Now their pipes are clogged at the last mile because they have built them to be clogged. They could not afford to build them unconstricted. Why? Because they are then commoditized and can no longer meter and charge for every transaction. Some access pipes may be clogged sometimes. If so it is by design.

With the decline of wireline deliverable voice bits Whittacre is searching for access charges - he wants to get his pennies from all those google bits and you tube bits.

As Qwest rakes Level 3 across the PUC coals - Qwest is grabbing its equivalent of access charges.

Only if you are as stupid as George Bush would you give the phone company a monopoly over its last mile when its business model was underattack from more efficient IP networks and not expect the phone company to go on a rampage. Its late - I better stop.

Vest: \”AT&Tv2 is on the timeline because that’s what we have, a reborn near-national scale territorial facilities owner, with monopoly control over the only access segment that connects millions of households to the Internet. This territorial facilities owner does not want to support wholesale services anymore, and it complains a lot in public about the grave dangers of network congestion.\”

\”The fact that these warnings come at a point on the multiplexing trend line where it’s possible to deliver a continuous 1Mbps stream 24×7 to every household in America over just a couple of optical fibers (out of 250+ on most every important point-to-point segment), is purely coincidental – or is it? In any case, if this contrast between fear mongering about congestion and the reality of near-infinite supply causes any cognitive dissonance with your readers, then I can only sympathize.\”

Cook\’s Edge: Between 1990 and 1992 I spent 18 months with the USA Congress Office of Technology Assessment. The purpose of OTA was to prevent congress from making STUPID technology mistakes.

No more the republicans in 1994 got rid of OTA. Its hard for me not to be very very cynical. I am talking a bit with Dirk van der Woude in Amsterdam. He tells me: Some ten or so Embassies of the Netherlands have a technological innovation officer.

Forsooth! Those wiley nederlanders. Apparently one thing these diplomats do is publish a mail list on their observations of technology goings on around them. Clever, eh. George Bush would never do that - he has other ways to spend taxpayer money. :-/

Fred Goldstein replied: The current system for long distance billing is an out-and-out
disaster. Have you been following the state-by-state wars against
dial-up Internet and especially Virtual NXX? Familiar with the
Global NAPs disasters in MA and VT? Level 3’s state-by-state battles
with Qwest? That’s an artifact of the LD billing system, which is
being applied to ISPs in some states now, as in “ye olde modem taxe”,
only now it’s sometimes for real.

LD billing got to be this way because the LD and local industries
were split in 1984. The local carriers got to impose “access
charges” on both ends of the call, which the LD carrier paid. Since
access charges were hidden, the LECs could impose high monopoly
rents, with only industry insiders seeing it. LD rates reflected
this, of course, but people probably thought tha the LD carriers were
keeping a much larger percentage of their billings than they actually
did keep. Indirect billing invites abuse.

Cook’s Edge: I agree with Fred. But I would also point out that this loops right back to Tom Vest’s analysis quoted above of territorial control. Each modality (phone and cable tv) has an monopoly over its access to its customers. And the FCC, Congress and PUCs appear to be indifferent to the telco abuse of its newly granted monopoly. (cable always had a monopoly in the US - but not in Canada.)

The principal to remember here is that given almost unlimited bandwidth from fiber, the telco business model REQUIRES that bandwidth be rationed. In my opinion this is establishing a conflict that can only be satisfactorily solved by open access community owned fiber networks. Here fiber becomes the fifth utility and service providers can connect and offer wholesale or retail services to the community over SHARED fiber infrastructure.