7 ms·

How AT&T Is Planning to Rob Americans of an Open Public Telco Network

92 points by Libertatea 14y ago

Wista 14y ago
I'm not sure I agree with all the logic in this article? Higher Prices: This is not a deregulation, surely it would make AT&T have to compete with other VOIP services? The issue are the necessary safety/security services and hiw these are not well governed in the TCP/IP world? Service Disruptions: I can't see how both AT&T and smaller operators both using public IP would disrupt? I think there's a trade off between between price and quality of service, those that go with a Cadillac service vs those that know they are getting a slower service albeit at a lower rate? Inequality and discrimination: This on eis an issue, it's the Governance of "essential service", My sense is the legislation needs to change to a) Force this be be carried over IP (I know there are technical issues) b) Subsidize or keep a lid on prices?
- michael_h 14y ago
  On your point regarding higher prices: I think the idea is that AT&T would be able to charge whatever access fees they want for service to rural and low income areas. They would have to compete with other VoIP services, sure, but those services need to be delivered over some infrastructure.
- toast0 14y ago
  Re higher prices; the recent evidence in in California where the Public Utility Commission decided to no longer regulate tariffs for normal phone service, I believe they still have a tariff for low cost service for low income households. Not surprisingly, AT&T has raised their prices. Sure there's some competition, but I can't continue DSL service from my preferred ISP (Sonic.net) without an AT&T land line, because I'm behind a remote terminal.
sokrates 14y ago
Well, then go fix that legal loophole. "Moving services to IP" is modernization to me, not an attempt at deregulation.
raverbashing 14y ago
Let the switched network die its deserved death It's costly, it's an awful use of resources, for no good benefit. POTS is a huge ruby-goldberg device, it's almost laughable sometimes. All that so that the terminal can use 19 century tech (yep, not 20th century, 19th century) Regulation shouldn't be about the technology details, it should be about the service provided. Oh by the way, the US Postal Service is being driven to bankrupcy by regulation as well (I'm not saying all is bad though)
- fr0sty 14y ago
  > the US Postal Service is being driven to bankrupcy by regulation as well More correctly they are being driven to bankruptcy due to ballooning pension payments (and a congressional mandate to actually fund those obligations).
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    To fund them way ahead of a reasonable schedule actually.
    - robomartin 14y ago
      And that is just fine. If every government agency had this "feature" we'd have half the government we have today. Politicians need to feel the pain of paying for their delusionary spending ahead of the need in order to ensure that they don't spend what we don't have or what we can't afford. What a concept: Want a new program? Save the money you'll need for the first five years of operation and then we can talk about it. Programs have been rolled out with no runway whatsoever and counting on sucking more money out of taxpayers to cover the holes. If the post office didn't have to face the reality of funding these insanely ridiculous government pensions my kids and their kids and maybe one more generation after that would have to pay taxes to provide postal workers with nearly a full salary for the rest of their lives. That would be wrong.
      - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
fishercs 14y ago
IP is a good thing, there will be changes made i'm sure to accomodate for innovation... kudos to AT&T
gz5 14y ago
Access duopolies are the problem and have nothing to do with core network tech. Give us multiple access pipe options (IP access of course) and the telcos can do whatever they feel like in their cores (and most already use IP cores). This is really just an attempt by ATT to get us to help subsidize their retiring of the legacy systems that we helped subsidize in the first place.
smutticus 14y ago
The argument of this article seems to be, "We can't fix how the FCC regulates IP services so we must force AT&T to stay in the dark ages." You can't simultaneously decry America's networking innovation and complain that AT&T is moving to IP. Everything is moving to IP. Circuit switching is dead. They're even putting TDM over IP nowadays(ITU Y.1588v2 and SyncE). If you really want to improve the situation don't act all Luddite. Start the conversation on overhauling common carrier legislation. Bring Judge Greene back from the dead and break these carriers into thousands of competing tiny operators.
- twoodfin 14y ago
  I don't get it. How can anyone look at the subsequent explosion of IP and mobile services and conclude that telecom deregulation in 1996 wasn't a smashing success? I'm sure there's room for improvement, but I'm not sold on a radical restructuring.
  - jordan0day 14y ago
    One argument could be that the "subsequent explosion of IP and mobile services" occurred in spite of telecom deregulation, and not because of it. That's probably false, but there's also likely a sliver of truth there. Imagine how much more innovation we might have, were the telecoms not de facto monopolies. Also, I'm not sure many folks are arguing for total regulation -- instead, like smutticus, I think most people would like to see a more competitive market than the one we have now.
  - AnthonyMouse 14y ago
    >How can anyone look at the subsequent explosion of IP and mobile services and conclude that telecom deregulation in 1996 wasn't a smashing success? By comparing to the results in other countries that didn't deregulate common carriers, which have the same innovations at lower prices and with fewer restrictions on what you can do with your devices.
  - josh2600 14y ago
