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

Doubtfull

[Kris Thalamus]

It may sound like a good idea, but with so many politicians indentured to big media corporations, I have a hard time imagining that this will turn into anything other than ill-conceived pork-barrel spending.

Re:Doubtfull

[wayward_son]

Graft, corruption, pork, and incompetence must be factored into the cost of any Government project.

That being said, I think it's a good idea. There are many rural areas of the country where broadband could be useful, but it is not profitable to run or maintain a connection out there.

The old REA (Rural Electrification Administration) was highly successful in bringing telephone service and electricity to rural America. Something similar could be done for broadband.

If you were wondering about paying for it, that's simple: cut agricultural subsidies, especially for ethanol. Those are a massive waste of money, and cutting them while providing rural infrastructure would be at worst a wash for rural America, and at best a better deal.

Re:Doubtfull

[cyngus]

As a former resident and student of Iowa I can tell you the ICN was really awesome. I attended a debate and competition host over the ICN once in Iowa. It was also cool to take a bike ride in the country and see the little signs that read
"WARNING: Underground Fiber Optic Cable
ICN"
It was a great idea and its sad that more states haven't followed. If a low population density state which is fairly poor by national standards can build a state of the art communications network, what are the excuses of the rest of the country?

Re:Doubtfull

[Junior J. Junior III]

Whoever modded the above a troll is ignorant of the legislative process. We are not living in a direct democracy. Our elected leaders DO decide a lot of things FOR us. How else do we explain the existence of the IRS?

Re:Doubtfull

[Threni]

> Whoever modded the above a troll is ignorant of the legislative process. We are
> not living in a direct democracy. Our elected leaders DO decide a lot of things
> FOR us. How else do we explain the existence of the IRS?

Yes and no. It's like the UK. We have a Parliamentary Democracy. We elect members to Parliament, and they scurry around doing stuff.

Having said that, if the people really didn't like something, they're more than capable of forming a new party and voting it in. It's ignorance, and propaganda based on ignorance, which is responsible for the state we're in - whether this be the UK or the US.

Re:Doubtfull

[Ween]

You are right, I pay almost $20 a month in taxes and fees on my phone bill. In fact, I pay as much in taxes and fees as I do for the phone line itself. To make matters worse, you cannot get out of paying these fees. No amount of complaining and arguing will do any good. So the dilemma is, do I use cell phones only and pay the cable man for crap I dont want so I can have cable internet, or do I pay the phone man for crap I dont want so I can have DSL. Either way, Im screwed out of my hard earned money.

Re:Doubtfull

[fleener]

That's fine, but if all I want is a meager transfer speed, I end up paying for your high-use needs in the form of higher monthly bills. The cable company will increase rates all around to finance this new "service."

fcc

[Tirel]

The key task of the FCC should be to unwrite old rules and write a few new rules so as to create clear incentives for existing network operators and service providers to build a Big Broadband network. Regulation negatively influences Big Broadband business plans. Currently federal and state regulation causes consumers and taxpayers to pay staggering sums to sustain old networks when much less money could pay for the same services plus additional services and also for the cost of building Big Broadband to every home and business.

Re:fcc

[DaHat]

Nay, regulations are often quite useful and can benefit consumers.

Ever look at some of your cable or cell bills and see as what I think is called the "Universal Access Fee"? Ever wonder where these 'fees's go?

Here in South Dakota, we've got a few big cities (by SD standards) and lots of small ones. Even in some of the medium cities, there is little financial incentive to build out broadband networks to consumers. Such fees go into a pool to provide the needed incentives to network operators to expand their broadband networks out to those who otherwise might be cut off.

As an example of this, since 2000 I believe, South Dakota has had at least a T1 running into each and every public elementary, middle and high school in the state.

I've got friends on farms who surf the net using cable or high-speed wireless, all made possible through such service fees and regulations.

Isn't one of the benefits of the internet it's access to everyone? Shouldn't we help bring such access to all of those in our country who otherwise might be cut off from it and who are willing to pay for it?

Re:fcc

[div_2n]

I know many schools that send LOTS of data upstream and are looking to do streaming video/audio to and from remote schools.

