Cable Equal Access Case Goes to Supreme Court

DCTooTall writes "The FCC has ruled that Cable High-Speed Internet is an Information Service, and therefore not subject to the same equal access regulations that govern DSL. Brand-X Networks sued the FCC for equal access to the Cable Networks and won. The FCC appealed the decision and next Tuesday the case goes to the Supreme Court. The Telco's have repeatedly used the current FCC stance on Cable Broadband in their fight to get the same monopoly on DSL. This case has the potential to not only open the Cable networks to competition, but also prevent the Telco's from further attempts on limiting DSL options."

Re:In Plain English?

[Ironsides]

Local telephone companies (who own the wires) are required by law to sell allow other companies access to their wires (whereby the other company can supply local service) at below market costs. Sometimes around or below how much it costs them to maintain the wires as well. This way we can have competition between multiple local phone companies on the same set of wires. This was extended to DSL some years ago.

Now, Cable companies (who sometimes own the wires and sometimes don't, in my are the county officially owns the wires and we still only have one cable company) are not required to open up their cable lines to competing companies.

from TFA

[killawatt5k]

"High-speed Internet connections are not telephones," HA!

Re:government involvement?

[NormalVisual]

In almost all cases, yes, there was some form of government subsidy, whether it be by allowing only one cable company for a given locality, or giving free right-of-way for the lines to be run, or other such consideration.

Re:In Plain English?

[mamladm]

With Cable Internet services the Cable TV operator is the only internet service provider on the cable network and no other provider has any right to gain access to that network providing their own service.

With DSL services the situation is different. Internel service providers have the right to get access to the telco's network to provide their own service over DSL in competition with the telco that owns the wires.

The telcos would like to get the same monopoly status that cable operators have. Internet service providers would like to get the same access right to cable networks that they have to telco's DSL networks.

The FCC has tried to argue that there is a difference between cable and DSL that justifies the difference in access rights. Not everybody agrees with that view and so the issue went to the courts.

Re:Techinal Problems

[BumbaCLot]

Wrong, they actually do.
Not all ISPs have to supply DSLAMs to share DSL with telcos. I work for an ISP and we sell Verizon and SBC DSL. We are charged for lineshares by both companies. With Verizon we provide them with DLCI numbers and have static IPs for our customers. With SBC, their Redback routers look at the username and route to our system based on that.

Re:Competition

[thinkliberty]

Look at the contract your cable company has with your town or county (depending on where you live.)

They prohibit another cable company from laying cable. So no one can compete, even if they wanted to lay their own cable.

Re:the real problem

[j0nb0y]

Just FYI, deregulation started in the 90s, under Clinton...

Re:That'll learn 'em.

[charon69]

Well, time for like my 3rd comment on Slashdot ever...

I realize you were joking, but, just in case nobody knows, here's how DSL works in a nut shell.

Your typical POTS line (Plain Old Telephone System) is just an analog connection to the phone company (yes, this is a generalization). The human voice and ear can only cover certain ranges of frequencies, so there's really no point in attempting to do voice communication beyond a frequency limit. But the higher frequencies can still go across the line just fine. As such, a DSL modem just modulates the data to correspond to frequencies higher than anything that you can say or hear and puts it on the same line as your voice traffic. To further ensure that there's no overlap between your voice traffic and the data modulations, you put a low pass filter on all your analog phone lines to make sure that they can't interfere with the data portion. At the phone company, they just strip the frequencies back into two separate systems and demodulate the data to get the 1s and 0s back.

Yes, actually, I do work at a company that makes this stuff. Why do you ask?

Re:Techinal Problems

[silas_moeckel]

OK I actualy do this for a living every now and then and your pretty far off. There is a limit to the number of channels avalible past the fiber. 188 of them last I checked but not all cable co's have upgraded there physical plant to support them all. Each provider would need a minimum of 2 channels to hook there head ends into (for practial purposes they whould need space in the CO or very near it)

And as to DSL your incorrect again, everybody does not have to put in there own dslams to make it work. Many get an ATM feed from the incumbents DSLAM and that is the first shared bandwith and ATM can and does provide garentee's as to bandwith use per virtual circut. Often the incumbent changes as much for this service as they do for DSL as to avoid competition.

Less bandwidth at higher cost over time.

[falconx7]

I'd really appreciate more competition for Cable internet. I'm too far for any DSL options, and i've gotten really annoyed with the cable connection from Charter. When I forst got the service, I was really happy with it. 1.5mbps down and 768kbps up. You'd like to think that years after the original service prices would decrease, and faster bandwidth options would open up. Instead the reverse has happened. Prices gradually went up, and bandwidth varied. For a while I was getting 2mbps down and 128kbps up. The increase in down bandwidth I didn't really care about, but cutting upload bandwidth to 1/6th, that was horrid! They finally relented and changed it to 3mbps down and 256kbps up. The change in download bandwidth hasn't really mattered to me, and the upload bandwidth is still 1/3rd the original rate.

I assume this likely occured because in the first few years, they didn't have too many customers and had plenty of room on the infrastructure, but now that its getting more crowded. I'd hope competition would hopefully encourage spending effort on increasing bandwidth options, even if that requires laying down more lines.