

How AT&T Is Planning to Rob Americans of an Open Public Telco Network - Libertatea
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/02/the-latest-sneaky-plan-to-rob-americans-of-a-public-telco-network/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Top+Stories%29#.US9CchDDcG0.hackernews

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smutticus
The argument of this article seems to be, "We can't fix how the FCC regulates
IP services so we must force AT&T to stay in the dark ages."

You can't simultaneously decry America's networking innovation and complain
that AT&T is moving to IP. Everything is moving to IP. Circuit switching is
dead. They're even putting TDM over IP nowadays(ITU Y.1588v2 and SyncE).

If you really want to improve the situation don't act all Luddite. Start the
conversation on overhauling common carrier legislation. Bring Judge Greene
back from the dead and break these carriers into thousands of competing tiny
operators.

~~~
twoodfin
I don't get it. How can anyone look at the subsequent explosion of IP and
mobile services and conclude that telecom deregulation in 1996 wasn't a
smashing success? I'm sure there's room for improvement, but I'm not sold on a
radical restructuring.

~~~
josh2600
Because the measurement of success is different. In '96, we paid for a
nationwide fiber network, and the big telcos decided they could deliver 10mbps
symmetrical over last mile copper. Today a 10mbps symmetrical copper circuit
is delivered via Ethernet-Over-Copper and costs ~$1000/month in downtown SF.
Every home in America was supposed to have a 10mbit symmetrical fiber
connection by mid 2000's.

What you see today is a pale reflection of what might've been. You're happy
you have connectivity, and that's great, but your connectivity sucks and you
shouldn't be happy about it because you paid for a better network and didn't
get it.

Does that make sense? AT&T and the other big telcos stole the dream of
ubiquitous fast Internet by mortgaging our future for continued copper
obsolescence. And we wonder why there's no money for metro fiber networks...

~~~
pasbesoin
In my state, SBC (now AT&T) received... approximately $700 million, IIRC, in
tax breaks and incentives to roll out broadband statewide and provide some
degree of "universal access".

The first thing they did, afterward, was to have their lobbyists pressure the
state legislature to let them out of their half of the deal (pass laws to that
effect) -- while keeping the tax breaks and incentives, of course.

Personally, I had DSL through them, and it is the worst... "utility" service
I've ever had. Three appointments before the installer showed up, who was an
independent subcontractor who left bare wires twisted together on the building
exterior.

Their network was a nightmare, requiring 10+ hops all over the place just to
exit onto a trunk. And it would die every week or two. One service call
handler who was at her wits end admitted she was subcontracted and could only
file tickets. She couldn't even look at a filed ticket to see its status. Zero
feedback to the customer.

And... it took on average 30 minutes to reach a service rep. By contrast, call
up to _order_ service, and your call was answered within 30 seconds. The only
part of their service they appeared to spend money on: Revenue intake.

They _only_ started getting better, and upgrading their offers, when Comcast
started rolling in the same territory and eating their lunch. (Not that I'm
overly lauding Comcast, these days.)

If you (grandparent comment) think the big telco's are doing you any favors...
well, I disagree.

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zero_intp
This is a truly ignorant article. There is no support given for any of the
extreme positions taken. Additionally, it presumes that any change in
regulations will reduce requirements instead of transferring those not already
covering last mile IP, which is the obvious action.

The requirements for running the telephone system do not end just because the
transport medium is IP. In many cases, the transition to IP services makes the
existing IP infrastructure beholden to higher uptime and connectivity
requirements.

Try telling federal regulators that you did not deliver an emergency call
because you were in a peering dispute. Today, American backbone IP NSPs are
required to deliver outage information to the FCC, and this is prior to any
assumption of life-critical services.

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raverbashing
Let the switched network die its deserved death

It's costly, it's an awful use of resources, for no good benefit.

POTS is a huge ruby-goldberg device, it's almost laughable sometimes. All that
so that the terminal can use 19 century tech (yep, not 20th century, 19th
century)

Regulation shouldn't be about the technology details, it should be about the
service provided.

Oh by the way, the US Postal Service is being driven to bankrupcy by
regulation as well (I'm not saying all is bad though)

~~~
fr0sty
> the US Postal Service is being driven to bankrupcy by regulation as well

More correctly they are being driven to bankruptcy due to ballooning pension
payments (and a congressional mandate to actually fund those obligations).

~~~
Symmetry
I think the real problem is that they were given a lucrative monopoly (mail
delivery) and in return were required to provide universal service. But the
internet made mail delivery much more expensive, while the costs of universal
service have remained constant.

Which all goes to show that if the legislature wants to create a public good
they should have the guts to raise taxes to pay for it, rather than trying to
be clever and accomplish their aims through the back door.

