FCC Considers Deregulation of DSL 414
Phlatline_ATL writes "In an article on ArsTechnica, they explore the FCC's current consideration to reclassify DSL as an information service and as such would no longer require the telcos to lease out their lines. This seems like it would effectively make the telcos the exclusive DSL broadband providers." From the article: " So after six months to a year it would be goodbye Earthlink and Speakeasy, hello SBC DSL monopoly (in the case of Chicago, where I live). So the telcos would get what they want, which is no competition while the consumers get screwed. But it's perfectly logical under the FCC's definition of broadband competition, where they want cable to compete with DSL--and hopefully IP over power lines and WiMax down the road."
I've been (Score:5, Insightful)
They're not the cheapest, but their staff is the most knowledgable I have seen, and they're definately the most Linux-friendly.
The more people that switch away from SBC the more money the competition has to fight this stuff.
Thats what they deserve.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Universal internet access (Score:3, Insightful)
The current problem is that the vastness of America means that private companies don't find it cost effective to hook up Ma and Pa Kent out in the sticks. But under a government system, those people would get the service.
A lot of people don't want to pay for that, I'm sure. However, if you consider that the reason you have your broadband is because it just happens that you are lucky enough to live in a densely populated area. People who run farms and are otherwise far away from the crowds of cities simply can't generate enough demand to make it worth the broadband companies' while to hook them up.
This deregulation is the opposite direction that the FCC should be taking. There are certain things that the government ought to provide, or ought to subsidize in large amounts, and one subset of those is basic utilities. The Internet is one of the utilities that will be key in the future of our country. It makes sense that we get a jump on it now and wire (figuratively speaking. Wireless would work as well) the whole country up.
Hopefully? (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder if their hope extends to hoping that broadband-over-power-lines magically doesn't spam the radio spectrum with interference. Last we heard, it did...
Err wait, that's competition? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this what competition now is?
Re:I don't see what's wrong... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I don't see what's wrong... (Score:3, Insightful)
I do. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Benefits of this? YMMV. (Score:5, Insightful)
McLeod has Fiber running 150 feet from my house along County Rd 46. I don't have access to those lines and they are likely sharing the "public space".
So why are they being treated differently? If we are going to regulate/deregulate due to public space I want access to that Fiber.
Re:I don't see what's wrong... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I don't see what's wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
CLEC's and other DSL providers have had since the 1996 Telecom Act to try to build a business in the face of the 800 lb gorilla.
It is silly to act like the ILEC's have been successful by building a business just like anyone else does. They haven't. They had the enormous advantage of being the only game in town for a long, long time.
What we need is structural separation.
Break each Babay Bell into two units.
One being a regulated company that owns the outside plant. It would be required to sell access to everyone equally at requlated, cost-based rates.
Take the switching and retail side of the company and put it into another, un-regulated unit. This company would buy loops from the regulated company just like every other CLEC does.
Of course this is pie in the sky.
The Baby Bell's have far too much lobbying power for this to ever happen.
Re:I don't see what's wrong... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's BS from the telcos when they say if they had to compete with other companies in thr DSL space they couldn't be profitable, or would have no incentive to put in fiber. Just like any business, the cost of the infrastructure would be passed on to the consumer, regardless of the company that supplied the service. The truth is that the telcos are not interested in competing because they would not be able to set their own premium fees for basic service.
Not all of the telcos are standing still, though...to their credit, Verizon has gone ahead with switching to fiber (which in itself shows that the comment about the barrier for switching to fiber is a lie). In my area that means we WILL finally have true competition between cable and DSL. I look forward to it.
Telcos like third parties (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Confusion About Capitalism (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately now the government regulates as lobbied and not necessarily as needed. What is THIS model called?
Re:Universal internet access (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Deregulation never works (Score:3, Insightful)
Your cable bill has tripled? Are you getting more channels than you used to? Why don't you switch to satellite if you're unhappy? Or, wait a couple of years for the telephone company to start providing TV.
