> Sender: •••@••.••• (Audrie Krause) > > Arun Metha wrote: Mehta (for the record) > And > prices are going up even as costs are going down. Pardon my ignorance of prices in the US, but other than some rate increases in the case of ISDN, which is really a niche, i have not come across evidence of telecom prices going up in the US. If someone points me to url's that *prove* otherwise (i.e. rates over time) I'd be grateful. I would like to suggest that telecom deregulation is too recent in the US for anyone to be able to infer that it is increasing prices. In the UK, where such deregulation took place a while ago, prices have definitely gone down. My experience of industry is that by and large, they are quite comfortable in a regulated environment, which protects them from competition and guarantees profits. In this case, they must have seen the writing on the wall -- the regulatory environment in the US was making the companies globally uncompetitive, because anyone setting up a cable TV facility these days would automatically want to include telephony, Internet access and the like as optional extras, so as to generate more revenue. If US companies have no experience of running such facilities in the US, but their competitors do, they lose business. > Sender: •••@••.••• > and mr > mehta, what of your own local issues? Check out •••@••.•••, where we can discuss these at length. Arun Mehta, B-69 Lajpat Nagar-I, New Delhi-24, India. Phone 6841172,6849103 http://mahavir.doe.ernet.in/~pinaward/arun.htm •••@••.••• Moderator of india-gii, which discusses telecom issues relating to India.