SCOTUS Rules Incumbent Telcos Must Share Network Access At Cost 134
schwit1 writes with news, as reported by Bloomberg, which will likely have bearing on (like it or not) regulation of peering among Internet carriers: "Established local telephone companies including AT&T Inc. must share disputed parts of their networks with competitors at cost, the US Supreme Court ruled. The unanimous ruling backs the position taken by the Federal Communications Commission in a fight stemming from the 1996 law that injected competition into the local telephone business. The law requires so-called incumbent local carriers, whose ranks also include Verizon Communications Inc. and CenturyLink Inc., to share their facilities with rivals."
Re:Cable too please! (Score:3, Informative)
My thought on local cable was that you should do a bit like electricity deregulation - have one company that runs the fiber to the house, which requires the massive money investment. They lease out usage to TV, internet or whoever at regulated rates. Have wide open competition for content providers - what you want, you pay for, and nothing else.
You can't do this with cable, there isn't an individual line that goes from your house all the way back to the cable company, the wire in your house is only "yours" to the pole where it combines with everyone else in your neighborhood. The wire coming to your house is capable of carrying approximately 125 channel slots. Those channel slots can be used in 1 of 4 ways...
1. A single analog channel
2. 2 HD Digital Channels
3. 3 or 4 SD Digital Channels
4. Approximately 30mbit of download capacity for data
You might live in an area where the the cable company has started pretty much requiring set top boxes, whats happened there is they have run out of spectrum, and are beginning to put what were analog channels into digital in order to free up 2 or 3 channel slots for other purposes, High definition or Internet are the big drivers.
Oh sure, you could do a frequency split with a 2nd carrier, but that service would, by necessity, be digital only, and both carriers would have a far sub-standard offering because they've only got 62 channel slots to work with.
Bandwidth on the CATV lines is a limited commodity, and even in small systems it is running out.
One other thought is that you could divide the city up into quadrants, and have a separate provider for each of the 4 quadrants, but the nature of the technology is that any given subscriber can only have 1 choice so if you live in quadrant A, you get provider A.
Of course, allowing a 2nd (or even 3rd) provider to overbuild the system would allow for real competition, 3 wires on the pole means there are 3 providers available, but what company is going to go through that expense when they don't have the city issued monopoly to ensure they can pay for the massive investment they just made?
Re:Good overall, however I question "cost-based" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cable too please! (Score:5, Informative)
Minor corrections:
[180] channel slots [upto 1000 megahertz].
1. A single six megahertz analog channel
2. [5] HD Digital Channels
3. [10] SD Digital Channels
4. Approximately 30 [or 40 Mbit] of download capacity for data
Points 2 and 3 are why cable channels often look pixelated compared to live broadcast. The cable channels squeeze as many channels as possible into each 6 megahertz/40 Mbit wide slot, which means the viewer sees lots of macroblocking and mosquitos in their picture.
Re:Cable too please! (Score:5, Informative)
Headline vastly overstates the opinion's impact (Score:5, Informative)
Canada has a freer market, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, it's interesting to note that here in Canada, we have the exact opposite - the big telecommunications companies pretty much have free reign except for some small legal matters.
E.g., the FCC mandates that consumers must have choice in set top boxes, so CableCARD was created. Sure it's iffy, but at least you guys get to have "premium" PVRs like TiVo, Moxi, Windows Media Center, etc fully working with digital cable. Here we have to put up with cableco provided boxes that only work with that cableco. They won't activate any equipment you didn't buy from them even if it's identical.
Point 2 - UBB. The CRTC rule that jacked up DSL rates was changed from (cost+%) to (retail price-%). So if the incumbent sold DSL for $20/month and it cost them $10 to provide, instead of the ISP paying say, $12/month and providing service with the remaining $8 (the way it was), the rules changed so the ISP must pay say $18 (10% off retail) for the line. That's why TekSavvy had to jack up prices.
Hell, the only provider that seemed to have done a decent thing was Shaw by announcing new limits and plans that even include an unlimited service. Probably because they were bleeding customers and feared the government might end up stepping in with regulation. Bell and Rogers though... bleh.
Free market, indeed. Sometimes I wish our CRTC had balls like the FCC.
Re:Good overall, however I question "cost-based" (Score:3, Informative)
Full disclosure: I work for a major telco, but want to keep my job, so I'm posting AC.
If your service is interrupted and you're using Verizon lines but aren't a Verizon customer, your work order goes to the bottom of the pile. If the pile isn't large, they'll still leave some cushion room in case a flood of calls come in from their own customers. And they won't move you up when that flood doesn't arrive.
This is incorrect.
How a trouble ticket is handled depends entirely upon how the customer opened the ticket. It also depends on what level of service they requested at the outset, and how often they call to escalate the ticket.
If your circuit is taking errors every couple of hours, but you call it in as down hard? We're going to resolve the ticket as "No Trouble Found", because the automated testing will have completed faster than the problem could be found. This can also happen if the circuit is taking enough errors to take it down for you, but not enough to impede the automated testing to the CPE.
And of course, if you call in a ticket as taking massive errors, or even better, down hard, but then don't give us test release?
Then yes. Your ticket will get degraded to a pri-2, put on customer time and go into the holding bucket until you call in with a test release. To be fair, if the circuit is actually dead, most of the techs will ignore the "do not test" and test anyway to find the source of the trouble.
So opening a ticket with the correct trouble description, giving us test release, and providing us with access hours, local contacts and phone numbers will go a very, very, VERY long way to getting your service restored. (God, I wish I had a penny for every time I had to waste 30 minutes to track down a local contact. I'd be rich as Croesus.)
Also, bear in mind, yours isn't the only circuit in the world. We've got LOTS of other circuits that are down, and they all need our attention. And as with anything in this world, squeaky wheels get greased faster than quiet ones. This is why we have escalations. If you are diligent and call in every hour to escalate your ticket, I promise you, it WILL get seen to. In the case of DS3 or above circuits, that usually happens pretty fast already, because DS3s can carry 28 T1 circuits, or a mix of T1 and DS0 circuits. That means a dead DS3 can have 28 or MORE very angry customers.
Trust me. We try to move on those as fast as possible.
Higher than DS3 means either one of the Tellabs or Alcatels shit the bed, and believe me, they do it a lot. Or worse, we've got a fibercut out there somewhere. Now we're talking hundreds of customers, all with tickets, all escalating, all pissed off.
Of course, this all depends on where the circuit goes. Just because you bought it through us, doesn't mean it follows our lines all the way to your building. It probably goes through a local exchange carrier, or LEC. If that happens, now WE are at the mercy of the LEC, and all we can do is the same thing YOU do, and keep escalating. And if you thought hold times were bad when YOU call in for an update, hold times for us means putting the phone on speaker for at least half an hour or more. *cough*att*COUGH*frntier*
If you're an ISP, then chances are very good that you'll be supplying service to local emergency services. Police, fire, EMS or state government, even federal government. If that's the case, then those circuits will have a Telecommunications Service Priority, or TSP code. This translates to "Fix Me First!". TSP circuits over-ride all others. A LEC must dispatch on a TSP, regardless of overtime concerns or union regulations. The only thing that trumps TSP is safety, and calling a halt to repairs because of safety will mean an investigation later on, so it'd better be genuine.
TSP is also hereditary. If your piddly little DS0 has a TSP-2 rating, then the shared T1, and that shared T1's DS3 also carry the TSP-2 rating. We see this a lot with railroa