Also sprach Steve Sobol
Jeff Mcadams wrote:
Look at the history of computing and computer networking...the more open solution wins, almost without fail. Open up the telco networks, and the cable networks will loose out and will cease to be relevent.
The RBOCs seem to think, however, that two wrongs make a right. The prevailing thought being something like, "Sure, openness is good, but if the cablecos aren't going to be open, then its bad for us to be open."
Uh...huh?
You've got it wrong. It's "They don't have to do it; why should we?"
But they'll give lip service that open networks are good...so the two arguments that we're attributing to RBOCs boil down to be the same thing...just stated differently.
But it's a fight that others can fight too. Big guys. AOL probably won't (AOL==Time Warner, remember), but Earthlink and MSN might.
EarthlinkMindspringOneMainSprint of BORG *is* aligned with Sprint, but Sprint isn't an ILEC in the vast majority of towns across the USA.
Everyone should be fighting for this, IMHO. Little ISPs, big-name nationwide
retail providers, and backbones that aren't associated with an ILEC. That means UUNet and Intermedia, for example. MCI isn't an ILEC in most places that I know of, either.
So why aren't we fighting?
We are...though its kinda low grade since the bigger current fight is to maintain the current openness on the RBOC networks since they seem to have the FCC and at least some Representatives pretty much on their payroll, and are doing their best to embrace and extend their monopoly out into broadband. My experiences are in dealing with BellSouth, and to be quite blunt, I can't see why anyone would want to acknowledge working for such a completely unethical company. -- Jeff McAdams Email: jeffm@iglou.com Head Network Administrator Voice: (502) 966-3848 IgLou Internet Services (800) 436-4456