Still fighting against telco's limiting other ISP

[Mel Wilson]

Yanni Chiu wrote:
> In another mailing list I'm on, someone is defending Bell's position. 
> I'd like to have the opinion of people here. His contention is that 
> wholesalers just resell Bell's internet service, and thus are not true 
> competitors. 

Sympatico charged $50/month for a high-speed connection.  Teksavvy 
charges $29.95.  Looks like competition to me.

> He contends that a true competitor would locate equipment 
> inside Bell's central office switches, so as to gain access to the "last 
> mile", and that equipment would connect to the Internet completely 
> independently of Bell (instead of the current wholesale ISP situation). 
> He add's that such a competitor may face obstacles from Bell when trying 
> to gain access to the central offices though.

He's picked an argument he thinks he can win -- not an argument that 
makes sense in this world.  Chuck Norris could gain access to the 
central offices, in a movie.  Not worth pursuing, IMHO.

> So I'm wondering, is Bell required to provide access to their central 
> office switches to allow competitors to access the "last mile"?

Last miles are very expensive to build.  Right now we have two:
- the point-to-point mega-bundles maintained by Bell and built when 
Bell was a regulated monopoly
- the frequency-splitting co-ax maintained by Rogers et al. and built 
when Rogers was a ... [don't know the history that well.]

The regulatory position has been that it's ridiculous to keep building 
more last miles.  Therefore businesses that want to offer 
communication services should be able to use the existing facilites 
for a fair price.

Bell now is doing a big infrastructure upgrade to offer television and 
movies using Internet Protocols.  Then they can take over cable TV and 
Bell executives can wave their\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b boo and jeer at 
Rogers executives.  TV/IP could imaginably take all the bandwidth 
there is, so Bell has an incentive to pare things down.


	Mel.
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