FCC Chair Says Broadband Top Goal

Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "FCC chairman Kevin Martin says 'his top goal is to increase Americans access to high-speed Internet,' the Wall Street Journal reports. 'Late last week, he began circulating plans to loosen rules so neither phone nor cable companies will be required to share their Internet connections with competitors like America Online, a change that essentially would create a duopoly in many local markets. He also embraces the idea that local governments should be allowed to offer wireless Internet services, at least in rural areas where some phone and cable companies balk at providing high-speed service.' The Journal also has a transcript of its interview with Martin, in which he discusses indecency and whether broadcast rules should also apply to satellite and cable."

Comments

nothing but hot air.

[Lumpy]

He wants to energize the deployment of broadband in America?

remove all restrictions. Allow municipal wifi. Allow everything. Disallow cities from forcing companies to pay extortion to them in "franchise fees", one of the biggest hurdles and deterrents to small business starting up in an area.

when i see real solutions from the FCC then we will see real progress..

Re:nothing but hot air.

[MosesJones]

remove all restrictions. Allow municipal wifi.

Remove all restrictions... and get the tax-payer to subsidise it...

AN interesting approach.

US... Health care for the rich... Wi-Fi for everyone.

Re:nothing but hot air.

[DigiShaman]

Let just subsidise everything while we are at it. I mean, only the government knows what's best for a free society.

Seriously, when the fuck are we going to draw the line. The more the government taxes you, the lest free capitol you have left over to make your own free choices and purchases.

Government should only get funding from it's citizens for military, fire, police, and transportation.

Re:nothing but hot air.

[hackstraw]

Disallow cities from forcing companies to pay extortion to them in "franchise fees"

In looking at my bills, there is a neatly itemized bill that is outside of all advertised pricing that says: "franchise fee".

So to me it seems like I am being extorted, not the poor company.

Now, lets wait until the FCC has fucked up the internet like phones and collects about 33% of the bill due to various FCC fees for the privilege of using the internet like I have for over 10 years already.

Why is it that gasoline filling stations are few of the companies out there that actually tell you up front how much something is going to cost (with a big sign visible to boot)? Everywhere else I go, I can expect to pay an additional 10 to 30 someodd percent additional on my bill for the things that the company "forgot" to put on the price.

Going Backwards

[ehaggis]

Before there was a "requirement" to share lines, many ILECs (Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers) withheld valuable technology from the public. Bellsouth had DSL capability for years but releasing to the home user would have cannibalized their business T1 subscriptions. Even with "requirements" to share lines and invite competition, ILECs tend to drag their feet and construct obstacles for CLECs (Competitive Local Exchange Carriers) to enter the market.

Whatever.

[jpiggot]

Well, that's great Kevin. Glad to see you're loosening rules in order to reward billion dollar companies, whom I'm sure have my best interests at heart (cause, you know, they always have before...just look at how great the customer service for those cable monopolies worked out) And it's nice to see that you're taking a break from being a slave to a highly vocal minority that seeks to impose their quasi-religious views on what I watch in the privacy of my own home.

I also love his supposed problems with "blocking channel options" not being available to cable and satellite customers. What a non-issue to suck up to "concerned parent groups" I don't think I've seen a cable system since the '80s that didn't have some option on your cable box to block channels, and satellite always had it. God forbid parents should read the manual, or actually pay attention to what their children are watching.

Wrong, wrong, wrong

[XanC]

The goal of government is to prevent people from interfering with each other's rights. Not to form society according to the vision of master planners.

The FCC should exist to enforce private property rights on pieces of spectrum, and stay the hell out of the business of engineering society.

What is the trade?

[rolfwind]

Unless some further regulation is attached, I don't see how promoting a duopoly is beneficial to the consumer.

Traditional U.S. government sanctioned monopolies attained their position by HAVING to provide service to the majority of consumer even in areas that would be a losing proposition (because of infrastructure versus population density) and having their prices set for them by a regulatory commission.

Will Verizon have to suddenly build more Central Offices (CO) or mini-CO's (so more people can get DSL) for the sake of this benefit? And what will Comcast trade in?

I fail to see how this helps anything but the big business.

The part of local government and wireless is cool, but at best this initiative will be sporadic or in big cities where getting broadband is less of a hassle.

Yeah, that'll work

[overshoot]

Cut all competition out of the process, and you get what we had in 1995: Baby Bells that would charge you for running a "study" of whether they could hook you up in five or ten years.

That, and of course you also get (surprise!) the "preferred network solution provider" as the one-and-only choice. Guess which "preferred network solution provider" has the most sweetheart deals in the USA?

Hint: they not only "support" only one operating system, they don't allow others to connect.

Re:Sure it is

[LWATCDR]

"You can make something ubiquitous if you make it free, otherwise charging $40 - $80 for the "right" to broadband won't find it available in every home in America."

Nothing is free. Who will pay for it? You do not free power, water, gas, or place to live why free bandwidth.

Re:this doesn't make sence

[dgatwood]

It would help "broadband", which translates "help a handful of companies charge higher rates for worse service so that maybe those companies will have a financial incentive to deploy broadband more broadly." Bottom line: the FCC is now firmly in the pockets of the ILECs and the public had better get used to getting screwed, 'cause it's only going to get worse. Much, much worse.

There is exactly -one- way for the government to help broadband deployment: provide large block grants to communities for use in building up public communications infrastructure. The cities that have put in municipal fiber tend to be years ahead of neighboring communities in terms of broadband deployment, with lower costs for the user, better service, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think the government should be in the telecommunications business. I just think it should own the infrastructure and lease it on fair and equal terms to private ISPs and LECs as the ILECs are currently forced to do. That would put everyone on equal footing (except the ILECs, but even then, largely so).

