| It's all a big de-regulatory / re-regulatory mess! While I don't care for the tactics that the Baby Bells seems to be using, I can understand their motivation. Remember that the Telecom. act of 1996, I believe, forced Telcos (Bells) to lease some of their slots to competitors at wholesale rates. The idea was that because of the cost and risk associated with building telecom infrastructure, start-up competitors, whose presence in the market would provide all the blessings assumed to come from raw competition, would need a boost to get going. I suppose the thinking went that once the start-ups got a foothold and started making some profit, they would invest in building their own infrastructure and ultimately make even more profit.
The fly in the ointment that much of the mandated wholesale leases were taken by big established companies, such as MCI, AT&T, etc. So now you have the Bells forced to lease some of their infrastructure at discount prices to major competitors who should have the capital to build their own but who are "glomming" on the Bells. Now the Bells aren't exactly struggling newcomers, but it must be terribly frustrating for Bell execs. to have to swallow this. Yes, there was some benefits the Bells accrued in accepting these terms, namely the ability to get into the long distance market, but I believe that was a settlement of sorts, not a friendly proposal by the Bells.
So it seems we have a clash of the titans here. Really, the entire American business world has gotten to be such a mess that it's hard to find a clean, sound side to take. But as far as corporate morals and ethics as well as products, prices, and customer service go, I'd take the Bells over the CLECs like AT&T and MCI any day. And anyone who wants to see Comcast as their great white hope, well, I'll keep you in my prayers. This is the company that grudgingly allowed advertising for Satellite TV only if they did not disparage cable service, all the while running ads for their own service that are ruthlessly disparaging to satellite (I mean come on - whoever mounts a satellite dish with duct tape only gets what he deserves!).
I want to know who thought it was a good idea, not to mention a workable one, to have the equivalent of Wal-Mart leasing store space to K-mart at a discount? Naturally, Wal is going to do everything they can to disadvantage K. And even if start-up telcos ended up leasing all of the regulated capacity from the Bells and did then build their own infrastructures, is this a good idea? How many infrastructures do we need, how many can we support? Would not the roads be endlessly broken up as each individual company makes repairs, adjustments, and upgrades to their cabling? Do we want four COs on every block, so to speak?
I think there is promise in the idea that some cities in he US have implemented, where the networking infrastructure is a public utility and the service providers lease it on an equal footing to provide the service. I don't think telecom as we know it today can ever be a truly competitive market. |
