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The Hard Questions in Broadband Policy
Andy Oram has written a nice article looking at broadband internet access and the governmental policies that need to be in place if fast, symmetric internet access is to be widely available and affordable in the U.S. The U.S. still doesn't have fiber to the home, and if the last couple of competing DSL providers go under, we may never get it. In the meantime, the U.S. government is approaching the problem by eliminating regulations on the Baby Bells, which is sort of like combating street crime by taking police officers off the street.
You obviously havn't been paying attention. LEO satellites are expensive to maintain, and you either have to have a tracking dish or (more likely) and omnidirectional antenna. Tracking dishes are expensive and prone to failure, omnidirectional antennas pick up lots of interference and tend to be unreliable. Finally, just how many farmers in the middle of nowhere are there? How many of them want broadband? How many will be willing to pay a LOT for the access? I can think of one other company in recent times who had this business model: Iridium.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
I don't think the added expense is worth it. As it is, the ILECs don't even want to upgrade their COs, let alone upgrade the "last mile". I'm 18,000+ ft from my CO, and I'm 10 miles outside Boston(!). Verizon out here is losing more DSL customers than it's signing up because of the low quality lines, and Verizon hasn't done a thing to improve the quality. Fortunately there's cable modem service that actually comes to my house and gets me a decent rate.
Running fiber to my house brings me nothing but a higher phone bill. Maybe faster service, but I've had the cable modem for three years and have been quite satisfied with the performance.
I mean, really. What good is having 1GB to your house when you're all going through a 100Mbps box in the CO, which goes to a 45Mb backbone in another location? I can now share at 1GB to my neighbor? I can pay $8 to watch a movie? I can get phone service that has lower QOS than cell or POTS?
Building a network of fiber to the curb is not really different in principle than building the curb itself and the road that it is part of. It's just another part of our infrastructure. Like roads, water, sewer, electrical power and phone service, high speed internet access is infrastructure. Providing infrastructure is a legitimate function of governmnet. With electric power, natural gas and phone systems, the gov't has more of a regulatory role with a company acting as a regulated monopoly. The DOTs of each state contract out work on highways. That's the way infrastructure has been built. It ain't going to happen by private companies, out of the goodness of their hearts building roads. They never do. They ain't going to run fiber to the curb either. There ain't nothing liberal or conservative about this. It's strictly pragmatic. While many folks want to cuss the gov't and regulated monopolies, nobody has a better solution. California has veered away from this type of approach and they are paying the price. That's not the only reason they are in trouble but it's a major part of the reason. What passes for deregulation these days is really a thinly veiled form of corporate welfare. There are no technical reasons we can't have fiber to the curb right now, only political ones. It all comes back to sticking with what has worked before. If you want new infrastructure, stick with implementation approaches which have worked in the past.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
The problem with broadband as currently implemented is that it's too centralized--and problems with availability of service in the event of downtime are just a small part of it. Because it's so centralized, it's open to heavy governmental regulation. And everyone suffers.
Under the 10th amendment of the US Constitution, broadband cannot be regulated by Congress unless it is part of interstate commerce as defined by Article I. If a broadband network were entirely located within a single state, then Congress couldn't reach it.
But state regulations are also a problem. The idea that states are somehow a better protector of civil liberties because they answer more to their constituencies is lunatic: they're just as prone to tyranny as any other legislative government, and the lording minorities can be even smaller and more extreme. No, states can't be trusted to regulate broadband either, because then you'll have rabid right-wing states like Utah and Vermont implementing censorware at the legislative level, and you'll have rabid left-wing states like Massachusetts and Michigan stumbling over each other to mandate subsidized access for the poor.
What I propose is that we should go back to the old pre-ISP model where each user was responsible for his own access. We got it to work back then even though the technology was more primitive and almost prohibitively expensive. If each user is his own master, then he can decide whether to be tyrannical in his little fiefdom (for example, by exercising proper parenting techniques and restricting his children's internet access) or free and easy. There aren't any technological impediments, so let's start today.
That's is a braindead assessment. They aren't trying to "eliminate" regulations but rather remove those that prevent some of the baby bells from providing a service that they are CAPABLE of, but are currently not ALLOWED to because some laws that were instituted with the stated intent of providing for more "fair" competition. I'd be curious how much money was involved in that decision...
What it's done is to unfortunately, it's given a bunch of companies with shitty speculative business plans the opportunity to have a go at it, while disqualifying other companies from competing at all (at least in certain areas).
