Slashdot Mirror
U.S. Broadband Access Falling Behind
EpochVII writes "FreePress recently released a report(PDF) detailing the woeful situation of U.S. broadband access. From the press release: 'By overstating broadband availability and portraying anti-competitive policies as good for consumers, the FCC is trying to erect a façade of success. But if the president's goal of universal, affordable high-speed Internet access by 2007 is to be achieved, policymakers in Washington must change course.'"
Hasn't this been known a long time now? And by long time I mean around seven years??? The US has pretty infrastructure, yet we aren't doing anything with it, and broadband remains ridiculously overpriced compared to the likes of Sweden, where synchronous 100Mbit/sec connections can be had for just few dozen kroner a month.
The real challenge is rural areas. Unless something spectacularly revolutionary happens, like somone launching a bunch of solar-powered autonomous blimps with WiMax transceivers onboard, anyone outside city areas is going to be left behind. I blame our government's lack of involvement in progressing the telecom industry here, such as a series of bad decisions by the FCC, and letting Verizon and Friends® hold the sword instead.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
I'm also waiting private libraries to replace those provided by the government. Those public libraries are for losers and eggheads.
It's the role of the government to ensure competition in a marketplace. Y'know, the free market.
Competition reduces prices by eliminating monopoly/oligopoly pricing structures.
The current FCC is ruling in favour of monopoly/oligopoly pricing structures, since big telecom companies want government to ensure appropriate return on investment. Y'know, the antithesis of the free market.
If that was the reason, you'd have the same excellent communication infrastructure at least in your major cities and associated suburbs and satellite communities.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
It's called mod_gzip. Maybe you've heard of it.
- Dynamic HTML is fatter still, including the page you're reading
Slashdot? Dynamic HTML? Umm.... You really have no clue what dynamic HTML is, do you? Here's a tip: Dynamic HTML is not forms, or server-side-generated pages. It usually involves a little JavaScript and something called the Document Object Model.
- CSS simply adds to the problem by oversending code/data
So instead of loading style.css once per site, and keeping it in cache, and defining per-tag styles and, when that's not enough, using neat short little class="" attributes... we should instead use big ugly tags on everything? And tables and images for layout, I suppose?
- XML is another bucket of overkill; every page sends a new schema, and a bunch of unneeded, duplicate info
Umm, I'm not about to call XML a 'compact' file format (until you pipe it through gzip or something) but do you really have any idea how XML is typically used in Internet applications? I'm interested to know how you think the XML page sends a schema in a neat little HTTP attachment or something.
The idea of using more compression in more places isn't a terribly bad idea, you just don't seem to have a particularly good grasp on the reality. It's in decently widespread use already.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
All retarded bureaucracies overstate their achievements - don't you read Dilbert?
More BS to inflate the numbers -- see above. Personally, I don't view anything slower than 768/256 as broadband.
Seeing as Japan's land is all densely populated, it won't cost much to run fiber, copper, or WiFi to everyone. The US has a much more dispersed population to reach.
People with little money to spare don't spend it on faster internet access, and companies are more willing to run broadband where it's economical. No duh - next?
Mmmm... don't even want to go there. As usual, Washington whores itself out to the biggest campaign donator. This will happen as long as money is considered a form of speech.
There is nothing anyone can do about having to cover a large expanse of rural areas. The only thing we can do is force corruption out of government and reign in the monopolies, allowing competition to benefit everyone. Until then, we will see broadband access intentionally mismanaged to benefit monopolies.
Until there's even high speed (20+Mbit) Internet available in the big cities *at all*, for less then $5,000 a month, you can't say we're limited by land mass.
Right now, it doesn't matter where you live in the US. You can't get it. So until you can get these speeds in the highly populated areas you can't use the last mile arguement.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
A lot of people are perplexed at why broadband sucks in the US. They blame the government. They blame the size of our country. They blame the market. But look who's primarily behind broadband over here: Phone companies and cable companies.
Let's start with phone companies. Does it really benefit phone companies to have great and cheap bandwidth? Not when everyone switches over to VoIP killing their high profit long distance service. Not to mention that businesses pay for EVERY call they make. If broadband was great and cheap, the phone companies would disappear.
Let's move on to cable companies. Pretty soon you'll be able to watch movies via broadband. E.g., Netflix is about to offer movies. In a few years you'll probably be able to watch any movie and any TV you want with a simple clicks. Does this benefit cable companies? Nope. Because they make tons of money, nearly all their money, selling premium movie channels and content via pay-per-view. In other words, if broadband was great and cheap, they'd also be out of business.
Thus, the ONLY way we're going to get real broadband in the US is by wrestling control of it from the current status quo. That's why I'm really excited about broadband over power lines. The power companies have nothing to lose with broadband.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.