Broadband Obstacles

Strange Beer writes: "The Washington Post is running a story discussing many of the roadblocks and speedbumps that Telcoms and ISPs have encountered while trying to rollout broadband. Not surprisingly, most of the obstacles were built by them." The government approach is dysfunctional. Broadband prices are going up - 25% or more in the last six months. Simultaneously rollouts have stopped except in metropolitan areas, and the Bell monopolies are busy finishing off the last independent DSL providers. This is the "free market" in action (government-sponsored monopolies crushing independents), and therefore unquestionable in the US today, and it's also the reason why people aren't getting high-speed access. The only solution suggested in this article is to essentially browbeat citizens into overpaying for high-speed service that they don't want and probably isn't offered in their area, solely so that the MPAA can sell us movies on demand, if they ever decide to do so. What exactly is the thought process here?

Comments

Re:You /. people really like the word "monopoly"

[Luquid]

It's true that Bell and everyone like them are giving DSL access to the people at a lower cost than most other companies. The only problem is that they're doing this to blow any smaller companies out of the water.

Now if the second part of what you said was true, and these larger companies were doing the best business they could, then I wouldn't be typing this right now, but the fact is that half the time they're a bunch of bumbling idoits. Just recently I had to yell at an AT&T tech so they would fix router problems that they didn't even know they had.

Also, the fact that something becomes a monopoly is actually inherently bad. In fact there are a number of US and Canadian laws to prevent it. There are also laws that prevent software pirating and a lot of people don't care about them, but I'm guessing by the looks of "your" homepage you aren't one of those people.