Fw: Email hosting (was: ATTBI/Comcast rant)

[Hewitt Tech]

I meant to send this to the list, sorry you'll see it twice Travis ;^)

-Alex

----- Original Message -----
From: "Hewitt Tech" <hewitt_tech at attbi.com>
To: "Travis Roy" <travis at scootz.net>
Sent: Wednesday, January 22, 2003 10:04 PM
Subject: Re: Email hosting (was: ATTBI/Comcast rant)


I recall reading an article in the Globe that suggested at least a couple of
reasons that DSL resellers went under. Specifically Harvard Net complained
that they would sell DSL to a customer and put an order in with Verizon.
Verizon would then wait two months and say "Gee, we don't have the right
equipment for that line and no can do". Needless to say, the Harvard Net
people were left with egg all over their face and a very angry non-customer.
The other issue was the problem of lot's of venture capital looking for a
very short term payback. The phone company has amortized their gear
literally for decades. Various studies have shown that Ma Bell and the power
utilities consistently pay their employees much better than the rest of
private industry. That's because as a monopoly their pricing is not closely
related to their costs.

In Canada, various provincial governments pump money into infrastructure
including telecommunications in hopes of attracting employers. They've been
somewhat successful but I'm not going to argue that their system is
better/worse than the American system. The Canadians have universal health
care for ~9 % of GDP while the American health care system at last estimate
(about two years ago) was costing around 15% of GDP and rising. The
American system has 47 million Americans with little or no health coverage.
Taxes in Canada run around 50% when all is said and done. In America taxes
have been running around 35-40% but I suspect that the American system is
becoming unbalanced with a few fabulously wealthy people and lot's of poor
or nearly poor people who are progressively doing worse. I think there needs
to be some kind of balance and it needs to be achieved politically. When
politics breaks down you get the former Soviet Union. Russia hasn't got an
effective revenue collection system and so the place is run more or less
with the government acting like the mafia.

See? I solved the whole thing! ;^)

-Alex

P.S. One other problem with this discussion - we really don't have access to
 the books for the companies in the telecommunications business. We don't
know specifically what their revenues are (although AT&T is supposed to have
2.5 million cable-modem customers) and we don't know their true costs. So
yes, we know it's expensive to put in commercial grade comm gear but at
$50+/month per customer I'd expect them to be making pretty good money if
they amortize the expenses over say a 5 year period of time. The on-going
costs are replacing broken equipment (I still have my Lan City cable-modem
after almost 3 years) and support personnel costs (no idea how many they
have and how much they cost).

----- Original Message -----
From: "Travis Roy" <travis at scootz.net>
To: <discuss at gnhlug.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 22, 2003 9:36 PM
Subject: RE: Email hosting (was: ATTBI/Comcast rant)


> On Wed, 22 Jan 2003, at 9:04pm, travis at scootz.net wrote:
> > ... There's no "correction" here ...
>
>   Then please explain to me why almost every single DSL
> company has gone out of business.

Because they're still need Verizon to set up the line for them.. They
were very smart to do the following:

1) Be slow
2) Screw up JUST enough
3) just to much

They did those to get people to hopefully switch to Verizon DSL, or at
least ditch who they were with. And almost every? Please.. Covad is
around, as is speakeasy and Earthlink. There's smaller places like MV,
DirecTV's DSL service got dumped to push their two way sat service. If I
go to dslreports there's still a ton of companies listed... The reason
they stuck around.. They either built up their service slow (MV), they
already had a good chunk of money (Earthlink) or they were a good
alternitive to Verizon (Covad/Speakeasy). I found Vitts to be overpriced
for the service they offered, and they came out of nowhere and magically
had a ton of VC money to throw around.. They had the look and feel of a
HUGE company. Speakeasy was around at the same time but not many people
heard of them.. Who's out of business and who's still around?

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