Letters to the editor

No relief needed

Regarding "FCC may relax competition rules for local carriers": Have we all forgotten how the RBOCs/ILECs build out infrastructure when they have total autonomy? The states, Feds and residential/business customers pay for it via increased recurring and one-time costs, approved by state utility commissions. To believe that the RBOCs are going to ramp up rollout of broadband services quicker because of UNE "relief" by the FCC is comical. That's like making a blanket statement that if we increase everyone's wages, more people will start saving money.

Doing away with the UNE rules might also give the RBOCs the breathing room they want to streamline their OSS/BSS model, to bring down internal costs for broadband delivery and ongoing service and billing. At the same time, the RBOCs could very well (slightly) increase their monthly costs for broadband services, thereby improving their revenue margins of broadband services, which is what we're really talking about here. Plus, it would then be an unregulated service that would not have much (if any) competition - and how would this be beneficial to the general population the RBOCs are authorized/required to serve?

The article states, 'At least if the RBOCs start investing, consumers will have a choice of cable modems, DSL and satellite in most areas. Right now, consumers in most parts of the country don't have a choice - they have either one or the other, so prices stay high,' Gownder said." Again, how is this going to improve by doing away with UNE rules? Broadband delivery and accessibility is governed by the ability of the RBOC to service the market area by having the proper infrastructure to support broadband delivery. If there is difficulty in easily delivering broadband because of infrastructure issues, there are many options for that - but the underlying motivator here is simple: will there be enough of a market (i.e., subscriber base) to support an upgrade/augmentation of infrastructure? The overwhelming majority of metro areas that have the infrastructure to support broadband delivery, already have the access in place - changing the UNE rules won't speed up the process for the other areas, only the user market itself will drive that issue.

As for DSL vs. cable vs. satellite for broadband options, this is another distortion. Each delivery model is hampered by its own physical infrastructure model as well as its potential market - the only possible exception being (perhaps) satellite delivery of broadband (once the "bugs" have been worked out and speed/latency improves), but then you have the argument of monopolies in non-terrestrial space. The FCC relaxing rules on UNE is not going to "speed up" anything, it's only going to slow us back down. At least our telephone bills are going to be more entertaining.

David Kelsheimer
Director, network services
Strativa
Irvine, Calif.

HomePNA screams

Regarding "HomePNA comes screaming back": We need another company promoting both the HomePLUG and HomePNA alternatives. They both have their niche, even in cramped offices. Microsoft would have done a better service to add these two alternatives to its hardware lineup instead of jumping on the insecure 802.11b bandwagon. Microsoft should focus on bringing a secure UPnP infrastructure to reality. All UPnP appliances will require power, so HomePLUG and even HomePNA seems the better route for UPnP appliances, not wireless. 1M bit/sec will be more than adequate for some appliances.

Robert Townley
Software engineer
Eye Consultants, PC
Omaha, Neb.

Clue giving

Regarding Mark Gibbs' "Backspin" column "Christmas clue giving": I would like to give a clue to everyone who has missed the basic problem with spam - that we pay for the infrastructure to enable our use of the Internet. Spammers do not compensate us for their use of our facilities (our Internet connection, ISP, mailbox space and our time) and in effect are stealing service from us.

The root cause of this problem is that e-mail can be transmitted essentially for "free." This concept is fine within a company or college campus, but not in the commercial world.

There is a similar problem in the world of direct telephone solicitation. The telemarketing flaks are taking advantage of one of the most important rules of debate: If you can control the definition of the terms, you are very likely to win the argument. They talk about "Freedom of Commercial Speech," which has a nice ring to it, but of course, they've sidestepped the main point: That we pay for the phone and the phone line, and they demand our time, without compensation, to answer their calls. When I receive a call from a telemarketer, I generally hang up right away, but if I'm feeling charitable, I tell them, "This phone is for my convenience, not yours. Do not call back," and hang up on them.

For the Internet to fully "grow up," there will have to be a charge for transmitting data, whether it be mail, video, or data. It's just simple economics.

Steve Sacco
Maitland, Fla.

Dream tablet

Regarding Mark Gibbs' "Backspin" column about his desire to see a real tablet computer this year ("Dream tablet"): There is just no way that a pen-centric computer will appeal to anyone with any facility using a keyboard, if there's any serious amount of input to be done.

The keyboard is currently the reigning champion for the human/computer-input interface. The reason for this is that text input is still the ruling paradigm for most tasks, and the keyboard is still the best way to make that happen.

Kurt Buff
Redmond, Wash.

Regarding Mark Gibbs' tablet PC design factor of "Instant on, instant off and instant reboot": I have been wondering for years why the PC manufacturers don't do something that was done when non-IBM style PCs first hit the market - have the operating system encoded to chips on the motherboard. Commodore, Timex-Sinclair and Tandy all had some, if not all, of the base operating system on chips. Bootup was relatively fast, considering the speed of the CPUs in use. With today's CPU/bus speeds, having at least the operating system kernel on flash chips on the motherboard would make the PC boot/reboot as if it had never been turned off; even faster to get back to a usable state than coming out of sleep/hibernate/suspend modes.

Upgrades could be written to the flash the same way BIOS is upgraded today, via a bootable floppy (a good reason for keeping the a: drive). With a little forethought concerning security of the operating system kernel, we could be assured of a virus-free bootup by interrupting the loading of infected applications. We could even clean an infected PC by wiping the RAM and then virus scan from the kernel operating system implementation.

This would require Microsoft to designate some portion of operating system code as minimum for PC operations. That may be the hardest thing to do.

I don't know what flash memory costs, but like everything else, if the demand is there, then the costs will go down. Come to think about it, why not have the motherboard manufacturers incorporate a read-only memory card reader on the motherboard? Then users could "burn their own" operating system upgrade via a memory card writer.

Carl Atkins
Network analyst
Virginia Commonwealth University
Richmond, Va.

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