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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.
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?
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".
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.
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!
"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?
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.
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).
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"