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Re: Opposing Bells
Even I have been accused of being an apologist for AT&T but I have never
forgotten that it took years and years for the justice department to break
up the iron fist of this monopolist of all monopolists.....and until the
break up, the only real innovation in the preceeding 30 years was touch
tone dialing....on phones you could only obtain by renting from the MA Bell
system members.
If AT&T doesn't want to offer high speed open services, maybe Portland, Los
Angeles and others should consider not allowing the transfer and opening
their cities up for proposals from others (like GTE) who might want to do
so.
It is time for cities and consumers to develop a few expectations....and
forget Washington DC....that city has disconnected itself from anything
real.
Rick Dahlgren
Cottonwood Communications
rd@cottonwood.com
> 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
>>
>>
>>