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Why Municipal Broadband is Good
batageek writes "An excellent interview with Jim Baller (muni-telco-lawyer) concerning the growth and efforts of municipal broadband providers and the fights they go through with the incumbent providers and state legislatures." If you're wondering why you don't have fiber-to-the-home yet, read this.
Broadband access is becoming the new extended basic utility.
Just like Gas, Electricity, Water, cable, etc. Instead of Cable coompanies having a monopoly on access, and being about to set there rates as they see fit, I'd welcome a utility regulatory group be put in place.
"This must be a Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays."
Electricity is required for a minimum standard of living. If municipal water & sewer is not available, they can be handled with wells and septic tanks. Arguably, telephone service (wire or wireless) is necessary for emergency 911 service. Broadband internet, like cable television, is a luxury. The government is plenty big already without getting into the entertainment business. How much easier is it for big brother to monitor you if they are providiing the access?
I have the choice of cable, DSL from several vendors, satellite, and dialup. The private sector is handling my business just fine.
1. Is this a fact???
3. Do this guy cares if that's truth????
Answer:
Niyyaa....
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
Around where I live, one can get a decent cable or DSL broadband connection for a fair price. However, to get optimal broadband, and I mean really optimal, you need to have a fiber-optic connection into every house. Think of how great that would be - streaming audio and video, ability to download whole CDROM ISOs in incredibly short amounts of time. (You really need that if you want to download RH8 and 9.)
The problem with this is that it's so darn expensive. Those fiber-optic connections have to be perfect. It's just too expensive to put that in on a mass scale. It would be great if the government could fund that. But you have to wonder whether society will really benefit from everyone having a super-fast connection. Would these fast speeds be used as a tool or as entertainment?
Actually, I don't always blame the corporations. But in this case, they're apparently lobbying to prevent municipalities from doing FTTH. That's the downside of profit maximizing. Rather than creating "stuff" for the public good, they are spending money to control politics.
There have been some interesting economic studies of this phenomenon. To summarize, when companies start spending profits to secure more profits, rather than create new goods, the economy starts to go downhill.
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
Ding, ding, ding ding....
You hear that? That's the clue train. ya just missed it.
Where to start.
Explain to me how Comcast has competition? DSL is NOT competition for Comcast Internet services (this is not an arguable point BTW).
Of course its competition! Competition is defined as two companies who have the same product with differing circumstances (its not Webster's, but its good enough). That means if people have another option at high speed internet, they might *gasp* just take it! This means that Comcast might have to lower their prices OR up their customer service (which is crap) in order to keep the customers they have.
If the phone companies or local municipalities up their interest in high speed internet (adding CO's in rural areas, et al), then this is what we call "competition."
Force the "natural monopolies" (their words, not mine) to compete instead of taking over and doing what they want.
There is still a choice involved. And hell, if everyone is running off the muni's bandwidth, and cable is shared bandwidth, then you're cable access is going to be mighty fine (assuming that comcast ups the bandwidth limit for "basic" customers).
Again, this is competition. You are still left with a choice, even if its not the one you like.
Why do you think Comcast immediately starts the propoganda machine as soon as muni's get this idea in their head? Think about it, and the answer might come eventually.
Lumpy is right. If you actually learn about fiberoptics before you pan someone's idea you might be able to make smart posts.
I think you misunderstood your parent. How do you know that you will never want more bandwidth to every single home than "a technology that is easier to terminate and cheaper to work with" can provide? It doesn't matter if neighbouring blocks collectively can have a 1Tbps connection if the last 50 meters is twisted pair. As you implied, if you run fiber up to your home, you will never have to upgrade your cabling, but any copper- or airborne technology will become outdated.
The world will end in 5 minutes. Please log out.
By contrast, look at France where people TRUST the State. Working for the State is not demeaned, and people see it as an honour, and there are those prestigious Grandes Écoles (great schools) who turn-out nothing but extremely competent bureaucrats (those schools skim the cream of the crop of each schools in France - they accept only the best of the best students). The result is extremely efficient and well-run public corporations and utilities, say like the SNCF which operates the largest network of the fastests trains in the known universe.
Instead of whining against filling forms, why don't you do something positive like trying to fix those problems by, say, bringing more smartness to their process???
As long as the anglo-saxons will have that shit-for-brains attitude against the State, you will get the shitty public service you rightfully deserve.
The government doesn't have to be an ISP. I think they should be willing to help put in place infrastructure, like fiber lines, or whatever other kind of lines you want to use.
These lines can be used by any schmoe company to sell service. I used an example, in my previous posting, of roads. The roads are the infrastructure, whereas the actual service comes from Ford, Chevy, Toyota, or wherever.
The point of the whole story seemed to me to be that the telco companies aren't going to put up new infrastructure because at this point, (and forever at this rate) it's not profitable to do so.
If we have the government grant money to municiplaities to put the infrastructure in place, then they can sell to their heart's content all of the service they wish. In the end they would end up with a bigger customer base. How's that not good for business?
Speak for yourself.
Hi,
And in places where gas prices are regulated its gone up too, because demand has increased and resources are dwindling which leads to incrased prices.
You can't effectively import it from outside of North America easily so cheap gas from other nations who have an excess doesn't help us at all.
There is an empending energy crisis in the US, your increases in energy costs are the warning and not completely releated to deregulation.
Later,
MarkV.
If government let the market handle everything, there'd be no point to bribing government officials, so that money would go somewhere else, namely, to trying to stay ahead of the competition.
If we let the market handle everything, there'd be no need for bribing the government. Corporations would do whatever they wanted to, and we'd be working 12 hours a day for starvation wages. That's the problem with the Randite pipedream - it has as little to do with reality as Communism.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
NG prices went up because nearly every new power plant being built is gas fired. Insert obligatory rant about environmentalist wackos preventing nuclear power plant construction. (Yes, wind and solar when practical, but we'll still need nukes.)
Like pumping highly explosive gas through residential neighborhoods is safe.
Bubba aint a world traveler. But I have read South Korea has some of the best and most affordable internet service. Bubba has also read that one major factor in its success is the wise intervention of the South Korean government. Anybody knowledgeable first hand about this???
HenryJamesFeltus.com
"The problem with the idea of endless worker slavery is that it ignores the fact that eventually labor is no longer plentiful and companies bid up the price on it as much as any other business input. Beyond that, labor does tend to differentiate its pricing based on worker treatment. If you have two equivalently paid jobs, the one that features working for a bad boss will simply not be your choice.
Good treatment of workers lowers labor costs and more and more businesses are figuring that out. "
This would work, if it was a perfect world. You are assuming the Invisible Hand permits a worker to move wherever he needs to; you must assume he has a working vehicle that can move him long distances if necessary. You assume the worker can, after rent and car and medical, can save enough money to switch jobs, with the attendent delay between paychecks.
And you must factor in having a family to support. They need not only food, but stability. Changing jobs and moving every six months is not an option when the kids are in school.
And also, factor in being married. You can't willy-nilly move around the country when your wife or husband has a paying job.
And factor in this: only about 1 in 4 people get a college education. A small percentage of those in turn will not be in careers, like IT, that permit job shopping for advancement.
And factor in: if you have any medical conidtion, at all, you most likely will not be covered under the insurance at your new job. Preexisting condition.
Worker slavery? Yep. Left to their own devices, corporations will shape all ends to their goals. And they are. They want us lower paid, with sinking benefits, locked to the job, and fireable at the least excuse. And no unions, please.
Sorry to be negative, but it is true. Worker choice, for the vast majority, is shrinking to non-exisitence.
Enviromental Wacko's are Nuts... The harm done by Nuclear power plants is extreamly minimal when compared to the dammge done by Burning/Destorying Unrenewable resources... Lets use all the urainum to make power.. not weapons so that terrorists can get thier hands on em and nuke the world.
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt