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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.
Goddamned Tom Selleck told me I would be able to watch any movie ever made anywhere, anytime. I should kick his ass!
And what about that moon city?!!! The moon belongs to America! And clean, cheap fusion power stations are only 10 years away!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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
...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
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.
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...
Oh yeah, because my city council completely ignores the morality police and listens to me.
What city do you live in? I want to move there.
KFG
I thought the article was interesting, but I have a couple of questions that the writer completely ignored.
First, as someone above mentioned, if the FCC were to regulate this in any way, would that mean that they could impose decency standards to the content delivered? I would hope not, but I can see the FCC trying to do it.
Second, would the services coming over the physical medium be purchased from the group that maintains the physical structure? Or would you be free to shop around? Would we have cable providers or would you order your channels directly (e.g. directly order HBO, comedy central, etc. seperately - a la carte)?
Third, what about tying in cellular phones? Basically like using VOIP and wireless access points. If you have the fiber everywhere, just add the access points to act as cell towers.
-dave
/., where "Apple and Google provide Iran with nukes" will be refuted with "But Microsoft is a convicted monopolist"
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?
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).
Taking care of public networks -- whether they are roads, water, power, telecomm, etc -- is exactly what local/regional governments should do (preferably with federal support). They have the necessary scope for the job, and unlike commercial interests they don't have disincentive to spend money on routine maintenance and expansion.
Let private enterprises compete fairly at the back end to provide whatever goods and services are sent down the pipes. Let government provide said pipes for all to use, unlike our current highly cutthroat but also highly inefficient networks.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.
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.
MichiganDan writes:
The Iowa Communications Network provides an interesting case study in ways that networks, concieved by politicians, can indeed be built without excessive pork attached.
This is absolutely incorrect. ICN has been a terrible failure, and is actually being prepared to be sold off to rid the state of Iowa of the nightmare. Here in Des Moines, it has become a third rail in the legislature for many years because of the increasing budget impact. It already takes much of the state's cigerette settlement as well as a large demand on the general budget. Worst of all, it's so poorly run and the fiber technology increasingly outdated that there is no end in sight, other than dumping it.
Some facts on the ICN disaster:
1. It's just about to be put on the block. See the ICN website for details on legislation being drafted to sell off the pieces of the ICN to whoever will bid on them.
2. It has been an administrative mess. ICN has had issues in the past several years with telecom fraud (they apparently weren't equipped to prevent toll fraud). Their IP service to schools has been so poor (due to budget issues, inefficiencies, competence challenges) that many schools have simply left, only to find faster service at lower costs from the private sector. My children's school has a T1 connection through ICN, but sees typically 50-80 kbps speeds on the ICN piece (as tested from their router - we had to look at why the classrooms were getting faster speeds on dialup). Upstream, the word is that ICN just hasn't purchased the necessary capacity to service what they have sold. This is further indication that they are not truly representing costs, even though they're terribly in the red.
3. The original design was a pork barrel benefit, which doomed the project out of the gates. I worked for a carrier that was asked to bid on the original RFP in the early 1990s. The RFP was puzzling - it appeared that it was intended to fail. Upon further inquiry, we learned that a coalition of incumbent telephone providers had manipulated the RFP design in a manner to ensure the project would fail. They expected they would end up with the network (built at taxpayer expense) in a few years. Given the present asset sale proposal, this may indeed be finally happening.
it *can* be done without the pork and failure.
ICN is nothing but pork and failure, unfortunately. Please, don't make our state's mistake in yours!