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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."
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."
Entertainment? Funny, I primarily use my broadband access for work. I guess that changes broadband access to a "Multiple-use" classifcation. Anyhow, your local/municipal government is already in the "entertainment" business -- they probably have a senior citizen's club, a little league team, some sort of recreation fields, maybe a new year's eve celebration...The list goes on. Just because you may only use your network access to play some poker game doesn't mean that other people may use it for other purposes.
As for the private sector handling your business, what do you think will happen in the next few years? DSL from several vendors will switch into Verizon DSL, and that's about it. All the other smaller providers will be muscled out, but that's another topic. You really only have the choice of two cable (most likely only one) providers, satellite is slow and is being phased out, and dialup is for webtv, or something.
The variety of choice for broadband is going to lessen over the next few years, so as i see it, it would benefit both myself and my community to have a network connection utility that would have to answer to the people (publicly run or regulated) rather than a private company whose main interest is profit.
As for big brother -- if someone wants to monitor you, they'll monitor you, whether you've got earthlink or anything else. Worrying about that is like pissing into the wind.
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"