OT - Cell Service - How They Do It in Europe

[James Knott]

Duncan MacGregor wrote:
> On February 29, 2008 01:33:43 pm James Knott wrote:
>   
>> Lennart Sorensen wrote:
>>     
>>> It seems strange that the phone market in europe is much better in the
>>> private hands (although roaming charges are insane and being looked into
>>> by regulators), while it was inefficient and expensive when it was
>>> government run.  In north america privatization seems to have made
>>> things worse in some cases, although not all.  It's not an overall
>>> improvement in many cases though.  For some reason competition doesn't
>>> seem to work out very well here.  It may just be the low population
>>> density that is the problem.  It costs too much to startup a nation wide
>>> service with not enough potential customers.
>>>       
>> For the most part, telecom in North America has alway been private,
>> though a regulated monopoly.  Competition in the U.S. has had a much
>> bigger impact than here.  Many services cost much less there, more than
>> can be attributed to population density.  In fact, if you want a
>> dedicated circuit from, for example, Toronto to Vancouver, it's much
>> cheaper to go via U.S.  Even going across town is much cheaper in the U.S.
>>     
>
> Inexpensive dedicated data lines had the  effect of preserving proprietary 
> network protocols and their hardware. In Canada, only the biggest companies 
> could afford dedicated lines, and shared lines and packet-switching gear was 
> not supported by the big US hardware vendors. So we had the worst of both 
> worlds. We mice tried to follow OSI networking until the Elephant farted and 
> rolled over, leaving us and the world with TCP/IP.
>   
Actually, packet switching has been around for years across North 
America, including X.25 and Frame Relay, along with ATM, which uses 
"cells", rather than packets.  For many years, Europe was behind in this 
area.  Also, the hardware that's capable for sharing lines has been 
around for many years.  I used to do a lot of work with Newbridge 
products and they had multiplexers that could mix 'n match various 
services over a dedicated line.  Further, it's been possible, for many 
years to buy a fractional T1 from the carriers.  However, until it 
became legal to resell telecom services, it was difficult to share 
bandwidth with others.  Even today, I often set up systems, where a 
customer can split up the leased bandwidth, among a couple of different 
systems, such as PBX phones and computer network to a remote site.  As 
an example, I could set up a system where you'd have 8 PBX lines sharing 
a T1 with about a 1.4 Mb/s network connection to the remote end.

> We are seeing this again with cellphone technology. It seems clear that every 
> serious businessman  wants a good environment for monopoly except when he is 
> trying to compete with a larger player; then he wants a 'level playing 
> field'. 
>
> Remember when the Telcos swore that they all lost money on local telephone 
> service?
>
>
>   
I don't have the numbers, but I seem to recall at one point business 
local access was subsidizing residential local access and most of the 
profit came from long distance.  I can also remember when it used to be 
a toll call to phone across Winston Churchill Blvd., even though you 
could look out your window and see the person you were talking to!  Back 
in those days, you'd pay a few dollars per minute to call Europe, while 
making a lot less than you do now.  So, compared to 40 years ago, 
telecom is a bargain!



-- 
Use OpenOffice.org <http://www.openoffice.org>
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists