Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1997 16:01:25 -0500 (EST)
From: Steve Cole <coles@kos.net>
To: 3sm79@qlink.queensu.ca
Subject: Your web page (with CC to staff)
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.3.95.970121152208.2293A-100000@mercury.kosone.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

I just wanted to let you know that I am very aware of your web page at
Queen's university.  I do support your ability to make this information
available, however, I do question the policy of posting extremely biased
and misinformed messages from the cablenet.general newsgroup on the page -
I have no easy way to dispute or correspond in the web forum.

I want to make very clear to you and to other Cablenet subscribers that
our motives in blocking four pages of the web site at KOS from Cablenet
have literally *nothing* to do with competition - we have competition from
at least 14 other competitors and we do not block them in any way.  People
who say otherwise are giving knee-jerk reactions to the issue at hand and 
are simply misinformed or are ignoring the issues at hand.

The real reason we are taking the actions has to do with the
anti-competitive monopolistic practices of the cable companies - *not*
with the validity or even the pricing of their service - though it is
definetly not cost-justified and the CRTC is being urged to consider it -
pricing and breadth of service can be dealt with competitively, and
should be in a healthy economy.

The cable companies, and Cogeco is no exception, are required by law, much
like the telephone companies, to provide "adequate capacity" to third
party providers such as Sympatico, Kingston Online, iStar, and the smaller
players, at costs which allow them to compete on an even level with the
cable companies - that's right - an even level, where service becomes the
main differentiator and cost is a necessary but equally important second.
Our tax dollars went into forming the cable companies, and they are
permitted to operate as monopolies with the proviso that they provide
access as a "common carrier" to anyone else wanting to provide services
over the media.

Where this model breaks down is that despite attempts from any number of
Internet providers to gain access to the cable medium, the cable companies
will not participate.  I personally was told that because I am a
competitor, I'd have to figure out how to get access myself - *clearly*
meaning that they have no intention to meet with the requirement to act as
a common carrier.  Bell Canada competes with us, yet when we sit down with
Bell, they want our business like no tomorrow - they know they stand to
make loads of money off our success as well.  However, in doing that, the
cable companies would have to justify their own pricing and would have to
explain how if they can provide the access at cost A) but an ISP cannot
afford to do it except for cost B), how much is being subsidized from
cable subscriber C), when subsidation is an anti-competitive practice?

All scalability and security issues aside, which are factors to be dealt
with, this means that the cable barons are not fulfilling their CRTC
authorization requirements.  It means that they have been able to
seemingly gain competitive advantage while the ISPs that want to provide
similar services are mired in the soup of misinformation and doubletalk.

Personally, I will be competing with *DSL technology at up to 6Mb/s
private channels (rollout will begin at private channel 128Kb/s and scale
without customer intervention as the service becomes more economically
feasible to do so) and have no fear of competition other than that the
cable barons will undermine the CRTC's ability to govern the industry, and
attempt to starve other companies out  by subsidizing Internet access with
cable television fees.

In short, and in conclusion, at such time as the cable companies act
responsibly and lawfully, I will drop our detection immediately.  As it
is, I have every confidence that Cogeco will refuse to do this - as you
know, they even refused to respond to the article in the Whig, knowing
they cannot refute the fact that in three months, no other provider has
announced cable access - because they have been unable to gain provision
on the cable network.  

You may post this message to your page or to the cablenet newsgroup if you
wish, however, I do not agree to have it in print.  And I want to make
very clear that it is not the CableNet users that we are protesting, as I 
am confident that they will move to new technologies as they become
available - and maybe neither of our companies will be involved.

I don't expect to have changed your mind, but hopefully I made you think.
I have no intention of changing our policy without changes at the CRTC
level.  Until then, happy surfing, and thank you for your time.

PS:  Please refer to the latest version of our pages.  The ones that you
have mirrored are very old and contain admittedly emotional elements of my
own very frustrated attempts to contact the cable company for 3PP.  You
can link directly to the pages at http://www.kos.net/weprotest.html  


Cheers,
Steve      |President & Systems Administrator,  Kingston Online Services
           |(e pluribus unix)    Multiple-T1    URL: http://www.kos.net/
           |Business and Education partners in SouthEastern Ontario 
           |
           |"Through the firewall, out the router, down the T1, across the
           | backbone, bounced from satellite, it's nothing but net."