| Here's some thoughts 1. Competition
The telco act divided the bell system up, most notably to promote competition and break up a monopoly. Supposedly in the consumers best interests.
It broke the company up, that is about all it did.
As for competition, it created the CLEC or Competitive Local exchange carrier, and gave the state regulatory officials the power to determine how much the ILEC, Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier, could charge the CLEC. Most states mandated that the ILECs had to give CLECs a deep discount, up to 70%. The ILECs could make 30% to cover maintenance of the line and costs associated with providing the service. There were thousands of CLECs, you could be a CLEC just by filling out some paperwork and sitting behind a computer in your living room. All the CLEC's do is buy service from an ILEC and resell it to a customer, they are merely a billing agent. The dialtone is furnished by an ILEC regardless of who you buy it from. No CLEC could afford to wire a community in order to compete with an ILEC. Most have no customer support, they have no one to go to your house and fix a jack, install a new jack or fix anything beyond the NID, Network Interface Device, on the outside of your house. Although they were allowed to bundle Long distance with their service and the ILEC's could not, this was actually disadvantageous to the consumer, the CLEC's had little or no customer support, charged as much or more than the ILEC's and were allowed to bundle their long distance. Now, you can get unlimited long distance for $30 a month, from an ILEC, if the ILEC's could bundle their services all along you would have had cheaper long distance a long time ago. From what I see, the CLEC's target mostly people who can not get service from an ILEC, usually due to credit or unpaid bills. These people usually pay more from the CLEC than they would from an ILEC since they are a greater risk and they have no other choice but to go with a CLEC.
The real competition is on the horizon, the cable companies have scalded their customers for several decades with high prices and sad service. now they are in for a run for their money. By allowing the mergers, the government has allowed the telco's to compete on a level basis with a worthy competitor, the cable companies. They have done what no CLEC was capable of doing, they wired the communities. Now it is going to be a matter of who can provide the consumer with the best services for the best price. The consumers will be the winners now and this is competition.
2. Services
AT&T agreed to provide 100% of its customers with broadband service by the end of 2007. Obviously they intend on spending some serious cash in the best interests of their customers.
You need to look at the differences between the cable companies and the telcos. The cable companies never originally designed their systems to provide anything more then video and the telcos didn't design their systems to provide anything more than voice and data communication. Now you have cable companies adding data and voice services and telcos adding video. You have two different technologies at work here trying to offer the same services. You must make a decision as to what is most important to you when choosing between these two technologies. cable is proven for video and the telcos are proven with voice and data. It's a no brainer as to which provider is best at providing which services.
Comcast offers DTS, Digital Telephone service in my area, I work for a telco and do atleast 5 winbacks a week. A winback is where someone went from us to comcast and it didn't work so they come back to us. When comcast offers DTS, the customer's number is ported to the comcast equipment and comcast becomes their service provider, they provide the service from their softswitch in their cable TV office to the customer over their infrastructure, a form of VOIP. The main problem I hear about is dropped calls and incompatible equipment. The main reason I hear that people originally went to comcast was either price or a bundled deal generally in area's that we did not have DSL deployed in yet. In any case, nothing beats the old reliable POTS, Plain Old Telephone Service, line when you depend on telephone service, only available from you local ILEC.
3. Fiber vs Copper
Copper is the core of the telephone business. It is in place,it has a proven track record and it simply works. There are 2 fiber technologies, FTTP, Fiber To The Prem, which extends fiber all the way to the house and FTTN, Fiber To The Node, which extends fiber to remote terminals in subdivisions allowing high speed data equipment to be moved closer to the end user thus making it available to more customers. High speed data, DSL, is limited by the subscribers distance from the equipment. FTTP would allow the most bandwidth allowing the fastest speed and more services, but is also the most costly at this point due to the equipment involved. it is a good option for new subdivisions. FTTN is the only practical way to get service to the existing customers, the copper is already there and deployment is cheaper. More people will be able to get DSL in a shorter time frame by using the existing infrastructure with FTTN.
4. The Merger
This merger will benefit the consumers, look at it this way, when you go to Sams Club and purchase in bulk, you get a better deal than you do buying the same item at the convenience store down the street. Why, Sam simply purchases in a much higher volume so they get a larger discount and since they sell at a much larger volume can pass the savings on to the purchaser. Look at your telephone bills, how much have they increased or decreased over the last 10 years compared to your cable bill? I had cable, the bills went up every year, I dropped cable and went to Dish, the bill has been the same for several years, my telephone service is reliable and my DSL is faster than the neighbors cable broadband and doesn't go out several times a month and every time it rains and I have paid the same or less every year for my voice data and video.
5. The Future
I believe the future will see strong integration with wireless, high speed data, voice and video. The winners will be those that can combine all of the services seamlessly at the most reasonable price with the best customer service. Fiber will be the way to go and the phase out of the telco's switch equipment for soft switch VOIP is on the horizon. But, the telco's will wait for a reliable VOIP solution before deploying it in order to maintain their level of service and customer satisfaction.
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