Comments on: War that helps — consumers

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 16 Apr 2003 15:44:38 +0000

smoke crak not iraq

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 26 Mar 2003 11:48:29 +0000

Can the Iraqis hear or see are tv news?
If so Why are we telling everything we know on tv.
Thanks

By: Rob Woodard

Rob Woodard — Tue, 17 Dec 2002 09:34:00 +0000

I'll take a stab at it, at least as I understand it. The national telecommunications infrastructure, composed (exclusively until relatively recently) of copper wires strung on poles or in cables buried underground, was installed by the Bell system. When you purchased telephone service from Ma Bell, you purchased access to the wires run between your house and their local "central office", the ability to have your connections switched to other subscribers connected to that same CO, the ability to connect to subscribers connected to other COs nearby, other COs farther away, etc. This was all "bundled" together as part of your basic phone bill; you got it all from one place, Ma Bell (and later the Baby Bells). You couldn't elect to pay Ameritech for your local loop service, SBC for local long distance and Pac Bell for national long distance. And new companies couldn't get in to compete because stringing new wires for each company just wasn't practical (imagine the web of wires, all from different companies!), and the incumbent owners (Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers, or ILECs) wouldn't sell access to their systems to competitors (Competitive Local Exchange Carriers, or CLECs).

The government stepped in (in 1996) and said that the ILECs *must* allow CLECs to purchase and resell access to their local loops and all the subsystems that linked their COs. This was the only way to promote competition and hopefully growth in the telecommunications industry. It hasn't been terribly successful in that; instead, the ILECs have squeezed out most of the CLECs and have gotten the rules changed so they can reassert their monopolies by merging back together. Anyway, that's what I think is meant by unbundling: selling access to each part of the telecommunications network individually.

Here are some supporting links:

A Michigan study
An Xchange Magazine article

By: Chris Bratlien

Chris Bratlien — Mon, 16 Dec 2002 22:54:32 +0000

The article repeatedly refers to the concept of 'unbundling' as being a catalyst for broadband growth. Can someone explain 'unbundling' to me?

Also, I am impressed at how significantly reduced the mbs offered to a household in the US is.

By: ToastyKen

ToastyKen — Sun, 15 Dec 2002 04:08:47 +0000

Isn't one reason for this the population density, though? I'd imagine the costs of supplying fiber to a giant apartment of users would be a lot cheaper than supplying bandwidth to various people scattered throughout the suburbs..

By: Rob Woodard

Rob Woodard — Fri, 13 Dec 2002 12:11:28 +0000

Here's a link to an interesting supporting article:

http://www.point-topic.com/scripts/directory/profile.asp?company=152

From reading this one article it would appear that the "broadband price war" you cite didn't happen until the government came along and declared it. That's just not going to happen here, certainly not with a pro-business Republican administration and Congress.