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To: ahhaha who wrote (9321)	5/9/1999 2:44:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

Re open access, you say: "Actually the circumstance is completely in everyone's interest to implement. It is only narrow minded greed that prevents admission of the added value open access provides." In some respects I'd agree with you fully, were it not for the need for some necessary upgrades, which will manifest before long, in the last half mile. If it were to open up now, the manifestation I'm speaking about would only be accelerated, proportionately. Let's look at an example. Imagine a serving area that is currently experiencing 15% penetration by ATHM subs, equivalent to 150 users in a 1000 home segment, suddenly being opened up to all of those AOLsters in the same neighborhood? Add another 300 users, resulting in a field of 450 in total, and you have exceeded the 25 to 30% penetration bogie that the HFC might have been designed to accommodate. You've surpassed it by 150 contenders for the same bandwidth. At that point you decide to open up the 'other' channel. There's a limit, though, as to how many 'other' channels you can do this with. And we're still talking email, chat and ftp/html-level downloads at this point, not interactive services or streaming multimedia yet. You still have the administrative and plant level quagmires we discussed just a couple of messages upstream, if the MSO does not take on a neutral, third party-like, role, like an ILEC overseeing its last mile access and transport domains. Otherwise you wind up with a fox guarding the hen house situation, of sorts, similar to the need for structural separations of business functions, again, like the ILECs have been faced with both now and in the past. The media types that characterize these two models may be viewed as drastically different, but the gaming principles that come into play are fast-becoming strikingly similar, if not exactly the same. Two contrasting alternatives that I could envisage to the status quo would be: (1) Grant the MSOs their due rights to their own private property, a principle of natural law that gets lost to the ages for some reason in this business (it's no one else's business how they administer their own plant); or, (2) the MSOs would open their existing platforms to comply with open Internet standards in ways that are compliant with IETF RFCs, from the outset, as opposed to the creation of an intranet like presence for a closed user group. The second of these would open up the wires to the last mile to everyone, service providers and subscribers alike, just as the plan called for in the beginning. And unless we lose sight of this principle altogether, that's what the IP model is supposed to be all about. Gains may be achieved by closing the gates at this time, but eventaully this kind of regime may result in users being stranded, or worse. Only time will tell. These are contrasting approaches. Neither, I'm sure, will sit well with ATHM. On this one, however, the horse is already out of the barn, where the HFC design is concerned. What to do to make everybody happy? I'm open to comments and corrections, as always.