Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: 2 May 91 14:20:31 GMT From: "Fred R. Goldstein" Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Decreasing Costs of Transmission Message-ID: Organization: Digital Equipment Corp., Littleton MA USA Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 326, Message 2 of 9 Lines: 65 In article , Barton.Bruce@camb.com (Barton F. Bruce) writes... > The not millions but BILLIONS of dollars they are about to use to > sink the South East Expressway underground in Boston is totally > needless. They are perpetuating the ugly downtown mess that > originally was 'necessary' only because it was not possible or > economical to communicate effectively with other businesses unless > you were physically DOWNTOWN. Sigh. Once again, the "futurists" come out with an idea that works only so far as you don't follow up on the Law of Unintended Consequences. Don't get me wrong: I make a living in telecom, and think that keeping it expensive is a Bad Thing too. But Downtowns serve a purpose. Let's go way, way out beyond the pale of reality and assume that talking on a phone, picturephone, high-bandwidth-virtual-reality-phone, etc., could be as effective as face-to-face communication. (Yeah, right.) Just for argument, let's assume that fantasy and go to the next step, where businesses can be located on any convenient hilltop. In such an environment, concentrations of the workforce (downtown) go away. But people still have to work somewhere. Clearly our homes don't cut it: While a significant fraction of the population _can_ work at home _some_ of the time, our homes aren't big/quiet enough to support much of our modern office gear, and the human interaction of being in an office with co-workers is rather useful -- to me at least! So we end up with less-concentrated offices. (And with offices in the suburbs, housing can be farther from the city, causing creeping suburbanization. Soon there are no farms left for a hundred miles. Been to NJ lately?) We end up with Los Angeles. We end up with sprawling suburbia, where you can't have public transit since there's no concentration of workspaces to run the transit lines to! I work in the exurbs and commute _out_ from town (the easy way!), but it's a car or else! The Expressway in Boston carries a fraction of total commuter traffic; trains carry a huge load of those who work downtown. Much Expressway traffic in Boston is passing _through_; there's an ocean next door, so you just can't go east a bit. And if you have a sprawling, decentralized environment, what do you think that does for telecom costs? Most of the subsidies that we pay in non-residential telecom go to pay for the longer local loops needed in non-urban areas. Downtowns make money for telcos. Downtowns allow competitors like Teleport to have a chance. Who could afford to run fiber to all the newly-paved hilltops? Telco, as a monopoly, maybe. But it's not efficient. > The telco's charter should be 'how much can be done for how little > dollars', rather than, sadly, the reverse. It's true that telcos' historical "rate of return" regulation has encouraged over-investment, but there's no free lunch. Somebody has to foot the bill, and "futuristic" Californication of America won't solve it. Fred R. Goldstein Digital Equipment Corp., Littleton MA goldstein@delni.enet.dec.com voice: +1 508 952 3274 Do you think anyone else on the planet would share my opinions, let alone a multi-billion dollar corporation?