We're Running Out Of Bandwidth > Carriers are integrating for cost containment

Carriers are integrating for cost containment

"Carriers have literally stopped fiber pipes dead in their tracks in terms of construction for many of them and instead are focusing on mergers and cost containment."

Hi there....anonymous....ummm build anything? Don't think so!

Ever hear of DWDM?

Let me post a link: »en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWDM

Read it over. Don't understand it (it's ok - im sure you anonymous for a reason), and talk some more.

In the mean time, let me provide another article....notice the date.... Apr 24, 2000. Old...isn't it? Look over the article.

»telephonyonline.com/mag/telecom_···avestar/

Plus, the 800G can use interleaving - a wave-packing technology - to combine the 320 wavelengths to provide 80 channels at 10 Gb/s.

reply to CostContainment

reply to fcisler
Yes IPv6 is pretty spiffy too. But does it exist in the wild? How many real world implementations of DWDM are there? How many outside of the two grandchildren of Ma Bell?

reply to kapil
You need to get you facts straight. The 1996 telecom act did more to damage the ability for the telecoms to develop new services like broadband. The whole scheme was something out of Atlas Shrug. The ILECs would be force sell access to the CLECs at a price dictated by the FCC that was below cost. It caused a gold rush of CLECs with the ILECs footing the bill. That and the dot com bust had lead to demise of many telecom companies such as Lucent, MCI etc. It show the liberal idea of competition based on numbers is a complete failure.
What Net Neutrality will do is send a clear signal to the backbone providers to do not expect to get a return of investment on any new network construction. They will simply invest elsewhere.

reply to kapil
Err... places like (South) Korea have issues like a total inability to use anything other than a Windows PC on the internet, thanks to government meddling.

»www.kanai.net/weblog/archive/200···0h53m55s

Yay for government meddling!

BTW, I can and do get dialtone through Cavalier. So here's another bit of anecdotal evidence of competition. Why don't we ever hear the liberals (by the way, I'm not a "neocon" but what you might call a "conservative") complain about the small ILECs who are complete, total monopolies and who have offered totally inferior services to Verizon for decades? My dad has no choice of a phone company in central NY (I forget the company) and has always had audible noise on the line and 24K modem connections. No DSL, no ISDN for that matter.

Why is "big government" okay but "big corporations" are evil?

reply to richardpor
Lucent and MCI didn't die.

Lucent went through a bad period because everyone, altogether stopped buying telecom equipment. And Lucent is an equipment maker not a carrier. I prefer to think that as a descendant of the original AT&T, Lucent had a certain amount of bad karma that followed it through the many spin-offs. Lucent was just purchased by French telecom equipment maker Alcatel.

MCI/Worldcom commit ed fraud a la Enron. They didn't go out of business...just declared bankruptcy, changed names from Worldcom to MCI and eventually got bought out by Verizon.

What you say about "ILECs forced to sell to CLECs at below cost rates" is nothing but ILEC astroturfing.

ILECs didn't like sharing their monopolies. So they claimed that the 100 year old copper was worth its weight in gold by using fuzzy depreciation math. The rates were based on unrealistic numbers...the true cost of a copper loop is next to nothing...ILECs just didn't want to sell it to CLECs at the real price so the made up a number and then complained that the government was forcing them to sell at a loss.

If copper loops cost as much as AT&T would have you believe, how are they offering DSL and unlimited POTS with nationwide calling for $50-$70? At a loss???...look at their SEC filings, I don't think so.

The ILECs will invest elsewhere? Where? Finance movies? or get into the mortgage business? The phone companies are in the business of being phone companies. They have a vested interest in maintaining and updating their network if they want to remain a viable business and they will continue to spend on it...anything other than that coming out of their mouths is posturing for better legislative leverage.

reply to operagost
Big government isn't inherently bad, just like a big corporation. But greed corrupts. Both business and government.

I'm with you, we shouldn't have any monopolies - utility infrastructure, electric grid, phone, natural gas, petroleum should all be nationalised...and private companies should be able to offer competing services that run on top of the publicly owned infrastructure.

If you and I own the copper, and all DSL companies have the same underlying cost for the local loop, we can more clearly compare costs...and hopefully have more competition in the marketplace.

reply to kapil
The 1996 Telcom Act was obsolete almost by the time the ink dried. The Act's goal of increasing local competetion from CLECs has largely failed- instead market forces provided competition independant of the 96 act in the form of VoIP (which they didn't think to address) and cellular services that are cheaper and more widely available than 10 years ago. These forms of competition successfully emerged not so much through FCC intervention, but because they largely kept their filthy paws off them- at least in comparison to other telecommunications services.

In this case my fellow free-market advocates were right- the flawed, cumbersome 1996 Telcom Act had much less impact on local competition than did market forces and advancements in technology.

The arguments that the AT&T / SBC merger will have a significant impact on reducing competition are overstated in my opinion- there wasn't significant local service competition between them anyways.

reply to kapil
"The ILECs will invest elsewhere? Where?"

Upgrades to the local loop to support tv?

reply to fcisler
The main issue is with the undersea transatlantic routes which I think is what Deloitte was referring to.

In this case, Level 3 had acquired and has options to acquire capacity on multiple fiber cables. Back in Feb 2006 they were at 85% of capacity on their transatlantic routes.

What level 3 is doing is acquiring capacity on multiple cables because its own fiber optics cables DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH CAPACITY. But by the time all is done its quite possible that some backbones will NOT be able to secure the bandwidth it needs and so some backbones will be problematic with delays. As broadband usage and speeds go higher, there is a sharp need for more bandwidth and this is where the problem lies. Level 3 in their actions is saying "We are trying to acquire all the capacity we can get because we are predicting mass usage."

reply to operagost
Don't ruin his rant with facts. It just pisses him off.

All that POTS competition existed solely on paper. The CLEC dialtone was ILEC dialtone in a resale wrapper. True alternative facilities-based providers never existed because they didn't have to...they could just piggyback onto the fraud which Congress created in 1996.
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reply to richardpor

reply to CostContainment

reply to John Galt
I stand corrected