Alec Saunders SquawkBox

What drives LD prices?

The Smug Canadian speculates, in Long distance prices, about why long distance calling rates to Afghanistan and Iraq are so high compared to other places.  He offers that perhaps it’s because soldiers and NGO’s have driven demand up, or that the US Government is controlling rates to those places and has jacked prices up to flow cash into those countries. 

It’s relatively inexpensive to set up a POP to deliver phone service anywhere in the world.  For under $100K US you too can operate a route to any spot on the planet. Simply buy a high speed connection, drop a Cisco AS5xxx class VoIP gateway into that connection along with an inexpensive rackmount PC, and contract with someone like telic.NET to manage and bill the traffic for you.

Rates are high to those places because of risk, demand and infrastructure costs.  Where do you get a block of T1’s in Iraq or Afghanistan? Satellite might be a good bet, but that’s very expensive.  What’s the risk, once you’ve installed them, that government or fanatical elements might either confiscate or destroy your investment?

If you’ve got the guts to build the POPs in those countries, you’re going to try to recoup the investment as fast as possible.  At 76 cents per minute retail, it’s likely costing the retailer 38 cents wholesale to Afghanistan.  Provisioning just 1 T1 of capacity to that POP would mean that the wholesaler could recover his investment in 30 to 45 days. 

Welcome to the world of VoIP, where you too can be a telco.

Carmen in Seville

Marc’s Voice posted a link to this performance of Carmen in Seville.  Awesome!  Carmen staged on site in the Seville bull ring, town square, and so on.  What an extravaganza!

Joho on Gay Marriage

Joho published a piece on gay marriage this morning.  I’ve cut the beginning out and reproduced it here.  I also recommend reading the Bob Herbert piece that he references.

Are we Sodom?. Bob Herbert’s column today in the NY Times “Bliss and Bigotry” made me cry. It’s a good column, but it did not provoke my sadness and anger so much as allow it. I keep surprising myself with how much the issue of gay marriage means to me. Every day I find it means more. When I was a young a-hole in the ’70s, my line of grad school patter said that homosexuality is an inferior form of love because the sex carries no risk.

10% of the population is gay.  That means it’s likely we all know a gay person. I know lots, in fact.  What impact does excluding those people from societal institutions like marriage have on them?  On society?

On a deeply personal note, I have 5 sons. It’s not inconceivable that one might show up on my doorstep one day and announce that he’d found the man of his dreams.  What humane and just society could tell him that he had no right to happiness?  To equality?  As a parent, I certainly couldn’t.

All of which brings me to the reason for this rant…

Recently I’ve had a spate of Conservative Party hopefuls show up on my doorstep, since I am a member of the Conservative Party.  The local nomination meeting is next week.  They all uniformly support a number of causes which I agree with, but none, yet, has come forward to support anything but the “traditional” definition of marriage.  I’ve sent each of them away with a simple message.  In my Canada, the law applies equally to everyone, and everyone is equal before the law. My Canada has strong, vibrant, inclusive institutions that celebrate all people regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation.   That’s the Canada I want for me, and for my five children, and for their children. 

Stephen Harper, Belinda Stronach, and Tony Clement… I vote Conservative.  You need to win me at the convention, and a wishy-washy commitment to allow members to “vote with their conscience” won’t do it.  I need to see leadership from anyone who would be the future prime minister of Canada.

This arrived in my mailbox today…

According to this CNN report, Rosie O’Donnell is going to San Francisco to marry her long time girlfriend.  Her reason for doing so is quite interesting.

O’Donnell said she decided to marry Carpenter, a former dancer and marketing director at Nickelodeon, during her recent trial in New York over the now-defunct Rosie magazine.

"We applied for spousal privilege and were denied it by the state. As a result, everything that I said to Kelli, every letter that I wrote her, every e-mail, every correspondence and conversation was entered into the record," O’Donnell said. "After the trial, I am now and will forever be a total proponent of gay marriage."

In other words, had she been married, her spousal privilege would have protected their privacy.  Since, by law, she was unable to marry, that privacy was not protected. 

Common Law, in Canada, provides that spouses cannot be forced to testify against each other as well.  The common rules were codified in the Canada Evidence Act as follows:

"No husband is compellable to disclose any communication made to him by his wife during their marriage, and no wife is compellable to disclose any communication made to her by her husband during their marriage.": Canada Evidence Act R.S.C. 1985, c. C-5, s. 4(3).

If proponents of the "separate-but-equal" position in Parliament win the day, and gay couples are granted a civil union as opposed to a marriage, will they be spouses legally, or something else?  Will spousal privilege apply? How equal will "equal" be?