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To: Ted Schnur who wrote (7635)	4/10/1999 4:00:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

Ted, thanks for passing along those views and the URLs. I don't know how much clout this organization has, but I wouldn't count them out. I would count them out at this time, unless they are ready to cause the sinking of an erstwhile viable ship, and are willing to go along for the swim. In other words, even if they get their way, during the intermediate term they will become losers along with the existing subscribers of these systems, under the current state of the art - as it is currently being deployed. There is no way that there will be enough bandwidth and other critical resources which are needed to implement and upgrade the local segments (especially if they get their way without paying a premium), including qualified personnel resources (technicians) needed to implement the new residential connections. And then there is the requirement to partition the administrative and maintenance responsibilities at the head end, the rudiments of which haven't even been broached yet. There is also an issue of fair weighting of available resources amongst disparate principals on a limited, shared medium. This last one is an especially tough nut to crack, since a very large ISP [like AOL] might come to dominate the majority of the pipe without fair weighting algorithms being put in place. And said algorithms don't exist yet, to any widely agreed upon level. I think that the lack of trained resources has become extremely clear for all to see, philosophical points notwithstanding, for the moment. There's simply not enough of what's needed in all regards to go around for all takers in one fell swoop. It'll take several to four or five years at the earliest for such a comprehensive availability to take shape for a pluralistic distribution platform. And not without the introduction of oodles of fiber and additional remote optical nodes to bolster yesterday's designs. We should remember that many of the precepts of yesterday's designs [the ones which are coming to fruition now] were formulated prior to what's now commonly referred to as the Internet Explosion. It was predicated on one way lookups and downloads, in the absence of any serious promise (or threat, as it it turning out to be from several perspectives) of multimedia rich content. This kind of lobbying which you alluded to (in the urls) could only lead to irrational expectations on the parts of users, bordering on hysteria, and furthering the widespread _broadband_ hype that already exists... if that is still possible at this point. FWIW, Frank Coluccio

To: Ted Schnur who wrote (7635)	4/10/1999 4:57:00 PM
From: Robert Scott	Respond to of 29970

But the big difference is that the Act of 1996 required local loop to be open - this is not the case for cable services. So it is a long road to hoe to get new law especially when the old one is only 3 years old!