Slashdot Mirror
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."
UTOPIA, which still has yet to make an entrance in Utah...will this ever come?
**It runs through my veins like radioactive rubber pants! Do not deny my veins!**
The post contains an exact quote from the article, nothing more
You are correct in part, however when you're buying bandwidth at the state level, for the entire state system you can get decent prices from the telco's. :) shhh though, that's our little secret.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Talk about old news... or maybe just good predicting - this was part of my networking class 10 years ago.
First, there was supposed to be FTTC (Fiber To The Curb) and then FTTH (Fiber To The Home) to replace the telephone network. FTTC has been partially implemented in some areas. The Cable company has moved on this much faster than the phone company, though. FTTC is basically fiber optic cable to a neighborhood, and POTS (Plain Old Telephone System for the acronym impared) from there to the home. The shorter distance to the digital switch (the fiber) allows faster connections on the local line - sorta how 56k modems required a certain distance to the CO(Central Office of the phone company) to get their speed boost - basically, the signal can only run at a certain speed for a certain distance before getting distorted and unusable.
FTTH would be great, but I'm not counting on it anytime soon - I saw the estimated cost years ago, and I could see why FTTC was deemed feasible and FTTH not.
So you're against the military? The federal highway system? What about all those other programs that your tax dollars have gone to over the years that have benefited you either directly or indirectly?
By what you're saying, though... do you think people should just leave small towns and farms in a mass exodus? You should spend some time out here and see the quality of life. I've got an hour commute each day where my average speed is 65 mph! I do this because I live in a nice small town of 6200 people where nothing happens. Take a look at a local telivison stations web site, or the local news paper of Sioux Falls, the biggest city in the state. What do you see? Very little in terms of violence or conflict often times. Big news here is when our former governor and congressmen does something stupid and gets himself convicted of manslaughter.
I grew up in the Minneapolis area of Minnesota and deliberately moved out here for college and have stayed afterwards to get away from over crowdedness, traffic, and many of the other less then fun aspects of big city life.
If you think we are devoid of culture you only show your ignorance to some of the original cultures on this continent.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
No, that was Michael Powell, the current chairman.
To be clear, it's not an HDTV tuner that's required, but an ATSC tuner - a digital tuner, in other words.
Television broadcasters are on the air in many locations with digital signals that you can't receive with standard analog tuners. In order to reclaim the spectrum from the analog stations, it's necessary to reach a "critical mass" of digital tuners in the field.
Basically, it's the chicken/egg thing all over again.
It's very, very nice. We are supposed to get 10 Mbps symmetric, but typical speeds are a bit lower (something like 7-9). Granted that is somewhat confabulated by our use of WiFi at home as well. (Streaming full screen video to your laptop in bed... so what are YOU watching, eh?) Bandwidth-intensive applications were encouraged, last time I checked. Some TV stations are available as are movie downloads (real VoD!) and telephony.
Cost is similar to DSL or cable here and is around SEK 400/mo or about USD 55. (Current exchange rates make that look higher than it feels here.)
There is a similar service in Italy from Fastweb and in Iceland (I think by Reykjavik Energy).
The UTOPIA optical-fiber-to-home plan for Utah seems to be a sensible business plan for using public bonds to bring fiber to 18 cities, but it is (surprise) getting hammered by representatives from the local phone and cable companies, Qwest and Comcast. While their representatives don't seem to mind driving to legislative hearings on public roads, they do seem set against letting this project go ahead.
One of the two area papers, the nominally non-LDS, liberal-ish one that is dominant in the affected metro area, doesn't like UTOPIA either, and thus covers it from that perspective.
In another current, pressing theme, local politicians and newspapers fret over how to best bring high-paying high-tech (back) into the state.
Does anyone have good examples of good high speed networks that bring in or otherwise enable the formation and growth of new industry? I would like to have these to forward to the UTOPIA folks and key legislative offices. (Disclosure: I am an ECE prof. at a U in the UTOPIA footprint.) The Utah legislature is in session for another couple of weeks.
Also, in many areas, T1 prices are about half of that now, mostly due to implimentation of HDSL2 signaling.
Look at your NIU rack if you have HDSL2 lines and you'll see why it's cheeper - the telco side only uses one pair of copper now.
Who writes this bullshit? The "phone system" is definitely NOT "maxed out". In the 1990s, telcos put many, many miles of fiber in the ground, and in general increased the capacity of their switching stations. At the same time, research in fiber optics lead allowed them to increase the bandwidth of EXISTING cables.
.com booom), and now there isn't ENOUGH demand for it.
The long-haul telcos are sitting on far, far more bandwidth than they have consumers for. That's why the telco industry has been in a slump for years -- they invested tons of money in capacity (during the
Yes, we would all like to have 100Mb/s to the desktop. However, part of being an adult is realizing that wishing doesn't get you jack shit. Money does.
"pork barrel" spending is another name for wasted government money. It is an epithet used to cast FUD over whatever is being targeted. Commonly used in reference to NASA, military spending, members of Congress getting federal funding for their home states, etc. etc.
Only recently has some morons (fcc) decided that broadband = fast. That couldn't be further from the truth. Simply put, broadband = multiple channels of analog signaling (frequency division multiplexing).
Chances are if we do get 10/100 access at home it won't be broadband. It will be baseband, which would be multiple channels of digital signaling (time division multiplexing).
-Nick
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson