[ale] bandwidth competition (changing the subject)

[Thompson Freeman]

 09/08/2008 09:17:47 AM, Sean wrote:
> Within the past month or so AT&T has installed a large fiber cabinet
> at the condo's front entrance right next to the existing POTS 
> cabinet.
> Has anyone heard when (if ever) MaBell actually plans to start
> offering
> television service.  The condo would _love_ to ditch Comcast.
> 

Just a bit of a wishful whine here. I personally would _love_ to see a 
service which just provided the fiber to the house/home/condo/whatever. 
Nothing more, just a big fat pipe, preferably with a power source right 
down beside it independent of the power company which could run a POTS 
style interface, or other low power data task. In this way, I would 
hope to limit interference in the market to the biggest single 
bottleneck in revamping electronic communication and media while 
opening up the ability of the players to compete on service and 
support.

Into this fiber the customer would choose competitive offerings for 
push media (cable TV), asymmetric media (on demand cable TV), internet 
connectivity where the data asymmetry isn't necessarily known ahead of 
time, phone/video phone, alarm monitoring with appropriate 
bandwidth limits within each provider's contract. Total bandwidth 
promises sold not to exceed 80-90% of the minimum available bandwidth 
between the service head and the customer equipment.

Regulation of this fiber pipe should be in terms of reliability of 
service, total bandwidth, and access to all providers of electronic 
communications services/media. 

I'm sure that the engineers in this group can clean up the 
specification here considerably, and the libertarians can clean up some 
big brother issues.

I think it would work pretty well, but the current dominant players 
might get clawed up in the transition process. And hence I doubt that 
they would support it. 

YMMV