In my analysis the recommendations are going to be largely irrelevant. I have come to the conclusion, as others have, that LLU now has little to offer and indeed maybe a danger in that it could hold back desirable developments while all in sundry work to get the last bit of bandwidth from an old set of technology. I've dipped into the reports and the appendices and they show a pre-occupation with the past - I guess this is not surprising because it is about potential sharing of legacy infrastructure. The analysis of pricing seems to miss the major point that the current pricing is not linked to the cost of provision of the various services. The pricing is of course what Telecom and the other telcos believe the market will bare. We are fiddling at the margins here. In my view the vision must be to provide at least 100Mbit services to the household. Tables that purport to show the 2009 uptake of bitstream services of 256K down/128K up, are just a quaint curiosity. Rich wrote: "You WON'T get this major change by using Telecoms infrastructure because the architecture and technology is WRONG (and Telecoms prices would have ensured just a marginally better deal - remember the 5% discount). LLU just encourages more of the same crap we have now. We have to forget it and move on." I entirely agree and agree with his later remark: "Telcos can use the Telecom network, people looking for real networking solutions can innovate (and leave them to wither and die)." Almost daily we now see reports of initiatives aimed at fibre to the home or 100Mbit services to the home. For example: "Growth of the Internet May Take Nothing Short of a Revolution" Wall Street Journal (12/22/03) P. B1; Gomes, Lee Upgrading the Internet so that 100 million U.S. households can access it at 100 Mbps--over 100 times faster than most high-speed home connections today--is the goal of the "100 by 100" consortium organized by four major universities and other research centers with a $7.5 million National Science Foundation grant. But achieving such a scheme hinges on a contentious debate about whether Internet technology should follow a "revolutionary" or "evolutionary" path. Carnegie Mellon University Professor Hui Zhang argues that an evolutionary strategy cannot be supported by the Internet's current fundamental design set: At the root of this problem is the increasing complexity of the network, which is mostly invisible to average users. Zhang says the complexity of the Internet's routers has become so great that only a small number of companies can build them, while maintaining the operations of a large-scale network is becoming a costlier and more difficult proposition. The outcome of the evolution vs. revolution debate will determine how these problems are handled, and while the current Internet functions on a "connectionless" scheme, there is advocacy for a future Internet with a "connected" architecture similar to telephone networks. Though Zhang thinks there are plenty of fiber-optic lines in the U.S. to support the backbone of even the swiftest Net, bridging the "final mile" between homes and the Internet is pricey and difficult, though new methods of using wireless communications could be helpful. Those who espouse the revolutionary Internet developmental path will also have to face networking companies' resistance to making technical changes that may hurt their competitiveness. See http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2003-5/1222m.html#item2 I believe we need to lift our sights. We know that the technology is up to it - and it is affordable. When we focus on data networking, rather than specialised legacy voice networks, it becomes clear that bandwidth should not be a scarce resource. Neil -- _____________________________________________ Neil James, Assistant Director (IT Policy), Information Services Division, University of Otago, P.O. Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand. Tel (03) 479-8594 Mobile 021 393-123 FAX (03)479-8577