Re: Vixie puts his finger squarely on the key issue Re: Sprint peering policy

["Stephen J. Wilcox" <steve () opaltelecom co uk>]

I'm certainly no expert on US telecom politics but, on a global scale Telecoms
companies always seems to be monopolies and ISPs arent.. and its not to do with
political policies

Most (all?) countries historically had an incumbent operator which at some time
in the last 20 years was deregulated .. the trouble is whichever entity gets to
own the wires in a region has a total advantage over the competitors and always
comes out on top.

By contrast ISPs started in pockets and grew out, eventually overlapping and
setting up good levels of competition. The traffic profiles are very different
too, most phone calls stay inside the region whereas most IP traffic goes
outside the region, (country, continent..) which changes the dynamics of the
business and makes for an equal field of play.

The two worlds obviously meet where the ISP wants to use last mile
infrastructure and then you're back to the telecoms monopoly to provide that.

Regulation doesnt have to be like it is for telecoms, it would need to suit the
specific problems of the ISP industry and shouldnt need to be over imposing, it
wouldnt be a bad idea at all.... but it worries me that a handful of "tier
1" companies seem to dominate and they all share similar anti-smaller-isp
policies and any regulation would need to make sure it benefited all the
providers and not just the big ones.

Steve


On Sun, 30 Jun 2002, Vadim Antonov wrote:

> Oh, no. If anyone has illusions that politicos can somehow fix the
> situation, he ought to do serious reality check.  If anything, they made
> that mess in the first place by creating ILEC monopolies and allowing
> those supposedly regulated monopilists to strange the emerging last mile
> broadband providers.  With the obvious result of getting backbones to lose
> the projected traffic and revenue streams.
>
> (Of course, they were also very lax in policing conflicts of interest and
> accounting practices).
>
> The "serious economic trouble" means that some of those tier-1 providers
> will go to chapter 11, and emerge with paid-for capacity and no crippling
> debts (and with sane executives, too).  At least 4 will survive; the
> potential value of the remaining ones to their creditors will grow as
> competitors die off.
>
> --vadim
>
> On Sat, 29 Jun 2002, Gordon Cook wrote:
>
> > We are now halfway through 2002.  the build out is complete and most 
> > of the builders are  either in chapter 11 or in danger of going 
> > there.  Does anyone believe that the non regulation arguments of the 
> > build out phase still hold?  If so other than for reasons of blind 
> > ideology (all regulation by definition is bad), why?