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Re: Opposing Bells
I am interested in feedback on this issue. Here is an editorial I
wrote Tuesday, June 29, after interviewing Mayor Riordan anonymously -- on
a talk show!
Joe Shea | 1812 N. Ivar, No. 5
Editor-in-Chief | Hollywood, CA 90028-5026
The American Reporter | (213)467-0616
http://www.american-reporter.com | joeshea@netcom.com
"The first daily newspaper with original content to start on the Internet."
-- Adam Gaffin, Internet World (Sept., 1995)
____________________________________________________________
THE AMERICAN REPORTER
Vol. 5, No. 1102 June 29, 1999
"Vincit Veritas"
___________________________________________________________
* * *
_________
EDITORIAL
WHEN RELIABILITY COUNTS
by Joe Shea
American Reporter Editor-in-Chief
Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan finds himself
uncharacteristically stymied these days after three of his hand-picked
Information Technology Commission members resigned rather than give their
stamp of approval to his plan to allow ATT (via its new cable operation,
TCI, acquired from John Malone) to be the sole provider of high-speed
Internet access to the City of Los Angeles.
AOL and other competitors in the ISP business want Riordan to
force ATT to provide high speed Internet access to them, and then compete
with ATT in selling the service to the Los Angeles market. His technology
appointees wanted competition, and quit rather than cast a vote against
the man who appointed them.
Riordan said that the cost of providing the connections that ATT
will have to bear is so great that L.A. may never get high-speed access if
the company can't control the system they build, and he is asking the
federal government to set a policy for the city to follow, rather than let
his city serve as a guinea pig.
Portland, Ore., meanwhile, has adopted a plan that will permit
competitive delivery of high speed access (Editor's note: I've since
learned that ATT will not deliver high-speed access to Portland as a
result), and the Los Angeles decision is being "widely watched," as they
say -- both as a model for other cities, of course, and to see how much
loot the winners will carry away from one of the nation's richest markets.
It's not academic at all what Los Angeles decides; in just a few years, a
trillion dollars or more will accrue to the winners of L.A.'s high-speed
access fight.
It's hard to feel sorry for AOL or ATT, but it's easy to feel
sorry for Angelenos like ourselves who know that high-speed Internet
access will open up new worlds of cyberspace for all of us. It will
enable the delivery of movies, tv, streaming video and the World Wide Web
at speeds up to a hundred times faster than we enjoy now, and will
consolidate and then expand the fantastic gains made by Internet
e-commerce, which amounted to $300 billion in the past year.
If the Net is fast becoming a gigantic shopping mall, ATT is
building a freeway to it to replace the rutted one-lane dirt road we now
have to travel. And if the other promises of the Internet -- the creation
of a vast repository of all the world's knowledge, and the deployment of a
vast electronic force for democracy, are to come true, then they need that
freeway, too.
It would surprise some readers of this space if a kind word were
ever spoken here about ATT -- but if it were, that word would be
"reliable." We have little experience with high-speed access, but long
experience with long distance telephone service provided by ATT, and while
it has always cost more than we care to pay -- and we have gone to
upstarts like Net2Phone to avoid them -- we have never lacked for service.
That can't be said of Pacific Bell, our huge local telephone company (from
which we have now switched local toll service to ATT, too) or any other
provider we know.
ATT has mounted and maintained a thoroughly robust system for the
better part of a century now, and to the marketplace it has made such
sense that despite the breakup of the regional Bells 20 years ago, most of
them have again combined. None, we have noted, have been able to provide
consistent, reliable service in the way it was provided before the
breakup, and none of the regional Bells have been as good at what they do
as ATT has been.
That brings us, though, to the problem of single providers. It
can well be argued that if we must have one provider, it should be ATT
because ATT paid to build the system, usually builds superb systems, and
has always maintained them well.
But Internet access is not like long distance systems, to be sure.
It is far more technically demanding, we think, and far more costly
because it has to be built now, rather than be extended from existing
systems that have been with us almost a hundred years. Like any such
system, it will fail, at some point, if only because it cannot grow to
maturity -- to full reliability -- without discovering its weaknesses.
ATT is well suited to manage that developmental process, we
believe, but no single provider's failure can be permitted to cause the
city's entire high-speed access system to fail. Los Angeles at the end of
the 20th Century is a place of enormous wealth and fabulous creativity,
and those qualities will challenge even the most brilliant and invincibly
redundant of systems, and at that point -- when billions of dollars daily
in e-commerce and securities trading and vast chunks of high-bandwidth
entertainment programming are streaming into the world -- there must be a
backup system that is very nearly as reliable as ATT has always been.
We certainly don't see that potential in any ISPs we know, and we
would not trust such a system to the competitive frenzy they hope to enjoy
on ATT's backbone, but Sprint, with its substantial fiber-optic network,
is certainly capable of providing it.
If the mayor is intent on having a single-provider system of
high-speed Internet access built and owned by ATT, that's fine with us --
so long as there's a backup to which the system can instantaneously
transition so that not even a single dollar of e-commerce fall is lost to
system failure, and not a single word of some future talking book goes
unheard.
-30-
* * *
On Wed, 30 Jun 1999, Rick Dahlgren wrote:
> A new coalition has emerged called iadvance.org funded by Bell Atlantic,
> SBC and others. Former WH Press Sec McCurry and Former Rep Molinari are
> fronting this group which has come out in support of a bill (to be
> introduced later this week in the house) that would both squelch open cable
> access by law while liberally easing regulations that safeguard against
> Bells in the provision of data services.
>
> Talk about killing two birds with one stone! These groups are getting
> confusing.
>
> US West is for open access (except in Omaha) and supporting OpenNet with
> BIGGG BUCKSSS while SBC and Bell Atlantic are weighing in against open
> access.
>
> In the meantime lawmakers are working like crazy to give away all hope of
> competition in any form with the two "last mile" wireline monopolies (phone
> AND cable).
>
> The checks must really be flying.
>
> (snip)
>
> Rick Dahlgren
> Cottonwood Communications
> rd@cottonwood.com
>
>
>