In the boonies this is especially important. In the mountains of Appalachia, for instance, it is not uncommon to have many remote elementary schools that might be seperated from the main office by 30 or 45 minutes on dangerous mountain roads.

They COULD pay someone to drive that distance a couple of times a week to teach a specialty class that is only taught once a week thereby risking their life (think coal trucks overloaded and running people off roads. It DOES happen) each trip subject to snow, ice, etc. OR they could pay that same person to teach it once from any location (whichever is closest) and stream it to all others on their handy T1 line (or better by this new proposal).

There are reasons to do it. That is a real life scenario that I was approached on a consulting basis for a feasibility study.

but.....

[xao gypsie]

that has hidden and surprise costs written all over it. also, i ahve a feeling something like that wouldn't really get near to completion until my children are in highschool (i am as of yet unmarried).

A regulator's dream

[The G]

"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."

Thereby assuring that fast internet access is delivered over a single-point-of-regulation and allowing government licensure to determine how we get the internet for the next five decades.

And this is supposed to be a good idea?
--G

Re:A regulator's dream

[Shakrai]

Wireless is the best last mile solution so far, 802.11g allows plenty of bandwidth for anything any home user is doing today

Have you ever worked for a WISP? I have and let me tell you it's not a good last mile solution to the home user. It's only slightly better then DSL or Cable as a solution for business.

The business owner is more apt to let you put up that 50 foot mast to clear those trees -- or cut one of them down. The home user is going to freak if you suggest putting a 50 foot mast on his roof (or god forbid cut down a tree). If you don't obtain a clear LOS then the service will choke and die the first time it rains. Look at any medium sized US city -- count the trees in the residential neighborhoods. Better yet climb a communications tower and see just how many houses you actually have a clear LOS to.

Then there is the equipment cost -- the cable/dsl people can undercut you because they buy tens of thousands of sets of CPE (customer premise equipment) -- you can't pass the cost of your gear onto the customer when he can go and get a free installation and six months at half price from Roadrunner.

Granted us geeks will buy fixed wireless because it is a cooler solution (there's just something cool about pulling your bits from the air) but us geeks do not make a market -- at least one large enough for a WISP to survive.

Re:A regulator's dream

[$ASANY]

I'm surprised there isn't more comment on this supposed 10s of zillions of dollars that we can supposedly obtain by auctioning off spectrum allocated to HDTV. Given Reed's history in FCC auctions, I'd think there's be a lot more skepticism.

I was part of the team that built the FCC auctions system, back in the "C" block days of the mid-1990s where we would set a new world record in auction "revenues" every few months. This was the initial cell phone stuff that gave us Sprint and the other early wireless providers. We talked about balancing the federal budget solely with FCC auctions revenues for years to come, FCC economists painted rosy pictures about the tsunami of revenue providers would make with all the new services this spectrum would allow, and made these companies think it was worth pledging billions of dollars in order to get their hands on that spectrum. They were heady days.

After these record breaking auctions, where fledgling companies would have to make humongous down payments on their licenses out of their seed capital, these companies built out their networks and started marketing to consumers. The only problem was that they couldn't possibly generate enough revenue to cover their FCC obligations, and they started to default or disappear altogether. Then there was the little matter of the FCC yanking back licenses without following the rules about defaults and auctioning off the defaulted licenses only to have the courts order that spectrum be restored to the appelants after it had been transferred to new licensees.

In the same way that AOL put the screws to the internet revolution with it's "fsck 'em" mentality of squeezing every last dollar from everyone they could mug, the FCC mugged the telecom/wireless industry for everything it could possibly extract and left the industry in the same ruin that AOL helped to create in the dot-com implosion. But this was government, with much bigger weapons to employ in it's greedy neo-capitalist slash-and-burn strategy.

So Reed Hundt wants to do the same with spectrum pledged to the broadcast media to entice them to roll out HDTV, and then squeeze every last dollar possible out of whoever might be interested in using that spectrum. Who's going to finance this? How many investors are eager to finance businesses that have as their only substantial asset an FCC license?

