Lest we forget that AOL has some allies:
teledotcom.com
Here are some excerpts, although you may want to skip to the last paragraph, because that, fortunately, is the reality:
Pressure is mounting for the cable industry to "unbundle" its network-the same way dominant telephone companies must lease the piece parts of their local networks to newcomers developing competitive services. Here's the catch, though: If cable operators have to unbundle anytime soon, they say, they won't be able to continue rolling out advanced data services.
Recently, though, Sprint Corp. and other competitors have begun to suggest an alternative trigger for forcing cable unbundling: the fact that the cable industry owns one of only two wires into most homes and is already a dominant provider of multichannel TV.
The telephone industry's mighty lobbying machine has not yet geared its cable unbundling campaign up to full throttle, but early shots were fired soon after AT&T announced its agreement to buy Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI, Englewood, Colo.). "The proposed AT&T acquisition of TCI would hurt competition, unless the combined company is required to offer unbundled access to the cable loop in the same manner that local phone companies must allow access to telephone loops today," Sprint CEO William Esrey said in July.
Sprint is not the only telecom service provider seeking to pry open cable networks. "The world has changed," says Larry Sarjeant, vice president of legal and regulatory affairs at the United States Telephone Association (USTA, Washington, D.C.). "Networks aren't as different as they once were," he notes.
"Eventually the question of how cable networks will be unbundled will have to be addressed," says Fred Briggs, chief engineering officer at MCI Communications Corp.
As these initiatives [OpenCable & PacketCable] advance, and it becomes more and more clear that the cable industry intends to deliver voice as well as data and video, cable operators fully expect competitors to call for interconnection as well as unbundled access. Currently, in the United States, high-speed data is treated as a premium cable service, with local franchise fees levied per subscriber but no oversight by state telecommunications authorities. IP telephony
launches would bring cable into a more typically regulated industry.
In Canada, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission already regulates data access over cable networks and makes cable operators open their networks to other Internet service providers. While U.S. cable execs protest south of the border, "unbundling of data service hasn't slowed Canadian operators, who have been very aggressive in building out their networks," says Michael Harris, president of research and consulting firm Kinetic Strategies Inc. (Phoenix).
Any debate over the terms of cable unbundling-whether an operator would have to open one 6 MHz channel for all comers or one channel per third party-would be complex, Harris adds. "Even if there were a ruling, it could take years to implement rules," he says. Bottom line: "There would be plenty of time to win market share and move on," he says. "And the more services you can offer on that same wire, the quicker payback comes."
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