Democrats May Promise Broadband for All

andyring writes "According to CNS News Service, the Democrat Party will have an agenda that guarantees every American will have affordable access to broadband within five years as part of their 2006 election year agenda, according to Nancy Pelosi, House minority leader. Absent, of course, are any details as to how they will accomplish it when they are the party out of power in Congress."

Comments

Re:Maybe it's just me...

[Intron]

Good point. How about just guaranteeing food, shelter and clean water. Nearly 18% of children in this country live live in poverty.

In India...

[rathehun]

...one of the promises of the present government was that it would make broadband affordable.

What happened was pretty decent, for a government programme. 256 kbps broadband was rolled out in all the larger cities, at Rs. 500 (USD 10) per month - however, there was a rider - a 1 GiB transfer limit.

This scheme, however, was sufficient to start a major price war, and broadband prices have been steadily falling, upto the point where it's now being pushed way more heavily than dial-up.

The problems:

• Lack of heavy-usage plans
• Nightmarish problems with free-usage hours, and subsequent billing
• Billing
• Last mile hasn't been unbundled, so each company has to lay their own cables, resulting in private companies being unable to offer their lower prices/higher usage plans to customers who want it

However,

• Since the government monopoly has to, by law service rural areas, the problem of a lack of access, that one hears about so much on /. is really not a problem
• Cheap!
• Excellent (personal experience) service, downtime of about a week in the last year of my having it
• Technical support, while incredibly hard to actually *find*, is remarkably well informed - came home, and was happily using the command line on my linux server, to which the line was connected
• Typing from it right now ;-)

Whether it was the best idea, whether it helped starving people...those are all debatable points. But surely, it is hardly an incredibly expensive project, which will kill off the American economy?

Even if the government doesn't offer fiber-connections to the rest of America, 256k broadband is perfectly capable of accessing Wikipedia, joining and taking part in mailing groups...there will be a section of the society whom it will help.

Cheers,
Rahul.

Re:Maybe it's just me...

[Hackie_Chan]

Neither of those things will make your health care affordable though, the only way it will be affordable is if you tax wealthy Americans more and use their money to pay for it. Which to me, just seems a bit too socialist.

I hate it when just because you want to tax those who have more that you're "socialist". It's stupid poo-flinging arguments like that which've made it so that 45 million Americans are uninsured. Let me quote myself in a post I made earlier on /.:

Just look at the Toyota plant in Ontario [harpers.org]; The company turned down hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies in the United States because, when compared to Canadians, U.S. workers are too hard to train, often illiterate, and expensive to insure. Also according to General Motors Corp. chairman and chief executive G. Richard Wagoner Jr. the American car manufacturers are losing [washingtonpost.com] their ability to compete in the global marketplace in large measure because of the crushing burden of health care costs.
The US is the only industrial country without a national healthcare system. We're the most dissatisfied [umaine.edu] out of the top ten. Pay almost twice as much [newsbatch.com] as number two. Yet still 45 millions are uninsured [census.gov].

You're saying to me that it's not in the best interest of the rich to have insured Americans? As Adam Smith said; it's justified to take from the rich as it's them who benefit the most from the smooth functioning of the state.