Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Danger: No more pay phones
When the World Trade Center came down on September 11, 2001, my wife called me to say she was OK on a pay phone. Cell service was out (or so overloaded it might as well have been out). My wife joined a long polite queue at a public pay phone. Everybody in line understood the need for short calls. It was an emergency. It worked.
An article today in the Chicago Tribune says that AT&T is shutting down the last remnants of its pay phone business, making our rich web of communications options thinner. This isn't new news. The Trib says,
Think ecology. Think biodiversity.
We need non-Internet ways to communicate too. A router repair technician needs to take a non-Internet pager or cell phone to repair jobs, because the very reason she's there is that the Internet isn't working.
When telecom was a monopoly under the Bell System, the network worked because it was gold plated. When the Bell System spent more money under Rate of Return, well, hey, a percentage of each dollar spent on gold plating fell to the bottom line. Then under "competition" the theory was that the many competitors, each trying something different, would support the reliability we need, see my BCR essay Buy as Many Nines as you Need.
Now competition is drying up and the idea that telcos have a public duty is moribund. Our options are shrinking, what remains is getting brittle. What next?
An article today in the Chicago Tribune says that AT&T is shutting down the last remnants of its pay phone business, making our rich web of communications options thinner. This isn't new news. The Trib says,
The trend has been obvious for a long time. A decade ago, Ameritech Corp., the Chicago-based phone company that was dominant in the five Great Lakes states, tried to sell its pay-phone business, which included about 70,000 pay phones in Illinois, but failed to make a deal. When Ameritech was taken over by SBC Communications Inc., SBC executives also shopped around the pay-phone business and found no takers.We need diversity. The Internet, originally a network of networks, achieved its robustness from diversity. But as the Internet gets concentrated in fewer hands -- and the finances become more efficient -- we lose something vital.
Think ecology. Think biodiversity.
We need non-Internet ways to communicate too. A router repair technician needs to take a non-Internet pager or cell phone to repair jobs, because the very reason she's there is that the Internet isn't working.
When telecom was a monopoly under the Bell System, the network worked because it was gold plated. When the Bell System spent more money under Rate of Return, well, hey, a percentage of each dollar spent on gold plating fell to the bottom line. Then under "competition" the theory was that the many competitors, each trying something different, would support the reliability we need, see my BCR essay Buy as Many Nines as you Need.
Now competition is drying up and the idea that telcos have a public duty is moribund. Our options are shrinking, what remains is getting brittle. What next?
Technorati Tags: AT&T, Competition, Infrastructure, privatization, Verizon
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