~~~
cdh
USPS is expected to remain profitable as a commercial business, but to some
extent is still treated as though they were part of the federal government.
Their ability to make tough business decisions when they need to is crippled
by a slow, ineffectual congress which refuses to allow that. I think the
lesson here is that you can't have it both ways.

If USPS were allowed to make their own decisions, they wouldn't necessarily be
in this mess.

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Wista
I'm not sure I agree with all the logic in this article?

Higher Prices: This is not a deregulation, surely it would make AT&T have to
compete with other VOIP services? The issue are the necessary safety/security
services and hiw these are not well governed in the TCP/IP world?

Service Disruptions: I can't see how both AT&T and smaller operators both
using public IP would disrupt? I think there's a trade off between between
price and quality of service, those that go with a Cadillac service vs those
that know they are getting a slower service albeit at a lower rate?

Inequality and discrimination: This on eis an issue, it's the Governance of
"essential service", My sense is the legislation needs to change to a) Force
this be be carried over IP (I know there are technical issues) b) Subsidize or
keep a lid on prices?

~~~
michael_h
On your point regarding higher prices: I think the idea is that AT&T would be
able to charge whatever access fees they want for service to rural and low
income areas. They would have to compete with other VoIP services, sure, but
those services need to be delivered over some infrastructure.

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sokrates
Well, then go fix that legal loophole. "Moving services to IP" is
modernization to me, not an attempt at deregulation.

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josh2600
Normally, I'm the first to scream bloody murder about AT&T and their
shenanigans, but I wonder what the author's point is to be honest.

In the first case, he seems to be decrying IP regulation and wishing us back
to a non-IP world (which we haven't been in since the dawn of DSL). In the
second case, he seems to believe that having copper telephone service is
essential to survivability for the elderly. The latter point is more apt and
the former has had little bearing for almost 20 years.

No, what the author should've said, instead of keep copper alive, was "let's
regulate IP communications". The US suffers because of a lack of modern common
carriage laws, and we will continue to lag in technical development until this
problem is fixed.

Forget copper, stop fighting a war from the 80's. Let's regulate IP.

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gz5
Access duopolies are the problem and have nothing to do with core network
tech. Give us multiple access pipe options (IP access of course) and the
telcos can do whatever they feel like in their cores (and most already use IP
cores).

This is really just an attempt by ATT to get us to help subsidize their
retiring of the legacy systems that we helped subsidize in the first place.

------
wmf
I wonder if this total deregulation theory is correct. Didn't the FCC apply
some kind of "walks like a duck" test to Vonage to determine that it is
subject to telco regulation? If so, the same principle should apply to AT&T.
Of course, you may need $200/month broadband to run your regulated VoIP
over...

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matterhorn
Who owns the telecom infrastructure in question? Who built it? Who paid for
it? I am very skeptical of anything referred to as "public." What exactly is
"public" about it?

~~~
pyre
AT&T was a government mandated monopoly with gauranteed profits for a while.

~~~
josh2600
Further, AT&T was a quasi-government entity for almost 40 years starting with
World War I.

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fishercs
IP is a good thing, there will be changes made i'm sure to accomodate for
innovation... kudos to AT&T

------
robomartin
Let it die. I haven't had POTS in probably ten years. I don't want to have to
support that infrastructure financially through taxes (or whatever). Despite
the fear mongering in the article we are far better off today than we were
many years ago.

The US comms infrastructure seems to move and evolve slower than at smaller
countries for very simple reasons. When you take the lead you give late comers
the advantage of looking at what you have done to improving upon. Our
infrastructure is absolutely massive when compared to, say, Estonia's (not to
pick on them at all, great country). This means that rolling out step
improvements is very costly. There's something pro-government folk seem to
insist on ignoring: ROI. Companies can't roll out new massive infrastructures
and throw away investment from the prior generation. Yes, progress in the
context of a significantly larger system will look and feel slower. Our next
generation IP infrastructure is being incubated today through experiments and
evolution. Perhaps it will take the form of 1Gb/s fiber to the home or
something less radical but equally awesome. Only private for-profit enterprise
can bring us this.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
>Our infrastructure is absolutely massive when compared to, say, Estonia's
(not to pick on them at all, great country). This means that rolling out step
improvements is very costly.

You have the math exactly backwards. If you have ten million customers instead
of ten thousand then you have a thousand times more customers to spread your
costs over and you get greater economies of scale.

>Companies can't roll out new massive infrastructures and throw away
investment from the prior generation.

Sure they can. They just don't ever want to, which is why they don't and why
regulators are needed to make them do it.

>Our next generation IP infrastructure is being incubated today through
experiments and evolution. Perhaps it will take the form of 1Gb/s fiber to the
home or something less radical but equally awesome. Only private for-profit
enterprise can bring us this.

Kindly explain how some foreign countries with highly regulated or state-
operated telecommunications companies already have faster internet connections
at lower prices than major American cities.

