Telco Digital Extortion? > Mr. Smith goes to Washington

Mr. Smith goes to Washington

Everyone jumps on Bellsouth's case about this when this has been going on in other forms for years, by both cable and telcos alike. When a new technology comes out do you see it in the older parts of town first, no. You see it in some new high dollar subdivision on the edge of town. When a cable company rebuilds a node where are they more likely to lower the number of subs per a node at; in the lower class neighborhoods where there is a higher sub turnover rate or in the up scale neighborhoods with a lower turnover rate. It is the same with adsl, the telcos are more likely to turn up a dslam in a up scale neighborhood because here they know they can obtain and keep more subs on the service. Even when many companies expand their backbone network it tends to be built to support the newer areas of growth, leaving the old areas behind in the process. Also many ISP's have limiting data flow on certain ports of their subscribers for some time, that is a very similar thing, just they are not making money off of it. There is another question that still begs to be answered, what will the profit from the money be used for? If it is used to lower the cost of broadband will also increasing the speed of the service this would help keep many who just use the internet for basic surfing. A change in routing would be hard to notice in some internet apps, it will take one that is time sensitive or with heavy data flow to show the difference, and in these two areas many of the cable and telco ISP's already have issues.