Some truth about Comcast - WikiLeaks style

Mon Dec 20 11:55:22 UTC 2010

On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 8:48 PM, Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net> wrote:
> Running a wire to everyone's house is a natural monopoly. It just
> doesn't make sense, financially or technically, to try and manage 50
> different companies all trying to install 50 different wires into every
> house just to have competition at the IP layer. It also wouldn't make

What no one has mentioned thus far is that CLECs really are able to
install their own facilities to homes and businesses if they decide
that is a good way to invest their finite resources.  This is why we
see several options for local loops in the "business district" of
every sizable city, as well as in many newly-developed areas such as
industrial parks.  These infrastructure builds are expensive, the
CLECs had limited logistical capabilities and could only manage so
many projects at once, and obviously, they focused their efforts on
the parts of town where return-on-investment was likely to be highest.
 Businesses often do have several good choices for voice, data,
Internet, and so on.  Cogent is an example of an essentially
Internet-only service having some degree of success at this without
even offering voice, or initially even transport, products.

The reason we will not see competitive facility builds to residences
is they have a very long ROI scale.  Everything in the traditional
telecommunications world did.  Many POTS customers still pay a fee for
DTMF or "touch tone dialing", because when their phone company
invested in new cards and software to support DTMF signalling, they
passed those expenses on to consumers.  These upgrades cost on the
order of a thousand dollars per phone line, but consumers could get
the benefit of DTMF by paying a couple dollars per month.  See also:
call waiting, caller ID, and so on.  I don't know about you, but I was
still using an "ATDP" dialing string until cable and DSL became
available to me at home (in about 2002) because I did not want to pay
the extra fee for touch tone dialing or other features I didn't need
on a dedicated modem line. ;)

We see examples of more choice available to business consumers than
residences, due to economies of scale, every day.  A business,
apartment community, or neighborhood association can choose from
multiple dumpster-tip services for trash collection.  Most residents
do not have enough trash volume to justify a bulky dumpster, so their
only practical choice is whatever curb-side trash collection company
has an agreement with their local government.

-- 
Jeff S Wheeler <jsw at inconcepts.biz>
Sr Network Operator  /  Innovative Network Concepts