Rural nework economics [was: Sabotage...]

Tue Nov 4 14:28:39 UTC 2003

On Mon, 3 Nov 2003 19:53:00 -0700  " John Brown (CV)" wrote:
> rural or not,  capitalism will hinder redundancy unless
> the shareholders or the insurance companies say otherwise.

Lack of capitalism killed telco redundancy.  The telephone company had
no competitive reason to build it and the regulators don't understand
the issue enough to enforce it.  Therefore, the telco management (and
engineers?) coasted.

We compete to some extent with the incumbent.  Our shareholders care an
awfully lot about redundancy.  Senior management has promised that our
networks are redundant in the vast majority of cases and any existing
lack of redundancy will be removed in short order.  We buy fiber from
the telco, CLECs and the power company.  The telco could get redundancy
cheaply from bothering to buy fiber from other sources, but they have a
real "not invented here" mentality which reduces the quality of their
services.  If they can't justify the capital costs to pull fiber, they
don't have fiber... at least in Maine.

I believe in the long run, our shareholders will see a better return on
investment than telco shareholders caused by issues like this.  If so,
capitialism works in this case.

regards,
fletcher