Be very wary of Reed Hundt prognosticating a windfall of billions, and suspicious of any company that thinks it's going to make a good return on investor's money used to buy spectrum at astronomical prices. There was no free money then, and there's certainly not going to be any free money with this same failed idea in the future.

On the right track...

[GreyWolf3000]

But I'd rather see this come from local communities. They could vote on who they outsource the labor to, how much they are willing to pay for, allow people who don't want to participate to "opt out," and also allow communities that want the Internet, but not the HDTV, to have it "their way."

good idea

[spectrokid]

and create a HUMONGOUS monopoly which would have made Ma BELL look tiny... Cut one cable and if 9/11 happens again more then 10 miles away, you'll never know it....

Highly unlikely

[CyberHippyRedux]

Though this sounds like a perfect wet-dream for us all, there's far too much money riding on the current infastructure for this to happen.

Not to mention the political impetus of the anti-big-government crowd, and the rising budget defecits. I believe this prospect would be DOA in any legislature for many years.

Yeah, whatever

[stratjakt]

Is a 10 to 100mbps network fast enough to carry a few dozen HDTV streams, two or three voice conversations, and still have enough bandwidth left over for the interweb to be considered broadband?

Would even a gigabit pipe to my home have enough bandwidth for all that?

Did the submitter misquote, or is this another career politician blowing words out his ass that he doesn't really understand?

Old folks are like that. I have one politician client who's convinced that the quarter of a T1 he shares with the rest of the county is "way fast".

Censorship

[cyrl]

And with one big network, that should make it easy to regulate, RIAA, MPAA, whomever else wants to restrict access

We'll build it, but will they come?

[ajayvb]

Take a look at this; http://100x100network.org/ The government is funding research to build and roll out such networks. My question is: where are the applications? The biggest driver for bandwidth I've seen so far has been KaZaa and the other P2P stuff. Nothing else seem to have spurred bandwidth demand otherwise. I mean, isn't that the only intensive stuff people run on DSL /Cable even now?

Is Reed Hundt the same FCC chief who figured out..

[i)ave]

...that the best way to fund the current HDTV rollout was to force every consumer who buys a new 25"+ Television after 2004 to spend an extra $300 for the built-in (mandatory) terristrial HDTV tuner even though they may not want it or even need it? Thanks, but no thanks.

Government run networks

[seichert]

Besides the obvious civil liberties issues, the government does not have a good history of running networks. Just look at Amtrak.

City Mouse / Country Mouse

[Steve B]

It's just a fact of life that certain things are cheaper to provide in the big city (e.g. comm infrastructure) and other things are cheaper to provide in the boonies (e.g. land). People make their choices accordingly.

Re:WHEN?

[Doesn't_Comment_Code]

Some of the newer housing complexes near me (not my own home) were built with local fiber networks connecting the neighborhood (~= 25 houses). They all have internet access this way. But what's even better is the bandwidth they enjoy within the neighborhood.

It's overkill if you ask me. But they seem to be having a great time downloading from each other's computers and playing multiplayer games with no lag time.

Its already being done in some areas...

[Lord Haha]

My parents live in Northern Virginia, where you can get your phone line in the house replaced with cat6 wires. Basically you get a fancy connection point o the wall and a "smart" box (which is basically a router) in the basement.

The system works quite well, but when it came to home networking, we avoided it, because high-speed internet for us was cable (not using cat anything there) and then we went for a wireless router so that I/my father could easily use our laptops in the house.

Overall Nice idea, but with wireless networking becoming cheaper and cheaper, and is heading towards matching 100mps wired connection speeds, a more realistic thing to do would be to getting digital cable or dsl repeaters out in the world and let home users network however they please.

Why?

[Sentosus]

Why not just provide more spectrum for wireless and lets eliminate the mass of cables for a central source for maintenance and upgrades?

It is a good idea to provide that much bandwidth, but it really shouldn't be wasted on TV Signals. Why not add in a free open library of educational materials? Why not allow it to be used as a replacement for public schools where a student can watch a full video of a teacher without the distractions of a classroom environment?

My biggest issue is that we (Americans) should be more interested in wiring up a good portion of the population to high speed (Always ON) service before we worry about upgrading the network for more bandwidth. Every town over 1500 people should have a high speed connection instead.