~~~
robomartin
No, my math is right. It takes a lot more effort and money to move a large
mass.

> Kindly explain how some foreign countries with highly regulated or state-
> operated telecommunications companies already have faster internet
> connections than major American cities.

Because their infrastructure decisions come after our infrastructure
decisions.

It takes N years to "wire" a large city like Los Angeles. After that you have
to get your money back. Yes, that is not a criminal act. Meanwhile country
"X", many years later, looks at what was done in Los Angeles, checks out the
more current technological offerings and installs a system that yes, probably
leapfrogs what the average customer in Los Angeles has.

The true test would be the next evolutionary step. When a city like Los
Angeles is ready to make the next big shift in connectivity it will be really
neat. Country "X" will then fall behind and it will probably be very, very
difficult for them to make the next leap 'cause, well, they have to pay for
the investment just as well.

The technology that is going to make a huge difference is fiber to the home.
We already have it in certain places in Los Angeles. I happen to know that
there's fiber in the telco box right outside my house. Why? I saw it being
installed fifteen years ago. Not lit yet. It will be, eventually. Fiber is
great in that you can greatly enhance transmission rates by driving it
differently. There's probably a few more evolutionary steps ahead of us before
fiber bandwidth is tapped out.

There's another issue a lot of people might not consider when thinking about
upgrading the infrastructure of a country like the US. If tomorrow we all had
1Gb/s service at home and at work it would probably crash the Internet. The
infrastructure required in order to support something like that at our scale
is massive and cost a ton of money. I don't know if costs are geometric or
exponential. They are huge. A small country has advantages here as well.

No, government and regulation is not the solution. It never is.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
>No, my math is right. It takes a lot more effort and money to move a large
mass.

Please explain how it costs more per house to install fiber when you can buy
materials in bulk and have a larger number of customers to spread fixed costs
over.

>It takes N years to "wire" a large city like Los Angeles. After that you have
to get your money back.

They did that decades ago. The cost of installing copper has been paid. The
reason they don't install fiber (and make no mistake, they have all but
stopped) is that they have no incentive to do it -- increasing average
bandwidth reduces their ability to engage in price discrimination against
users who are currently willing to pay a premium to reach a threshold level of
bandwidth that would become the new baseline. Scarcity raises prices. Why
would they ever pay money to upgrade technology that doesn't increase their
revenues? The answer _in a free and competitive market_ would be competitive
pressure, but they have no effective competition.

>The true test would be the next evolutionary step.

Explain what provides the local incumbent with any incentive to be the first
to take that step.

> If tomorrow we all had 1Gb/s service at home and at work it would probably
> crash the Internet. The infrastructure required in order to support
> something like that at our scale is massive and cost a ton of money. I don't
> know if costs are geometric or exponential.

Rubbish. The costs are sub-linear. A user who gets a connection which is 100
times faster doesn't automatically transfer 100 times more stuff. The
predominant cost of installing fiber to the home has nothing to do with
bandwidth or networking equipment and everything to do with paying line
workers in bucket trucks to dig holes and string fiber.

>No, government and regulation is not the solution. It never is.

Do you even hear yourself? Telecommunications is a regulated industry. It's
right up there with power transmission and commercial construction. No one is
even suggesting changing that. If you went to AT&T and asked them whether they
would be in favor of repealing all the telecommunications legislation that
applies to them, thereby disallowing them from using eminent domain and
providing unlicensed access to all comers to the entire radio spectrum, they
would laugh you out of the building.

The only question is whether the regulations we impose are ones that benefit
the public or the incumbents, e.g. by causing fiber to the home to be
installed sooner vs. later (or never).

