oh yeah.

[unixronin]

cymrullewes got this fortune this morning:

There were in this country two very large monopolies.  The larger of the two had the following record: the Vietnam War, Watergate, double-digit inflation, fuel and energy shortages, bankrupt airlines, and the 8-cent postcard.  The second was responsible for such things as the transistor, the solar cell, lasers, synthetic crystals, high fidelity stereo recording, sound motion pictures, radio astronomy, negative feedback, magnetic tape^[1], magnetic "bubbles", electronic switching systems, microwave radio and TV relay systems, information theory, the first electrical digital computer, and the first communications satellite.  Guess which one got to tell the other how to run the telephone business?

[1]  Actually, I thought Grundig invented magnetic tape.  But still....

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and Gods help you if you ever run afoul of them. Unlike when Sprint gave me customer-no-service some years ago, I gave'em the Trump™.... (You know, "You're Fired!") (Although I prefer to call it a George Jetson.... :) Furthermore, there's no race for build-out, so places like Maynardville, TN could basically kiss service goodbye at the Knox county line...

No, I like it the way it is, thanks. It ain't perfik, but I think it's better than it would be under monpoly.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Nobody's saying either way was perfect. I think you're making way too much out of this, counter-arguing points that haven't been raised.

Anyway, do you really think it's any better now? Hey, we'd just LOVE to tell Sprint to shove it. There's just one problem: We can switch to any third-party local phone carrier we like, and it's not going to do us a damned bit of good, because Sprint owns the physical plant. At least as long as we're a Sprint customer, they have some direct responsibility to keep our phone lines more or less working^[1], and they don't have the disincentive of nobbling a competitor through inaction on the competitor's service tickets. (You did hear the saga of getting our DSL service in Tracy, right?)

[1] we're down to eight kilobits typical peak data rate, often less, and each time Sprint "fixes" our lines, it gets worse. I was getting better data rates than this ten years ago.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

I think it's about time you got your congressman involved on this one. 8kbps? that's beyond ridic.

It's better here, I know. DSL here is down to $30/month on sale. I've got to dig out my old Fujitsu tonight and verify with Verizon that it'll work, and then I'm back in the highspeed biz. Verizon is also allowing third-party ISP's to go to unmetered bandwidth, and Qwest (who until just recently I called Qworst) is not only forced to match Verizon's cut-rate sale, but is going a step further and giving you the cut-rate with your choice of ISP.

See, your problem is there's no competition out in the sticks. Sprint can screw you over because there's no other game in town. Here we have the ILEC, three CLEC's, Comcast, and at least one person I know squirts the birdie for their bandwidth (and if I had a shot at South, I would too). There are also two ground-based wireless providers, one of which will give you a free 2MB link in exchange for access to your antenna and power for a repeater. With that kind of competition nobody can afford to piss off anyone too badly, except an ILEC working a CLEC's trouble tickets... and even that has limits.