[RFI] BPL Protest Opportunity? Give up? NO!

[Ian White, G3SEK]

Richard (Rick) Karlquist (N6RK) wrote:

>Or they're say, go ahead and sue, and if you win, the monetary damages 
>will be zero (or the proverbial one dollar), because ham radio is not a 
>business, ham radio licenses are free, thus there is no "economic loss."

How about the investment in all the HF equipment whose resale value 
would be almost wiped out? How about the loss of future earnings to the 
large and small companies that are presently supplying that market?

Those would be very useful statistics for any national radio society 
(yours and mine) to collect. The totals would be peanuts compared with 
the projected earnings of BPL, but as a very rough estimate a class 
action could be claiming well over $10,000,000.

That should be enough to get their attention. It's still peanuts 
compared with the projected income from BPL, but it certainly gives the 
lie to any claims of "no economic impact".


Good news from over here, I hope: since British Telecom has decided that 
it will roll-out DSL to almost the entire country - including small 
rural exchanges - by summer 2005, the economic incentive to invest in 
BPL seems to have collapsed.

There is still a problem for phone subscribers who live more than 4 
miles from the exchange hardware, but BT are promising to look at that 
too. If they do manage to extend the range of DSL, that technology 
should benefit the USA as well.


-- 
73 from Ian G3SEK