Ed, we've not seen the last of AOL's and the other ISPs' quest for open access on "all" cable networks. AOL figures that they were able to dominate the world of dial up networking (DUN), so, why would they have a problem on cable? There's a considerable level of merit to this logic, IMO.
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The incumbent long distance carriers, all of them, at one time resisted an open means of allowing users to "choose" their LD carrier, ad hoc, such as the use of 1+ dialing. They weren't necessarily wary of each other, as much as they were of other emergent interlopers who were gaining in number since the Divestiture of T.
They didn't want subscribers to have the option of selectively picking a carrier, at will, once those subscribers were "pre-subscribed" to them.
What each of the larger carriers were actually wary of was users going to smaller resellers, especially switchless resellers who did not bear the overhead costs of the larger carriers, for spot discount services in lieu of their own. But now we have 10-10xxx "dial-around" capabilities, nonetheless.
Furthermore, now there are a growing number of these resellers who are passing voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services, to boot. And guess who objected to the VoIP carriers at first? If you guessed the facilities-based and switchless resellers, then you were right.
And so, too, will these very same rituals and moves be played out by the ISPs in the cable sector, as well.
These were at least two or three levels further removed beyond that which the ISPs want from cable. The larger ISPs, such as (pre-twx) AOL and MSPG, couldn't hop onto ATHM from deeper into the cloud due to their sheer volume of traffic which they had that demanded direct HFC connections, but the smaller ones can (be interconnected upstream through IP).
Six thousand plus smaller ISPs also aren't going to sit still and let two or three of the largest ones continue to eat the whole cake.
Ironically, one of the salvations for RR and Home right now (and I'm not so sure how much of this is from pure happenstance) is the measly bandwidth allocations and the cumbersome administrative maneuvers they would have to endure in order to make openness available on their rapidly congesting HFC systems, characteristics which render them even more unfriendly to multiple ISPs on the same pipe and head end systems.
Now I know why the engineers over in AOL never offered up the technologies which they were contemplating to use in opening up Home's networks. And how do you like their choice of a partner that doesn't even serve in Home's territories? How does the saying go? "Hit 'em where they ain't?"
This hitting them where they ain't leaves a still untapped market for AOL, namely the larger areas covered by Home. AOL will not be satisfied with thirty or forty percent of broadband when the other sixty or seventy percent is still out there to be had.
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
