| reply to pfing
Re: I'm not supporting Cablevision... Good question. Here's why - carrier to carrier charges are the lifeblood of the ILECs. Charging for business circuits is the other artery. Once those go to normal profits, there is no cash left to fund expansive video deployments. Back to carrier-to-carrier charges: Video has none (content only). High speed data has none (when was the last time espn.com charged Comcast or Verizon to access its content?) - just have the cost to get to the servers. Phone is full of archane charges. Go-it-alone VoIP companies are not achieving positive cash flows (or I am reading the wrong statements) because they are churning out a lot of their bases to the ILEc and cable bundles, or the cost savings vs. cable bundle equivalents is not significant enough to switch. The question is not whether a company is competitive in total, but whether the source of the competitiveness comes from "hidden" revenue streams that mask the effectiveness of the core business. If you peel back the income statements of at&t and VZ, you will find some pockets of super-normal profits. Welcome to the cross-subsidy maze that the FCC, Judge Green (1984), the Congress (1996 Telecom Act) and politically-charged and consumer-unfriendly state PUCs have created. |
