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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (2124)	10/12/1998 3:41:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

Ken and All. re: "takings" Let's get back to the issue of taking the ILECs assets away from them. I posted a contrarian view on this a dozen or so posts back in order to see what would surface, and some good discussion followed. Let's play it out. It's easy to hypothesize about the wresting away of control, even auctioning off, the incumbents' assets. But it's very daunting from a practical perspective to begin to envision how mainstay telecomms would survive in the absence of the ILECs' stewardship over these assets. A better way of having the incumbents sweeten their bid (make their products more attractive) would be to threaten their dominance with competing technologies. This includes not only wireless and cable modems, but the power company feeds (or at least the use of their rights of way to string fiber and/or coax) as well. There are a host of ways to skin this cat without resorting to big brother tactics. Any and all takers today of expropriated facilities would in all likelihood be cream-skimmers, loathe to take on the burdens, drudgery and challenges of local plant in such a way as to preserve the status quo of quality, which is extremely high, from my view. Yet, someone would have to continue to do this, in concert with central office switch administration along with the wider scope of PSTN admin chores, for none of these service points operates in a vacuum. They're still mutually dependent on one another for the purposes of satisfying the overwhelming number of popular customer applications. POTS is still an insider's game, in many ways still demanding of a utility outlook, and we still cannot live without it, is where I'm coming from. Not very glamorous, but realistic. IOW, we have a hostage situation here, and the regulators and ILECs know it (along with would-be suitors who, in the main, would shudder at the prospect of being charged with backwards-looking technology acquisitions). This hostage situation exists even while the regs are, in many cases, philosophically or otherwise in bed with the ILEC principals at the local and state levels. Another misgiving, IMO, is the notion of being able to "take" fifty percent of the existing twisted pairs and re-distribute them to startups and pioneers. This presupposes that there is spare capacity out there right now, to the tune of at least 100% overbuilt plant. This simply is not the case, and it is decreasingly the case as time goes by. One of the problems the incumbents are facing now is copper shortages, including those short-haul residential circumstances where loop carrier systems heretofore were unjustified. Condemnation, taking through eminent domain, or any other acts of seizure and reallocation where the ILECs would be forced to forfeit assets would result in major service disruptions for a long time to come, IMO. Comments? Frank