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To: Hiram Walker who wrote (10365)	6/4/1999 10:52:00 PM
From: Benkea	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 29970

"though ATHM probably loses if this sets a precedent." Something coherent from the Yahoo board for a change addresses your last statement: "ATHM has agreements with 20 cable providers to have EXCLUSIVE access to their networks. AT&T accounts for only 30% of the passed homes (19 million for AT&T, 45 million for other cable companies). Even if AT&T opens its network to other ISP's, ATHM still has EXCLUSIVE ACCESS TO 45 MILLION HOMES as long as AT&T doesn't acquire them in the near future. AT&T has already got approval from most local governments. Therefore, AT&T DOESN'T NEED TO OPEN ITS NETWORK AT THOSE COMMUNITIES FOR SEVERAL YEARS. This lawsuit battle will take some time, and ATHM will increase its subscriber base dramatically during this period. Remember that ATHM's subscriber number increased 418% last year, more than half a million at present. By this rate, ATHM will have more than 2 million next year."

To: Hiram Walker who wrote (10365)	6/5/1999 11:49:00 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 29970

Hello Hiram, re: "Why would T stop the rebuilds?" I could think of several reasons why they would give the appearance of (or actually follow through with) cutting back on plant upgrades. The reasons span from gamesmanship, on the one hand, as a gambit going forward, to business modeling, on the other hand, if they think that the ROI for such upgrades will suffer from undue dilution, caused by others gaining competitive advantages while leveraging off of their (T's) investments and labor. There is also the "walk away" gambit that T could employ such as Ken Phillips outlined in the Last Mile thread: Message 9976680 What assurance does T have, going forward, that if they proceed on the basis of regulatory assurances from anyone (that includes collectively the FCC, the PUCs, Congress, Municipal Franchise Bureaus, DoJ, the Federal Courts, etc.) that those parties will hold fast on such assurances? I ask this question, in a similar manner to the post by Franz yesterday, because T has already been faked once in this regard by first getting the FCC to commit to a hands-off policy (as a condition for T to proceed with the original merger with TCOMA), only to receive a left cross to the head by the courts once the upgrades were in motion. There appears to be a high level of discordance in the establishment's rule makers' spaces on this issue and many other technology issues having to do with the 'net, at the potential expense of some players. It's still too early to judge or try to predict what T will do, except for the obvious appeals we're sure to see. If this ruling holds and is carried across other jurisdictions, however, T's continued incentives to improve plant will be dictated by how they may or may not charge for carriage on their systems. This not only affects T, but, IMO, would, through extension, also apply to the other MSOs, and even the larger wireless Internet operators, going into the future. In this sense, even the wireless acquisitions by MCI, Qwest, and others would be subjected to the same issues. I should add that I do not feel that this is a matter that can be compared to open access in telco central office environments, which are much more horizontally extensible than cable systems. While it is possible to increase the extensibility of HFC, the trauma will be far greater to the physical facilities owners, unless they are allowed to extract their due. It's also fair to assume that such upgrades which would be required to provide a truly open access system would require extensive engineering effort and design parameters that were never seriously considered prior to this time. The foregoing presumes that going forward, any new open access cable services will stretch beyond the plain vanilla surfing model we've known up until this time, allowing each ISP the potential for enjoying comparable amounts of bandwidth, and the ability to do what ATHM's own plans call for. Ahem... Comments welcome. Regards, Frank Coluccio