Date: Wed, 11 Jun 1997 11:25:14 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: henrich@crh.cl.msu.edu (Charles Henrich) Cc: terry@lambert.org, wilko@yedi.iaf.nl, michaelh@cet.co.jp, chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Cable modems Message-ID: <199706111825.LAA06360@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <19970610225010.32367@crh.cl.msu.edu> from "Charles Henrich" at Jun 10, 97 10:50:10 pm
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[ ... Moved to -chat ... ] Whoops! My hot buttons, my hot buttons! Aieeeeeeee!!!! > > The rest of us live in the armpit of the telecommunications > > industry (like US West and TCI cablevision) and we don't have > > Hey careful! I *am* in TCI land, and this TCI is the best cable system I've > ever seen. That's because they took what *we* paid them, and built *you* new infrastructure, preferring establishing a new market to marginally increasing an existing one. > And you have moronic consumers in the United states who cry "I have to > pay $70 a month for a 10mbit link to thie internet? Waaahh thats > rediculus! I wanna pay $5!" The cheapest T1 (~DS1) in the US West area can be had using a Frame Relay interconnect between the endpoints to avoid distance charges. This works out to $465 * 2 (line costs only). This is only a committed data rate connection if both endpoints are in the same LATA; they consistently overcommit inter-LATA circuits. This is ~1/7th of the 10Mbit rate you cite as costing $70/month This does not include equipment costs or endpointing charges from the NSP. For a committed rate of 44Mbits, you will probably pay over $10,000 a month. I know a T1 to the nearest capable NSP from Tucson is about $3000/month for 1/4 that bandwidth. The telco's in Europe supply terminal devices for ISDN. US telco customers have to buy (or rent) their own. Frankly, I'd be happy paying 1/4 of the rent I pay a month on my large apartment for a 64kx24x7 connection. I wouldn't be sending packets all the time, so they have real costs over an intermittent connection. I'd pay this to the first comapny that would show up at my door to offer it to me (US West, TCI, Frobozzco, I *don't* *care* *who*). If they were willing to go for FR instead of ISDN (Can't do that! We can't count message units on FR if the VC is up all the time!), they would save the costs they generally bitch about for this type of thing: the DTMF decoder for me dialing (I don't need to dial unless they don't let mee keep the VC up!) and the tone generator (I don't need one of thse either). It's all an issue of packet vs. circuit switching, and the meterability of either vs. the intent of the phone company to nickel and dime us to death over everything it can get away with without violating the terms that established its public monopoly. It's very similar, in my mind, to those assinine "ATM network access charges". It's costing the banks a lot less to not have to front humans to interact with their customers, just as it would cost the telco's a lot less to not have to front ADAC's, DTMFD's, and tone generators. > Capitalism works, and if consumers were willing to pay for quality, > we wouldnt be stuck with VHS, crappy NTSC telvision signals, lousy > POTS lines, and other useless (but cheap) products. It is not an issue of capitalism. The RBOC's in the US have a legal monopoly, and are not willing to accept a 6% margin as the cost of maintaining that monopoly. You do not get any effective competition in a market where a company wields monopolistic power. Look at Microsoft operating systems. Given the fight between the legally mandated margin and the desire of the company to abuse the monopoly, the company plays tricks with the PUC (Public Utilities Commision) in order to establish metered rate tarrifs, long distance carrier access charges on both ends of the connection, and other methods of increasing revenue withing the framework of the monopoly. At the same time, they avoid upgrading equipment for as long as possible to amortize costs as far as possible to get a tiny decrement in capitol outlay. I am fully versed in the mechanics of companies who don't buy foam cups for use by their employees (or visitors) as a cost cutting measure. Just like the US Air Force will avoid buying a $600 laser printer and have you walk to the next building to get your printouts, while just outside a jet is burning $12,000 dollars (50 laser printers) worth of jet fuel an hour for a one jet training mission. Cut the mission short by 1.2 minutes and you've bought the printer and saved the back-and-forth time for a building of people. I'm getting to the point where it would meet the cost/benefit ratio for me to *strongly* lobby the local government to sieze the wiring infrastructure via emminent domain, and lease it to whichever phone comany promises to provide the best service for the least cost over the length of the lease. One of the lease conditions would be wire maintenance. Wires, like roads, are then part of the public infrastructure. Now *THAT* arrangement would be an example of capitalism working the way it should; the best company for the job gets the job, not the company with the publically allowed (and impossible to revoke) infrastructure monopoly. Oh, and the reason we have VHS is because the people who came up with it lied to the consumers about its technical merits relative to Beta; you can only make a decision as good as the information you are given to make it. Regards, Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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