[TUHS] V7 Addendem [ really lawyers and AT&T consent decree ]

[ggm@algebras.org (George Michaelson)]

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The capital investment regime changed. AT&T like all the other telcos
used utility scale funding options, to buy asset with a 50+ year life
and then reaped the benefits against the long tail of payment on the
investment funding to make it.

Fast forward to the 1970s and people decided they'd rather sweat an
asset fast, make a huge Return on Investment, and let dumb schmucks
from their parents generation dig holes to earn low interest income
for 50 years. Who wants to live forever! Cocaine on aisle three, Junk
bond finance, speculation, deregulation... Pretty much everything
we're using right now, right down the food chain comes from that
decision. My laptop is in a three year depreciation cycle. My ISP is
desperately trying not to have to spend money every 5-10 years
re-engineering the switching and routing logic behind my
fibre-to-the-home. The glass in the ground will last 50 years, but the
government expects funding to complete its capital cost debt return
inside 5. (insane)

Admittedly, given the rate of change in technology, I think there was
some coupling. If you had just invested in a strowger exchange and
somebody showed you a transistor, if you were smart your heart was
sinking: Kid was in meccano, not in mechanical switching any more...

On Thu, Dec 7, 2017 at 6:30 AM, Kurt H Maier <khm at sciops.net> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 06, 2017 at 07:23:00PM +0000, William Corcoran wrote:
>> Well,  sure in 1963 the T1 carrier was a huge pipe.  It was a huge pipe in 1970.   It was also a huge pipe in 1980 for business.   (Not so for the telcos, as ATT had Metrobus in the 80’s and the telcos had SONET in the 90’s—-completely inaccessible but to the largest corporations)
>>
>> However, today, I have Fios with nearly 1 Gigabit up and down for a small fee.
>>
>> Thank you Judge Greene!
>>
>> (Let’s not forget, I now have access to a working v7 for free where the license previously cost $28,000.)
>
> But that was the flip side of being allowed to maintain a monopoly --
> you could get phone service damn near anywhere, while getting FiOS
> service is possible only in geographic regions small enough to be a
> rounding error compared to POTS penetration.  Near-universal service was
> the burden AT&T was required to bear.  Now, nobody is bearing it.
>
> The current state of bandwidth is great if you're in the right place at
> the right time.  For everyone else in the US nothing is getting better.
> Even 100mbit service is unavailable to the majority of the nation, let
> alone laughably bizarre requests like "reliability."
>
> khm