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CommentTuesday, July 24, 2007

Google Won't Put Up Or Shut Up

2 Comments

By B. MacNichol (WPN reader) - Fri, 07/27/2007 - 09:15

AT&T monopoly

I spent 15 yrs. in the contract telephone engineering business, and I can tell you that to build your own infrastructure, is just about cost prohibitive for anyone. (Example: Cable TV is still trying to catch-up, with what they started 25 yrs. ago.)

No matter who ends up with the contract, they will still have to rent physical lines from AT&T somewhere along the way. AT&T is in a win/win situation, this just decides where they will be sitting. (In the front row, or up in the bleachers.)

By bj (WPN reader) - Tue, 07/24/2007 - 13:19

Harold Feld pointed this out over the weekend

Post here:

http://www.wetmachine.com/item/854

Harold also pointed this incumbent advantage out in an earlier post: "the ”Nextwave PCS“ auction of 2000 . . . This was the last auction conducted with spectrum caps in place. That is to say, that incumbents were limited in how much spectrum they could acquire, leaving over licenses for new entrants. That auction gave a return of $4 Mhz/pop. (MHz/pop is the standard way to measure value of licenses. It is the license divided by the population of the area covered by the license.) The most recent comparable auction, last summer's AWS auction, fetched 53 cents per MHz/pop."

Another important development to ANYONE interested in broadband policy is Senator Durbin's experiment in Direct Democracy. He's asking for all of us to contribute to the conversation, and help define where WE want Telecomm policy to go.

http://durbin.senate.gov/record.cfm?id=279504