Posted on 10/22/2016 1:35:59 PM PDT by vette6387
It's the NY Slimes so only source URL is provided.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Anti-Trust Laws? What are those?
Bell Labs was great at invention, but AT&T had little incentive to deliver innovation to its rank-and-file customers. My parents had the same landline phone for 20 years, and were paying C&P Tel. $5 a month for it until the law changed allowing them to buy their own phone. And Ma Bell wasn’t necessarily the worst of the phone monopolies. I lived in Durham, NC in the early 1970s which was “served” by GTE at the time. Now, *that* was third-world phone service.
Take a chill pill.
And in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised that if Trump is elected President, Comcast—sensing potential trouble—will spin off NBC Universal post haste.
This one set of low-lifes buying other set of low-lifes. Both are expert at screwing consumers and supporting socialist takeover of country.
They’re called ‘Spectrum’ in La-La Land.
One would think they’d have a vested interest in Trump’s being elected, ‘cause if he isn’t, this Spectrum outfit is going to lose customers en masse.
Because monopolies are in effect, government-run trusts, and are easier for the government to control.
But if the Bell doesn’t put it in place they CAN’T pay for it. And it’s not like the phone company can really do partial upgrades. So many of the upgrades are entirely in the building, and the customer can’t really choose whether or not to pay for it. It’s not comparable at ALL to cars, it’s most comparable to ROADS. The phone system is a BACKBONE, it’s upgraded or it’s not.
Railroads were privately owned, but publicly funded. Especially when they decided to make the transcontinental.
Our railroad system system. It’s not the envy of ANYBODY. It’s hands down the worst rail system in the civilized world. It might be the envy of Viet Nam, but everybody in Europe LAUGHS at our rail system, it’s a sad pathetic joke that’s major technical evolutions behind.
Amtrak doesn’t resemble what I’m recommending for telecommunication. Amtrak resembles what WE HAVE RIGHT NOW in telecommunication: a complete dysfunctional system forced upon us by a stupid government. The government built Amtrak and broke AT&T, they should have left both alone. AT&T was working, we had the best phone system on the planet, now it’s a pathetic joke. The de-evolution of our phone system is the proof positive that the breakup was bad.
Only people in our modern world of disposable junk could think that having a piece of equipment work for 20 years is a bad thing. Meanwhile the backbone that phone connected to probably went through 4 or 5 major upgrades. They delivered tons of innovations, you just never got see them as quietly your phone system became more reliable while handling drastic increases of traffic.
I think you're looking at the highly dysfunctional passenger rail system in the U.S. and assuming that it is representative of the freight rail system. They are not the same, they are operated separately, and they have completely different business models.
Freight railroads and telecom companies face very similar challenges in their business models. One big one -- which is the main point in this discussion -- involves the enormous capital expenditure up front to build the infrastructure. It's true that the transcontinental railroad was "publicly funded" to a certain degree, but that was more of a function of the legal structure of the country at the time, and was also part of a business deal between the U.S. government and the two railroads that constructed the "transcontinental" segment of the line (from Council Bluffs, Iowa to California). The railroads couldn't do business out West the way they did in the East, because most of that area was not even organized into U.S. states at the time. The government underwrote bonds and gave enormous land grants that would have been worthless without the railroads running out there anyway. The bonds were eventually paid off, and the U.S. government maintained discounted pricing and scheduling priorities for military transportation as part of the deal.
Regardless of how the railroads were originally constructed, the business model today is built on private ownership and financing of capital expenditures. It's probably the most capital-intensive industry in the U.S. today. The rails themselves get replaced every 12-30 years, depending on how much they're used and on the type of track section ... curved track wears much more quickly than tangent (straight) track, for example. And that's just a small part of the capital expense of a railroad. The Union Pacific, to cite an example of a Class I railroad, has a fleet of 8,500 locomotives -- and these things cost about $2.5 million apiece. Do the math, and that comes to $21 billion in locomotive assets alone.
