Former FCC Chief Touts "Big Broadband"

Anonymous Coward writes "Reed Hundt has a vision about building a 10 to 100 Mbps network for every household in the U.S. He makes a great case for why it should be done and how we can pay for it. What's interesting about this piece is that Hundt advocates a new approach to universal service. Instead of giving away broadcast spectrum (for HDTV) and maintaining (ancient, inflexible) phone lines, we should spend money on building out a next generation fiber network to every household, and run both HDTV and phone over that network. Then we can stop funding the phone network (which is pretty much maxed out anyway) and sell off the HDTV spectrum for 10s of billions of dollars."

Comments

You don't think it could be useful?

[danaris]

Maybe they don't do anything right now that needs the upstream, but guess what? That's at least in part because it would cost $$$$ to get that upstream! If the state would pay for T1s for the schools, I guarantee you plenty of teachers (and administrators) would find good uses for them--like, oh, maybe running a decent school website? Providing streaming feeds of sporting events? Or graduation? I bet the art departments would love it, at least those with classes dealing in video--they could put the students' projects up online so that everyone could enjoy them, rather than just those who care enough to go find where they kept the VHS of it and borrow it.

Granted, it is expensive. But acting like it's useless is a dangerous attitude for schools these days--just about any technology can find its full potential in schools, if the interest and money are there.

Dan Aris

No one cares

[Wesley Felter]

Seriously, no one cares about the pedantic electrical engineering definition of broadband. Languages change over time.