Fairpoint Fairlining

Previously I noted that Verizon was selling off 1.6 million rural New England customers. VZ is selling them to a company called Fairpoint:
The operations in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, serving 1.5 million homes, will be acquired by FairPoint Communications Inc. of North Carolina, the companies announced Tuesday. FairPoint owns local phone networks in 31 mostly rural markets in 18 states, including the three where it is acquiring Verizon’s business.

Verizon to sell New England assets, BRUCE MEYERSON, Associated Press, Posted on Tue, Jan. 16, 2007

The Communication Workers of America (CWA) had tried to stop the sale in the interests of saving jobs. Continue reading →

Vividness and Interactivity

In the rush to IPTV that seems to be driving AT&T to acquire Bellsouth and Verizon to dump rural New England customers, telcos seem to be missing some dimensions. More than a decade ago, in 1995 in Wired, and in 1992 in Journal of Communication v42 n4 p73-93 Fall 1992, Jonathan Steuer pointed out that communication services could be grouped not only by vividness (for which old-style TV rates pretty high and HDTV rates higher), but also interactivity. Broadcast TV doesn’t rate very high on interactivity, no matter how high definition it is. Continue reading →

Rural Redlining?

The Communication Workers of America (CWA) points out an interesting result of telecom deregulation:
CWA and the IBEW, with the support of state and local AFL-CIOs, are engaged in a massive campaign to block Verizon’s plan to sell 1.6 million local access lines in Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire.

Campaign Underway to Block Verizon Sale in Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire CWA, August 11, 2006

When AT&T was the national carrier, it connected everyone. With divestiture and deregulation, it seems at least one telco is further divesting accounts that it finds too expensive. This means that those 1.6 million local rural POTS subscribers may end up paying more for their telephone service, if they can afford it. Continue reading →

Faucets and Tubes

Since we’re discussing ancient history like Carterfone, let’s bring up some more. In the BPL Ham post I mentioned essential access bottleneck monopoly; here’s what that’s about.

When discussing net neutrality, it’s useful to distinguish two types of network access, as a professor from U.Penn has done:

“Access” has been and continues to be an important concept in regulation and antitrust. In this paper, I consider two interrelated access concepts: access to essential facilities (access1) and access via interconnection to customers (access2). Neither concept is new; some industries are characterized by one or the other, some industries characterized by both. I argue that the public policy implications of each are rather different, and relate this difference to antitrust treatment of the “new” economy.

ACCESS != ACCESS1 + ACCESS2, Gerald R. Faulhaber, 2002

BOTTLENECKS AND BANDWAGONS: ACCESS POLICY IN THE NEW TELECOMMUNICATIONS, Gerald R. Faulhaber, 2002

In the second paper, he refers to the same two concepts as bottlenecks and bandwagons, respectively. Maybe we should call them faucets and tubes to match current terminology. Continue reading →

Carterfone, Then and Now

Most people have heard about Sen. Stevens series of tubes, but few people remember Cartfone, probably because most people using the Internet weren’t born in 1959 when Thomas Carter invented a device that let radio calls be fed through the telephone system, so oil riggers and the like could radio in telephone calls to home. Most Internet users weren’t born in 1968, either, when the FCC ruled that anybody (not just AT&T) could make devices to connect to the telephone network. Before that, your telephone equipment choice was basically a black brick with a dial, or a Princess phone that lit up. No wireless handsets, no cell phones, no answering machines, no faxes, no modems. The FCC ruling was necessary because when AT&T discovered Carterfone:
Then a monopoly, AT&T declared that any device that it didn’t make could potentially harm the network, even though about the only way to damage that era’s network of copper wires and electromechanical switches would’ve been with an ax.

FCC ruling from 1968 may have impact today, KEVIN MANEY, USA TODAY, February 1, 2007

Ancient history? Yes, but maybe worth repeating. Continue reading →

Fast Services?

Whenever I hear people talking about fast services that need broadband, they always seem to be talking about video, and by that they almost always seem to mean broadcast TV, as in a few producers and a few centralized distrbution points going to many consumers.

But what about podcasts, YouTube, and World of Warcraft? None of those are TV in that sense. Continue reading →

Bundles v. Choice

Telcos are so clever they seem to have slipped one past Doc Searls, here commenting on Robin Good’s IPTV post:
Well, here’s the first problem: Cable TV is “private delivery infrastructure”, and so is old-fashioned phone service. The mess Robin describes is not a conceptual stretch beyond Business As Usual — for telcos, cablecos or most of their customers. A few techies may know a line has been crossed, but that’s far from obvious to the rest of us.

Net losses, Doc Searls, 1 Feb 2007

Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? Most people won’t realize what’s the problem with what they’re getting, so they’ll buy the bundle. Continue reading →

IPTV Bundle Buyer Beware

Robin Good has a long post about how Americans are easily flummoxed by marketing into locking themselves into a telco IPTV solution at the expense of their Internet connectivity:
A telecom company, who is also a large Internet provider, needs only a little marketing campaign to convince its users and potential clients that with about $50 a month they can get the most unique offer to come around in recent times: super-high-speed Internet access, (the customer representative who called me to explain this offer and clarify any doubts said specifically 20 Mbps), home television channels with free and pay-per-view content including movies and live sports, and even a video-phone!

What they don’t tell you is that the moment you accept to do that, this is what will really happen:

IPTV And Home Television Offerings Are Telcos Best Stealth Solution To Bypass Any Net Neutrality Resistance: Wake Up Robin Good, 29 January 2007

Since Americans don’t know that real fast Internet means 50Mbps or 100Mbps in countries such as Japan or Korea that actually have it, they sell out for still slow 20Mbps.

Robin Good enumerates some gotchas in that “super-high-speed Internet access” offer. Continue reading →

Open, Fast, Among Peers

Peerflow is about open participation through a fast Internet.

While existing blogs promote pro or con positions on net neutrality, they don’t show enough of why it matters, how we got here, and what effects the Internet may have on everything else. Net neutrality isn’t some obscure technical issue: it’s about nothing less than control of the flow of information in society. Since a society is its communications, it’s about control of the society itself. Will a few large companies be able to control what everyone knows, or will there be an informed and participating populace?

I’ve looked for a blog that collates all this and haven’t found one, so I’m starting this one. Continue reading →