But somehow the railroads manage to do all this profitably, which tells me that nothing stands in the way of the telecom industry, either.
There's one big difference between these two industries that makes it much more challenging for telecoms to operate profitably: almost every customer of a railroad company is another business, while telecom industry has 300+ million people who are also customers to a certain degree. This presents enormous problems because these customers have an expectation that they have a God-given right to inexpensive phone service. This makes it difficult for any private company to operate profitably because the customers have no idea how much it costs to actually build and maintain the systems they use.
I don't see how a monopoly arrangement would do anything to fix that problem.
Get Sling tv at http://www.sling.com for $25 a month and you will get more then you do paying $141.88 as I was until last March when I switched. I pay $41.95 from Earthlink for internet which uses TimeWarner cable lines. Their first 6 months was $29.95 flat rate no extra fees.
Use a ROKU box like the Roku 3 or Premiere+ that you buy for about $100 (one time purchase) then download the sling tv app then go into the ROKU settings to update and now you have more to watch then before using cable tv at half the price.
Many many more channels at https://www.roku.com
Channel store: https://channelstore.roku.com/browse
You can buy a DVR and an over the air tv antenna for more tv channels. See http://www.tvguide.com then click on Whats On then Listings for what is available in your area.
DVR:
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Delectronics&field-keywords=dvr
Bfl
Meanwhile we don’t have modern engines, we don’t have modern track control systems, we average a derailment every 18 hours, we constantly run behind schedule, our rails are just plain falling apart. They’re probably shocked because they realize we just plain shouldn’t be running those trains on those tracks at those speeds.
No, I’m looking at our grossly postdated freight rail system.
Except of course rail and phone have two VAST differences. UP is moving THEIR vehicles on THEIR tracks and has near total control of all the traffic. A phone company puts in the system and then has ZERO control over the traffic. Phone companies deal largely in the land of potential. There’s this many people in the region, they might or might not generate this much traffic, how do we handle that.
The monopoly arrangement HAD fixed the problem. All you need to do is look at our telephone system before the breakup to see that it WORKED. We had a monopoly AND the best phone system on the planet. And I explained how. It worked, it worked well, it worked better than any phone system EVER, especially the crappy broken up system we have now.
2. We don't have "modern track control systems" because we don't need them -- or at least we don't need them as they've been mandated by the U.S. government. Installing positive train control (PTC) systems across the U.S. is going to go down as an enormous, unnecessary waste of money. For what it's worth -- it is passenger railroads that have been the last to install these systems, even though they have the smallest networks and more advanced signal systems than most of the freight railroad network. There's government at work for you.
3. The point about UP is a valid one, but it's not an exact parallel to the telecom industry. UP has a major competitor for a big chunk of its business: the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF). Sure -- many of their most profitable customers are "captive" in that they only have access to one railroad, but in these cases their rates are: (A) regulated by the U.S. Surface Transportation Board, and (B) subject to long-term contracts between the shippers and the railroads that give shippers a high degree of certainty about their rates and the railroads a guaranteed level of profitability.
Imagine a scenario where AT&T and Verizon (for example) have identical networks that serve comparable customer bases, but can also interface with each other. THAT would be a better parallel for the railroad industry, not a single network owner/operator that conducts business through agreements with local carriers. The telecom industry under either the current scenario or the pre-AT&T environment is comparable to an "open access" arrangement that has been proposed for the U.S. railroad industry for years -- without success (thankfully). In the long term, that type of arrangement would be disastrous for railroads and their customers, as you see now in telecommunications.
Is there any technological impediment to a "parallel telecom networks" business model in the telecom industry, comparable to what we see for railroads?
We have at least one train fall off the tracks EVERY SINGLE DAY. Of course we need PTC.
That arrangement was never going to happen. You can tell because here we are 30 years after the breakup and it still hasn’t happened. The biggest technological impediment is the same reason we don’t have competing electrical systems, water systems, gas systems, cable systems and everything else: who the hell is going to lay down the last mile to every single building in the country (or even just a city, or frankly a neighborhood) with only a 50/50 shot that any particular building will chose to be your customer. Then of course 20 years later new tech goes in place and you have to do it all over again.
