Because of “The American Way” the well-being of the people of america will always be screwed-over by vested-interests.

The original copper-wire was laid aeons ago, and provided it’s multiple return substantially enough; to go the LLU route would simply be completing the aims of the original ma-bell break-up. To require new cabling would simply be too substantial for anyone to ever get into the business -we saw in the 1st bubble how only down-town areas were mainly being fibre-cabled for corporate accounts, and that was it.

In the UK they have literally dozens of dsl providers, including the ability for naked dsl, and where even the cable company can use the copper network out of it’s area where the service difference is largely undifferentiated. This actually works for the benefit of BT because of the dynamicism of competition and stable guaranteed income it provides it.

It’s ironic that America lead the world when it allowed customers to select a separate long-distance provider from the local baby-bell, but then it seems to have frozen.

If the FCC et al don’t go the full LLU route, the only other hope is that there might be commoditised Wi-Max, but with the capital required for that, is it going to be likely?

Which will only mean that America moves further into the backwater of international domestic infrastructure.

Korea has 100mbs BB; In the UK, the minimum is 2mbs, 24mbs for adsl2 and 50mbs for cable-BB, while countries like China are able to start with virgin networks with the latest technology. Imagine how the world was looked-upon as when there was still wide use of dial-up, now imagine America being that!

Yours kindly,

Shakir Razak

There is an unfortunate tendency to villanize Martin and lionize Powell because Martin presided over the DSL dereg engineered by Powell while refusing to push for spectrum reform — which was Powell’s saving grace among techies. IMO, this does Martin an injustice and obscures what is really going on at the FCC today.

http://www.hyperorg.com/misc/delamination.html

I also find it amazing that the telecomms say they own a network that was paid for 1000% by tax dollars (yes, the four digits aren’t a mistake.) Where is the broadband to every home they promised us in 1996 in exchange for the tax incentives they got? The US PEOPLE own the pipes AND the spectrum, not Ed f*king Whitacre or his clone replacement, or any of the other Corporate Stuffed Shirts. And the current way of doing things will ensure that the new pipes are never built, since scarcity favors the telecomms.

http://www.wetmachine.com/item/441

Om, I agree with everything you said, but in future would you refrain from calling people “consumers”??? That’s corporation-speak, as AT&T would use to refer to people, and it belittles and degrades us all. Thank you.

Here’s the crux of the issue: most efforts to spur competition in the US market involve taking an asset from one party (the incumbent) and giving it to another (the competitor). This act may be dressed up in positive language (“open up,” “unbundled,” etc.) but it doesn’t change what is fundamentally happening.

If the incumbent is a state-owned PTT this may not be a bad thing. But if the incumbent is a business, most individuals, even disgruntled customers of the incumbent, might cringe at this sort of heavy-handed government intrusion in the marketplace (and, at the risk of offending the tender sensibilities of some of the posters above, just look at the outcry resulting from Kelo v. New London).

We have true competition between telcos and cablecos because each owns and operates their own access networks. If we want more competition, we should motivate more businesses to build access networks (wireless, electric utilities, fiber overlay, etc.). Taking it from those that have already built it does not create competition.

This is the #1 issue we have to get awareness of and grassroots support for. The argument that the duopoly is competition is ridiculous. I mean sure, we’re lucky the cablecos are offering at least some competition, and things would be even worse if we had only the telcos, but it is not the same as real competition. The simple contrast is the net itself. Imagine a net where our choice of websites/services were only those offered by telcos and cablecos. Contrast that with the net economy (and all the weatlth it has created) that we actually have.

The anology also doesn’t fit because the stores that contain those shelves were not build with taxpayer-paid subsidies, like the telco networks were.

btw, that’s the same reason our equivalent of the iPhone data plan costs 299/mt and has an unlimited bandwidth of 500mb/month… and your unused minutes… don’t carry over.

France Telecom is not owned by the French Government. They only have a 32.45% stake, not the two-thirds that you stated.

http://www.itireports.com/now_francetelecom.htm

Your Wall Mart/K-Mart analogy is stupid. There’s no bottleneck in retail storefronts. There is a bottle neck in communications networks, and it is an industry with enourmous economies of scope and scale. “Building a network” as you propose is an economically inefficient allocation of resources (i.e. this industry exhibits natural monopoly/oligopoly traits).

Open Acces works precisely because of these features.

Cox and AT&T may appear to be competing, but they don’t compete head-to-head on the Internet product, instead focusing on service bundles. There’s an old antitrust saying, “Four is few, six is many”. The bottom line is the U.S. broadband market is slumbering because of anticompetitive behavior by telco and cable incumbents.

No, instead we have incumbent infrastructure monopolists, in certain areas overlapping, creating duopolies. The problem with duopolies is that neither company has much incentive to compete. It is much easier to maintain prices and strive to increase margins in a duopoly.