virus Database: 269.9.6/865 - Release Date: 6/24/2007 8:33 AM Would you like to see your advertisement here? Let the WISPA Board know your feelings about allowing advertisements on the free WISPA lists. The current Board is taking this under consideration at this time. We want to know your thoughts. -- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
