[ NNSquad ] Re: Upcoming conference on "Broadband Census for America"

[Barry Gold <bgold@matrix-consultants.com>]

Drew Clark wrote:
> Lauren,
>
> I'd like to respond to some of the issues raised by the recent e-mail of 
> Brett Glass. (On Dave Farber's [IP], cross-posted to [nnsquad].)

I'm also a little confused by all this.  I can see Brett's concerns, but 
at the same time, an ISP must _advertise_ in order to get customers. 
Word of mouth is good, but I don't think it's going to keep an ISP in 
business for long.  And once they advertise, it shouldn't be that hard 
for the ILECs to find them and figure out where they do business -- and 
then take whatever anti-competitive actions occur to their beady little 
minds.

One option, of course, is for the small ISP to create a dummy 
corporation -- owned by the ISP itself or by its principals or officers. 
 The dummy buys bandwidth from the ILEC, then resells it to the ISP.  I 
suppose a diligent search would find this out, but I doubt if the ILECs 
stop to do this every time somebody comes and says, "I want a T3 line at 
(location)" or even "I want n GB/sec of ATM at (location)."  Either it's 
routine enough that they will just sell it for whatever they sell it to 
"everybody else," or they will take the request for a lot of bandwidth 
as an indication of a competitor, and *always* raise the price through 
the roof.  I doubt they need the info from Form 477.