D-Day for Indie ISP's?

That BIG business would be BIGGER @$$es then one could imagine.

"We don't want just to not compete with the smaller service providers, we want to crush them entirely so they can never rise up against us".

Hmmmm Are the Executive Management teams for the 'bells all graduate's of the Bill Gates Business School and Fish Emporium???

Big Business does what Big Business has a fiduciary duty to do...protect and enhance shareholder value. Sometimes that corresponds with some public interest benefit, sometimes it doesn't. This is why there are regulatory agencies.

Petitions for Rulemaking are filed every day at the FCC. Regardless of your stance on this one, take the time to submit a comment. The FCC operates in a legal vacuum unless it is joined by participants from outside the Portals. The ILECs know this and make it a point to be those participants. You can be one too and sometimes the FCC even listens to these reply comments. Either way it gets into the record.

Posting on message boards may be cathartic, but posting comments in FCC proceedings you care about or are affected by can actually help change the rules.

I have ifitl fiber service in my neighborhood for five years, bellsouth has a monoply. Comcast has 25 year old copper direct burial lines that have erroded to the point they can barely carry catv service. These lines support no internet, thus bellsouth is the only alternative.

5 years ago i was on the forefront with a 2-3mbs down and 350 or so up... but now it has been slowed network congestion, and bellsouth is not looking at letting us ever upgrade to a higher tier. They claim out ifitl is not compatible.

Bellsouth SUCKS!
-Eric

Yes, but will the people in power to make changes, stop taking their bribes & PAC money long enough to listen for a change??

Betcha they don't and this attempt at negative policy change will get dangerously far before being ultimately denied....I hope

edit: spelling

ok ok on the serious tip, i thought SBC 'tired' something like this and they got shut down (as in told no) because they said something like "You don't have ALL the rights to the lines, you only own them " or something of the sorts.

I have posted my comments to the FCC site and, if you care about having a service choice, I encourage you to do the same.

Contrary to wildly popular belief around here, these things actually do happen in the sunshine. PAC money and bribes are for Congress; when you see a congressperson nosing around a regulatory agency, that's usually the signal to follow the money. Regulators tend to be career civil servants or are passing through on their way to a law firm.

Again, if you are serious about this, participate in the process. 10,000 comments filed by indie ISP customers is a great start to stopping Rulemaking proceedings like this one. Your "vote" counts if it is coherent, has factual basis, and is submitted. Posting here does nothing but vent your spleen.

This is bs! in 2 years there will be one power house and it will be sbc. mark my words.
I heard a guy talking in a bar/resturant in Dc about how he just gave senator so and so's party a nice contribution for help with there building projects. which i might add he mentioned the dollar amount only vaguely ("his and hers ferrari's with gas money"). Aren't there campain contribution laws? I left promptly in discust still to this day i haven't found the project but i don't doubt that it does exist.

I love this comment
"BellSouth's claim is that because their own affiliated ISP service (which is similar to SBC/Yahoo here in California) already controls a huge majority of the market, so squashing the rest of the competition isn't likely to impact the market much."

Now here is my observation as i have dealt with SBC and CLECs in the past.
People don't want to choose the CLEC's because of support problems.. who's creating these support problems? the very ones that are supposed to be opening their network.*cough*
While using a CLEC and your in a SBC region the CLEC has to rent lines from SBC in order to provide you with service no matter what. So when you have a problem with say a T1 circuit you call the CLEC and open a ticket they in turn call SBC to check your line. And the CLECs don't get first priority by any means the direct customers of SBC do..

So i sign up for service with a CLEC who comes and installs the lines? an SBC repair/install person. how is this opening their network? To me this is just proof that SBC still has their mouth firmly wrapped around the right congress peoples privates!

Translation: Shut yer trap already Logan 5.

Got it...:o

Good old BS at it again. I have sent my comments. Hope they help.

Rural communities generally don't interest any of the ILEC's because of the relative rate of return on investment in these communities. When I launched WillitsOnline, at that time, there was always gonna be cable or dsl in town, and this community had been waiting for years, and was going to continue waiting indefinitely, and they (Adelphia and SBC) could get away with leading that carrot and never delivering the goods because, after all, they have all these other high margin communities they can focus on and forget all about us. So I developed a quality wireless system and for almost two years we still had nothing else. Good for me I suppose, but just goes to show to slothiness of these two other operators.

