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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.
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."
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.
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.