{"id":3585,"date":"2005-08-18T10:59:59","date_gmt":"2005-08-18T10:59:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/e-commerce\/teletruth-on-sbc-iptv.html"},"modified":"2005-08-18T10:59:59","modified_gmt":"2005-08-18T10:59:59","slug":"teletruth-on-sbc-iptv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/voip\/teletruth-on-sbc-iptv.html","title":{"rendered":"Teletruth on SBC IPTV"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bruce Kushnick has got to be the most painful thorn in the sides of the RBOCs. His tone may be confrontational for some but he makes some good points below. I would love to get the response from the RBOCs on this.<\/p>\n

—————————-<\/p>\n

Bruce Kushnick has got to be the most painful thorn in the sides of the RBOCs. His tone may be confrontational for some but he makes some good points below. I would love to get the response from the RBOCs on this.<\/p>\n

—————————-<\/p>\n

Teletruth News Analysis. SBC’s IPTV Lies: Do the Math — Wed Aug 17th,
2005<\/p>\n

USA Today’s\u00a0 <\/span>"SBC’s $4 billion IPTV investment ‘not much money’"
http:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/tech\/products\/gear\/2005-08-16-iptv-sbc_x.htm<\/a><\/p>\n

SUMMARY: MATH.& HISTORY<\/p>\n

Based on history, Teletruth believes SBC is misleading the public by making claims it knows can’t be true. They claim 18 million homes in 3 years will be rewired at a cost of $4 billion for "IPTV" — video services using the IP networks.<\/p>\n

— That comes to.$222 a household for deployment of a fiber optic based new service.
It is pure fantasy. And the equipment doesn’t even work today. —History points to SBC simply making stuff up to change laws in their favor.
====================<\/p>\n

The title of this USA Today article is correct, — $4 billion is not much money and SBC can not be trusted to either spend the money or deploy the technology.<\/p>\nUSA<\/country-region><\/place>:\u00a0 <\/span>"The carrier (SBC) plans to spend $4 billion by 2007 to wire 18 million homes for the cutting-edge technology. The project, if successful, would turn SBC into one of the largest purveyors of IPTV in the world."<\/p>\n

Welcome to fantasy island. I can say this based on the history of SBC to deploy technology as promised.<\/p>\n

Let’s put some facts on the table. In the 1990’s, Pacific Bell, Ameritech, SNET, and Southwestern Bell all had plans to rewire the 13 states with fiber optics — Pac Bell promised to spend \u00a0<\/span>$16 billion with 5 million households by 2000, SNET $4.5 billion, Ameritech would have 6 million households\u00a0 <\/span>— and the total number of households to be wired in these<\/p>\n

13 states was —- over 12 million lines by 2000!<\/p>\n

And customers paid for these networks through changes in state deregulation — massive financial incentives were given to the phone companies per state.<\/p>\n

When SBC took over — merged with — Pac Bell, Ameritech, and SNET, SBC closed down every fiber optic plan. Trashed\u00a0 <\/span>or sold off everything. There went the fiber optic future for 125 million people — 40% of the US<\/country-region><\/place>!<\/p>\n

But hope springs eternal,\u00a0 <\/span>as part of the Ameritech-SBC Agreement in 1999, SBC stated it would spend $6 billion to rewire the states, known as "Project
Pronto"—- Another flop. Never completed, much of the money unspent.<\/p>\n

And now, SBC claims it will rewire and offer IPTV (which requires broadband based on fiber optic networks).<\/p>\nUSA<\/country-region><\/place> Today: "The carrier plans to spend $4 billion by 2007 to wire 18 million homes for the cutting-edge technology."<\/p>\n

Do the math — It’s simply ridiculous!<\/p>\n

It comes out to 6 million homes a year — at a cost of —– $222.22 per household…. Please stop laughing.<\/p>\n

Anyone acquainted with this business knows that it cost more than $222 per household to rewire, much less\u00a0 <\/span>supply the technology needed for IPTV — which is new and has\u00a0 <\/span>been deployed sporadically in other countries.<\/p>\n

USA Today writes: "Indeed, nobody knows how IPTV will behave once it is\u00a0 <\/span>"scaled," or rolled out, to millions of paying customers. One of the largest IPTV installations in the world is in China<\/country-region><\/place>, and that one has only about 500,000 customers."<\/p>\n

And the real kicker — The stuff doesn’t work today, but they can make statements to show how SBC is delivering on broadband.<\/p>\nUSA<\/country-region><\/place> Today: \u00a0<\/span>"The wildcard is Microsoft. The tech giant is developing the operating system that will form the heart of SBC’s IPTV service – and it isn’t close to done. ….There’s also the question of whether the half-dozen or so vendors supporting the project can get their hardware and software to mesh properly.
Getting it perfect right out of the box is critical."<\/p>\n

Around the country, the Bell<\/city><\/place> companies are trying to block municipalities from rewiring or wifi-ing their cities. Trusting SBC and the other Bell<\/city><\/place> companies to fulfill any of their public statements is a waste of time, and citizens should stand up to companies who will say anything to remove more laws to make them more money and block competition.<\/p>\n

Worse,\u00a0 <\/span>SBC is planning on getting larger, now merging with AT&T.
Why hasn’t anyone investigated how the previous mergers SBC-Ameritech-SNET-Southwestern Bell, raised rates and harmed broadband deployments and competition. SBC was supposed to be competing in 30 cities outside these regions with wireline competition
— that never happened either.<\/p>\n

For a decade of Bell<\/place><\/city> Broadband Deceptions see:
http:\/\/www.newnetworks.com\/BroadbandandDSL.htm<\/a><\/p>\n

Bruce Kushnick, Teletruth<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bruce Kushnick has got to be the most painful thorn in the sides of the RBOCs. His tone may be confrontational for some but he makes some good points below. I would love to get the response from the RBOCs on this. —————————- Bruce Kushnick has got to be the most painful thorn in the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[191],"tags":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3585"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}