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]

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.