The solution to this problem is very simple for cities. The local government, either the city or the county, needs to own the physical infrastructure. They need to run the wires or fibers into every building in town, and run the other end into large, empty, central offices. Then the building owner or whoever is at the end of the wire gets to decide what to hook up to his wire in the central office. If he chooses an Internet service provider, that ISP has to lease space in the publically owned central office and install its own equipment. There would not be any exclusion of anyone from central office space, as long as they could pay the rent and someone wanted their services.
What an excellent attitude. Cynicism has been the driving force behind every positive social change, and this post has plenty of it.
Big business, in an ideal economy, has to know what's best for you, in order to suceed. You know why? Because in an ideal economy people like you don't just tolerate being pushed around by big business. If a company rips you off, you refuse to do business with them.
Society has become incredibly apathetic in this regard. Instead of taking a stand when a company tries to take advantage of you, everyone just likes to whine and run crying to the government, expecting them to make it all better.
Would you really prefer the government take advantage of you, instead? What makes you think that they're any more capable of being fair, when we have plenty of examples of corruption in government and of politicians doing things that certainly aren't in the best interests of those being represented.
Sure, you might say that we give our elected officials their power, and we can just as easily take it away. What you fail to realize is that you can take the power away from the big, abusive corporations just as easily. Just stop expecting the government to do it for you.
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
Thanks praedor, nice coverage of reasons for regulation of industry, if a little sarcastic.
I would like to note that moderation is the key to good regulation as it is the key to being successful at most things. There is a delicate balance between overregulation and do-as-thou-wilt, right-wing and left-wing, nationalism and treason, etc, etc, that must be struck to gain the maximum benefit for all involved. I always take the views of extremists on either side of a debate with a grain of salt.
I'm in Calgary, AB, and we have the option of cable (Shaw Cable -- pretty damn good) or DSL for internet (well everyone except me has the DSL option--I'm too far from the telco).
Pretty much every Canadian city with >50000 population, and some with less, have broadband internet. I'd say it's going pretty good here.
Nah. I don't think it's that they're afraid that it'll get in the way of their broadband media distribution franchise. I think it's pressure from big commercial interests to refrain from giving the common guy the bandwidth to be able to communicate with the rest of the internet. After all, if Joe Shmoe can make his voice heard above the din of the commercial entities that are trying to turn the internet into just another advertising mechanism, people might tune out the commercial parts of the net and start talking and listening to each other. Who knows they might even be tempted to tell others about how lousy the commercial interests are treating their customers. A dangerous development if there ever was one. Especially if you're one of those entities that want to have a lot of passive eyeballs out there merely looking at ads and buying things. And you don't need a lot of bandwidth to transmit your credit card number to an online store you know.
On the other hand, perhaps Freenet would help out in allowing people to disseminate their ideas to a broader audience without requiring a fat pipe into their home. Let each of the hosts of the Freenet users act as an individual leaflet.
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
There are several movements afoot to provide fiber to rural homes; but not by the telephone companies. The movements are largely being undertaken by Public Utility Districts (PUDs).
In Washington State the mostly-agricultural Grant County has over 7,000 miles of fiber laid by the Grant County PUD (http://www.gcpud.org/zipp/default2.htm). This system, when it's completed, will connect every home, farm, and business to the fiber network and allow the users to select from a among a group of competing ISPs for their email and bandwidth. Local ISPs can also sign on for their bandwidth out to the 'net.
The 1-year-old project originated when the PUD engineers lobbied for a remote-meter-reading system and escalated when someone suggested that they could just as well provide high-bandwidth using fiber.
GCPUD is farther along than most but it's far from alone. Several other Public Utility Districts in the State are following close behind them. However, there are some pitfalls: a few legislators, supported by the telephone companies, are fighting it with legislation prohibiting the PUDs from providing Internet access.
How ironic that rural America, long ignored by the large ISPs (AOL doesn't even have a local phone number in this county), telephone companies and cable/DSL providers, will be among the first to get bandwidth connections that will be the envy of the country.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
You are right that the lack of solid business plans killed dot-coms. But I think Kushnick's point is that if almost every small business in the country had high bandwidth access, you would have seen a better and more creative integration of the web with established successful small businesses. Instead, we got a bunch of venture capitalists trying to score big on an IPO, or egomaniacal CEO's trying to own an entire "space" on the web (ie, be the only online pet store).