The last mile is the nightmare of every utility. One the railroads studiously gets to avoid. It’s the most expensive part, and unless your guaranteed most the buildings in that last mile are customers there’s no way to turn a profit on it.
The biggest technological impediment is the same reason we don’t have competing electrical systems, water systems, gas systems, cable systems and everything else ...
I would leave water and cable systems out of this discussion for a couple of reasons. For water, there's no effective way to introduce competitive systems because there really would be only one effective source of the water (reservoir, aquifer, desalination plant, etc.) for any given region. I would also suggest that there's very little capability for "improvements" in water delivery systems comparable to what you'd see in telecommunications.
Cable is no longer a good example because satellite TV and fiber-optic phone/internet service serve as competition for a cable company even if that cable company has an exclusive franchise on a region.
Let's look at gas and electric, though. Don't those systems operate exactly the same way the phone system works today -- long after the AT&T breakup?
The breakup of AT&T wasn't necessarily a good thing OR a bad thing. In retrospect, it was probably irrelevant because the entire telecommunications industry was going to end up facing revolutionary changes that would have left the old systems in the dust. There's no way you can sit here in 2016 and paint an accurate picture of how the telecommunications industry would be working under the old corporate structure when the only basis for your comparison is a company (AT&T prior to the 1980s) that operated before the internet, fiber-optic networks, and cellular technology even existed.
You gotta leave water and cable in, because they all run into the same basic problem: the nightmare of the last mile. All that aquifer, reservoir and everything else is NOTHING compared to that. And the fact that the only serious competition cable companies are getting is from companies that inherited the last mile from AT&T shows how important that is.
Indeed gas and electric (and water and cable) do work the same way the phone system works today. And look at all the problems. Look at all the black outs, look at how bad everybody’s water is. More proof that it’s a bad system.
The breakup of AT&T was DEFINITELY a bad thing. We went from first to worst because of it. Those “revolutionary changes” haven’t left the old system in the dust. They’re still largely reliant on that old system. The last mile is still the last mile and for most of America the last mile of their telecommunication system is still those cable AT&T laid down before the breakup. America’s internet speeds (just like the rest of our telecommunication) seriously lag Europe and non-communist Asia. We totally can paint the picture, because we know how AT&T. AT&T was all about constant upgrading of the system, the entire system. They were about constant improvement, constantly adding to the infrastructure, constantly looking for new technology. Every time you run into anything in your telecommunications that hasn’t been upgraded for over a decade you’re experiencing how things DIDN’T work under AT&T. They never let things rot like that.
You're confusing "coincidence" with "cause" in this case. When AT&T was broken up my family had the same rotary phone we had when I was born more than a decade earlier -- which was no different than the rotary phone my grandparents had in the early 1960s. Advances in telecommunications since the early 1980s have been enormous. You can't possible tell me that any of this would have happened with a fascist/monopoly arrangement in place like we had before the breakup.
P.S. -- I don't see any more blackouts today than we had 25 years ago. And any problems we have with water systems are a function of aging infrastructure, not a dysfunctional business model. My tap water is fine, and the "last mile" is being upgraded as I type this.
No, you’re the one confusing coincidence with cause. Plenty of stuff was happening behind the scenes in telecommunication, but it was largely invisible to the end user. Pretty much the only signs we had were fewer dropped calls and less static on the line. After the AT&T break also comes the computer revolution. Which has been a major driving factor in the changes that have happened in telecommunication since the mid-90s. But those have nothing to do with the breakup of AT&T and would have happened anyway. And probably would have happened better because we’d have had better phonelines in place for the internet revolution.
25 years later and the reliability of the electric grid is the same? You’re not seeing the problem there? And aging infrastructure nobody is bothering to replace BEFORE is poisons cities full of people is not part of a dysfunctional business model? Better think those through again.
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