According to this post on boston.com, AT&T and BellSouth are lobbying on Capitol Hill to establish a premium tier of the Internet. Based on the text of the article the nexus of the argument is that the Bell companies need to offer a premium tier to deliver broadcast video services. This is further indication that the Bell companies barely understand their own business and have even less of an understanding of how video services are delivered. Either that or this is an effort to confuse members of Congress.
The telecom companies said that since they are spending billions of dollars to build new fiber-optic networks that can carry more data, they are entitled to give their own offerings the bulk of Internet bandwidth, and to charge others for higher-speed access.
”When costs are being driven into an equation, they have to be recovered somewhere,” said Bill Smith, chief technology officer of BellSouth. ”Why do fundamental business economics not apply to the Internet?
The Bell companies are arguing that they need to offer a premium tier in order to deliver their own video services. I have to contrast the claims of the Bell companies with how the cable companies delver video. In the case of the cable companies video services are delivered using a very different infrastructure than Internet services, and the only thing video and Internet services really share is the pipe into the house, and only then at the physical layer (OSI Layer 1). The two services occupy different electronic streams coming down that pipe and never the twain to meet. This is a very real simplification, and I readily admit that my knowledge of how cable television is delivered is about an inch deep.
The Bell companies are arguing that they need a premium tier for their own video to offer television services. I dont know enough about how the Bell companies plan to deliver their video services over fiber, but I would be very surprised if they were going to deliver it over the same wavelengths (this is fiber were talking about) as their Internet service. Even if the Bells are using the Internetworking Protocol to deliver video from the local head-end to the home, it would make no sense for that delivery to share the same network space as broadband Internet service. If these two streams did share any part of the network beyond the physical connection itself then your Internet browsing would grind to a halt every time soneone in your neighborhood turned on a television.
Does anyone believe that the Internet is really ready to deliver full-screen, real-time video? Multiple video programming to each subscribing household? To multiple households in the same neighborhood? I would be really surprised if the Bells planned to deliver video and Internet over anything more than the same physical connection into the home (again, OSI layer 1 only). If the cable companies can manage to deliver video and broadband Internet without handicapping third-party Internet content then I dont think its asking too much to ask the Bell companies to manage the same.
What I suspect is going on is that the Bell companies are taking advantage of legislators lack of understanding of how telecommunications services are really delivered (and journalists’ lack of understanding from the look of articles I’m seeing on this subject) to make a land grab for control over all of the OSI stack based on their duopoly for layers 1, 2 and maybe layer 3. (Yeah, I still need a post explaining what the hell all this OSI layer stuff means).
