Universal Broadband Access

meehawl writes: "Wall Street Journal has this on proposed new Government regulation and tax breaks to encourage Universal Broadband Access. This idea appears to be gaining ground. Whether this becomes a public good (Universal Service, the Interstates, the USPS) or just another corporate welfare program (or perhaps a mixture of both?) remains to be seen." Another submitter sent in an interesting story about broadband in France.

Comments

Has Someone Gone Mad?

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

From the article:

"It is critically important for the United States to adopt a national broadband policy that encourages investment in new broadband infrastructure, applications and services -- particularly new last mile broadband facilities," said Craig Barrett, CEO of Intel Corporation. "Regulatory policies should encourage all companies to deploy these expensive and risky facilities."

Unless I'm reading something wrong here, is this guy encourging companies to hurry up and try like crazy to go belly up?!? He says straigt out deploy these expensive and risky facilities. He SAYS they are risky AND expensive, but in the same breath thinks EVERY company should do it for the last mile connections.

WTF?

For the love of God...

[saberworks]

...please don't turn broadband internet access into the shambles that is the "modern" telephone system. People think Microsoft is a monopoly, but I'll tell you what, Qwest is the monopoly in this area. Most (if not all?) areas have a single telephone company that services everyone, so basically, if you have a problem with the company, you have absolutely no choice but to deal with their crap.

For instance, Qwest promised me 7cents a minute long distance, but when the bill came, it was $800 - they were charging me 25cents a minute because of a computer operator error on their part.

At the time I was working solely online, and I used the telephone lines to access the internet for my job - so guess, what? If I didn't pay them $800, they were going to switch off my phone (and thus completely removing my livelihood). Even after 6 months straight of talking to them on the phone once a week, they never gave me a credit. I was promised, at least a dozen times, that my account would be credited - but it never was. Turns out the "Customer Service Representatives" just put in a request for credit, and these secret guys in the back (that they wouldn't let me talk to, no matter how I begged) were in charge of actually issuing it. Well apparently they didn't agree with the CSR that kept promising me credits.

Anyway, I didn't mean for this to turn into a rant about Qwest, but the point is, don't give us this local monopoly crap that we have to deal with for phone, electricity, etc. Soon as we have that, we'll have them supporting only one operating system, overcharging, giving us crap "privacy policies" like Qwest's new one (they should call that an "anti-privacy policy").

Great new term for Users!

[ArcSecond]

"Internautes" = Internauts. I like it. Not so much "surfing" as an epic sea voyage. With sirens and cyclopses and a golden fleecing at the end of it all...