    Because the measurement of success is different. In '96, we paid for a nationwide fiber network, and the big telcos decided they could deliver 10mbps symmetrical over last mile copper. Today a 10mbps symmetrical copper circuit is delivered via Ethernet-Over-Copper and costs ~$1000/month in downtown SF. Every home in America was supposed to have a 10mbit symmetrical fiber connection by mid 2000's. What you see today is a pale reflection of what might've been. You're happy you have connectivity, and that's great, but your connectivity sucks and you shouldn't be happy about it because you paid for a better network and didn't get it. Does that make sense? AT&T and the other big telcos stole the dream of ubiquitous fast Internet by mortgaging our future for continued copper obsolescence. And we wonder why there's no money for metro fiber networks...
zero_intp 14y ago
This is a truly ignorant article. There is no support given for any of the extreme positions taken. Additionally, it presumes that any change in regulations will reduce requirements instead of transferring those not already covering last mile IP, which is the obvious action. The requirements for running the telephone system do not end just because the transport medium is IP. In many cases, the transition to IP services makes the existing IP infrastructure beholden to higher uptime and connectivity requirements. Try telling federal regulators that you did not deliver an emergency call because you were in a peering dispute. Today, American backbone IP NSPs are required to deliver outage information to the FCC, and this is prior to any assumption of life-critical services.
robomartin 14y ago
Let it die. I haven't had POTS in probably ten years. I don't want to have to support that infrastructure financially through taxes (or whatever). Despite the fear mongering in the article we are far better off today than we were many years ago. The US comms infrastructure seems to move and evolve slower than at smaller countries for very simple reasons. When you take the lead you give late comers the advantage of looking at what you have done to improving upon. Our infrastructure is absolutely massive when compared to, say, Estonia's (not to pick on them at all, great country). This means that rolling out step improvements is very costly. There's something pro-government folk seem to insist on ignoring: ROI. Companies can't roll out new massive infrastructures and throw away investment from the prior generation. Yes, progress in the context of a significantly larger system will look and feel slower. Our next generation IP infrastructure is being incubated today through experiments and evolution. Perhaps it will take the form of 1Gb/s fiber to the home or something less radical but equally awesome. Only private for-profit enterprise can bring us this.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- chez17 14y ago
  > There's something pro-government folk seem to insist on ignoring: ROI. Companies can't roll out new massive infrastructures and throw away investment from the prior generation. It's interesting then when some actual competition comes along speeds increase and prices lower. Look at what happened with Google Fiber in KC. This is an often repeated point that has been proved wrong time and time again. Sure, there is some truth to it on a basic level, upgrading services cost money. In reality the companies have the regulatory bodies under control, the politicians under control, and they don't have to innovate or invest to make insane amounts of money. Why not just improve services in cities where the population is very dense? Why not in places like New England where there are many cities close together? Why if I call to cancel my service my prices can be cut in half? They have the money, there is just zero competition so they don't care.
- AnthonyMouse 14y ago
  >Our infrastructure is absolutely massive when compared to, say, Estonia's (not to pick on them at all, great country). This means that rolling out step improvements is very costly. You have the math exactly backwards. If you have ten million customers instead of ten thousand then you have a thousand times more customers to spread your costs over and you get greater economies of scale. >Companies can't roll out new massive infrastructures and throw away investment from the prior generation. Sure they can. They just don't ever want to, which is why they don't and why regulators are needed to make them do it. >Our next generation IP infrastructure is being incubated today through experiments and evolution. Perhaps it will take the form of 1Gb/s fiber to the home or something less radical but equally awesome. Only private for-profit enterprise can bring us this. Kindly explain how some foreign countries with highly regulated or state-operated telecommunications companies already have faster internet connections at lower prices than major American cities.
wmf 14y ago
I wonder if this total deregulation theory is correct. Didn't the FCC apply some kind of "walks like a duck" test to Vonage to determine that it is subject to telco regulation? If so, the same principle should apply to AT&T. Of course, you may need $200/month broadband to run your regulated VoIP over...
matterhorn 14y ago
Who owns the telecom infrastructure in question? Who built it? Who paid for it? I am very skeptical of anything referred to as "public." What exactly is "public" about it?
- pyre 14y ago
  AT&T was a government mandated monopoly with gauranteed profits for a while.
  - josh2600 14y ago
    Further, AT&T was a quasi-government entity for almost 40 years starting with World War I.
josh2600 14y ago
Normally, I'm the first to scream bloody murder about AT&T and their shenanigans, but I wonder what the author's point is to be honest. In the first case, he seems to be decrying IP regulation and wishing us back to a non-IP world (which we haven't been in since the dawn of DSL). In the second case, he seems to believe that having copper telephone service is essential to survivability for the elderly. The latter point is more apt and the former has had little bearing for almost 20 years. No, what the author should've said, instead of keep copper alive, was "let's regulate IP communications". The US suffers because of a lack of modern common carriage laws, and we will continue to lag in technical development until this problem is fixed. Forget copper, stop fighting a war from the 80's. Let's regulate IP.

92 points by Libertatea 14y ago

Wista 14y ago

I'm not sure I agree with all the logic in this article? Higher Prices: This is not a deregulation, surely it would make AT&T have to compete with other VOIP services? The issue are the necessary safety/security services and hiw these are not well governed in the TCP/IP world? Service Disruptions: I can't see how both AT&T and smaller operators both using public IP would disrupt? I think there's a trade off between between price and quality of service, those that go with a Cadillac service vs those that know they are getting a slower service albeit at a lower rate? Inequality and discrimination: This on eis an issue, it's the Governance of "essential service", My sense is the legislation needs to change to a) Force this be be carried over IP (I know there are technical issues) b) Subsidize or keep a lid on prices?

michael_h 14y ago
On your point regarding higher prices: I think the idea is that AT&T would be able to charge whatever access fees they want for service to rural and low income areas. They would have to compete with other VoIP services, sure, but those services need to be delivered over some infrastructure.
toast0 14y ago
Re higher prices; the recent evidence in in California where the Public Utility Commission decided to no longer regulate tariffs for normal phone service, I believe they still have a tariff for low cost service for low income households. Not surprisingly, AT&T has raised their prices. Sure there's some competition, but I can't continue DSL service from my preferred ISP (Sonic.net) without an AT&T land line, because I'm behind a remote terminal.

sokrates 14y ago

Well, then go fix that legal loophole. "Moving services to IP" is modernization to me, not an attempt at deregulation.

