Re: "Telco Terrorism" -- Wired on Baby Bells v. the Net

> Telco Terrorism
> By Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com)

> Right now, the telcos have no financial incentive to
> promote speedier, more efficient technologies - and
> when they've tried, they've blown it through a
> combination of high prices and notoriously bad
> customer service and support. Take ISDN, a digital
> technology that has been ready-to-arrive for 25 years
> but never quite did. "The problem isn't technology,"
> according to James Love, an economist at the Ralph
> Nader-sponsored Consumer Project on Technology. "It's
> monopoly pricing by the telcos."

   If the telcos don't want to use efficient, effective technology
to render service to their customers, then I certainly wouldn't
want to *force* them to do so. However, neither do I want to be
*forced* to pay exhorbitant rates because the telecos want to
maintain a sloppily run monopoly on the services I have to choose
from.

> The telcos' solution: the FCC must let them levy
> per-minute access charges to raise the hundreds of
> millions of dollars a year needed to keep the phone
> system from crashing.

  My solution? (Thanks for asking. :>)
  If the telecos wish to remain in the Dark Ages, then let *their*
phone system crash. There will be no shortage of people standing
in line to make money by supplying customers with phone service at
competitive rates.
 
> "The Effect of Internet Use on the Nation's Telephone
> Network," blasted telco assumptions and pointed out
> their hypocrisy: the Baby Bells whine that flat-rate
> Internet services are congesting phone lines even as
> many of them are peddling flat-rate Internet access
> themselves. Some have actually given it away - 

  The old "loss-leader" promotion to get everyone into your
store. The telecos, however, then want to lock the doors and
petition the government for monopoly pricing, instead of letting
the "customers" shop across the street, instead.

> "It doesn't have to be a large charge," Bell
> Atlantic's Ed Young now says. "It can be something of
> the magnitude of a penny a minute, or even less. But
> it has to be something."

  "...so that we can raise the rates outrageously in the future."
 
> As a rule, Washington's
> bureaucrats are not power-crazed authoritarians; most
> are reactive creatures who simply respond to
> demonstrations of influence and power. 

  Translation~:~ They are usually manipulated by the most powerful
and influential of the power-crazed authoritarians.

> The high tech
> community responded by forming its own ad hoc
> coalition to pressure the FCC, and thousands of
> Internet users chimed in to express their collective
> dismay. Of course, the best way to win not just the
> battle but the war may be to remove the commission's
> power to regulate the Net altogether. Still, so far
> the real threat to netizens has come from complacent
> telcos and their legions of starched-collar lobbyists,
> not the FCC. The distinction is important, because the
> old rule of thumb still holds true: The enemy of our
> enemy may occasionally prove to be our friend.

  As long as everyone has Guns & Roses (with sharp thorns).
Say what you want about Timothy McVeigh, but if the government
launches another Waco atrocity in the near future, the citizens
will be paying much closer attention to the way it is handled.
  The attempt to control the InterNet is yet another attempt to
disarm the citizens. They are trying to get us to "voluntarily"
turn in our electronic weapons, such as crypto.
  "They will take my crypto when they pry it from my cold, dead
algorithms."

TruthMonger

Anonymous said:


>   If the telcos don't want to use efficient, effective technology
>to render service to their customers, then I certainly wouldn't
>want to *force* them to do so. However, neither do I want to be
>*forced* to pay exhorbitant rates because the telecos want to
>maintain a sloppily run monopoly on the services I have to choose
>from.

When satellite dish receive/broadcast services become common watch the 
scramble by telcos to update and offer cheap high speed links. Of course 
by then a lot of folks will just say fuck them. Here for your amusement 
are some sample prices offered by our very own blood sucking Telstra 
leech in our very own monopoly/oligopoly market (hard to say exactly what 
it is but there's no effective competition due to decades of government 
monopoly status:

All figures in Australian play money
====================================
Qoute from Toll$tra's web page: "Depending on your access speed, there is 
a low cost, flat monthly pricing for permanent modems or a two-tier price 
structure based on ussage for dedicated access ports pf 64 kbps and 
above."

Then if you dig and I do mean *dig* around on Toll$tra's web page you 
will eventually come across the actual pricing data if your lucky 
(depending on how you look at it).

Well now I just went to their web site and behold; in their wisdom and in 
their position as a internet provider they have removed(!) the pricing 
information on the page. You now have to ring them (I just tried..no 
answer) or email them (tried that 4 hours ago no reply so far) so I'll 
just post from memory. These figures will be wrong but they give some 
idea:

Permanent modem 33.6 connection: about $400 per month (plus call costs)
ISDN 64k: about $1000 per month plus 19 cents/Mb for data received over 
about 25 percent usage
ISDN 128k: about $2000 per month plus usage as above
DDS/FRAME relay: Astronomical $$$$$$$$ per month plus usage per above.
Establishment fee for the above: $1000 - $2000
Upgrade fee from to a new level: Same as establishment fee

I note with great interest an independent provider in New Zealand which
has a better competitive market situation in this area than Australia
(and a lot of other things I might add) offers a user account with up to
500kbs satellite feed for $79 (NZ) /mnth flat plus installation of $79 
plus you must by the satellite dish ($699). I would assume you can't 
resell bandwidth on this set up so the two are not directly comparable.

Oh yes and back to the topic, Telstra here trot out the same garbage as 
in the original post trying to justify timed local calls every year or 
so. Thus far they have been beaten...but only just. Technical solutions 
and a free market will be the only long term solutions, as we would 
expect.

-- 
   .////.   .//    Charles Senescall             apache@bear.apana.org.au
 o:::::::::///                                   apache@quux.apana.org.au
>::::::::::\\\     Finger me for PGP PUBKEY            Brisbane AUSTRALIA
   '\\\\\'   \\    Apache