Fred,
You've been advocating splitting the ILECs between their delivery and service models.basically making the delivery (last mile/middle mile) into common carriers and having the service business stand on it's own, for as long as I've been reading your posts (close to 10 years). You haven't come out and said that here (that I've seen), but isn't that what you are getting at? Let the monopoly be the monopoly (a regulated utility at that point) and make the service/content providers compete, right? Regards, Jeff ImageStream Sales Manager 800-813-5123 x106 _____ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Fred Goldstein Sent: Tuesday, December 21, 2010 5:41 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] Flexible rules promised for wireless At 12/21/2010 05:14 PM, MDK wrote: Fred gave his reasons, which if I were to answer to, I'd have to quote him, but the gist of what he said, was that the NEXT operator to come along would have to pay MORE to compete than the original. Yes, to reach the first customer, as well as on a per-customer basis, which sets the price. If Bell has 100% of the market and you don't have lines, then you'd have to pull a line to reach your customer. That's a huge cost compared to their being able to use existing lines. If you won a 25% market share and they had 75%, then if your cost per mile were the same as theirs, your cost per home served would be three times theirs. If you don't know the impact of that, look at RCN's sad history. Hint: It's in my book. Five billion dollars lost in four years. That's about as flawed a premise for technological matters as it is possible to have. Technology gets CHEAPER as it become more popular, subsequent competitors pay LESS to provide services than the first. This is WHY telcos and utilities were given monopoly status in the first place, so they would be protected from competition, thereby ensuring healthy and long term profits from their investment. No. The telcos did not have monopolies granted by law until 1934! Well, they had it for 17 years from 1876, under Bell's patent (which turns out to have been fraudulently granted, but hey...). But when it expired, competition sprang up like weeds in spring. LOTS of independent telcos were in business in the 1890s. Some were in new turf, some were "CLECs" (in today's terms). But Bell then bought Pupin's patent on the loading coil and thus had a monopoly on long-haul (>10 miles or so) calling. So the indies started failing. Bell (Ted Vail) proposed a regulated monopoly. In 1912, they were required to interconnect with the surviving indies, and banned from buying up non-bankrupt indies. The last CLECs petered out and were gone by 1930 or so. (Keystone in Philadelphia was the last big one.) When CA34 was written, the monopoly was made de jure. Fred used the example of roads, as a comparison. Hardly a valid one, since wire takes up minimal real space, and roads take up ALL the space we have for them. Roads are publicly owned, for the most part (yes, I know, private toll roads exist, but that's really outside of free market business, just the same), and consume the only space that exists for them, they live in a 2 dimension world. The two are NOT comparable, not even slightly. Of course not, but economically, they might as well be. There is negligible provision of mass-market competitive loop plant. That's why WISPs exist; it's the only competitive medium. What's really at issue here, is that the incumbents were built with money extracted from the consumer at usurious rates, and profits were protected and guaranteed by both federal and state law. And, incumbents have the historical benefit of having had that guaranteed profit from which to build an infrastructure that competitors would not have, and would have to start from scratch. We agree on that. Ideas of separating the lines from the service are merely responses to that fact, and in no way fix the issue. We disagree on that. Unbundling works all over the world. It started in the US but was reduced here, so it is not as widely available as it once was. But I do have WISP clients who do unbundled DSL "in town" while using wireless in the lower-density countryside. You can still get unbundled copper in most places (not all) within about 2 miles of a wire center. -- Fred Goldstein k1io fgoldstein "at" ionary.com ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/ +1 617 795 2701 _____ No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 10.0.1170 / Virus Database: 426/3329 - Release Date: 12/21/10
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