Some truth about Comcast - WikiLeaks style

Jeffrey S. Young young at jsyoung.net
Mon Dec 20 03:31:37 UTC 2010


one of the most interesting things about coming to Australia (after working in the USA telecom industry for 20 years) was the opportunity to see such a proposal (the NBN) put into practice.  who knows if the NBN will be quite what everyone hopes, but the premise is sound, the last mile is a natural monopoly.

I believe that 'competition' in the last mile is a red herring that simply maintains the status quo (which for many broadband consumers is woefully inadequate). I agree with you that the USA has too many lobbyists to ever put such a proposal in place, the telecoms in a large number of states have even limited or prevented municipalities from creating their own solutions, consumers have no hope.   one has to wonder how different the telecom world might have been in the USA if a layer 1 - layer 2/3 separation was proposed instead of the at&t breakup and modified judgement

jy

On 19/12/2010, at 8:48 PM, Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net> wrote:

> On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 08:20:49PM -0500, Bryan Fields wrote:
>> 
>> The government granting a monopoly is the problem, and more lame 
>> government regulation is not the solution.  Let everyone compete on a 
>> level playing field, not by allowing one company to buy a monopoly 
>> enforced by men with guns.
> 
> 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 
> sense to have 5 different competing water companies trying to service 
> your house, etc. This is where government regulation of the entities who 
> ARE granted the monopoly status comes into play, to protect consumers 
> against abuses like we're seeing Comcast commit today.
> 
> Personally I think the right answer is to enforce a legal separation 
> between the layer 1 and layer 3 infrastructure providers, and require 
> that the layer 1 network provide non-discriminatory access to any 
> company who wishes to provide IP to the end user. But that would take a 
> lot of work to implement, and there are billions of dollars at work 
> lobbying against it, so I don't expect it to happen any time soon. :)
> 
> -- 
> Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
> GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)
> 
> 




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