At the end of 2003, Adelphia finally turned on it's cable modem system. And, suprise suprise, three weeks later, SBC somehow managed to get DSLAM's installed and make DSL available here too. I'm talking THREE FREEKIN' WEEKS APART FOLKS. SBC is not just trying to continue a routine regular expansion of it's network and services - IT'S TRYING TO PROTECT IT'S MARKET, that's the _only_ reason why DSL got deployed here. To try and preserve it against cable. If adelphia had not moved here, SBC wouldn't have done a damm thing.

It's not about competition - it's about protecting the monopolies.

Bingo.

The argument that the FCC seems to be hearing today is that if they don't require competition on DSL (and potentially in the future, cable), that those providers will be nice and expand availability. As for the price - who knows.

The multi-modal concept is that every town will have cable and DSL, and the single cable co and the single telco will fight out a low price.

The reality is that COMPETITION is good for consumers, NOT government granted duopolies. Cable should be open, telco DSL loops should be open - and consumers benefit from the result.

I encourage you to file comments, using the info in the email above (be sure to get the proceeding number there).

I keep saying - Justin needs to register the domain name "sbccomcastreports.com" - if this goes through, that could be the long term result. You really want to be here, on BroadBandReports, talking about the shortcomings of your ISP, but knowing that there are only two carriers??

File a quick comment now, it only takes a few minutes. If you'd like the ability to choose from more than "THE cable company" and "THE phone company", this is your chance to say something about it!

-Dane

If the government forces the eeevil big business to lease the lines to them, (am I wrong, the telcos laid the line, right) then these "independent" companies are basically free riding, no?

they lease the lines, the telcos actually make more off the lines they lease to 3rd parties because they dont cost that much less than what they charge consumers, and then the telcos dont have to offer technical support, bandwith, email/news services etc... thats all the ISP's problem as far as they are concerned

i sent them this, dunno, think its ok... doubt they read them anyway...

quote:

---

The basis of this petition is that there is already adequate competition from other internet services (wireless cable etc) but what it fails to realize is that in many areas customers have only one choice for broadband services.

I had service from BellSouth many years ago and had my account suspended for "abuse," their reasoning was that because I was running an email server with my DSL line, I must be a business, even though I explained multiple times that it was only for personal use. They then wanted me to pay more than double the normal home DSL rates to continue my service with them. Cable and wireless are not options I have available to my in my area, so I chose to go with another DSL company (DSLi) to provide my ADSL services at the same price I was originally paying BellSouth, while allowing me to run my personal server.

I honestly believe that allowing BellSouth and other large telephone companies the power to not have oversight will mean the end of 3rd party ISP's and be disastrous for consumers and prevent the further development of data services.

How is it that in other countries all over the world data services are so much more advanced than here in the United States? Simple, large companies are run by investors, they do not care what the consumers want or demand, they only care about their bottom line. I am not suggesting a communist state, with state run broadband or anything silly like that, I want there to be fair competition (which it isn’t even that fair at the moment). With competition comes innovation, lowing in prices and overall good things for the consumer.

Instead of helping the phone companies acquire a monopoly you should be helping consumers get what they deserve, a fair playing field for broadband companies so that consumers can have a choice.

If Bellsouth was truly such a great ISP then there would be no need for 3rd party ISPs. But there are many small ISP’s offering consumers choices, and to get services that Bellsouth cannot or will not provide.

---

Its about a lost opportunity. If they lease someone else the line, they lose any services on that line. If their own ISP uses it, its different.

You have a mouth? Were those words coming out? Ok, just kidding. How about the CLECs deploy their on infrastructure and sell line-acces to those independent ISPs?

The problem is that the government got involved with the phone companies a long long time ago and have over the years proposed more and more rules to mitigate the consequences of this involvement and those of the last set of rules; it's a self propagating monster that sucks more and more entities into it each time (ie: sonic.net being drawn to leasing lines from other companies that are being forced to do so).

