FCC Leaves Broadband Alone

DaPhreaker writes "As reported by The Industry Standard in this article. The F.C.C has decided to take a hands off approach on the broadband market. " While I would advocate opening the lines up, I think the FCC may have adopted the best position for the next six months - let things sort themselves out more, especially in light of the rising battle between DSL and cable.

Action via Inaction

To claim that a laissez-faire attitude towards Broadband doesn't in fact create fundamental shifts in the regulatory structure of network access is ludicrous.

One of the prime factors of the Internet's ascent over the past few years has been the tens of thousands of people who chose to start up their own small businesses(guess what--not everything's a startup!) and provide Internet service to people.

While AOL was falling over itself just to pick up the phone, those thousands of people gave personal, real, one on one service to people all across the country--the world, for that matter.

Those of us in the open source world would do well to remember not all development comes from college students--ISPs fund development of critical infrastructure that's used today on an every day basis to keep things running.

I don't know what kind of delusion the FCC is under that AT&T will give up and divest itself of its broadband operations if it is forced to provide copper services to other ISPs. I do know that thousands of ISPs going out of business because the FCC believed the threats of the country's most powerful phone company(of course, being chased heavily by that UUNet/PsiNet/WorldCom/MCI/Sprint behemoth; who needs trusts when you have mergers?) smacks of injustice.

Nobody wants to regulate the net, meanwhile the entire concept behind failing to regulate the net is that self-regulation will occur. Self-regulation is presumed mainly in competitive environments where the failure of one party to "play by the rules" leads to a loss in market share to the gain of a competitor. ADSL and Cable companies are similar enough in corporate structure that both are likely to violate the same concepts that self regulation would be likely to solve.

Thus, the war on self regulation takes its shape as a demand for freedom. Whose freedom, of course, has been muddled substatially.


Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

No Surprise Here

Listen folks, the Republican congress is no friend of the consumer. They only care about aggrandizing big business. Remember, these are the folks who de-regulated the cable industries. We all know how well that's gone. Poor customer service. Rampant increase in cost in comparison to inflationary costs and investment in infrastructure.

My cable company went from having 2 plans (basic or expanded) to a "tier" structure giving consumers 3 options. This was done, according to the cable folks, so that customers would only pay for the channels they actually wanted to view. The customers who wanted fewer channels would not have to subsidize other views, they told us.

Here's how it really works. The cable companies have shifted a good majority of the cable channels that used to be part of the basic service to the top tier. This is all done under the guise of giving you, the consumer, more choice. More money out of your pocket. Cable companies don't offer a la carte programming. When asked why not, they never give a reason. Local sports programming that used to be included as part of basic service is now part of the top tier service.

Opening up broadband will not weaken the cable companies any more than opening up the phone system to independent carriers weakened the local telephone monopolies. It's called competition. Not too many people in business want to compete anymore. And we all lose out.

I decided to opt of the cable service. Unfortunately, I won't have that luxury with broadband.

the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Regulation

While I agree that de-regulation has improved competition from the break-up of monopolistic groups, such as the AT&T breakup in 1984, and that the hands-off approach helps in many ways, I see one problem:

The FCC also decided to take a complete hands-off approach to cellular phone standards. Each company was allowed to create or support whatever they wanted, and as a result we have PCS, GSM, and a host of other incompatible standards. The Europeans, who are usually much more pro-standards" than we are, are now years ahead of the US in cellular technology...because they were able to agree on using GSM.

I have no problem with having the broadband market open, but it would be nice if there was a STANDARD so that I could take my broadband box/TV/whatever to some other state and sign up with a different company without having to worry that the damn thing won't work because my box uses FOO, but my new provider only supports BAR.

Regulation, hell. It's called "common carrier".

Both I and others have made this point before, but I'll make it again:

Most cable installations were created, and paid for, under a grant of an exclusive franchise. This is an inherently anti-competitive situation, and it should not be allowed to continue.

Cable companies are infamous for acts such as getting rid of the channel you want and substituting something you have no use for, and accepting "deals" from content suppliers which require them to carry several channels of crap so they can get one popular one. Now these cable companies are suddenly in the ISP business. What does this mean for the customers?