One example: if it had the bandwidth, maybe the corner grocery store would let you order online, and have your groceries ready for you when you got to the store, saving you time. Instead we have WebVan and HomeGrocer.com, fighting to become the only source for online grocery shopping. High bandwidth on the last mile could really democratize the dot-com business model, take it out of the VC's hands and put it into the hands of local, already successful, small businesses.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
An 8-cent postcard sent to anywhere in the country in a couple days is a great deal. Seriously. You couldn't physically transport a piece of paper anywhere in the country by yourself for 8-cents. Even taking it across town would cost you more. And the first monopoly you mention is also responsible for safe workplaces, a cleaner environment, social safety nets that prevent the least fortunate of society from starving to death or dying from preventable disease, and a world-leading literacy rate, among other things. The second was also responsible for long distance rates in excess of $1.00 per minute, phones that you kept in your house but couldn't own, and couldn't get with your choice of colors or features.
In the absence of the regulation of the marketplace and competition, which phone companies don't have because they are government granted monopolies, some other sort of regulation is necessary. If not the government, what do you suggest?
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
You couldn't physically transport a piece of paper anywhere in the country by yourself for 8-cents. Even taking it across town would cost you more
/usr/local/games/bin/fortune.
Yes, but when there are 200,000 of them, and my cost is the same, I'm sure I could do it. Cheaper too.
safe workplaces, a cleaner environment
Unh hunh.. These are the schmucks that took forty years to even restrict sales of benzene, and fifty to reduce the maximum exposure to a level that wasn't giving everyone cancer. Sure sounds clean and safe to me!
social safety nets that prevent the least fortunate of society from starving to death or dying from preventable disease
I'm laughing. Everone that lives solely on social security is below the poverty line. Welfare is a joke too.
I didn't mean to imply AT&T was good; Just that they were the least of the two evils. Oh, and it's a quote from
.sig: Now legally binding!
There were in this country two very large monopolies. The larger of the two had the following record: the Vietnam War, Watergate, double- digit inflation, fuel and energy shortages, bankrupt airlines, and the 8-cent postcard. The second was responsible for such things as the transistor, the solar cell, lasers, synthetic crystals, high fidelity stereo recording, sound motion pictures, radio astronomy, negative feedback, magnetic tape, magnetic "bubbles", electronic switching systems, microwave radio and TV relay systems, information theory, the first electrical digital computer, and the first communications satellite. Guess which one got to tell the other how to run the telephone business?
.sig: Now legally binding!
...we can begin by forcing the FTC to aggressively pursue the fraudulent claims being made by DSL carriers/providers alleging coverage areas far greater than they can currently support.
"The regulatory regime in Canada is really favorable to building infrastructure,"
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"Now Australia is looking to Canada as a model for how to promote broadband competition."
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"American ISPs are looking to models from Canada"
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"These things are not a problem in Canada"
Canadians.. is there anything they aren't the best at?
-gerbik
From the article:
Kushnick thinks that, if the fiber had been laid, a wealth of new businesses would have sprung up to offer services and we wouldn't be experiencing the Internet downturn we have now.
What killed the dot-coms wasn't a lack of connectivity. It was more likely a lack of a solid business plan.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It's ironic that the problems currently facing the centralized communication networks -- the baby bells, I mean -- are exactly the sort of problems that the 'de-centralized' internet (assuming the 'internet' is the content flowing over the networks) was supposed to solve.
It's also becoming increasingly interesting -- to say the least -- to see how centralized networks (or, more specifically, corporations whose livelihoods depend on the centralization of their resources) cannot -- under any circumstances -- co-exist with de-centralized users or content.
De-centralized 'content' threatens the centralized 'form'.
Katz, are you listening?
OK, the problem with fiber is not as extreme as it is with cars, but... what will happen if there is no rural fiber subsidy? Well, the rural folks might get some kind of wireless network. They might get nothing, and for some of them that might be reason to abandon the country. Fine. America has a long tradition of people moving to get what they want. The black exodus to Chicago. The gold rush. The sun belt boom. The whole country to begin with. None of these migrations hurt anybody. A "fiber migration" away from far flung rural areas to the city could spark an urban renaissance. It would do it without government intervention. We don't know what the future holds. Broadband is *not* essential. If it were, people would have already abandoned areas that don't have it. I speak from experience. I am not in a rural area, but I am in a broadband blackhole. I have not moved because there are other far more essential reasons for me to stay. I am not "suffering". This is a convenience we are talking about. Not food, shelter, or clothing.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Implicit in many of these debates is the idea that everybody having broadband is a good thing. Why?
