I'm certainly no expert on US telecom politics but, on a global scale Telecoms companies always seems to be monopolies and ISPs arent.. and its not to do with political policies Most (all?) countries historically had an incumbent operator which at some time in the last 20 years was deregulated .. the trouble is whichever entity gets to own the wires in a region has a total advantage over the competitors and always comes out on top. By contrast ISPs started in pockets and grew out, eventually overlapping and setting up good levels of competition. The traffic profiles are very different too, most phone calls stay inside the region whereas most IP traffic goes outside the region, (country, continent..) which changes the dynamics of the business and makes for an equal field of play. The two worlds obviously meet where the ISP wants to use last mile infrastructure and then you're back to the telecoms monopoly to provide that. Regulation doesnt have to be like it is for telecoms, it would need to suit the specific problems of the ISP industry and shouldnt need to be over imposing, it wouldnt be a bad idea at all.... but it worries me that a handful of "tier 1" companies seem to dominate and they all share similar anti-smaller-isp policies and any regulation would need to make sure it benefited all the providers and not just the big ones. Steve On Sun, 30 Jun 2002, Vadim Antonov wrote:
Oh, no. If anyone has illusions that politicos can somehow fix the situation, he ought to do serious reality check. If anything, they made that mess in the first place by creating ILEC monopolies and allowing those supposedly regulated monopilists to strange the emerging last mile broadband providers. With the obvious result of getting backbones to lose the projected traffic and revenue streams.
(Of course, they were also very lax in policing conflicts of interest and accounting practices).
The "serious economic trouble" means that some of those tier-1 providers will go to chapter 11, and emerge with paid-for capacity and no crippling debts (and with sane executives, too). At least 4 will survive; the potential value of the remaining ones to their creditors will grow as competitors die off.
--vadim
On Sat, 29 Jun 2002, Gordon Cook wrote:
We are now halfway through 2002. the build out is complete and most of the builders are either in chapter 11 or in danger of going there. Does anyone believe that the non regulation arguments of the build out phase still hold? If so other than for reasons of blind ideology (all regulation by definition is bad), why?