Michael Gracie 

First, ignore some existing laws. Second, grease the lawmakers. Third, pull investigators pants down to their knees just as they start running after the problem. What do you get after that? According to some high profile attorneys, you get anti-competitive telco mergers. How does the government fund these shenanigans, and ensure their telco buddies can [...]

For a merger to work, the whole has to wind up greater than the sum of the parts. A while back I pondered whether the swathe of telco mergers would make things better. I couldn’t come up with an answer. Someone else now asks the same questions: “How would they be able to take, in [...]

While one guy was insinuating that network neutrality was going the way of the horsedrawn carriage, in the wrong forum at that, another was saying bandwidth utlization from apps like P2P was not really a big a deal right now. Quest CTO Peter Poll noted: “I… found that the traffic is well under what some [...]

The pressure against telco’s plans to charge content providers for access to their pipes (again), has made some headway. Instead of charging Google and Apple’s iTunes, they now want to charge their consumers different rates for access to those “premium” services. Techdirt says variable rate pricing sounds eerily like the internet of old, which just [...]

Because they have three-way communication going on compliments of the telcos. It didn’t take long for someone to push back against BellSouth’s pomp. But I don’t think it is going to matter – the telcos are just stubborn enough to try charging content providers for access anyway.

BellSouth “finally” announced that they are going to throttling down internet transport for content providers that don’t pay up. Well, actually they said they would be providing better service for those that paid, but what they really mean is the former. As Bill Smith, CTO at Bell South, pointed out: “Higher usage for broadband services [...]

The saga of struggling (and stupid) telecomm companies doesn’t only continue..its accelerating. The telcos can’t “create” their way out of wet paper bags, so they want to charge service providers for access to their lines. Of course, this will just stifle innovation and piss everyone off, but the telcos don’t care. And if you think [...]

The news out of Chicago was that for $110, you could buy the call records of any number, including cell phones, from a simple website service. What a fricken travesty! I can’t help but think this is the telcos’ doing. Where else could you get those records from (tap the switches)? The Illinois Legislature moved [...]

The question came up as to whether telcos are being too conservative with their TV plans, but I have to wonder whether the investment they will have to make is worth the price.