Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Bosco & Crossy's stock picks,talk area -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: allevett who wrote (13604)	10/22/2005 2:38:14 PM
From: Crossy	Respond to of 37387

Edit

To: allevett who wrote (13604)	10/22/2005 2:44:59 PM
From: Crossy	Respond to of 37387

re: Telecom Developments - another unexpected turn.. Ok, cannot deny that the fiberoptic & telecom universe will always have a place in my heart - after having had my first heyday as an investor in the tech & optcial components sector 5 years ago. Well it's certainly a sector I continue to be watching. now this industry moved into a cruel "stalemate" due to a couple of factors which I don'T want to go into right now. The US institutional and political system (essentially both parties) shifted from supporting entrants and competitors to backing ILECs (witness Rep. Tauzin and former Major and Gore campaign manager Daley running lock-step their "friends of the Bells" campaign across major party lines. Plus the regulatory climate (the FCC under Powell, various important courts) also supported most of these alterations, culminating in the assault on these all-important UNEs on behalf of an important Circuit Courts of Appeals in 2004 and early 2005.. One should think that this "delivered" the industry back to the ex-monopolists. Well, as Mark Twain once coined the reports of the death of competitions are somewhat exaggerated. And today I stumbled accross this blip. Very nice development and certainly something to watch.. See below ! Relatedly I finally UNBUNDLED my own last mile to one of the competitive providers in Austria. I get DSL and VoDSL (ordinary phone service provided over the DSL channels). Plus I get another VoIP layered service on top of this by means of yet another provider and an IPphone by Grandstream is just waiting to be ordered by me... Armed with these tools I'll be able to call the US at a rate of around $0.03-0.04 per minute. Plus I'll get a CLEC provided DSL service at 3072/512 kbit (up/downstream).. I know it's not fiber, but at least it's not from an incumbent ex-monopolist or a cable company too eager to sell me proprietary content while blocking all IP ports not deemed "appropriate" for residential powerusers like myself. What is more, DSL by means of technology design gives me a direct, dedicated Point-2-Point connection while cable modem is a shared medium, just like Ethernet. So the higher the speed of the connection ultimately goes (and it could go a lot higher with pending technology like DSL2 or Ethernet in the Last Mile) the bigger the advantage of DSL over Cable will be. I happily say goodby to the "great service" of these "cable guys". You were bette than our Incumbent but that's all you can claim to fame.. telephonyonline.com Cry foul By Ed Gubbins Oct 17, 2005 12:00 AM It's tough to get a fair shake in telecom these days. A federal appeals court this month overturned a lower court's dismissal of an antitrust suit aimed at all four Bells, advancing the suit that accuses the Bells of conspiring to bar competitors from entering their markets while colluding to avoid Bell-on-Bell competition. Its timing is odd, even anachronistic, in several ways. First, the development comes so long after the shakeout of CLECs as to be irrelevant. Second, it comes just a few weeks after Qwest accused fellow Bell SBC of anticompetitive antics in a complaint to the FCC. Specifically, Qwest alleged SBC threatened to cancel contracts with carriers such as WilTel and Time Warner Telecom if they entertained acquisition offers from Qwest. In response, SBC called the complaint “a sad, desperate act by one of our competitors, who is afraid of having a vigorous competitor in [its] own backyard.” Qwest is also simultaneously trying to convince a court that Utah's multi-city public wholesale fiber network, Utopia, unfairly pits the public sector against private enterprise. Bell antitrust suits were filed at a time when folks expected fairness from the telecom industry, but those days are long gone. In Philadelphia, the city is offering its own wireless broadband to residents. In Manassas, Va., folks are getting broadband from their electrical outlets. Meanwhile, a 4-year-old software start-up has pilfered more than a million voice lines from local phone companies. And cable operators are draining the market for residential triple-play services faster than telcos can ask, “fiber-to-the-what?” To top it all off, following a recent high-profile acquisition, telecom carriers built on more than a century of network investments will now have to split their voice revenues with a company whose core business is essentially holding vast online garage sales. Clearly any sense of fair play and propriety has melted away, and the industry is now deplorably controlled by the disorderly forces of technology and customer demand. About the only practice we all agree is still the fairest way to compete in the business world is the hiring of lobbyists to change the law in one's favor, as we were reminded of by Google's recent investment in Washington's K Street services. Google, with its young but growing muscles, has fresh designs on the telecom space and may have learned the importance in this sector of effective lobbying by having watched Bell companies wield it to great effect over the years. The authors of the next telecom act will have an incalculably tough job ahead of them if they commit themselves to establishing fairness in such a chaotic, shape-shifting industry. It will be far easier just to count up the money and weigh it in stacks on justice's scales.