That's hardly the exclusive goal of government

[Snar Bloot]

I think that things like building roads, administering various aid-to-needy-people programs, and limiting and controling access to various public resources (hunting licenses, fishing, park usage, timber usage, etc) might be in some way considered to be contributing the the way society is "engineered".

Re:Marie Antoinette

[eggoeater]

this strike anyone else as being a bit like "Let them have broadband!"

I'm not sure you entirely understand the meaning and context of this quote.* If the upper elite of society were enjoying streaming video from their 10MBps fiber connection, it would be a more apt paraphrase to say "Let them have AOL dial-up." (i.e. expensive, slow, and like the "cake" that the bakers of the time threw out, not much use to anyone.)


*Cake in the Antoinette quote refers to the flour mixture bakers lined their oven with at the beginning of the day and scraped off and threw into the street at the end of the day (when it was pretty much burned to a crisp an inedible.) Also, Antoinette, if she actually said it, was being glib, repeating the phrase ver-batim from a popluar book of the day...don't remember the book though.

Re:Sure it is

[Rei]

Nothing is free

So, when you last drove, you payed a toll and/or owned all of the roads that you travelled on. When you go to the park, you have to stop and visit all of the maintenance people first to pay them before you can get in. Of course, you can't walk on the sidewalk to get there, either, without paying. Naturally, you pay a fee to get into the local public pool, and you pay a fee when you swim on public beaches. If you want police to protect you, you have to go pay them first - same if you want firemen to come put out any fires at your house. Of course, you don't just pay them, you have to pay for all of their equipment and monthly bills as well.

What, you say? You pay for them through taxes? Well, that is what is being discussed here. The idea is to treat net infrastructure and services as we treat other "widely utilized infrastructure and services" in the country. Should broadband fall under that category? That's the issue up for debate.

Before everyone whines too much

[suitepotato]

The biggest cause of prices being what they are is that we who support these services don't work for free. Have the government do them and you can multiply corruption times ten and watch your taxes climb to cover it. Either way, you WILL pay.

And right now, YOU the Internet using public are one of the faster growing costs of the Internet: stupidity. It is the common users who infect their machines with viruses, it is idiot spammers abusing the net, it is script kiddies and amature hackers spreading trojans and so on. And we who support it, have to spend part of our busy time dealing with that. And did I mention, we don't work for free.

It is not a matter of Comcast profiteering or having some supposed monopoly. It is not about local or state governments not giving out municipal wireless (yes, let's trust our pipe to the net to the same people we otherwise wouldn't trust as far as we could throw them on any other subject). It's about the fact that building out miles and miles of fiber and copper costs. It's about the fact that thousands and thousands of industrial-duty routers and switches costs. It's about the fact that facilities to house the aforementioned items costs. It's about the fact that the people who KEEP it working despite the (l}users doing their level best to level the network, disrupt their own connections, and otherwise fark up their service and the service of others costs.

Just as with coding, I don't work for free. What I write isn't coming to you for free, the service I support in my day job isn't coming to you for free. But I don't expect too many to care. I see every day fellow support techs carp about the McDonald's wages they are now being offered to do jobs which used to pay $35K/year but then complaining that their high speed Internet costs. All I can do is shake my head as I give them a penalty line bounce lart.

Re:Before everyone whines too much

[tritesnikov]

So what you are saying is that you underestimated the amount of traffic that your routers would have to handle? Boo hoo. I payed $55 for month's use of a 4Mbps down and 350kbps(?) up (not quite sure of the actual up speed) connection and expect to have it. I should be able to load it with bittorrent traffic and whatever other traffic I want that maxes out my connection for the entire month.

Illegal or not. Now, let me qualify that. ISP's shouldn't care what I transfer, until otherwise notified by the appropriate authority that I am downloading movies or whatnot. Then, and only until then, should it be their prerogative to do something about it. (The whole common carrier thing.)

It also behooves the ISP's to take this position themselves, as otherwise it opens them up to whole worlds of liability. Copyright holders will want the ISP's to spend money in a futile effort to try and stop copyright infringement. This would entail spending money on buying and supporting equipment to monitor traffic, which I would imagine would not be too cheap considering the processing power needed to even start such an initiative given the amount of traffic flowing around.

First you have to be able to identify types of traffic (i.e., bittorrent), and have enough data to make sure that you can identify it properly. Then, you have to be able to decide if the traffic is legitmate or not, which would entail keeping an ever-changing list of torrent files and whatnot to be able to identify the traffic as illegal. Also, where do you get these lists? Is it your responsibility to go out and find these lists, thereby increasing your costs to maintain staff and additional equipment to do this? Is it something that copyright holders send you? What if they are wrong and you cut off legitimate traffic? Lawsuit, here we come. Now, let's start adding in other p2p networks and all of the equipment and maintenance that that would take. And this is even before privacy implications start to come in to play. Oh yeah, and if bittorrent or a derivative protocol ever start using encryption and becomes popular, all of that effort is now wasted. What are you going to do, start doing man-in-the-middle attacks to encrypted connections, and adding more processing power and cost to decrypt the connections to be able to monitor them? And if anyone finds out, and they will, hello lawsuit #2.

Man, buying another router or two doesn't sound so bad anymore.

The point is, people have payed for a month's worth use of whatever connection they have. If the overbooking assumptions on the neighborhood routers and pipes are not correct, then those assumptions need to change. The cost of any other solution is much higher. I guess there's always the old rate hike that could be used, but that still doesn't change the fact that the month's use of that connection was paid for and so it is that customer's right to use it full bore for the entire month if they want to, because that is what they purchased.