IP: AT&T and TCI- Seybold thoughts

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

From: Andys () Outlook com
Sender: "Andy Seybold" <Andys () Outlook com>
To: <farber () cis upenn edu>


Dave- A short article that is appearing in my June newsletter. Thought it
might be of interest to Ipers


Best regards,


Andy




AT&T To Buy TCI
by Andrew M. Seybold


Thoughts To Ponder


You have to wonder whether the folks at AT&T have thought this one out.
Buying TCI gets AT&T into about 30
million homes--that's how many TCI cable subscribers there are.
AT&T wants these 30 million customers, and more, to use AT&T for all of
their communications: local phone
service, long distance, cable TV, and Internet access. The customer will
receive a single bill at the end of each
month, and AT&T can get to them at every turn when they turn on their TV,
surf the Internet, and maybe even
when they make a phone call.
What concerns us more than the merger itself is what lies ahead for those
who opt for AT&T/TCI phone service.
Here are a few of the issues as we see them:


The Phone Company powers today's telephone system. In times of electric
utility power failures, the phone still
works.
The Phone Company (formerly AT&T) built hardened sites for its switches,
complete with back-up batteries and
generators. While it didn't have to build such a robust system, it did. And
it remains the service against which all
others are measured.
Does TCI have generators or battery back-up at its sites? Will phone service
provided over the TCI network be
powered by the network or by the AC power in our home (which goes out more
often than we would like)? How
reliable will our dial tone be? When a major storm or earthquake takes out
our power, will it take out our phone
service as well? How long will cable phone service be down? History shows
that phone service in the U.S. is about
99.8% reliable. Cable service today is about 70% reliable. Is having dial
tone 70% of the time good enough?


Who will have access to my voice and data traffic?
The way cable systems work today, all of the information capable of being
delivered by the system is carried to
every cable drop regardless of what a particular customer subscribes to.
When TCI begins offering dial tone and Internet data service, will my phone
calls and my data be sent over the
entire cable system? Will they pass through a cable that goes into a
hacker's house? Will he or she be
experimenting to find ways to listen in?
All known TV cable systems today have been breached. With the wired phone
service, a pair of wires or
combination of discrete circuits connects the phone in my house to the
switch. My neighbor does not have ready
access to a wire carrying my phone traffic.


In times of emergency, The Phone Company can prioritize who gets phone
service, balancing traffic until the
entire system is back online.
During a major disaster, it can keep emergency services phones on line while
it cuts business and residential
phones, bringing them up according to a pre-determined plan. Is the TCI
cable system capable of prioritizing
service, or will emergency services have to compete with granny calling to
see if everyone is okay?


Cable systems "leak" signals all over the neighborhood.
The cables along the road leak, connections where the cable enters houses
leak, and still more signal leaks
from inside wiring. In order to compensate for these signal losses, The
Cable Company pumps more signal down
the coax cable. Does this mean that my dial tone and data will be radiated
out into the ether for others to listen to
or capture and use?


Cable systems are not, historically, wired into office buildings.
How does AT&T expect to offer local phone service to the business community
within the TCI cable area? Will
TCI be running TV cable to businesses?


In Summary
As you can see, most of our concerns have to do with how robust the service
offering will be. AT&T set the
standards for service reliability even during the worst of times. The
Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs)
have continued the tradition. In most places, phone service is the utility
with which we experience the fewest
outages.
Our phones are also the most critical of our communications tools. We use
them for normal day-to-day chatting,
but we need them in times of emergency. We need to be able to dial 9-1-1 and
know that the call will be
connected. We need to have faith that our burglar alarm alert will reach the
central office. And we need to know
that when we want to check on our aging parents across the country, there
will be a circuit available to do so.
Our nightmare is that once these companies agree to move forward with their
services over cable, the folks in
the trenches trying to make it work will find that they don't have the
budget to do it "right." We could find
ourselves living in a world where services we have taken for granted all of
our lives are no longer a given. Is
cutting corners the only way to compete in a deregulated world? What
incentive do these companies have to get it
right and keep it right? Yes, we can always go back to our local phone
company, but most folks won't realize the
chance they are taking until a crisis when they really need dial tone and it
won't be there.
I would like to hear what AT&T has to say about these issues, and I would
like to hear from those who have
given us deregulation. I want to save money as much as the next person. But
not at the expense of having to
wonder whether I will have dial tone when I need it.