dyoo78
join:2002-10-25
Emeryville, CA
| reply to stickfigure
Re: This is not new
said by stickfigure  :
Well, to start off with, my experience with customer service reps in just about any company has been that they are not always given the correct information. So one rep may tell you that it is illegal to put DSL across CLEC line and one may tell you it is technically impossible and it could all be based on something they heard from someone else that didn't know either. Yes it is frustrating not getting a straight answer but what can you do?
I don't see ILEC's offering DSL over CLEC's lines so there has to be some reason why not. Now thinking about this logically, DSL is a product sold to make money right? If they could provide it across a CLEC's line at a decent cost and make a profit why wouldn't they? I don't mean to sound condescending, but business is in business to make money. It doesn't make sense to me if you have the opportunity to make a profit why they wouldn't take it. Definitely open to other possibilities but that's my thoughts...
Your argument bases the assumption that the market for DSL is perfectly competitive. Yes, a business is created to generate profit, but only in competitive markets. What we are seeing is not a competitive market, but local monopoly.
When it comes to monopolies, we've seen US policy favoring competitive markets, not monopolies - Sherman Anti Trust law ring a bell?
If you think about it logically, competitive markets drive down prices such that normal profit goes to $0. Here, normal profit is an economic term defining how markets should behave over time. A business may enter and leave freely, and bases its decision on opportunity costs of entering such market. Customers choose products in the market freely, also basing decision on marginal utility, consumer surplus, etc.
Yet what we are seeing in the DSL market is just the opposite. Companies that want to enter cannot. Customers that want to choose DSL from another service provider cannot, simply because their only provider are ILECs.
You question why ILECs don't offer service via CLEC lines by which you conclude that the market is competitive. Logically speaking, if this were a competitive market, why wouldn't they? In this case, markets aren't competitive, hence no interconnection to offer DSL service over other's lines.
Forced interconnection is not new. Are we forgetting that long distance service prices fell below CPI only after AT&T was divested and forced to interconnect with any company who wanted to offer long distance?
I don't want to be condescending, yet mere logic will tell you that ILECs don't like competition and that interconnection is a necessary part of a competitive telecom market. Business is business, only if it behaves like a business, not a monopoly.
[text was edited by author 2003-02-04 20:33:33] |
