On Tuesday, February 26, 2002, at 03:28 , Mark Foster wrote:
At 07:38 27/02/02 +1300, Rodger Donaldson wrote:
On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 12:36:37PM +1300, Mark Foster wrote:
Bandwidth has dropped in cost, but we download more, and faster, nowadays.
Oddly enough, you may find some relationship between these facts.
I do see the relationship, and people who rant about how its all too expensive irritate me - but I find myself having to agree with them to at least some degree. Id really seriously like to know what kind of margins there are in the Jetstream/Jetstart packages - because I know from an ISP point of view, the overhead is pushing the boundaries of what is genuinely profitable.
The internal revenue characteristics of the Jetstream/Jetstart packages to Telecom are irrelevant. Telecom is not a charity. The problem is that competing with Telecom requires a fresh access network build. That's an expensive thing, particularly if your target market is spread out over a city the size of Auckland, the revenue per household is likely to be relatively low, your major competitor already has an access network which was funded by the taxpayer, and you are a carrier drowning in a culture of telephony engineering. I think that mandating unbundling of the local loop would result in more competition, leading to choice and cheaper alternatives to the Jet* packages that seem to be universally hated. I don't agree that it's too late to bother with, either; even if you optimistically assume that the telephony mindset in the non-incumbent carriers is long forgotten, building out to local exchanges and installing your own DSLAMs is a much more straightforward exercise to fund than a disruptive deployment like Richard has described. There are probably at least ten ISPs in Auckland who could start deploying DSL service straight away, if they had access to the copper at the local exchange. I don't suppose there are ten ISPs who are currently planning fibre-to-the-home. Joe - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog