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To: WTC who wrote (3091)	3/14/1999 11:54:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Respond to of 12823

Tim, good to see you back. >Does anyone think that Case really believes he will win the TCI open-cable fight in a short time, so the alliances with ILECs are not important to AOL long term?< You know, I'm seeing more and more on the merits of a communications utility, just like the power company model (plug it in and it works), and all of a sudden it appears that we have a new class of facilities that has sprouted up that is exempt from participating. The strangle hold that the cable cos have on their facilities, with the blessings of Kennard and Co., may render this a moot point for some time to come. If anyone could reverse the trend it would be the cable subscribers, themselves, but as long as they are being fed telephone service by the ILEC (and will soon have a choice of phone service from their cable co), and the cable company is now providing them (or promising them) improved cable modem services, they are not likely to speak up or put up a stink. What if any leverage can anyone else use to pry this open, once you have a satisfied user population, or one that has been told that things will be better. I've not heard any gripes on these threads, in fact, that I can recall, that would suggest that current cable modem users would have it any other way. The wannabe ISPs, however, are the ones who are griping. The answer, I still believe, lies in the unbundling of the upper layers of the stack. Even if I have to go through an ATHM or a RR to do it, I can still get to my other SPs of choice at layer 3. Mostly Layer 3, without special tunneling arrangements. That is, of course, unless the dominant ISP doesn't start invoking use policies to the contrary, and begins to employ packet filtering to enforce same. Come to think of it, they've already shown a predisposition to do this on certain of their own on-net offerings. Hmm. Frank_C.

To: WTC who wrote (3091)	3/15/1999 12:59:00 AM
From: lml	Respond to of 12823

WTC: An interesting juncture will come when the ILECs eventually turn their attention to xDSL for the lucrative medium business and remote-work sites for large business customers. This day may be sooner than you think. Here in Los Angeles, in the midst of SBC/PacBell territory, Covad & Northpoint are offering IDSL & SDSL services without competition from PacBell. PacBell is not content with this. Sources indicate that introduction of services to compete & price undercut the CLECs is not very far off. Maybe someone can explain to me how the CLECs intend to make money over the longer term. The ILECs have deep pockets, & possess the ability to drive pricing down to levels that would exert tremendous pressure on the CLECs to make a profit.

To: WTC who wrote (3091)	3/15/1999 8:09:00 AM
From: Robert T. Miller	Respond to of 12823

As a small business looking at an AOL offering of $42 per month for dedicated access at 640Kbps ADSL I would consider a number of facts: (before I start it would be interesting how far up the curve toward the top 1000 US corporations this exercise would take you) a. I don't know the difference between the offering by BA/AOL whereby they connect me to a Frame Relay/ATM cloud and then choke me and oversell the backbone connection for $42 per month, and the offering by Covad/Flashcom/Globix/(your ISP?) at $79 per month into another Frame Relay/ATM cloud and choked with a different algorithm representing a different customer to bandwidth take. Who does understand it? How are they going to sell it? b. My cousin tells me to drop my T-1 line at $2000 per month and move my server to a co-location provider like 9NetAve for $39 per month. There goes a lot of my data management cost. A lot of my employees have AOL at home so they won't mind a $42 per month AOL DSL line in the office with our 7 PC network. Don't know what symmetric means, my cousin says if I don't have a server I don't need symmetric. Someday when I really need video conferencing I will get symmetric. c. Actually we never had a T-1 line. We have incrementally ordered 4 different dialup connections to 4 different ISPs and have 4 additional telephone lines. One $42 AOL account and an off the shelf network and out with 3 telephone lines and 4 ISP connections. If we need a server someday it will be for $39 no, $15 since we will just let 9NetAve host our domain. d. Ancillary services like applications or data warehousing I don't need yet, I am still trying to master email. About the AOL Bell Atlantic split of $42. I am only assuming that they will split it someway and it won't be Bell Atlantic $39, AOL $3. Bell Atlantic is offering their cheapest DSL line to ISPs at $39 and AOL is at $22 on a dialup. That totals $61. Bell Atlantic has said that they are applying for a tariff based on quantity that would apply to the AOL offering. It will be less than $39. Does anybody know waht the price is and if not why not? Shouldn't this be public? There is a reason for Bell Atlantic to lower their price for DSL lines based on quantity. What is the rationale for AOL to offer 640Kbps for less than the $22 they charge for 28.8Kbps while they take on the added risk of buying a large quantity of DSL lines? Market share or survival? And where is the army of small ISPs who will not be able to compete with a $42 AOL offering? Sooner or later they have to start demanding the same deal from the telcos. It will be very interesting to see what the minimum number of DSL lines qualifies for the lower price under the tariff. Maybe this is a one on one special case secret quantity discount tariffs between AOL, Bell Atlantic and SBC. I don't hear any screaming and shouting and I don't understand why?