more on : Telco's Arrogant Stand on Content

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Brad Templeton <btm () templetons com>
Date: January 7, 2006 6:48:20 PM EST
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Cc: fritz () fritzmills com
Subject: Re: [IP] more on : Telco's Arrogant Stand on Content

On Sat, Jan 07, 2006 at 06:25:45PM -0500, David Farber wrote:
> To put it in terms that perhaps the telcos can better understand: If
> I pick up my telephone and make a call to Google, I must pay my telco
> for my phone line and telephone service, and Google must pay their
> telco to provide the telephone service that allows them to answer my
> call, but there is no obligation on the part of Google to pay my
> telco, too. Nor is it true in that situation that Google has "used
> [my telco's] pipes for free."

I would agree more than 100% if it were possible.  However, bellheads
are trained to think a different way.  They are used to a regulated
world of reciprocal compensation.  While it's been dwindling, the
norm for some time was that when you made a local call to a competing
carrier, your carrier paid some money to the terminating carrier.
When a long distance company terminates a call at a local carrier, it
used to pay so much that it was the largest chunk of your per-minute
fee.    For a while there were dial-up ISPs that set up for free or  
cheap,
knowing they only would receive, and never make calls, and thus be paid
for all the calls they got.   Globally, it's a well known racket that
the cost paid to the national carrier to terminate an LD call could be
kicked back to the recipient of the call.

This is foreign to the "internet cost contract" which is simply, "I pay
for my pipe to the middle, and you pay for yours, and we don't sweat
the small stuff."   The earlier threat to this contract has come from
anti-spammers who wish to claim that e-mail they don't want is somehow
stealing bandwidth.  (Spam is evil in so many ways, but calling it  
bandwidth
theft is the wrong precedent.)

So to them, traffic is all about who pays.  There are dialed calls and
800 calls, but somebody always pays and one carrier compensates another.
(The exception is your access out to the LD carriers, which is billed
as a fixed rate access change.)   Internet connections aren't done that
way at all, but the old guard will grasp at any straw, even their
obsolete way of thinking, when faced with competition coming over the
infrastructure they sell to their customers.


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