🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <5dsorm$7l$1@news.iastate.edu>,
Kurt Glaesemann <kurtg@iastate.edu> wrote:

-} It's about time that people start paying for what they are using.  Using
-} modems to connect to the internet costs the phone companies huge amounts of
-} money because it's resulted in a huge surge in phone usage.

Not all phone companies are experiencing these kinds of problems.  I
believe BellSouth is one of the larger baby bells that is not complaining
about congestion due to modem usage.  The reason?  Good planning.  If
the reports about BellSouth are true, the problem here is not Internet
users being subsidized by other kinds of phone users, it is baby bells
who are guilty of poor management.

The local telephone companies that didn't have enough management foresight
to anticipate the change in usage patterns and plan appropriately are
the ones complaining that they need more money.  Many Internet users
have purchased second phone lines for their modem usage, typically
costing $60-70 to install and then another $20+ per month, that right
there is a substantial amount of money that the local telcos are receiving.
In fact, many people pay more for their second lines than they do for
Internet access itself.

Furthermore, if the local telcos had not mishandled the deployment of
ISDN by insisting on such outrageous pricing that most people couldn't
afford to buy it, they would not be in this predicament right now
either.  If ISDN was popular now, most data traffic would be digital
from end to end and thus much more bandwidth efficient on the switch
side.  (An idle digital connection doesn't require any bandwidth at
all, but an idle modem carrier signal over an analog line, requires the
full 56k of bandwidth, at least that's the way all switches currently
handle a modem carrier.  And yes, I am aware of the difference between
circuit-switch and packet-switched, but there isn't much reason the
telcos can't do some form of packet-switching inside their network to
more efficiently handle ISDN traffic.)

<Diatribe>
So, the way I see it, most of the local telephone companies made stupid
management decisions and, unlike the "real world" where a company has
to pay for making dumb choices and lose money until they figure out how
to fix the resultant problems, they want their customers, who have no
choice in service because of the monopoly nature of the local telephone
market, to pay for their mistakes.

I seem to remember a little bill passed last year with a name something
like the "Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996" that promised more
competition and lower prices in exchange for more freedom on the part
of the phone companies.  Well, welcome to the real world, babys, you've
been fighting tooth and nail to keep other local phone service
providers out of your markets, but you've been taking advantage of the
parts of the bill that benefit you.  I think it is high time that that
you start taking the good with the bad and instead of sticking your
customers with the bill for your screw-ups, you figure out how to do a
better and more efficient job, just like you promised when you lobbied
for the telecom reform act.
</Diatribe>

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------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jerry Whelan -- Information Superman                         jerryw@convex.com