Category Archives: Telephone

Control to Pay for Capacity?

Save the Internet found a recent quote by new AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson
We’re going to control the video on our network. The content guys will have to make a deal with us.”

— AT&T’s New Boss Wants Your World Delivered to Him, Save the Internet, 27 April 2007

Some say this is necessary to pay for infrastructure. Continue reading →

Ramping Capacity

Hands Off the Internet notes that all major TV networks suddenly (since last year) stream programs over the net, and concludes:
But it’s also a timely reminder of how these deals are placing unprecedented strain on the web’s capacity. Internet traffic growth surged past capacity growth last year. Average traffic was up 75 percent while capacity grew only 47 percent, according to the folks at TeleGeography.

— Katie Couric, Expensive Date, Hands Off the Internet, April 20, 2007 at 12:55 pm

Poor telcos and cablecos; straining to keep up. Continue reading →

Framing Net Neutrality

As we saw in AT&T’s Internet Predictions from 1993, the telco view of the Internet is as a telco-provided service. This is radically different from the Internet we have grown accustomed to, but it is what we are likely to get without net neutrality. Doc Searls gets to the gist:
The short of it is this: As long as we understand the Net as what Jay Sulzberger calls “some bundle of services delivered by the Telephone Company and/or the Cable Company”, we’ll not only never have Net Neutrality, but not even a conclusive conversation about it.

We also can’t have a productive conversation about it if we start with a regulatory conclusion and work our way back to businees from there.

Here’s a frame that may help: The Net is the best platform for free enterprise ever created. How do we help get that built out for everybody? I suggest that we’ve barely started, and that what Cringely gets from Comcast (and what most of us get from whatever company provides it) is still just an early prototype.

— What Net do we want? Doc Searls, 17 April 2007

If the big-telco-provided Internet were actually a free market for Internet service provision, we could maybe leave it to the market to protect Internet participants by providing open access among them. But it’s not; it’s at best a duopoly (telco and cableco) in most places in the U.S. So we need laws to provide for open access. And it would be nice if we also had more service providers, so there would be some semblance of competition.

-jsq

AT&T’s Internet Predictions from 1993

In 1993, several years after the commercial Internet was started by non-telco ISPs, AT&T produced the video “AT&T’s vision for the Internet”:
Picture phones on the ground and on airplanes. That’s in part 1 of Paleo-Future’s six part (OK, 9 part) series showing clips from the AT&T video. Watch the rest for a voice-actuated video-still-CAD phone tablet, plenty of virtual reality, and online shopping. In other words, a sort of visual AOL. Plus artificially intelligent agents and real-time voice translation with subtitles. Continue reading →

Neutral Net Face

An online chili vendor gets political:
Now, Maricle is worried that the big boys might gain an edge on the virtual highway where he set up shop. That explains why he and five other Internet devotees from Albuquerque sat down with Republican Rep. Heather Wilson in late February to urge her to act on “Net neutrality,” legislation that aims to block telephone companies from providing a premium service to Internet customers who pay higher fees.

— The Human Face of Net Neutrality, By: Jeanne Cummings, The Politico, April 9, 2007 05:34 PM EST

Politicians respond to local constituents. Continue reading →

Universal Service Considered Harmful

Fine-sounding slogans are fine ways to hide restraint of trade:
…when the Bell System’s Theodore Vail made up the term “universal service” in 1907 what he was really trying to do was squelch competitive phone networks — there were a lot of them, and they were doing very well, and Vail wanted to convince everyone that one phone system would be a far better idea. So the idea behind universal service in the early 20th century wasn’t spreading phone connectivity (competition had been doing a good job at that) or underwriting costs (because costs were being pushed lower by competition). It was, instead, the notion that being able to reach everyone on a single, centrally-managed phone network was a good idea.

—Universal service, by Susan Crawford, Susan Crawford blog, Tue 13 Mar 2007 09:33 PM EDT

In other words, interconnectivity. But with a centralized aspect, which wasn’t necessary technically, yet was optimal for building a monopoly. Thus the notion was used to squelch small competitors. Continue reading →

Telco BLocking as Symptom of Universal Service

Tom Esvlin points out that the former SBC sued the former AT&T in 2004 over much the same issue the current combined SBC+AT&T+Cingular is suing other telcos:
The complaint alleges: “… AT&T orchestrated and implemented a fraudulent scheme to avoid tariffed ‘access charges’ by delivering its long-distance calls for termination over facilities that AT&T obtained under the express condition that they be used for local traffic, and thereby disguising its long-distance calls as local calls.”

Now at&t is alleging that FuturePhone calls are being described as domestic long distance when they’re really international.

Local? Long distance? International? Why’s it important anyway? Not because of actual costs. Costs on the Internet over which these calls are being routed isn’t sensitive to distance at all; and, truth to tell, other than international tariffs and other monopoly rents, switching costs and not distance are the main cost component on POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service). Certainly the cost to terminate a call on a local network has nothing to do with where that call originated.

— at&t and FuturePhone – POTS Calls the Kettle Black, by Tom Esvlin, Fractals of Change, February 2007

Continue reading →

AT&T vs. Superior Telephone Cooperative, et al

Chris Herot interprets the AT&T Iowa lawsuit of 29 January 2007:
AT&T’s argument is that Superior is not entitled to charges for “termination” since connecting to the gateway is not considered termination but instead is just an intermediate routing in order to terminate the call elsewhere.

More on AT&T vs. Superior Telephone Cooperative, et al, Christopher Herot’s Weblog, 14 Feb 2007

Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but isn’t that what net neutrality advocates are arguing for on the Internet? Flat fee peering and end users only pay their own ISPs? Kind of ironic, if so.

In any case, Chris includes a link to the complaint.

-jsq

More Telcos Blocking

Jim Thompson dug up some background that indicates that the telcos blocking freeconferencecall.com are losing money due to various free conference call services using loopholes in telephone termination fees, and are suing.
“This is just the latest in a long line of get-rich-quick schemes that bilk others to make a profit,” said an AT&T spokesperson. The lawsuit claims that operations like FuturePhone’s are in violation of several statutes, including Iowa state laws as well as previous FCC decisions.

— AT&T’s ‘Free Call’ Bill: $2 Million, by Paul Kapustka gigaom.com, Wednesday, February 7, 2007 at 5:00 AM PT

Continue reading →