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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ftth who wrote (5147)	3/4/2002 7:00:12 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

Now let's see if I got this about right..... say I were a huge ol' telco and one of the largest cities in my service area were to propose a radical new network that threatened to totally obsolete my entire business model. What would I do? Why I might hire the Mayor's brother. Wow. Civic Net is dead. ......................................................... Next story...... Nextwave: Anyone got any comments on how this might turn out? nytimes.com Methinks the fix is in and Scalia's gonna help out some cronies.... BWDIK? -Ray

To: ftth who wrote (5147)	3/4/2002 10:41:47 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

ftth, re: "Had you seen this info previously:" No, I hadn't. Do you have a link for the entire article? I recall the RFI that was issued for the "consultants'" part of the project, which naturally preceded the construction part, including the PM function. It seemed like there were hundreds of interested parties at the time. One would think that if public funds were involved there would be a requirement for a weighted award, with a certain percentage of it going to woman and minority businesses (WMBs), which is usually satsified through subcontracting. And a requirement for any winning bidder of the lion's share of the project to be contractually bound to fulfill the design and operating parameters laid down by CivicNet's architects. Awe, okay already. If what you say is true about the short list, then there may be a distinct odor beginning to manifest here. I'd like to learn more about this. [Don't even bother to say it. I should know better by now.] In any event, if CivicNet takes on a personality similar to other I-Nets (municipal Institutional Networks), it would be, by common definition, functionally separated from the ILEC's or cable operators' logical functions, although sharing of certain parts of the physical layer would not be uncommon. In contrast, New York's I-Net, I believe, was planned and designed by the NY City Dept of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT), assisted by some pro-bono and some not-so-pro-bono consultants. When it was awarded I believe that it was LU (at the time AT&T Network Systems and Solutions) who implemented the larger SONET rings using DDM 2000 gear. NY's I-Net, which employs fiber that is glommed (extorted?) from the area's facilities based fiber carriers as a part of their franchise agreement, has remained largely segregated from the public network in all aspects that I've been familiar with, but its mix and reach was never intended to be as pervasive as that which CivicNet is boasting. Besides, with Internet access increasingly becoming the preferred method of public networking, who is to say what the public network will be, and what will differentiate it from what an I-Net CivicNet will be, as time goes by? I just read David Passmore's article in the February 2002 issue of Business Communications Review (no, it's not published on their web site, unfortunately, leastwise not that I can see), which describes how his firm has chucked the ILEC's voice services entirely in favor of an IP Centrex service from TalkingNets. This goes a ways to validating my last point about the eventual blurring of the networks, although it's still a bit early for IP Centrex to make much of an impact at this time, but something that I will very definitely keep an eye on. They are effectively doing (and then some) what we discussed three years ago both on the VoIP thread and over in the LMT here in SI. They are bypassing the local incumbent for voice and data at the upper layers, while continuing to use traditional broadband access to the 'Net. The following link points to TalkingNet's Services, Features and Service Guarantees, which the incumbent can't come close to matching without going into costly special assembly arrangements after months of software provisioning, if possible to implement using the current PSTN fabric, at all: talkingnets.com FAC