Tomorrow is a big day. The cable guy is coming to hook us up to the internet, cable TV, and a phone. We’re bypassing the phone company all together, because it is much cheaper. We should save about $100 a month by having a phone system through cable. We only need one phone jack in the whole house. The internet connection should be much faster. I hear the death toll of phone companies.
The main reason we’re switching is because of the cheaper cost. Cable is not subject to the same taxes as the phone company. About 40% of our phone bill has been taxes. I believe that cable was able to prevent Congress from applying the same taxes on them. Not sure why. It might be a free speech thing.
It’s funny how technology does not obey any Darwinian law. The best technology does not always succeed. Macs were always much better computers than PCs. Betamax worked better than VHS. And governmental laws are going to give cable an edge and dig a grave for Ma Bell.
Apt. 11d 
When we moved in January (from Harlem to Washington Heights, almost doubling our square footage), we cancelled the land line, which was only used by telemarketers and DSL. Now we only have cell phones, ICQ, and iChat videoconferencing. I suppose we might regret it during the next blackout, terrorist attack, or hurricane.
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Since you brought up the legal aspects of the issue, I thought I’d comment on why I decided to go with DSL instead of cable (even though it meant getting a landline, which I didn’t think I needed whereas basic cable I already had as its part of my condo association fees).
Telephone carriers are required by law not to
discriminate among content that flows through their wires. This means that getting access to the Internet through use of DSL insures that regardless of the material you access, the carrier cannot discriminate how quickly it
allows you to download the information. There is no such law regarding the practicies of cable companies. And although as of yet there does not seem to be evidence that cable companies discriminate among content, I based my decision on the principle that I want nondiscrimination guaranteed.
At least part of the taxes on phone lines are for the Universal Service Fund, which subsidizes the reasonable costs of connectivity in low-income and rural communities.
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I’m no liberatarian. I am sure that there are many good services provided by the taxes gathered from phone bills.
But I don’t want to be a sucker either. The difference between the cable package and phone+DSL+cable TV was $100 a month. For us, that’s huge.
The guy who installed our system yesterday said that they couldn’t keep up with demand. People are dropping their phone lines right and left. This weird tax loophole that the cable companies have is having a huge impacct on telecommunication.
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Being a biologist I have to make at least a minor comment here … natural selection doesn’t state that the best adapted organisms will survive, it simply states that they’re more likely to survive and pass on their genes than less well adapted organisms.
Thus, even if you have the best adapted phone company on the planet, it’s still not guarenteed to survive, as some stochastic event can come along and squash it. And, I would also have to argue that having a higher rate than your competition would also reduce the phone company’s fitness, thus meaning that it probably wasn’t the best adapted in the first place.
OK, I’m done being a bio-geek now. Sorry.
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