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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."
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.
"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
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."
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
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.
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?
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
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".
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
And with one big network, that should make it easy to regulate, RIAA, MPAA, whomever else wants to restrict access
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?
...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.
-- I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous
Besides the obvious civil liberties issues, the government does not have a good history of running networks. Just look at Amtrak.
Stuart Eichert
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.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
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.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
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 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.
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?
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
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.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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?
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.
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?
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.
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".
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.