Jing,
As usual, your observation is insightful, been missing you posts and thought you might bailed already. IMHO, after 30 months, when the contract between ATHM and cable companies expired, open access seems inevitable, otherwise, it will be what we called politically incorrect. But what would happen to ATHM after that? Of course, ATHM can't be playing itself like Terminator II, right? Let's hope ATHM can be strong enough to face all kind of competition within the cable pipe, Pardon me, I still need to have some technical guru to detail about how this is going to be done.
There are discussion before over here, what I have learned is POSSIBLE, but not quite mature yet. Just imaging that you have an office running Ether 100 to support 250 users, and you have contracted IBM to design the network. So the IBM guys bought a bunch of Cisco and 3COM routers and switches put them together and make them run smoothly. Now, all of a sudden the office required bringing in another set of routers and switches to do the exactly same service but through different channel (same pipe, different frequency) and try to serve the same group of people and the only difference is – they can have a choice of different set of network equipment. Please my dear fellow American, why do you want an open access like that??? Us the above scenario as example, unless there is a nasty political fight between two groups within the company, why would you do a stupid thing like that? Use the above scenario again, and please find me one company in the corporate America today is doing that now!!!??? What GTE and AOL have been proposing is exactly that – bring switches, routers and other related equipment to knock T's door.
Try to kill AOL is not only unrealistic but also stupid. What T is doing right now is the best we can hope for – offering AOL for free on TCI@home, I hope this free offer can last forever (not likely though), and propagating to COX@home, Comcast@home... This move will create chaos to AOL pricing scheme and serious challenging AOL business model. Have you noticed that AOL offer free PC on CompuServ instead of “You've got mail”? Just imaging the free PC offer on the 19 million “You've got mail” users, would that be a pretty picture considering all existing users have a PC already. On the other hand, does AOL has choice not to give that kind of offer to the got-mail accounts? No, they don't have any choice and you will see that sooner that you expected. Just wait and see. With the offer from MSN, DELL, NetZero, AltaVista... AOL's got-mail side doesn't have a choice but to follow - either free PC or free access. I pray that AOL won't be stupid enough to buy Microworkz; otherwise, the elite tech support there will be answering question on hard drive crash, BIOS messed up, hardware warranty...
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