Are we going to duplicate the same mistakes that were made with highways? Everybody just had to have paved roads through their county. We tore up rail systems and built roads. Now everybody complains about smog and sprawl. Highway casualty rates are the equivalent of re-fighting the entire Vietnam war every other year.
So what if only a few get broadband? The countryside will be a refuge from the ubiquitous connectivity that can be just as confining as it is liberating. I say, don't subsidize any of this crap. That will just result in more taxpayer expense. Then 50 years from now some unforseen social problem will arise because of it. The same liberals who advocated the subsidy that created the problem will advocate some other subsidy to solve it. Feh!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Broadband isn't a right
. Internet access isn't a right.
In the meantime, the U.S. government is approaching the problem by eliminating regulations on the Baby Bells, which is sort of like combating street crime by taking police officers off the street
Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but with the recent trend towards huge corporate mergers, does this mean that there is a possibility of all the Baby Bells merging to once again form one Big Daddy Bell?
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The AOL-Time Warner-Microsoft-Intel-CBS-ABC-NBC-Fox corporation:
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Pardon my ignorance, but how did the poster arrive at the conclusion that deregulating the baby bells is like removing police officers from the streets?
My best bet right now is for satellite access for my rural home.
Wild Blue is poised to come online in early 2002 and further down the road, Teledesic, in 2005 (scheduled). Unlike current satellite connections, Wild Blue's will be 3Mbps (albeit with high pings (300ms+), nevertheless, it should be affordable and relatively easy to install.
Teledesic's system will be 64Mbps with very low ping times, since it uses Low Earth Orbit satellites (LEOs). I believe this is what is going to change everything. Sure, fiber would be good for you city dwellers, but 64Mbps for a guy in the middle of farm land is pretty good. It will probably be less BW for home users, but they are saying that it will be price competitive, so I'd expect nothing higher than $50/month, but probably more like $30-$40 for 1 to 3Mbps (that's just a guess, tho).
Up until I got my cable modem for the bargain rate of less than $40 a month I was sure I would have to wait on the telephone companies to offer competitive rates to string a T1 into my home...Of course their was ISDN or at that time ramblings about DSL (if you happened to live next door to a switch...) Cox@home solved all my problems for a reasonable fee. I feel sorry for anyone waiting on the "baby bells" for a reasonable solution....Everywhere I turn I am reading articles on how the phone companies have bothched or missed the boat on consumer bandwidth solutions. For me I can just choose to move wherever Cable service is available and cross my fingers that the EULA's do not get to far out of hand.
IMHO
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
In the meantime, the U.S. government is approaching the problem by eliminating regulations on the Baby Bells, which is sort of like combating street crime by taking police officers off the street.
Uh huh. Because as we all know, all good things come from government! We can't trust that no good public sector to actually produce things that people want.
In fact, Michael is right. Clearly things are moving too slow, so the government needs to turn the Internet into a utility! Water pipes are utilities, why not data pipes?
Before you know it, we'll have a nirvana of 100mb fiber running to everyone's home! Universal access at last! And the best of all... a benevolent government running it all, watching out for our best interests. No one getting mislead into choose the eevil AOL, you will only be allowed to choose the friendly, helpful government.
Man, I can't wait until Michael is President.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
That's the thing that irks me. Greed to the point of "That's a good Idea! You can't have it because I want it"
If they can't have it, they gotta stop you from having too. Worse than a bucketful of frogs.
[A bucketful of frogs refers to an old country story of if you have a bunch of frogs in a bucket, when one tries to get out, the others will try to pull the potential escapee back into the bucket.]
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
From the internet to the legislature: "Please leave me alone. I do not wish government regulation or interference. I have only grown to where I am today by you slimy bastards keeping your hands out of the pot as much as possible."
did the democratic party subsidise this article? this article seemed to spew democratic gut beliefs all over. let the governement regulate service providers?! PLEASE! NOT MORE LEGISLATION! WE NEED LESS GOV'T CONTROL!
what i really don't understand is if company A comes to town and builds a fibre internet access where everyone on the network can download ISO's in seconds, and charges 60$ per month, should they have to let company B come to town and "lease" their lines (at a presumably discounted rate) to become a service provider? if I build the network, i sure as hell ain't gonna let someone else come and make money off of it
and on unfair pricing by the current broadbands? i don't see how it's fair to criticize them for being subsidised by their other services (even though i don't read any hard facts of the such). does ford/gm plan to make a profit on every vehicle line they put out? or do they know that a few cerain models are selling at a loss just to keep their vehicles on the road? if a cable company or phone company can provide broadband on the same line that's already going to the home, don't you think they have a right to do so? even if one product isn't making as much money as the other? do all the channels on the cable network make money for the cable company? i would guess that some of those channels are loss leaders as well. it's just a common business practice no matter which industry you're in.