raverbashing 14y ago

Let the switched network die its deserved death It's costly, it's an awful use of resources, for no good benefit. POTS is a huge ruby-goldberg device, it's almost laughable sometimes. All that so that the terminal can use 19 century tech (yep, not 20th century, 19th century) Regulation shouldn't be about the technology details, it should be about the service provided. Oh by the way, the US Postal Service is being driven to bankrupcy by regulation as well (I'm not saying all is bad though)

fr0sty 14y ago
> the US Postal Service is being driven to bankrupcy by regulation as well More correctly they are being driven to bankruptcy due to ballooning pension payments (and a congressional mandate to actually fund those obligations).
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  To fund them way ahead of a reasonable schedule actually.
  - robomartin 14y ago
    And that is just fine. If every government agency had this "feature" we'd have half the government we have today. Politicians need to feel the pain of paying for their delusionary spending ahead of the need in order to ensure that they don't spend what we don't have or what we can't afford. What a concept: Want a new program? Save the money you'll need for the first five years of operation and then we can talk about it. Programs have been rolled out with no runway whatsoever and counting on sucking more money out of taxpayers to cover the holes. If the post office didn't have to face the reality of funding these insanely ridiculous government pensions my kids and their kids and maybe one more generation after that would have to pay taxes to provide postal workers with nearly a full salary for the rest of their lives. That would be wrong.
    - seanmcdirmid 14y ago

fishercs 14y ago

IP is a good thing, there will be changes made i'm sure to accomodate for innovation... kudos to AT&T

gz5 14y ago

Access duopolies are the problem and have nothing to do with core network tech. Give us multiple access pipe options (IP access of course) and the telcos can do whatever they feel like in their cores (and most already use IP cores). This is really just an attempt by ATT to get us to help subsidize their retiring of the legacy systems that we helped subsidize in the first place.

smutticus 14y ago

The argument of this article seems to be, "We can't fix how the FCC regulates IP services so we must force AT&T to stay in the dark ages." You can't simultaneously decry America's networking innovation and complain that AT&T is moving to IP. Everything is moving to IP. Circuit switching is dead. They're even putting TDM over IP nowadays(ITU Y.1588v2 and SyncE). If you really want to improve the situation don't act all Luddite. Start the conversation on overhauling common carrier legislation. Bring Judge Greene back from the dead and break these carriers into thousands of competing tiny operators.

twoodfin 14y ago
I don't get it. How can anyone look at the subsequent explosion of IP and mobile services and conclude that telecom deregulation in 1996 wasn't a smashing success? I'm sure there's room for improvement, but I'm not sold on a radical restructuring.
- jordan0day 14y ago
  One argument could be that the "subsequent explosion of IP and mobile services" occurred in spite of telecom deregulation, and not because of it. That's probably false, but there's also likely a sliver of truth there. Imagine how much more innovation we might have, were the telecoms not de facto monopolies. Also, I'm not sure many folks are arguing for total regulation -- instead, like smutticus, I think most people would like to see a more competitive market than the one we have now.
- AnthonyMouse 14y ago
  >How can anyone look at the subsequent explosion of IP and mobile services and conclude that telecom deregulation in 1996 wasn't a smashing success? By comparing to the results in other countries that didn't deregulate common carriers, which have the same innovations at lower prices and with fewer restrictions on what you can do with your devices.
- josh2600 14y ago
  Because the measurement of success is different. In '96, we paid for a nationwide fiber network, and the big telcos decided they could deliver 10mbps symmetrical over last mile copper. Today a 10mbps symmetrical copper circuit is delivered via Ethernet-Over-Copper and costs ~$1000/month in downtown SF. Every home in America was supposed to have a 10mbit symmetrical fiber connection by mid 2000's. What you see today is a pale reflection of what might've been. You're happy you have connectivity, and that's great, but your connectivity sucks and you shouldn't be happy about it because you paid for a better network and didn't get it. Does that make sense? AT&T and the other big telcos stole the dream of ubiquitous fast Internet by mortgaging our future for continued copper obsolescence. And we wonder why there's no money for metro fiber networks...

zero_intp 14y ago

This is a truly ignorant article. There is no support given for any of the extreme positions taken. Additionally, it presumes that any change in regulations will reduce requirements instead of transferring those not already covering last mile IP, which is the obvious action. The requirements for running the telephone system do not end just because the transport medium is IP. In many cases, the transition to IP services makes the existing IP infrastructure beholden to higher uptime and connectivity requirements. Try telling federal regulators that you did not deliver an emergency call because you were in a peering dispute. Today, American backbone IP NSPs are required to deliver outage information to the FCC, and this is prior to any assumption of life-critical services.

