Monday, March 06, 2006

The High-Speed Money Line - New York Times

The High-Speed Money Line - New York Times: "But the phone and cable industries have powerful allies in Congress who are already proposing legislation that would let them introduce this tiered service. If the telecommunications companies get their way, the most obvious candidates to pay for the premium service are companies that offer videos, music and other data-heavy products. Consumer advocates worry that if Apple, which runs the iTunes site, starts paying network operators for faster access, it may try to offset the cost by raising the price of a downloadable TV show, now $1.99, by a dime or two."

Tangent: comment on the AT&T news from Kevin G. Barkes, in Dave Farber's Interesting People list:
"At this rate, we'll be back to having AT&T as The One Phone Company in justa couple of years, which sort of makes you wonder why anyone bothered with the divestiture in the first place. Given the choice between AT&T and Verizon, I think I'll just get my telephone service from the cable company."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Actually I now get multiple services from the Cable company:
cable, telephone and broadband.
Nonetheless, services is poor with ATT, Verizon and also the cable companies. I am not impressed with their customer service offerings!

pbokelly said...

Me too -- Comcast for Internet, TV, and residential phone; my office phone is Vonage. I had AT&T Wireless for a while, before it got acquired by Cingular; now that'll be AT&T again, if the acquisition is approved. Probably time to explore other options...