HDTV is Less Imporant than 256k Up/Down FOR 90% POPULATION is my Motto.

Re:Why?

[iwadasn]

The answer is simple, wireless will never be a viable solution for lots of people needing lots of bandwidth, end of story.

Don't believe the long winded philosophers, useable spectrum is scarce. If everyone in the country wants to connect to the tower ten miles away at 100 megabit speeds, it's just not gonna happen. There is too little spectrum. Cell phone reception is bad enough, internet, forget about it. My wireless router is almost worthless due to interference from my neighbor's cordless phones or hair dryers, or whatever.

Basically, a single optical fiber can carry a huge volume of bandwidth, far beyond what radio will ever manage, especially considering that my fiber optic line doesn't produce or receive interference.

And before anyone claims that they could just open up more spectrum, let me head that one off at the pass. There is very little useful spectrum. Most spectrum has lots of interference on it, often from thing that humans make (our electrical gadgets) and sometimes from things we don't (cosmic microwave background). Most of what we have should be reserved for radars and important communications, not wasted on my grandmother because it's slightly easier for her to get 10 mb/sec over wireless than 1gb/sec over fiber.

Maxed out?

[ThosLives]

Can anyone tell my just why our (i.e., the US) phone system is "almost maxed out"? The US system has 10 digits (including area code). Even with fax machines, mobiles, and computers, how are we anywhere close to maxing out the 10^10 numbers available? (that's 10 billion numbers, folks - about 1.5 for every person on the planet, or about 33 numbers for every man, woman, and child in the US (using 300 million as a population - which is a slight overestimate).

I know that some area codes are "reserved" but each area code is only 10 million numbers. Does anyone know why there is such a number crunch? I would wager that it is due to poor allocation of numbers rather than a shortage of unique identifiers. (For instance, I've heard rumors of making US phone numbers 11 digits - do we really need 100 billion domestic phone numbers?)

Do we have such poor resource management? (This is even worse than the IPv4 running out of space, which I know is due to allocation and because 2^32 is not even as large as the planet's population).

Comments? Questions?

Re:Maxed out?

[Zog The Undeniable]

The US telephone numbers are allocated quite well, based on size of population. For instance, there is one area code for the whole of Wyoming, because few people live there (I understand there are some big hills...).

Conversely, the UK system was based on *centres* of population. So a small market town gets as many numbers as a medium-sized city. This is why UK phone numbers have had to be rehashed a couple of times. We were very close to running out of numbers in London, Reading, Leicester, Bristol etc.

Re:Sign me up!

[JaredOfEuropa]

Ahh yes, universal broadband, complete with government beaurocracy, paid for by taxpayers, funneled directly to the wallets of media industry campaign contributors' wallets.

However horrendous the service that state companies or state-run programmes provide, there is one thing that they are actually quite good and even efficient at (at least over here): building and running a public infrastructure. State companies so far have been able to provide excellent infrastructure for electricity, telephony, gas, and public transport.

Since a few decades, more and more of such utilities have been turned into private enterprise. The result? Prices have not gone down a lot, and in some cases (railways), the physical infrastructure has suffered. The notable success of privatisation has been in the level and quality of service, something that state companies are notoriously bad at. So all in all, I do think privatisation has been a success.

I'm very much a believer in the free market, but I think that there is something to be said for state-run infrastructure: for example, a high-speed Internet network to every door. Let private enterprise provide the backbone networks, the services, and so on, but let a state-run company take care of the connection to each house. Our government should have done this with the old telephony network... paid-for by taxpayers, but now in the hands of the formerly state-run PTT, who wilfully and blatantly frustrate any attempt by other companies to enter in the voice telephony business, since that is still their own core business as well. Mark my words: if one company is offered the job of hooking up everyone to this fast Internet (or perhaps everyone in a particular region), you will see that they or a sister company will want to undertake offering the actual Internet service to customers as well... it will be in their own best business interests to thwart other companies offering competitive services.

{insert name here} has already done this

[victor_the_cleaner]

{$Company Name} Business Plan:

Let's see....we'll lay a bunch of fiber, way beyond the current demand, because as soon as we turn it on people will come out of the woodwork to lease it!