In fact, both Taiwan and Singapore have rolled out fibre to home or neighborhood fibre (where there is a fibre switch on each street and it gets converted to ethernet).
/mentality/ of the industry which is preventing their engineers from spending lots of money to completely rebuild the infrastructure. Much like the US auto industry and the US steel industry, the US telecom will soon fall to the likes of NTT and New Taiwan National Telecom.
The difference between American/European and Asian telecoms is in the maturity level. The Asian telecoms are still very young and are in the expansion state, whereas American/Euro telecoms are embroiled in corporate takeovers, their CEOs trying to make an extra buck, and generally playing the "Ma Bell is in ashes let's fsck" game. The Asian telecoms were virtually nonexistant until the late 1950s and 1960s after they finally recovered from the last world war. At the same time, AT&T was THE evil empire. (Imagine that if you wanted to buy a telephone, you had to buy it from your local AT&T office).
So while the asian telecoms were just building their networks, the Americans and Europeans were laying down T-lines and E-lines, respectively. Thus, it is much easier for Asian telecoms who have not yet "institutionalized" to retrofit their systems. Note that "institutionalization" has nothing to do with "monopolization" nor does it have anything to do with "decentralization". It is the whole
True, broadband access is not, and hopefully never will become, a necessity in the way electricity, water, and fuel are today. However, as more and more services are offered exclusivly on-line, there will be a gap between those with broad-band access, and those with slower access.
An Example:
Here at school all class registration is done on-line via a web-based system. Based on your class standing, you are assigned a period of time in which you can access the system and register for classes for the next term. Everyone with the same class standing registers during the same period of time. For example, everyone in their second sophmore term registered last Monday beginning at 6:00pm. Here is where the inequity between broad-band and traditional access comes into play: If you are registering from the campus LAN (computer labs, dorms, on-campus apartments, etc.) pages load almost instantly, while if you are registering via a modem connection into the university network, pages load much more slowly. The result is that students registering via the campus LAN are more likely to get into their first choice of classes than are those registering via a dial-up connection.
Now lets expand this further. Lets say that many services now provided by traditional means are provided through an application service provider setup. Those without decent bandwidth will become second-class citizens.
We need the government write legislation which provides a fair, competitive market-place, to ensure that everyone has access to broad-band internet. Also, remember that 100 or so years ago, neither electricity, water, phone-service, or natural-gas were a 'utility' by your definition.
Come test your mettle in the world of Alter Aeon!
So a small number of broadband ISP's are set to corner the market and charge high prices. I say, what's the big deal?
Electricity is a true "utility". It is useful, nay, vital for so many daily tasks that there is a real need for the government to regulate the electrical utilities, and prevent monopolization and price gouging. The same is true of water, natural gas, mail, and (to a lesser extent) telephone service.
Internet service is _not_ a utility. So far, internet service is not necessary to perform any daily task. Oh, I'm sure that the "need" for internet service will eventually be forced upon us; I can see a future where companies will start billing customers and sending important notices entirely through e-mail. Broadband access is even less of a necessity. So why should the government involve itself in the business of regulating ISP's?
hyacinthus.
OTOH my friends on the south shore who have Cox @Home have constant service headaches, outages, hacker attacks (you can have your fixed IP address, I *like* PPPoE), have found customer service to be ignorant, unresponsive, and rude, and while they get more bandwidth than I do they don't seem to get what they were promised.
OTOH I've heard of people with similar DSL headaches elsewhere. It all depends on who your provider is and how serious they are.
Oddly, my regular phone service went out last month due to a bad line from house to pole, but the DSL continued to work. I have been using BellSouth FastAccess for about 4 months now and have never had even a 5 minute outage. Go figure.
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The PUD's are planning to send the guy with the cable to your house anyway, though, because it's to their advantage to install the remote meter-reading network. They're willing to pay for him to drag a cable out there anyway. So it's gravy for them to give him fiber instead of copper. They don't have to charge you for the most expensive part of setting up the infrastructure because it's something they would have done themselves anyway to save money on meter readers.
You're right, though, after the wait for cable and painful measurements of house-to-CO distance for DSL, it is pretty ironic that the most rural folks of all may get even better connections than those of us "lucky" enough to be in broadband now.
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