robomartin 14y ago

Let it die. I haven't had POTS in probably ten years. I don't want to have to support that infrastructure financially through taxes (or whatever). Despite the fear mongering in the article we are far better off today than we were many years ago. The US comms infrastructure seems to move and evolve slower than at smaller countries for very simple reasons. When you take the lead you give late comers the advantage of looking at what you have done to improving upon. Our infrastructure is absolutely massive when compared to, say, Estonia's (not to pick on them at all, great country). This means that rolling out step improvements is very costly. There's something pro-government folk seem to insist on ignoring: ROI. Companies can't roll out new massive infrastructures and throw away investment from the prior generation. Yes, progress in the context of a significantly larger system will look and feel slower. Our next generation IP infrastructure is being incubated today through experiments and evolution. Perhaps it will take the form of 1Gb/s fiber to the home or something less radical but equally awesome. Only private for-profit enterprise can bring us this.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
chez17 14y ago
> There's something pro-government folk seem to insist on ignoring: ROI. Companies can't roll out new massive infrastructures and throw away investment from the prior generation. It's interesting then when some actual competition comes along speeds increase and prices lower. Look at what happened with Google Fiber in KC. This is an often repeated point that has been proved wrong time and time again. Sure, there is some truth to it on a basic level, upgrading services cost money. In reality the companies have the regulatory bodies under control, the politicians under control, and they don't have to innovate or invest to make insane amounts of money. Why not just improve services in cities where the population is very dense? Why not in places like New England where there are many cities close together? Why if I call to cancel my service my prices can be cut in half? They have the money, there is just zero competition so they don't care.
AnthonyMouse 14y ago
>Our infrastructure is absolutely massive when compared to, say, Estonia's (not to pick on them at all, great country). This means that rolling out step improvements is very costly. You have the math exactly backwards. If you have ten million customers instead of ten thousand then you have a thousand times more customers to spread your costs over and you get greater economies of scale. >Companies can't roll out new massive infrastructures and throw away investment from the prior generation. Sure they can. They just don't ever want to, which is why they don't and why regulators are needed to make them do it. >Our next generation IP infrastructure is being incubated today through experiments and evolution. Perhaps it will take the form of 1Gb/s fiber to the home or something less radical but equally awesome. Only private for-profit enterprise can bring us this. Kindly explain how some foreign countries with highly regulated or state-operated telecommunications companies already have faster internet connections at lower prices than major American cities.

wmf 14y ago

I wonder if this total deregulation theory is correct. Didn't the FCC apply some kind of "walks like a duck" test to Vonage to determine that it is subject to telco regulation? If so, the same principle should apply to AT&T. Of course, you may need $200/month broadband to run your regulated VoIP over...

matterhorn 14y ago

Who owns the telecom infrastructure in question? Who built it? Who paid for it? I am very skeptical of anything referred to as "public." What exactly is "public" about it?

pyre 14y ago
AT&T was a government mandated monopoly with gauranteed profits for a while.
- josh2600 14y ago
  Further, AT&T was a quasi-government entity for almost 40 years starting with World War I.

josh2600 14y ago

Normally, I'm the first to scream bloody murder about AT&T and their shenanigans, but I wonder what the author's point is to be honest. In the first case, he seems to be decrying IP regulation and wishing us back to a non-IP world (which we haven't been in since the dawn of DSL). In the second case, he seems to believe that having copper telephone service is essential to survivability for the elderly. The latter point is more apt and the former has had little bearing for almost 20 years. No, what the author should've said, instead of keep copper alive, was "let's regulate IP communications". The US suffers because of a lack of modern common carriage laws, and we will continue to lag in technical development until this problem is fixed. Forget copper, stop fighting a war from the 80's. Let's regulate IP.