I can think of a few companies that we can plug in here, Qwest comes to mind first though.

And how much is this going to cost us?

[BarFly143]

It only cost me a one-time $23 investment for my UHF RadioShack antenna that delivers all the OTA HDTV programming I want from ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, PBS. Why would I want to start paying a monthly fee again for some highly-regulated, monopolized system that will most assuredly introduce a whole new slew of security issues?

Re:Sign me up!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been pushing for this for years.
Some cities have done it already. It makes a lot of sense!

Goverment does the roads. Why can't they do the fibre to the home too? They regulate stuff a ton as it is, making the "private" phone/cable networks closer to belonging to the government anyway. (such as forcing the corps to reach people further out of the city---that is why everyone can have a phone)

They also force the telco to share it's phone lines with others.

These local corps are constantly fighting with the regulators to cheat us all the time. I bet you the cost of government corruption is half the crap spent on the greedy corps playing games. (not to mention the never ending lawsuits by the cities to make comcast abide by its contract.)

One thing though, don't let the gov run the network. Leave that to private companies. Just provide the fibre to the home.

All sorts of small business ISPs would spring up all over the place!

What about existing platforms that show potential?

[DOCStoobie]

What would happen to all existing TELECOM companies?? Second, Cable(hybrid fiber-coax) using a new standard that is now being rolled out (DOCSIS 2.0) can push 10 Mbps in both directions, and by using digital compression, can squeeze enough HDTV down the pipe, an also have dedicated spectrum for voice traffic(be it VOIP or POTS modulated over COAX). So they can use their spectrum efficiently, keep all three services separate(as far as throughput goes) so that intense data trafic doesn't affect voice or video. SOUNDS LIKE A DECENT PLATFORM TO ME...... OH YEAH.....and they arent ran by BIG BROTHER....

Nope

[Mr. Underbridge]

Nothing else seem to have spurred bandwidth demand otherwise. I mean, isn't that the only intensive stuff people run on DSL /Cable even now?

Nope. If you count cable, it's definitely TV, which runs on the same pipe as your broadband. I don't mean that to be a smartass comment, because on the proposed network, they plan to carry a lot of HDTV. Read uphill a bit from your comment, and there's a guy wondering if gigabit would be enough to carry all that.

I don't know which of the two of you is right, though. ;)

Taxes Benefit Large Carriers Over Smaller Ones

[Doug Dante]

The State of Michigan created about $1 billion in loan guarantees to bring broadband to every citizen. We have both urban (Detroit, Grand Rapids) and rural areas (the Upper Peninsula)

SBC gets the vast majority of that money.

There are innovative small business people using wireless links between grain towers to bring broadband to rural areas, and they don't get a dime.

Cellular data carriers are also not eligible.

This just makes the inefficient infrastructure of large carriers more cost competitive at taxpayers expense.

Michigan citizens would be better off if they were able to get direct subsidies for a portion of the most expensive basic broadband services. For example, allow me to get a subsidy of $25 on a $100 per month "basic" broadband bill, while my friend gets no subsidy on her $50 per month bill. I could either apply for the subsidy directly, or the carrier could collect it for me and subtract it from my bill with my written permission.

If it aint broke.

[StillNeedMoreCoffee]

When the power goes out in your house. You can still pick up the phone and call, assuming you have some phones that don't rely on house power. When the phone drops on the floor, it still works. The wires are in place in your home and to the switch.

There is a place for a stable tried and true technology for basic communication.

Although the internet seems very stable the local distribution systems are suseptible to network hanky panky that the current system is not.

The ability to listen in and record your conversations and transactions and internet queries would be enhanced. Now with the Patriot Act (actully a misnomer) there is a much higher probablility that your life will be scrutinized by those currently in power without your knowlege and more importantly without oversight or accountablilty. That is an extremely scary and dangerous thing.

I would imagine that the current power structure would love to have a central control of all communications you recieve, be able to monitor all communication you give. What a wonderful world. First the courts and then the media. 1984 where are you.