The longer we let this happen the more people are gonna be screwed when it either collapses or someone fixes it by removing the retarded regulations. The Problem is that, most peoples view of economics consist 3 rules:
1. those who have more money than me are evil
2. anything that results in a transfer of money from an entity to an entity that is relatively poor with respect to the one giving up money is good.
3. quick = good
And thus we end up with a situation where the big company is forced to subsidize their competition, and everyone thinks that is a good way to foster competition.

I say we admit that we were screwed, let the ILEC's have the lines and let the chips fall where they may.

Competition is good, but it is not the be all and end all solution to high prices. An unfettered monopoly is the best magnet for real competition.

I don't see where they lose anything. The only thing they care about is money. This is not a giveaway. The wholesale ISP lease charge, in some cases, is more than they are charging their existing retail customers (at least for intro periods). This is pure profit to them since they have no support cost. (The cost to physically maintain the line is the essentially the same regardless of where it ends up).

To me it seems like a win-win situation. However, my guess is that they want to eliminate any competition so that they can then raise the prices as much as they want. As far as competition from cable is concerned, it is too easy for prices to rise (in unison) due to collusion between the two companies....we have seen that many times before with other companies

It sounds like same sh*t sandwich different Byte.

Luv ya

Flushls

The part that happens in the sunshine is a charade; the actual decisions have already been made in the back rooms.

heh first they attack the Munis and now they set their Phasers and Photons on the CLECs. what they basicly want is anything over copper pairs to only be them. and sat isnt really competition because the only reason to even get Direct PC is when companies like bellsouth are too lazy to wire streets.

Both cable and dsl must share their lines. They were allowed to put lines in before houses were erected in many areas. Once houses are made and everything constructed its almost impossible to run new lines to compete. Thats why competition must be preserved at all cost. The companies against competition know they got a break and that its not fair to not allow the same breaks for new competition. And of course the only way to provide an equivalent break is to allow the competition to lease lines that were run before houses were in the way when it was cost effective.

So I suppose you are one of the ones who just post here and at other venues, but don't participate in the rulemaking process since you think it is a 'charade'. And then complain that the government is owned by corporations. Do you deal with the FCC or are you just guessing?

I agree with you that the lines must be shared but I think the problem lies in the approach given by the Telecommunications Act. I'm sure people will disagree with me but one of two other approaches should have been implemented instead.

Perhaps the less acceptable approach would have been to force the RBOCs to lease the lines only and not allow them to compete as ISPs.

The approach I think is better would have been to have the government (Federal, State, or Local) buy out the RBOCs and make everyone CLECs.

I'm generally a free market type but given the physical limitations of utilities common to every household, ownership of that utility gives one a huge advantage from the start and that means that this whole ILEC/CLEC plan was doomed from the start. I used DSL through various CLECs for years and when I tried to switch to Verizon it was so screwed up that I went to Comcast where this fiasco doesn't exist. I hope it never does. If every competitor should share the cable line then don't allow the owner of that cable compete with other leasers. It doesn't work.

No kidding? So, are you say that the board of directors for companies should ignore the interests of the stockholders and not care about profit as a leading priority? Show me what Top 1000 corporations in the United States that doesn't care about money as one of their top priorities.

I know that for funds in which my 401K is based upon need to earn me money, and if those funds are comprised in part my company X trying its hardest to dominate its sector of the business then so be it. Now, this is not to say what is being done, here, is right or wrong, but at least acknowledge that the whole idea of a for-profit business is to make money, not lose it.

I am biased of course because I work for Bellsouth. But...let's look at this reasonably. Why should DSL service
be the only broadband regulated? Cable broadband is not! DSL
over power lines wont be. I don't completely agree with putting small mom/pop businesses out of business in the process of attempting to deregulate oneself...which in the big
scheme of things is all the ILEC's are trying to do. Level the
playing field for all broadband providers...either regulate and tax all of them, or none...period. As far as having service with a CLEC and a Bell Tech showing up, that is a
requirement from the Fed Gov. Do you really think I would show
up at your door with AT&T/MCI/Whoever service and repair it if
it was not mandated by FCC? Not!

I agree. The cable companies have a virtual monopoly in their respective markets in regards to cable services. Additional lines from competitors is out of the question 90% of the time because the cable company has exclusive rights in that community. Sounds to me they are trying to have their cake and eat it too.