TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Verizon Plans to Offer "Naked DSL" on 4/5 of its Wirelines

Re: Verizon Plans to Offer "Naked DSL" on 4/5 of its Wirelines

Clark W. Griswold, Jr. (spamtrap100@comcast.net)
Sat, 12 Feb 2005 18:19:00 -0700

Steve Sobol <sjsobol@JustThe.net> wrote:

> Bull.

> It's a marketing issue. It's a monopolistic
> big-telco-doing-whatever-they-want-to issue. There is no technological
> requirement for there to be a dialtone on the same line as DSL, and
> no, I'm not talking about SDSL, I'm talking about ADSL which usually
> must be bundled with POTS service.

Sigh. While I'm no fan of SBC or any of the others, not everything is
the fault of the big old telco you know ...

In the case of DSL, someone has to cover the costs of maintaining the
wire and doing the billing. When DSL was first rolled out, it was
promoted as an add-on to voice phone service. The independent DSL
providers (and eventually the telcos themselves) successfully argued
to the various state PUCs that they should only have to pay the
marginal or addon cost to put DSL on the line, since the subscriber
was already covering billing and maintenance through the voice bill.

Tariffs, regulations and accounting systems were written by the sates
and the telcos to make this happen.

Now, the DSL providers want to sell a naked product. Well, all those
laws/systems/regulations have to change. In fact, in many cases the
telco doesn't even know what it costs on an individual basis for a
naked line - they've never had to compute it that way before or track
costs that way before. Far easier to add it all up and divide by the
number of subscriber lines, eh?

While there is no technological reason to prevent naked DSL from being
sold, you clearly don't grasp all the other factors that take time and
money to change. While the telcos may not like sharing their old
copper pairs, they've pretty much resigned themselves to it, since
they were installed under regulated rate of return rules.

What's a bit more unfortunate is that the telcos have successfully
managed to exempt themselves from sharing any new fiber that gets
buried. Since the capacity of fiber exceeds that of a copper pair in a
bundle with a bunch of other copper pairs by a factor of a million to
1 or more, the long term viability of naked DSL is questionable at
best.

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