And I remember when the electro-magnetic spectrum was public domain albiet regulated. Now with legislation it is sold and owned and it is illegal for you to even listen to certain frequencies. Radio's can't be sold in the US if they can tune certain frequency bands. Who are these people?

Possibly not...

[Svartalf]

If they're the ones rolling out the bandwidth, they win- BIG. In a 100Mbit situation, you're looking at video on demand, VoIP, etc- all of which works in a manner much like what people really, really want. Bill it in some flat rate per block of bytes, give everyone a base free amount of bandwidth, and tell them to go play. The company that can manage all of this without going broke in the rollout and sets the billing properly, will win big.

This is a no brainer

[robo45h]

To all the naysayers posting here, I'll quote the article which quotes "The Valley": You don't get it. You're a /. reader using the Internet at its best, but you don't get it. "Big broadband" (as the article calls it) is the future. All the commotion we currently have about getting DSL or Cable modems or slow fixed wireless or sattelite broadband is just plain silly. The further commotion about VoIP over the current "Little Broadband" is even sillier. OK, /.ers, I'm sure you can get this. I've seen quite a lot of new housing develpments constructed recently here in (formerly) rural Chester County PA. And I've seen tons being built in Las Vegas (consistantly one of the fastest growing cities in the US for the past few years). Can you believe in this day and age we're still pulling several ancient copper wire pairs (same exact technology as Mr. Bell himself used) to each new home built? Plus, we also pull a coax-cable? Plus, when the home owner runs into the horrible service and high rates of the local cable monopoly, they slap a satellite dish on their house? This is for *new* construction! At this point in history, we should be pulling fiber to each new home built and just peeling off bandwidth for TV, HDTV, VoIP, Internet, etc. Google. You'll find that it's already being done by "smart" communities -- and not just for new construction. Five cities in Utah I believe recently announced plans. Kutztown PA was a pioneer. It's not a quesiton of "if" it should be done. We will fall further behind other countries like South Korea if we do not do it. Plus, as my little example and the article clearly point out, it's actually cost effective. It's a question of when it will happen, and how. There are tons of political and special interest issues to be dealt with. And how should it be regulated and managed? I like the way it's currently happening. Local municipalities are installing the networks and managing them as local utilities. This eliminates "big Government" issues. It doesn't eliminate the inefficiencies of government vs. free business -- but the "last mile" element of providing connectivity is pretty much doomed to be dealt with as a regulated utility / monopoly of some sort, whether it's telephone, cable, power or even natural gas. Perhaps each municipality should go out to bid and let companies compete to construct the system and operate it for the first 10 years. The bids would include construction cost and also the absolutely guaranteed consumer rates (even if they are rates that include increases over the 10 year period). After the contract is up, companies bid on operating and maintaining the network for the next 10 years. The actual ownership of the network remains with the local municipality. Perhaps use a state PUC umbrella to govern and coordinate these things. but the PUC is so beholdin' to the utilities they supposedly regulate here in PA that I'm not too fond of this model.

The bandwidth trend is down, not up

[Animats]

If you look at what's actually happening with DSL and cable, the trend on bandwidth delivered to the end user is downward, not uppward. When DSL first launched, a typical product was SDSL with 1.5Mb/s in each direction. Now, entry level is 384/128Kb/sec, and you can't get more than 384Kb/s upstream DSL at any price. Even though the technology is symmetrical.

Cable modems show a similar trend, as cable companies hang more people on without adding more cable segments, routers, and fibre uplinks.

This is a marketing decision, not a technical one.

Re:The government can't do networks.

[17028]

Yea, and long live the urban legends!

Re:Doubtful

[ldspartan]

Try prefacing a search term with define: in google; it gets me pretty good results. For instance:

Pork Barrel

--
lds

Re:Buying parts of the spectrum?

[Carnildo]

How much for the visible light part? If someone bought that part, could they sue you for seeing?

Some college kids in Australia got an exclusive license to the 550nm spectral band, and had a few days of fun threatening to sue anyone making unauthorized use of it. Of course, the license was revoked in a hurry once the regulatory agency realized 550nm was the color "yellow".

Doubtful, not Doubtfull

[captain igor]