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pnh102
Reptiles Are Cuddly And Pretty
Premium Member
join:2002-05-02
Mount Airy, MD

1 recommendation

pnh102 to moonpuppy

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to moonpuppy

Re: FCC Sanity?

said by moonpuppy:

However, what I do have a problem with is a company not servicing an area and then saying no one else can because they MIGHT want to provide service at a later time.
They aren't doing this though. They are simply lobbying against the government providing such services. If cable and telephone companies were really stopping other companies from providing services, then how does one explain FIOS or Project Lightspeed? Surely the cable companies would want to stop these deployments. The same goes with Comcast or other cable companies expanding their service areas. Surely the phone companies would want to put a stop to that as well.

phattieg
join:2001-04-29
Winter Park, FL

phattieg to rradina

Member

to rradina
Competition this, that, WHATEVER! I don't see how it could possibly help. Lets think here, big company, versus start-up/smaller company. Smaller company needs overhead, and can't get it without charging the same as the big guys...
moonpuppy (banned)
join:2000-08-21
Glen Burnie, MD

moonpuppy (banned) to pnh102

Member

to pnh102
said by pnh102:

They aren't doing this though. They are simply lobbying against the government providing such services. If cable and telephone companies were really stopping other companies from providing services, then how does one explain FIOS or Project Lightspeed? Surely the cable companies would want to stop these deployments. The same goes with Comcast or other cable companies expanding their service areas. Surely the phone companies would want to put a stop to that as well.
The phone companies already have part of the infrastructure in place so they can upgrade it. However, VERY few places have more than one cable company.

Also, you might want to read this old article here about Verizon wanting to stop a muni WiFi project:

»Verizon Ban Could Cripple Philly Wi-Fi

And cable has tried to stop these deployments. They cry about franchise agreements they have to follow that the telcos don't want to follow.

pnh102
Reptiles Are Cuddly And Pretty
Premium Member
join:2002-05-02
Mount Airy, MD

1 recommendation

pnh102

Premium Member

said by moonpuppy:

Also, you might want to read this old article here about Verizon wanting to stop a muni WiFi project:
It's too bad Verizon did not succeed. The City of Philadelphia has a record high murder rate this year. The money the city is wasting on building this wireless network could have been used to hire more cops.
said by moonpuppy:

And cable has tried to stop these deployments. They cry about franchise agreements they have to follow that the telcos don't want to follow.
It's not the telcos' fault that cable wasn't smart enough to initially get a state-wide franchise from the git-go. However, any potential future competitor will benefit from a streamlining of this process from now on.
moonpuppy (banned)
join:2000-08-21
Glen Burnie, MD

moonpuppy (banned)

Member

said by pnh102:

It's too bad Verizon did not succeed. The City of Philadelphia has a record high murder rate this year. The money the city is wasting on building this wireless network could have been used to hire more cops.
While I agree Philadelphia has bigger issues than WiFI what gives Verizon the right to stop it?
said by pnh102:


It's not the telcos' fault that cable wasn't smart enough to initially get a state-wide franchise from the git-go. However, any potential future competitor will benefit from a streamlining of this process from now on.
Cable got the local franchises because, at the time, they were NOT big enough to wire up an entire state and many of the first deployments were very small. Only recently have we seen the huge cable conglomerates that now service entire sections of the country and not one county at a time.

pnh102
Reptiles Are Cuddly And Pretty
Premium Member
join:2002-05-02
Mount Airy, MD

pnh102

Premium Member

said by moonpuppy:

While I agree Philadelphia has bigger issues than WiFI what gives Verizon the right to stop it?
I know! Comcast, along with everyone else who pays taxes to the city should have been able to stop this.

marigolds
Gainfully employed, finally
MVM
join:2002-05-13
Saint Louis, MO

marigolds to pnh102

MVM

to pnh102
said by pnh102:
said by moonpuppy:

Also, you might want to read this old article here about Verizon wanting to stop a muni WiFi project:
It's too bad Verizon did not succeed. The City of Philadelphia has a record high murder rate this year. The money the city is wasting on building this wireless network could have been used to hire more cops.
said by moonpuppy:

And cable has tried to stop these deployments. They cry about franchise agreements they have to follow that the telcos don't want to follow.
It's not the telcos' fault that cable wasn't smart enough to initially get a state-wide franchise from the git-go. However, any potential future competitor will benefit from a streamlining of this process from now on.
How is this benefit created?
Does someone lose as the result of the creation of this benefit, or is the benefit pareto efficient? If so, how are the losers being compensated? If there are no losers, then why is there opposition?
moonpuppy (banned)
join:2000-08-21
Glen Burnie, MD

moonpuppy (banned) to pnh102

Member

to pnh102
said by pnh102:

said by moonpuppy:

While I agree Philadelphia has bigger issues than WiFI what gives Verizon the right to stop it?
I know! Comcast, along with everyone else who pays taxes to the city should have been able to stop this.
Comcast should have no right to stop it. If that were the case then Verizon should have the right to stop Comcast and any other cable company from offering voice services since taxes help pay for phone services and POTS is still regulated.
rradina
join:2000-08-08
Chesterfield, MO

rradina to pnh102

Member

to pnh102
I agree. Internet access and television service are not rights. For that matter, phone, electricity, sewer and water should not be a rights but a privileges. However twisted their logic, I suspect some states probably have laws that make it a right. I'm not sure how the constitution enforces this but maybe they amended the constitution. Regardless, that's a whole different discussion.

I believe every business should have the privilege to pick its customers and provide whatever service it can based on profits. In my opinion, this is congruent with basic capitalism. However, whenever utilities are involved, both companies and the government are predisposed to involve legislative action to define, assist and govern fees. Generally this is caused by lack of true competition (oligopoly).

My bottom line belief: If some level of government is to provide an advantage to a particular company, then I believe that government has an obligation to ensure the advantage eventually provides the product or service to a majority of its constituents. And....eventually should be reasonable and not 10+ years.

RadioDoc

join:2000-05-11
La Grange, IL

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1 recommendation

RadioDoc

said by rradina:

My bottom line belief: If some level of government is to provide an advantage to a particular company, then I believe that government has an obligation to ensure the advantage eventually provides the product or service to a majority of its constituents. And....eventually should be reasonable and not 10+ years.
That was the premise behind granting monopolies with regulated but guaranteed rates of return. In exchange, the utility (electric, telco, whatever) was required to serve 100% of the customers in the franchise area who wanted service, regardless of the cost to the company.

What you believe, and what most of the so-called regulators forgot in the 1980s is that despite all the rhetoric there are natural monopolies which do not lend themselves to facilities-based competitive markets. But besides the economic disincentive to overbuilding there are public interest considerations as well. You generally would not want to have, say, 10 electric companies all setting poles and stringing their own wires. Cities would be strangled in power lines.

The Reaganomics era threw that out the window and championed "the market" as the regulator of choice for just about anything. While the regulatory landscape in the early 80's was anything but desirable it had elements of sanity which are missing from today's scenarios. This is one of them. At some point the local regulatory agencies (usually some franchise authority of some sort) got stupid and demanded the sky from the huge cash cow which cable TV grew into. Service became unimportant as long as the local alderman had his access channel to use as a campaign tool.

National franchising is another knee-jerk reaction to bad regulation, but there is no real comparative benefit to the current situation, either. If there were, 100% of all cable TV customers would have state of the art HSI because the local regulators would have mandated it. They are mostly impotent and Comcast, et. al. know it. Despite their whining to the contrary, they'd love to be out from under these local contracts.

braynes
Premium Member
join:2005-03-14
Waterville, ME

braynes to pnh102

Premium Member

to pnh102
"Competition does allows you to play the providers against one another to get a better deal for yourself. Quite a few people have used with success the threat of moving from one provider to another as a means to get their current provider to continue a promotional rate where it would have otherwise expired."

Not where I live they say ok sorry good luck,bye-bye.
Bruce
rradina
join:2000-08-08
Chesterfield, MO

rradina to RadioDoc

Member

to RadioDoc
said by RadioDoc:

That was the premise behind granting monopolies with regulated but guaranteed rates of return. In exchange, the utility (electric, telco, whatever) was required to serve 100% of the customers in the franchise area who wanted service, regardless of the cost to the company.
If that's really true, how did the telcos manage to get USF? Is that a result of the deregulation?

I also agree that we cannot have 10 electricity providers stringing poles in neighborhoods. The same holds true for other service utilities including cable and telephone -- unless the latter two can go wireless.

Incidentally, that's where my hope is. If wireless can continue to improve for the last mile, most consumers may be able to live the Holy Grail of true competition. There will always be rural challenges but a majority of rural customers don't enjoy public water and sewer. At their expense, they drill wells and install septic systems.

RadioDoc

join:2000-05-11
La Grange, IL

RadioDoc

The USF is a figment of Congressional imagination. A enormously large, bacon-flavored figment.

Wireless is not the future, unless your future is one of continuously degrading service quality and laughably inept spectrum management. But as long as the marks keep shoveling their money into the cellular coffers you won't see any improvement in price, service or availability.

We have "wireless" video. It's called OTA television and satellite TV. Considering the number of digital signals one ATSC transmission can carry, and the number of ATSC channels which may be available in any given market, broadcast TV is the way to go for the ad-supported content and satellite is the way to go for paid content. The current wet dream of video on demand via the Internet is not viable unless significant changes are made in the way it works. It is insanity to think a separate bandwidth-consuming connection for each viewer is sustainable when the broadcast model is so much more efficient and has zero marginal distribution cost for each additional viewer.

Cable will never be able to go "wireless". Their entire business model is built on total control of the path. Once their 'last mile' hits the air it's effectively free.