Sean Donelan <SEAN@SDG.DRA.COM> wrote:

I'd rather avoid Mr. Doran's vision of which provider can out last their screaming customers longer.

I'd rather too. Unfortunately that is always the nature of business: increasing profitanility can be achieved by charging more or by reducing value provided to the customer. If customers are unwilling to pay more for the current maoist (let all flowers bloom, that's it) Internet, it'll die, exactly like small groceries.

At least when ANS tried this last time, they offered to compensate some of the mid-level networks for some of the investment made in local and regional networks.

That was different. ANS then was the only game in that forest, and they were quite unwilling to look monopolistic. Now if you don't like Sprint you can go to MCI and vice versa.

The Internet seems to have been incredibly successful by not following the traditional telco way of doing business. I don't know why the facilities based telecom companies model would produce a more useful, solid or sustainable business model just because it is being thought up by a manager at a facilities based telecom company.

They can do things right. Telephone service is ubiquotus, cheap and dependable. Compare to Internet. The problem with telcos is that changes in their thinking are inevitably linked to changes in management. There's a lot of high-level managers who put their reputations on Internet being nothing more than an academical toy. Some of them will go away. Some will join the cheering crowd and try to do damage control. Five years ago, the idea of a telco doing Internet was so ridiculous that my friends laughed at me. Now try to find telco which doesn't have an Internet service.

How is that marketing plan for ISDN coming along?

ISDN was broken as designed from the very beginning. I understand telcos unwillingness to deploy it quite well. But this tells more of design by standards commitees than of telco managers.

Billion dollar companies can have bad ideas too.

They can afford it. --vadim