Where Is The Broadband?

gouldtj writes "First Monday is running an article in its current issue entitled: The many paradoxes of broadband. It discusses some of the issues and ideas behind broadband, but seems to focus on: Where is it? There is also a really nice discussion on the telecom industry in general, along with the .com boom."

Comments

Re:posted from 28.8 dialup

[scoove]

Compare this to the US where if you live in a small town you are pretty screwed.

Not true. My home town (population 997) has excellent broadband. $35/month. I'm obviously biased, as my company covers one-third of the state providing broadband to communities as small as 400. And guess what? Nobody fleeced a taxpayer to make this happen. Not one cent of gubmint money made this happen.

We tried various broadband wireless connections but they were highly unreliable.

Interesting. In our part of the state, DSL has that reputation. It comes in 128 kbps (advertised, though at 6 pm, the fractional T1 that the incumbant LEC uses for Internet egress is filled up with P2P and other stuff, so you get about 40-50 kbps... dialup, over that $70/month DSL).

Bottom line is that no technology works well when it's operated by incompetent providers, or folks who just don't plain care anymore. Drive past your service provider's office at 4:30 pm. If there are no cars (all gone golfing), don't count on them working hard to give you good service.

*scoove*