At 11:00 AM 8/20/96 -0700, Brian D Williams wrote:

Jim bell writes:

...

What do you mean, "doesn't really fit the facts"?!? What part of it was incorrect? Fiber-optic _is_ commonly used in inter-office trunks, right? It doesn't wear out, right? Higher usage doesn't entail greater costs, right? The capacity, while not strictly infinite, is high enough so expanded usage doesn't strain most links, right? Finally, modern phone switches have sufficient connect capacity so that they can handle usage which would have been considered "unusual" by yesteryear's standards. All of this points to an obvious conclusion: Telephone companies do not, in general, have increased costs as a consequence of increased telephone usage.

Fiber does not wear out per se, but it does need replacing, partly from the inevitable contractor accidents (landscapers) and occasional entropic events.

However, those events are generally uncorrelated with usage...

Mux cards and repeaters do go bad on a regular basis, there is a correlation between usage and increased maintenance,

Well, technically that's true, but these devices are usually running continuously, not merely when a call is being made. In other words, more talk != more failures. For the most relevant (though minor) example that I can think of, consider the typical laser diode used to drive fiber optic cables. These devices have a finite wearout mechanism (as opposed to most IC's which generally do not wear out in normal usage), so they may be seen to have a limited lifetime. However, in use they are continuously transmitting data, even when portions of the channel are unoccupied, so they have a constant life regardless of individual phone usage.

and of course increased usage means increased electricity usage.

This is an extraordinarily minor effect, as you might imagine.

One point that seems to be missed here is the very high cost of compliance with government regulations. If the internet phone people have to comply with the same regulations it will drive up their costs dramatically, and if the regulations are lifted for all, the RBOC's think they can out compete them.

If that is the main difference in costs, then we should abandon those regs. Another big cost is billing, which could be eliminated if usage were unmetered. In any case, I tend to agree: Make these changes, eliminate the LD/local subsidy, and the LD companies would have no problem (at least domestically) competing against Internet phone. (International may be a different story, because foreign telcos tend to be owned by countries.) Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com