Gigabyte March on Washington

An article in Tuesday's Rapid City Journal tells us that local phone service will increase some 10-fold if the current USF fees are not provided.

The quote has PUC member Bob Sahr saying that the Kennebec Telephone Co. has estimated that without money from the fund, the average residential phone bill of $16 would rise to $159.

FCC Commissioner Adelstein is on a tour of his native homeland of South Dakota, apparently to address the problem he is part of in the recent FCC ruling of declassifying DSL services from a telecommunications service to an information service, of which would reduce funds from DSL services currently going into the fund.

But in Adelstein's own statement of this ruling, he comments that this would not have been a ruling he would have penned. He talks of a "meaningful compromise", of which he does not explain. Though he tries to explain the reasons for this ruling, (of which the author of this blog post feels is asinine) he tries to apologize for anything he has done or may be the cause of in the future. He even goes on record as saying " It remains unclear whether the approach we have taken thus far has been a success".

A New York Times article today had this quoted:

"Every dial-up customer we convert to D.S.L. takes one customer off the table for cable modem," said Bob Ingalls, president of Verizon's retail markets group. "We have a price for every budget."

And let us not forget the dialup customer's they take (steal) away from ISP's that have no competitive service to offer because of their anti-competitive/anti-trust behavior, of which the FCC (we got to save our jobs) has looked the other way, due to the politcal pressures of a lame duck administration in pay back mode of campaign contributions.

A story in the Waco Tribune-Herald looks at telco and cable spending on lobbying in the past year's Texas legislative session, where a law authorizing statewide video franchises and other deregulatory provisions was being pushed hard by SBC and Verizon.

Overall, the major phone interests spent up to $10.2 million on lobbying, compared with a maximum of $1.7 million for cable...By contrast, Time Warner Cable, the biggest cable company in Texas, spent from $220,000 to $505,000.

And it so began...

Once upon a time there was a very wise ruler who heeded the counsel of his advisors. In his Kingdom there was a very powerful feudal lord, Lord AT&T, who sported a fancy coat of arms recognized around the world. Lord AT&T was so powerful that he possessed the power of communications for all the land, and this was called a monopoly.

A ruling was ordered by the Ruler's Court of Supreme Advisors that Lord AT&T must divest his holdings and share them among other feudal lords. And so, Lord Ameritech, Lord Bell South, Lord NYNEX, Lord Bell Atlantic, Lord Pacific Bell, Lord Southwestern Bell and Lord US West were bestowed with riches beyond the dreams of avarice. They came to be called the Lords of the Baby Bells.

For the rest of the story - Lords of the Bells

Tales of the Sausage factory, By Harold Feld

Comcast (the nation's biggest cable company) and Time Warner (the second biggest) are dividing up the bankrupt corpse of Adelphia. At the same time,  they are swapping their own systems so that in cities where Time Warner and  Comcast compete against each other (like New York and Los Angeles) they  won't compete anymore.  

Well, you may ask, what's the big deal? So I  switch from having no choice but Adelphia to no choice but Comcast or Time  Warner. Why should I care? The answer depends on some rather complicated economics. Briefly, to advertisers, programmers, and politicians, the  ability to control a city (or, as they call it when measuring effects, a  "designated market area" or DMA) is much more valuable than the same number of customers spread out over the whole country.