• Since the cable company has an exclusive on the local broadband market, the customer can expect to see useless "services" layered into their bill.
• Access to other ISP's will be slower and/or more difficult.
• Should the phone company roll out xDSL, these mega-companies can be expected to behave like the airlines: when one of them adds a "service" or raises prices, the other will too. Customer choice will all but vanish.

The FCC should have bitten the bullet and kicked the cable companies (and the phone companies) out of the content business. Entities which supply bandwidth should not be able to tie that product to a particular brand of content; the customer should be able to go anywhere for pay content, or forego it entirely and only visit free sites. The only thing the monopoly cable/phone companies should be allowed to do is move data; everything else should be the province of independent, free-market suppliers.
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Deja Moo: The feeling that

Other Factors Involved

While I am against large monopolies just as I should be, there are other factors involved with the government just opening up the cable lines. Think of this analogy. You are a farmer, and you have spent years cultivating and building up your farm. Your soil is finally nice, and you are having abundance of crops. What if the government told you that you have to let other farmers use the land with you have nutured for the last few years. Its the same principle. The cable companies have spend many years and millions and millions of dollars to upgrade there networks. Why should they have to let others use there network, if these other people have had no part in building the network in the first place. Its a free ride for these companies that are riding other the cable companies years of hard work. Nothing was stoping these other people from building large fiber networks while the cable company were upgrading theres.

Re:Action via Inaction

This type of hands-off regulation really isn't good when it prohibits competition.

The very idea that cable companies are the only ones which could install and upgrade the cable infrastructure to support cable modems is silly.

If the cable industry was broken down like the telephone industry, a CLEC would be able to throw in their own hardware to support cable modems, be allocated a freq range and roll their own or at least have the cable company roll out the base infrastructure and backhaul the traffic back.

Simply put, cable companies are becoming telecommuniations companies and should be subject to the same regulation that existing ILECs are. Several cable companies are even registered LECs.

Personally, I think the cable industry has been upgrading their networks for digital cable because they are scared to death of DirectTV, not because they want to provide cable modem services. That was just icing on the cake.

Then again, I don't see how any ISP can provide a quality service to customers for what is effectively, ~$15/month. It amazes me that DSL providers and other high-speed providers don't have riots in their parking lots from the oversubscription rate they need to maintain. :)

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Content? Content has nothing to do with this!

Here I go again, this is basically a repost that I have posted at least 20 times about this issue but I guess I will have to keep syaing this over and over and over. Cause people still don't get it.

First thing Tau, content doesn't have jack to do with anything here, we are talking about bandwidth. I don't pay Time Warner for their pretty little pictures. I pay them for my 800kbps downloads. And secondly who paid for the copper at this point is irrelevant (sp?), the fact is cable companies control the copper. For all practical puposes it is thiers. Besides when you are talking about the grants, those didn't include switches, routers, and hubs. That came from the cable companies pockets. And that is quite a pretty penny. But even that doesn't matter because the competition that your advocating will amount to absolutely nothing.

What people don't realize here is that allowing ISPs to terminate connection across the cable companiy's copper is not going to create the competition that will effect the level of service people recieve. The cable company will still run the show when it comes to the physical layer. Understanding that, any logical person will come to the conclusion that the cable company will still have controll on your level of service, no matter who you are paying for your IP address. You will still pay the cable company for the connection, and then you will pay you ISP for the ip address. The cable company is still gonna get your cash for the bandwidth. The only competition that is taking place here is for the ip address. It would be exactly like a dialup. You have bad line noise on your phone and can't hit a 56k connection? Your ISP can't do anything about it. This will hold true in an open cable network. You have extreme latency on your neighborhood segement? Your ISP can't do anything about it. The only compititon that will effect your level of service is competition of the PHYSICAL LAYER!!!!!!!! Open access advocates are trying to fix a glass table with sledgehammer here. Wrong tool, it won't get the job done. Open acces will do nothing for anbody except shoot the consumer broadband market in the foot. I had put this with my orginal post but Hemos took it out, (I am sure most people are getting sick of me saying this but)The consumer broadband market it too young for the FEDS to be muking around with it. Case Closed, End of Story.