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

To: axial who wrote (34402)	7/12/2010 8:35:03 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

Hi Jim. re: "Is the objection that government cannot speak for the public interest, when in fact that is government's responsibility?" First off, I don't want to single out any particular country's NBN. They all appear to be going down the same path, more or less. That said, even with all best intentions, a government, any government, will always make mistakes, and unfortunately this happens more times than we'd care to admit. Sometimes they make gross mistakes; in this case, a goodly number of mistakes have been made. The country already has POTS and Cable TV for the most part. What every nation needs at this time is a clean sheet of Internet glass upon which to build technologies of all types, wired and wireless - per terrain, per teledensities, per loading factors, per extraordinary needs, and how about "per preferences", etc., which are uncontaminated by the aforementioned anachronisms, where POTS is dying a fast death and Cable is morphing to....well, cable is morphing to Internet. So as the POTS thing loses its appeal for users they are free to add a VoIP adapter for voice, if they're not already doing this, or also using Skype (where many are already doing both). When the Web-TV arena matures, likewise they can gradually shift their viewing habits to Web-based content, which many are doing already. Yet, even though the staunchest among pro- NBNers already know all this, they're moving forward and not only replacing two highly-questionable technologies with limited shelf-life in their current forms with brand-spanking-new, state-of-the-art gear that does the same old thing as the stuff people have in place today, but at the same time and at a cost of tens of billions of dollars they're also planning to define a "closed-access" technology to support Internet along with all of the above, the design of which (assuming it is based on PON, which is what all indications now point to) will all but assure that competition is locked out at the physical layer, at a minimum. By defining in-residence interfaces they'll also succeed, and again, here I'll allow "inadvertently", to establish restrictions on hand offs to smart meters, and very likely other CPE in the future, as well. nb: here I refer to the "competition" not only in a commercial context, i.e., competition between rivaling peers, but also from the standpoint of innovation and Darwinian/evolutionary processes as well. It all comes back to the same old top-down-vs-bottom-up, loosely-vs-tightly-coupled, central-vs-distributed-control set of arguments we've been discussing since time immemorial. That the government is in this case attempting to do a "good thing" is unquestionable, IHMO. At the same time, just because their intentions are good doesn't mean that whatever they choose to do is going to be the right thing, in fact I see here where the plan is flawed on many levels. You might recall the months I spent writing recommendations with a number of my peers concerning open access, open networks and open architecture and design. All of those open discussions apparently went nowhere. Thoughts? FAC ------