Aseahawkfan wrote:The phone companies like Verizon and AT&T were originally going to let other companies build out DSL networks over their infrastructure. The big cable and phone companies decided to do it themselves. Fiber start ups couldn't compete with a companies that already had huge fiber cable networks built out and phone companies with an already existing infrastructure.
Actually, that is not true. I worked 8 years on the AT&T wholesale team and we sold our backbone to any other ISP or network that wanted to pay for it. We even undersold our our retail account teams. Reality is that the main backbone that the internet runs on is AT&T's backbone and other ISPs buy bandwidth on it now. The edge is what is different.
I remember getting in a lot of trouble when Dave Dorman (CEO and President of AT&T at the time) announced that AT&T was being sold to SBC who also bought out Bell South a short time later because I said it was a dumb move at the time. I believe it was in 2003 that this happened. The reason I said it was a dumb move was because AT&T had just built 30 data centers in the U.S. at the cost of approx. $500M each (total of $15B tied up in data centers). The price tag for AT&T in that sale was $16B for the global operation. Business, retail, data centers, wholesales, the entire shooting match. Plus we had like $8B in cash in the bank and our debt had been paid down from $56B 2 years prior to like $6B. Now Dorman got a golden parachute for the deal of about $32M for selling out the way he did but the real strategy was totally missed at that time. Here's what I said should have happened. NOTE: Once SBC bought out AT&T and Bell south, the local access was reduced to just 22 states that both of them were prominent in. SBC and Bell South were LECs (Local Exchange Carriers) that had the wire in the ground to the homes and businesses but not the backbone. That's why they wanted AT&T. What should have happened is AT&T go after content to put in their Datacenters. Music, movies, apps, backup capabilites, Disaster recovery, virtual servers, etc. etc, etc. Then tell all the local exchange carriers, mobile, cable and other access carriers that we don't care how you connect with us, just connect with us and we'll serve the content. This would have opened up all 50 states and worldwide markets to AT&T. Instead, they limited AT&T to just those 22 states and only the LECs in those states because who would want to benefit the local access competitor in those states? e.g. Time warner, comcast, verizon, etc.
Lo and behold, I was the odd man out though. The establishment in AT&T couldn't wait to get back to the glory days of the 80's and early 90s of selling local access again and I was then put on the outside looking in. Nevertheless, the local access sales never really materialized for the embeded lifelong AT&Ters because the technology had moved on and they no longer had a monopoly on homes access to the cloud. Satellite, cable, wimax and other technologies had replaced their monopoly. Now it seems that AT&T is finally recognizing the strategy that I had envisioned so many years ago. But this is not the only time they came around to my vision of the way the network should operate.
While in the wholesale division, I designed the T-mobile network that AT&T offered to buy in 2009 for Billions of dollars. AT&T wanted that network so bad that they put up $2B that T-mobile would get if the deal fell through for any reason. A few months later, it fell through when AT&T backed out for no reason. Probably because they found my design documents and realized they already had the network they needed just needed to add a few backbone routers to duplicate the services. What's funny is that T-mobile offered to buy out anyone's contract no matter how much it cost if they switched to T-mobile. (I have to admit, this made me laugh that they used AT&T's forfeited funds to buy AT&T's cusotmers away from them).
I have built many Sprint, IBM and other networks as an AT&T employee in the past. Many of the designs were bid against our retail business and consumer teams, too. The only network I didn't build for was Verizon and that's because they bought MCI as soon as SBC bought AT&T.
The new FCC chairman wants to let the FTC prosecute anti-competitive business violations like throttling data. That may work. Personally I'd prefer the internet service providers disentangle content production from internet service. It's too much of a temptation to use your fiber network to wipe out content competitors like Microsoft did leveraging Windows to dominate so many aspects of the software industry. I hope cellular technology upgrades fast enough to make the competitive advantage obsolete. With companies like Google with Youtube and Amazon with their streaming service competing, money will be there to fight for bandwidth equality.
Not to mention the repatriation of the $Ts of stranded offshore if the tax bill goes through.
Note: our cell companies are probably the worst in the world. Countries that entered into the cell market later installed newer technology than what we had deployed in the early days. ripping out the old for a wholesale changeout is unreasonable since most people would have to upgrade their devices. So we in the U.S. have had to gradually change our technology over time and we are still much behind the ROW.
One thing to remember, Microsoft for all the shortcomings must be remembered for what they did in the market for standardization. Remember Vines, and all the other incompatible networks? It was Microsoft that set the standard for NIC access to the NDIS standard. That gave them the "in" to the OS, etc. but those of us in networking in the early days remember the incompatibility of the different protocol stacks that existed back then.