The Savings and Loan crash was mainly because the federal government wasn't charging enough for the FSLIC insurance -- normally you pay more for insurance on high-risk activities.
The old airlines have been in trouble because they're having trouble competing in a deregulated environment. Southwest, among others, is doing pretty well. The reason that they're bailed out is that the Congress is too lilly-livered to actually allow competition to work and let the weak players die off. If the business model is so bad, why are there so many new players?
Deregulation does cause upheaval, no doubt about it. But, markets work better than regulators do.
Re:Unfairness (Score:5, Insightful)
No company is going to be able to install the nationwide infrastructure that the telcos have -- it would be a multi-trillion-dollar investment if it was even possible given the amount of disruption to everyday life (digging up streets, etc.) that would be required. It was built piece by piece during the monopoly era, funded by a combination of tax money and monopoly profits, over a period of 90 years. The only way to participate in the DSL market is through the existing infrastructure.
To anyone who thinks Bell Telephone was a benign monopoly, well, you're wrong. I remember all too well the days when you had one choice of long distance carrier -- AT&T -- and you paid whatever they felt like charging. I remember when a 3-minute call to a town 15 miles away cost $1.63 (my parents made sure I'd remember). I remember when you were legally prohibited from owning a telephone; you had to rent them from the phone company, and since they had a monopoly there, too, they had no reason to offer anything more than desk, wall, and "princess" styles, and a handful of colors (about 5), so they didn't. I remember when long distance calls were something you made on special occasions, birthdays and holidays, not how you chatted with your friends for hours. I remember when they required you to get permission before connecting so much as an answering machine, and argued that allowing people to plug in their own hardware would cause the entire national phone network to collapse. (funny, it's still there) The Bell monopoly was never benevolent.
It is just mind-blowing that the federal government is redefining "competition" as "closing down multiple profitable companies competing in a given market and turning that market over to a single monopoly."
Re:I've been (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Benefits of this? YMMV. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I've been (Score:3, Insightful)
That's exactly what he means - when you tell them that you checked out the problem from your end with (insert your favorite Linux network tool here) and got result Foo, they will say "That's cool, we'll check Bar and..." ta-daaaa, they'll have you up and going. Or at least that's been my experience, and I've been a happy customer of theirs for 2 years.
Re:Benefits of this? YMMV. (Score:3, Insightful)
And if you wanted to come in and run your own lines, they'd probably let you. Just pay the same everyone else pays.
Re:FIOS (Score:3, Insightful)
It wasn't abcnews.com that made the internet great, it was the thousands of enthusiasts doing their own thing that made it great, but now we have what seems to be an active campain on part of the ISPs it dissuade people from doing their own think and experimenting a little.
Bah, I'm ranting again.
Re:I don't see what's wrong... (Score:2, Insightful)
If cable wasn't already established along with the telephone infrastructure, we would not have cable today. They snuck in when they weren't seen as a threat. As it is, the telcos are suing governments who allow wireless setups.
http://www.muniwireless.com/archives/municipal/48
Re:I've been (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Err wait, that's competition? (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't that like saying only one company is allowed to make pencils, and another to make pens, and those two companies will compete? They fight with the marker company and the crayon company too?
Bad analogy. Pens and pencils and markers and crayons do similar things but not the same thing. Meanwhile, DSL and cable, from the (non-geek) customer's perspective, do the same thing. Therefore, from a market standpoint, they are direct competitors - they are both simply broadband services.
Would it be nice to have competing cable providers or DSL providers? Sure, if we take that notion out of context. But those cable/DSL lines are private property, paid for and owned by private companies. Am I willing to destroy the concept of property rights just so there can be "competing" cable companies? No way.
God no (Score:3, Insightful)
Exhibit A: I called them up because an installation had gone wrong and I couldn't get online. Wanted to know whose fault it was. Turned out I hadn't released the DHCP properly, and it was waiting to time out, so they reset it on their end - and then I realized I hadn't written down any mirrors for my BSD distribution I was trying to get working, and didn't have any other working computers. So they tracked down a BSD distribution site for me and gave me the URL.
Exhibit B: They have semi-supported IPv6 tunnels (in that the service is available, but is not *officially* supported - unofficially, it is supported.)
Exhibit C: They have a server-side firewall to block incoming ports that tend to be problematical. It's configurable by the end-user. Yes, I have some control over *their firewall* on their end. (One of the options is "off entirely", for the curious.)
How much of that would be preserved with Verizon? Fuck all.
(Addendum: While digging through the config to see what the exact state of IPv6 was, I just realized I can change my reverse DNS entry for my static IP. Through the web interface. With full official support. I love these guys.)
(sonic.net, for the curious.)
Re:Universal internet access (Score:3, Insightful)
It wasn't even close. We could have fibered every home and business in the US ten years ago at a fraction of what we have paid for "competitive" private business to do the pitiful job they do know. Capped uploads, because they are content providers and don't want you competing with them by being a broadcaster; usage monitoring; price increases not mandated by rising costs; capricious repair charges; bribing government officials; locking out private and municipal developers of free 802.11 services; mergers that raise, not decrease, prices; "morals" monitoring, coming soon; union blocking...
We could have gigabit WAN with ethernet jacks in every home. Costs per unit would have dropped because of the enormous clout the purchasing agent would have brought to bear on the manufacturers.
To forestall the first objection I feel coming on, the costs you all will cite for fibering up a home are irrelevant. Those current costs are jacked up enormously for a premium service from natural monopolies. Cost per unit would drop if the profit motive were removed.
Somehow we managed to build highways, provide electricity, natural gas, and telephone service in the US during the 19th and 20th centuries without creating profit-choked monsters to ream us for every penny they could make, and if not for the ideologues in vogue today, we wouldn't be paying them today.
Businesses in the US are based on the Randian corporate model, and are inherent liars and thieves, tho they've developed techniques among their decision makers to pretend that they are not, even to themselves. Regulation is essential, or they will devour anything they can get their hands on.
Widespread WiFi built by citizen contributors, linked by laser or microwave backbones, could have broken this stranglehold, but the first laws are already in place to prevent the possibility.
Internet access is a public utility, and should be treated as such. It is also not a limited resource, like gas or electicity -- scarcity models are not applicable, however much the current providers are trying to imitate scarcity.
Re:Universal internet access (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Benefits of this? YMMV. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Unfairness (Score:1, Insightful)
So where have you been for the last six years?? In politics, conservatism literally means those with the money and power keep it. I mean how can you conserve if you never had it to begin with? That's why they repealed the estate tax, because it took away some of their hoardings.
What's sad is that this decision is perfectly in line with conservative politics, because for conservatives a successful competitive company exists to amass wealth. So for example, cola companies paying supermarkets to not give shelf space to other products is pro competitive since it allows for more profit. Similarly, open source should be pro-competive because it lowers the overhead of most everything, but to conservatives it is anti-competitive because that lowers the cost to enter markets and thus lowers the profit.
So you see clearly the problem with regulated DSL is that these resellers are eliminating profit. That's bad for competition from the perspective of the people with the wealth and power (those with something to conserve). Just remember that to a democrat good competition means lowering the prices people pay whereas to a conservative it means raising the profit of their company and investments and everything will make sense.
Re:I do. (Score:2, Insightful)
Apples and Oranges.
Education is available to everyone on equal terms. Telcos were granted local monopolies.
Re:Confusion About Capitalism (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously though, you're correct, the problem which will be created by this is that the telcos who own the lines will be able to destroy all competition and then pillage their customers. If people think that Verizon DSL is bad now, wait until they don't have to compete at all.
While I don't think it will ever happen, what I would like to see is for the control of the lines and providing a service on them to be declared an anti-trust violation. As such, you would have one company which owns the lines and leases them out to companies to put services on, and everyone else would just be in the business of selling services. Unfortunatly, there is just too much inertia behind the current state of affairs for this to happen. Not to mention, technically, the telcos are responsible for the building of the network, though with some government help, and therfore do have some property claim to the lines.
That said, we're fucked, the FCC is about to hand the large telcos the collective heads of thier competition, in the DSL market, on a silver platter. And, at the same time, bend all of the US citizens over for an ass raping by the large telcos.
Yay for the FCC! Showing that they truly are the Fuck the Citizens Commision.
Re:Benefits of this? YMMV. (Score:3, Insightful)
Double standards are part of having a shitty government. They will say, "You want to build here? Ok, we'll give each of these people $5,000 to 'git." to a big developer. If you're a startup or some average citizen, they'll say something like, "And make all those people move out? It would cost so much to fairly compensate them, and they would be resistant to moving! Those houses and folks are old, let them be."
Consequently, if I said someone was violating my copyright for a song, I'd be laughed at and no one would do anything about it. But when the RIAA says it, the fucking FBI is beating on people's doors!
You'll get access to that fiber line when they can profit from you having access to it, and more than pay for their original costs of bringing it into the area.
Re:Confusion About Capitalism (Score:2, Insightful)
As the OP said, the "natural monopoly" refers to the cost of independently building a competitive service. If another startup can't spring into being, get some financing, and lay a bunch of cable to an entire service area, then you can't count on the market to magically create competition. The barrier to entry is too high to make it feasible.
The whole point of open access regulations is to try to separate out the cost of building and maintaining the plant from the rest of the service. The only reason to do so is because it's very costly to build a duplicate plant.
It may very well be that the best solution is to remove the bit transport from private ownership, and treat it as we do roads. Nobody really wants to be in the business of transporting bits, because it's a no-margin commodity. (You can't get a more indistinguishable commodity than a bit!) Network providers only build the network in order to sell you high value services, and want to control the network to block competition from offering similar services. If a third party (the government, or a bit transport company separate from service providers) owned the network with equal access to all, then the problem of the cost to build many competing networks would go away.
No one suggests that grocery store chain A should build roads to all its stores for supply trucks, while chain B should build all its own roads for the same purpose. The cost would be absurd (even though it wouldn't cost "all that much more" for chain A to build extra lanes on its road network, beyond its actual needs.) But that's the situation we have with data networks instead of road networks.
Re:I've been (Score:3, Insightful)
I want to comment on this since I happen to be a tech for a major DSL provider. (COUGH! Shit Bell Corp) I know more than to speak off of a script. We are forced to read off scripts, and deviation is frowned upon. I actually work for an outsourcing company that contracts with SBC. We have agents in and outside of the US. There is much grumbling and consternation due to these scripts, much of the time we feel like our hands are tied on certain things. Legally, they are. If there is a problem with the OS (say, winME is hosed), they are referred to their manufacturer. If one of our techs tried to fix windows and hosed it up even worse, then we can be liable for it. Most people calling in to an ISP are too clueless to realize if the problem was caused by a tech, but it has happened. One customer was switching from a Siemens modem to a 2wire and the tech had them switch the power supplies, thus causing the magic smoke to escape. We had to eat the cost of the out-of-warranty equipment.
It's a great argument against outsourcing, actually. There is a huge ivory-tower syndrome issue, it pisses me off to no end. Our only recourse with bad policies and incorrect tech documentation or incorrect procedures is to fill out a web form that some dipshit reads, and half the time they don't understand you, so nothing ever gets changed. We are graded on how we answer a call, and if it is not done verbatim, or near verbatim, we fail the call if we are being monitored.
Anyway, rant off, Speakeasy is taking a risk in doing stuff that they do for their customers. From a tech support view anyway.
I wonder who initiated this FCC change? It seems like more of the same from the era of the Bush administration. Handouts to big business.