SBC CEO: Pipes Can’t Be Free For Other To Use

This is a PR disaster in making for SBC…CEO Edward Whitacre, in what surely has to be a momentary lapse of reason, said in an interview with BW that Google, MSN, Vonage, and others may have to pay to get access to their broadband pipes..this comes the day FCC approved SBC’s $16 billion takeover of AT&T, and put in a condition that SBC and other rival Verizon permit its customers to surf anywhere they choose on the Internet and use any applications on it, for the next two years.

In response to a question, he said: “How do you think they’re going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!”

He said more than that…in an extended piece in BW, he added: “They use my lines for free — and that’s bull.”

The second story also has a good comparison of the IPTV and broadband approaches by SBC and Verizon.

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