Search Results for: AT&T

Found 53 search results for AT&T (this is page 6 of 6).

Broadband Competition Shot Dead By FCC

I struck up a conversation with a Bellsouth tech last week who regaled me with all the planned improvements Bellsouth hoped to make with its network. He was a DSL tech as well as a line installer and was quite fluent in the upcoming technology. Among the gems he threw out were a 6 Mbit download speed coming in September and video on demand coming soon afterward. The goal is 100 Mbits to the home, and will be here sooner than you think. Bellsouth has embarked on an aggressive deployment of new DSLAMs to growing neighborhoods with the goal of bringing fiber to within 5000 feet of their subscribers.

The video on demand stuff sounded appealing, as that’s where I expect things will be heading. I’ve said for a while that the television network is a dying breed. PVR’s like Tivo blaze the way for viewers to purchase their programming by the half-hour, not by the channel. Bellsouth hopes to capitalize on this with their video service, which will pipe three or four simultaneous channels into your home over their copper. Then again, those of you who were in the game in the early days will remember that ISDN was hawked for video on demand. Look how that turned out!

The tech repeated a line I’ve often heard from other telecom technicians: things aren’t fair because the phone companies are regulated and other ISPs (like Time Warner, or competing DSL providers) are not. The view from the phone companies is that their hands are unfairly tied. That all changed last week when the FCC has effectively killed DSL competition. The ruling allows incumbent carriers like Bellsouth to cut loose competiting ISPs from their DSL network. No longer are the ILECs required to offer their copper to competiting providers. As others have noted, the future doesn’t look good for Internet users.

In many other cases it would be a win for a free market. It doesn’t quite square here, though, because the phone companies owe their existence to their early days as monopolies. That fancy infrastructure the phone companies so jealously protect was bought and paid for at the expense of you, the ratepayer. AT&T executives used to brag how the government, in the name of national security (sound familiar?), paid for a large chunk of its network.

So if we want to talk about fairness, we should take that monopoly into account. We should also take steps to ensure another monopoly doesn’t grow up around broadband access. Last week the FCC opened the jailhouse door and now the robber barons are on the loose again.

If there ever was a time for home-grown, wireless neighborhood networks to show how broadband shold be, it’s now. Let’s dust off those yagis and get to work.

The Consultant And The Shepherd

This made the rounds at work.
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A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the shepherd: “If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?”

The shepherd looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answers: “Sure, why not.” The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his AT&T cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on the internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.

Then the young man opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulas. He uploads all of this data via an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and turns to the shepherd and says: “You have exactly 1586 sheep.”

“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my sheep” says the shepherd. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car. Then the shepherd says to the young man: “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my sheep?”

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?”

“You’re a consultant.” says the shepherd.

“Wow! That’s correct,” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?”

“No guessing required.” answered the shepherd. “You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew; to a question I never asked; and you don’t know crap about my business. Now give me back my dog.”

A Forest For Phone Books

We got our new phone books yesterday. As usual, they weigh a ton and are almost too big to flip through. A burning question (ok, not really. I slept pretty well last night) I have is why does the phone company still print these damn things?

Telephone use has exploded in the past few years – so much so that many areas now have to dial ten digits to call across town. Mobile phones, fax machines, PDAs. Everything has a number now. There are even a half-dozen different companies who can provide your dial tone.

So why, after all of this growth, does the phone company print these enormous books and then pay a small fortune to have them distributed? Hasn’t anyone considered putting it all on a CD?

It can’t be cost. AOL made a name for itself by its relentless mailing of free AOL CD’s in a scheme to get people using their service. If AOL can mail out millions of unsolicited CD’s for free, why can’t the phone company do the same with their directories?

I can’t help but consider this hunk of dead tree as a sign that the fable of the monolithic telephone company has a ring of truth to it (ooh, sorry). These fat, monopolistic companies are happy to sit on their anticompetitive goldmine and let everyone else lead the way with innovation. With size comes timidity.

It is no surprise it took the breakup of AT&T for the Internet to finally prosper. I hope the Net will someday replace these dinosaurs entirely.

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