Public Power

for today's wired world

the purpose of this

is to give the reader a simplified basic background in the fundamentals of the telecommunication controversy.

Throughout all of this it will be important to keep in mind the concept of “convergence” and a bit of history.

Convergence simply means that the old way of delivering TV over a community antenna, voice using traditional switched circuit dial tone, and Internet is being replaced with a way (called Internet Protocol or IP) of delivering information and content by sending it in packets of binary digits (off and on blips called “bits”) over a web of wires, fiber, radio beams, or laser shots. Over the next few years as “convergence” is completed, that web will deliver packets of all kinds and cause TV, voice, and Internet to all be delivered over the same mechanism. All the services will converge and be deliverable by one system. In the past the communications system was essentially wires between point A and point B that were temporarily connected. Those wires carried a current bearing an analog relationship to the content, e.g. the louder the voice the more powerful the electricity on the line. When the phone was “hung up” the connection went away. However, the emerging new way of delivering TV, voice, and data resembles a road system on which the road is always there and vehicles (packets) of information are routed to all points on the map based upon tags on their license plates. Recognizing this fundamental shift in communications has profound implications on how the issues are approached by public policy planners.

 

The old switched system evolved by necessity and made sense. Fundamentally, the telephone was variations in electrical jolts (called analog signal) carried on a wire between a microphone and a speaker. A company strung a wire from every house and business to “the telephone office” where the wires could be patched (switched) into each other for local voice service or patched into a long distance cable to “exchange” the signal with the telephone office in another “exchange”. The result was copper phone wires hanging on telephone and light poles or buried in alleys and ditches. Generally, only one company deployed phone wires because prior to the 1990’s state sanctioned monopolies were granted in each service area. These monopolies also came with state or federal subsidies in many rural areas. Ma Bell got the lion’s share of the monopolies. Monopoly was considered necessary because it was expensive to string all those wires and Ma Bell had some critical patents and know-how. Even after the state sanctioning of monopoly stopped, a practical monopoly remained. The unfavorable economics of stringing another set of copper wire to each premises simply prevented it from being done. Besides no one really wanted to string copper phone wire anyway. Copper wire and the analog switched phone system were well on the way to becoming dinosaurs.


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