"Case wants new government regulation that forces the cable companies to break up their internet offering into two pieces: access and Internet services and give competitors access to the cable wires which were recently upgraded by the cable companies at significant expense"
Case doesn't know what he's in for (if he is serious) if he gets his wish. Nor do I suppose does he have a solution to just how to go about doing this. There are some serious architectural issues which present themselves when you try to commingle disparate controls on a single cable system.
At best, I view this as an ill-advised approach for AOL to be taking, or more likely, a stalling tactic designed for maximum smoke effect with the hope of distracting ATHM while AOL prepares other solutions, of which there are a growing number. Taking this tack, AOL would be better served using DSL for the moment, or wireless and other cable systems who are non-aligned with ATHM, until a truly broadband landscape over cable manifests itself sometime in the future. We ain't there yet. The sorry fact is that, if AOL were to gain access via cable (on ATHM's consortia systems), neither party would win. Both would come out looking like 9.6 kilobitsville.
ATHM sponsors' distribution plants will have a hard enough time supporting ATHM traffic in the not too distant future, if they don't see to it that an upgrade is performed before long. When you add AOL's traffic to ATHM's potential, without appreciable financial incentives, you wind up with the total personification of all of the evil things that have ever been said about the admission of the commons into any economic model.
In terms of performance, what is now a variable thing on ATHM systems, that is, between a couple of hundred kb/s and 1 or 2 Mb/s will become 14.4 kb/s, or worse, for all on many existing systems. At some point collision domains can actually undergo meltdown, when preventive algorithms pass the point of critical mass. But all this has very little to do with what may come out of Washington. It seldom has.
Frank Coluccio |
