For all the free trade sell outs that have been going on, it’s almost unfathomable that this could be true. If it is, it’s an amazing commentary on our corporate positioning.
I do not understand, what is the problem here?
Game over? liberals... Can’t live with them and they won’t move to france
"The company was literally throwing money away, which a regulated monopoly could never do but SoftBank could...It was simply luck that SoftBank's broadband ISP turned to profitability before the company was completely broke."
Who's going to be throwing away BIG MONEY to risk on "simple luck" to gain competition with the big players?
How many times have we heard that America has “fallen behind” in something and will never catch up? Hmmm? Remember in the 80’s, all the fretting about Japan “owning” the semiconductor industry? Now Intel alone eats their lunch, and thats not even including AMD and the PowerPC consortium.
Those ISPs in other countries with their broadband - just about every one of them is buying Cisco routers to sling bits processed by Intel, AMD, or Sun processors. The data generally land on Seagate or Western Digital disk drives - all built into HP, IBM, or Dell servers.
In the US, we pay a lot for communications services. Why? Because we can afford it.
Here’s the secret about telecom costs. The telecom company is going to charge as much as you are willing to pay. That is, unless their government tells them how much they can charge. We DO NOT want that.
If AT&T was never broken up in the first place (1984), then perhaps this would not be an issue.
Then again if AT&T was not broken up, then I doubt long distance calls would still be expensive.
Hmmm. Sounds like the usual editorial doom and gloom. About 10+ years ago I heard complaints of there being a lack of content on the internet. Then there was the worry that popular sites on the internet would be saturated with requests causing them to shut down. Then there was the worry about... And on it goes.
The Left, who loves to scold the rest of us about ‘sustainability’ cannot understand how commercial projects must have sustainable economics. That means the value of their services must exceed on average the cost of providing them. The private telecom infrastructure in the US is sustainable. A project in some other country may have high bandwidth, but it also probably has high tax subsidies.
This is like ethanol, which appears to be about equal to gasoline in price at the pump, but only because government taxes all of us so it can subsidize the price by about 50 cents per gallon. Peple who love ethanol cheer the fuel, but they are willingly ignorant of the economic damage it is doing elsewhere and they will fight tooth and nail to keep the subsidy, despite how many bridges we could repair with the billions we are spending on it every year.
We have similar ignorant laments from time to time about passenger rail. Look at other nations! Aren’t they so advanced in their rail service? We are so behind. Yes, indeed, we never hear how much it costs and how much of the taxes of the $6/gallon gasoline goes to pay for such a great rail system.
Lastly, these high speed links are not all they are cracked up to be when used for net access. If you run traceroute on any connection, you will find a connection goes through many routers and links, and the dirty secret of a high speed connection is this: the speed of your end-to-end connection is the speed of the slowest route segment.
Just my opinion, from my ebusiness experience, the net capabilities aren’t used to their fullest capabilities due to the lack of skill and knowledge of the common user.
Hardware and services are available if the business needs it. Small to medium businesses don’t fully utilize the internet due to lack of personal to run emarketing for them. The customer base isn’t as high as it should be due to lack of computer skills.
More liberal shorts wringing....the game is almost over for ATT and Verizon.......mash here
Interesting thread. Thanks to all contributors.
The company I work for has roughly 600 stores all over the country. We use AT&T quite a bit now for the local ISPs (including the old BellSouth, SBC, and a few others), as well as hosting one of our DS3 lines locally, and using one of their "CO-LO" sites in Dallas as our backup site... One thing I've come to realize is that with all the acquisitions, AT&T is nearly as big as they were before the breakup. More importantly, they're back to their old attitude, perfectly summed up by Lilly Tomlin on "Laugh In" so many years ago... "We're the phone company. We don't have to care!"
Mark
American companies figure they can keep their customers happy by NOT providing better services. If no one knows what REAL High Speed Internet Access is, then no one will be angry because they don’t have it. Charging outrageous premiums for less than standard service in other countries keeps the major telecom’s money outlay at a minimum, while raking in HUGE profits in caparison. This along with the average American’s superiority complex AND their refusal to investigate how the rest of the world operates have combined to give American’s a HORRIBLE HSIA infrastructure filled with monopolies who send the least amount of money possible on it to begin with.
You don’t believe me? Just look at the cell phones in the US compared to foreign countries. Want to pay for something at a vending machine with your credit card? Not in the US. Want to pay with your Cell Phone? Not in the US.
I’m as free market capitalist as the next guy, but when you have so many LEGAL monopolies that innovation CAN’T come about by the little guys, then the system is broken. In this case, and may others, the system is broken.
And for those saying that this HSIA is only for piracy, I don’t even know where to begin. Why have heating systems that heat your house to 70 degrees, 50 degrees will keep you alive just fine. Why buy an HDTV, a 19 inch SD TV works just fine. The analogies are vast. Just dig you head in the sand if you want to stay at 750K up/150K down. I bet you are still using AOL, the internet training wheels
if you remember cell phones, *many* countries adopted cell phones on a massive scale well before the US as a whole. similarly, down here in Chile I was able to do online banking to Chilean banks via WWW *SIX YEARS* before I was able to do the same at my US bank.
why??? because US is composed of fifty states, state governments vary widely from state to state, and some states seem like they are in the stone age technology wise -- it doesn't help that communication is typically a monopoly and whoever runs a monopoly wants to keep things the way they are and rake in the dough with their existing infrastructure - can you say ISP? as in telephone and cable modem ?
They should have been upgrading their antique infrastructure instead of spending billions on unnecessary acquisitions.’
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070801/at_t_investment.html?.v=2
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/070731/aqtu040.html?.v=23
That’s $600,000,000 budgeted over the next couple years for just 2 states.
So, that means the rest of the world gets their porn faster than we do.
Thought you might find this of interest~!