Re: How Workarounds Drive Telecom and Networking

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Brett Glass <brett () lariat net>
Date: May 2, 2009 8:26:31 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net, "ip" <ip () v2 listbox com>
Subject: Re: [IP] How Workarounds Drive Telecom and Networking

Interestingly, history is repeating itself. Owners of fiber backbones  
-- such as Level3 --
are now refusing to sell "dark fiber" and are insisting upon selling  
services by the month. This practice (which, by the way, has hurt my  
own ISP severely; the local cable company got fiber before it started,  
and now we cannot) can only take place if the owner of the fiber has  
significant market power -- that is, if there is no alternative  
provider that WILL lease or sell dark fiber. Thus, it is a symptom of  
a tipping point -- the advent of dangerous concentration in the long  
haul fiber markets. With Qwest's long haul fiber backbone up for sale,  
we must be extremely cautious not to let this concentration increase  
and to find a way to reverse it a bit. If we do not, the backbone  
providers -- who are already strangling rural broadband providers by  
refusing to provide "on-ramps" -- will gain inordinate power over all  
telecommunications, including the Internet itself.

--Brett Glass

> Another part of telecom policy was the coupling of physical facilities
> to the services that used them. Telephone wires were owned by the
> service provider, and were only designed, or upgraded, as that service
> provider saw fit. This vertical integration was not an issue when the
> one service that really mattered was Plain Old Telephone Service. In
> that era, the main issue was balancing the price of calls vs. the
> price of the line itself. Only a small portion of the actual cost of
> telephone service is usage sensitive. Long distance calls, and in some
> places local calls, were priced far above cost, in order to subsidize
> the fixed price of local service and pay for the expensive wires up on
> the poles and under the streets.
>
> This service-driven model quietly started to fall apart in the 1980s
> when fiber optics became practical. Fiber changed the key economics.
> Up until then, high-capacity services were very expensive to
> provision, so they had to be expensive. Even a measly copper T1
> circuit, 1.5 megabits, leased for thousands per month. A strand of
> fiber was far more versatile, and had enough capacity to "bypass" many
> billable phone calls. Fiber could have been seen as infrastructure,
> but that was not compatible with a service-driven business model.






-------------------------------------------
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com