| FTTP means no competition, period The Verizon proposal is chilling. It means a total cutoff of third-party information to their ratepayers!
Right now, if you're served by Verizon copper, you have a choice. You can make a "local" dial-up call to an ISP, at maybe 24 kbps, or faster if you're lucky. You can subscribe to an ISP who purchases Verizon's telecom DSL service. Or you can subscribe to an ISP whose DSL comes from a CLEC, who uses Verizon's copper.
In the first case (dial-up), you can only do this because the FCC has ruled that calls to ISPs are jurisdictionally interstate but must be retail-billed as local calls. That "ESP Exemption" sticks in their craw; every few years VZ asks for the right to charge for ISP calls the way they charge LD providers. It's nicknamed the "modem tax" and it's not completely dead, just not something that can be discussed by the FCC in an election year.
In the second case (Verizon DSL), Verizon's common carrier obligation requires them, like any LEC (yes, even a CLEC), to sell telecom service to any appropriately-situated party that requests it. So lots of ISPs buy DSL from Verizon. Their wholesale price, thanks to the FCC, is roughly the same as their retail DSL+Internet service price (around $30/mo depeding on volume, plus upstream linkage). So it's not too competitive except for business. But it is an option. The FCC has, however, in long-pending docket 02-33, proposed removing that obligation from DSL. Thus Verizon (and every other ILEC) would be allowed to cut off every independent ISP. Powell's sitting on that one for now with no decision made.
In the Triennial Review order last year, in a part that was approved by the court, the FCC ruled that FTTP need not be shared with CLECs, except that if it's an overbuild of copper, then they have to make a single analog voice-grade channel available to CLECs, for narrowband voice service use. If it's a "green field" FTTH, and there is no existing copper (which a CLEC would be able to use, if it were an overbuild), then the CLEC gets no access whatsoever. The CLEC would literally need to dig their own trench. As if the typical subdivision community association would allow it, or as if it were economically possible.
Cable modem services are not common carriage. That rankles phone companies a little, but only becuase they want to use it as an excuse to get out of the obligations that came with their monopolies. Now if Verizon gets to treat that monopoly FTTP as not common carriage, then indeed your only ISP choice in such a home would be Verizon Online. And as a non-regulated ISP, they would have an absolute right, if they chose to exercise it, to:
* censor your web browsing, so you can't read sites that they or their friends in Washington don't want you to read
* censor your email
* block you from sending or reading email except through their filtered servers
* block FTP, peer-to-peer, and any other ports they felt like
* block VoIP, heuristically detecting it via Layer 7 monitoring of every open port. (And I've seen the box that can do this.)
But hey, Mike Powell thinks that this is good, because you'll be able to watch Fox News on your computer really fast. |
