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FCC Commish - US Playing 'Russian Roulette' with Broadband
LarryBoy writes "In a speech given at the YearlyKos Convention in Chicago, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps lambasted US broadband policy, saying that the US is 'playing "Russian roulette with broadband and Internet and more traditional media."' Copps also took issue with an op-ed piece ('Broadband Baloney') by fellow commissioner Robert McDowell last week. 'In his speech, Copps didn't mention McDowell by name, but he did claim that broadband in the US is "so poor that every citizen in the country ought to be outraged." Back when then OECD said that we were number four in the world, he said, no one objected to its methodology. Copps also had fighting words for those who blame the US broadband problems on our less-dense population; Canada, Norway, and Sweden are ranked above us, but all are less dense than the US. Besides, this argument implies that broadband is absolutely super within American urban areas. Copps noted, though, that his own broadband connection in Washington, DC was "nothing compared to Seoul."'"
>In his speech, Copps didn't mention McDowell by name, but he did claim that
.ear deployment over my work's VPN, it sucks even more.
>broadband in the US is "so poor that every citizen in the country ought to be outraged."
I don't know if the average citizen would even realize if their downstream bandwidth were boosted significantly. If my mother can download her web page in 3 seconds instead of 5, I am not sure she really cares.
The real battle seems to be with the upstream. Face it, sending photos sucks. If I have to do any sort of large
And to worsen things, I don't believe this is an infrastructure issue. These are obviously artificial caps levied against all users (both the legitimate and abusing customers). Maybe they could throttle the upstream for those with prolonged heightened levels of usage?
Jim
http://www.runfatboy.net/ - A workout plan for beginners.
Yep, and 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
Yeah, trouble is, not everyone is able to get those speeds. Getting those speeds in Houston suburbs would be a Godsend - literally no one here gets anywhere near that.
is the granting of local monopolies. Until that is stopped, or the communities change the monopoly to a SMALL one (i.e. from your house to a block-level box or CO via fiber), this will continue (in fact, get worse). The current policies are disasters. And as to the news corps., they should never have been allowed to buy multiples. That has turned America's news system into a total joke. Now, nearly all are simple mouth pieces of the republican party (and will probably turn shrill when the dems win).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It's not so much the caps that are the problem it's the fact that your broadband provider is selling 10x (or more) the bandwidth they have available working on the presumption that you will not actually use your full bandwidth most of the time.
This was all good and well when email (not spam) and simple web pages were the Internet norm, but with dynamic pages, streaming video, audio, other content, and unparalleled levels of email we need to stop over-selling the actual bandwidth available. If what we have isn't good enough to service the customers -- upgrade the infrastructure to something that can handled 30MiB/s down and 15MiBs up (or whatever)
Also, stop calling them "unlimited" plans with the simple truth is every provider limits your bandwidth usage either by threats or through packet shaping.
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Ah, the "I have fast internet therefore everyone has fast internet" argument. No idea which orifice you pulled that 90% number out of, but given the large suburban population of our country, your situation doesn't map onto the rest of the population.
You got lucky. Don't move near a city.
There should be some equivalent to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_Law for arguing that the US is a less densely populated country when faced with the fact that such and such service or infrastructure in the US is inferior to its counterparts in other industrialized countries.
It's about fucking time someone with the clout of the head of the FCC got vigorously vocal about this. Much better that Powell's focus on tit-flashing.
If you want to fix this, I suggest the following it: take all of the cables away from the existing telcos and make one nationwide heavily regulated company that would just maintain the lines and sell bandwidth to whoever could afford it. That would go a long way towards leveling the playing field.
Sure, you could de-regulate: end geographical monopolies and grant any company wanting to run cables access to the public rights-of-way. However, this would needlessly duplicate infrastructure, and companies would use inter-networking contracts to limit competition. The biggest impediment to offering new services in a telecomm market is to connect to existing networks. Incumbent networks have a huge advantage because they already connect many, many customers. If you create a startup telco, your customers expect to be able to talk to people on the other network. The incumbents can simply price you out of the market by making it expensive for your customers to talk to theirs.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
The point is that if Sweden and Norway can get high speed internet into the wilderness then the US should at least be able to get high speed internet into their cities.
The fact that the country is larger shouldn't make it more difficult as such. Making a large network is just connecting two smaller ones no?
Enter the loophole in the law that states that if they build a brand new line from the central office to your house, they can control its content. Guess who can't put in new lines? Right... the "competing services" who are supposed to be able to access the lines that already exist. Therefore, you have a conflict of interest in that the line maintainers are the only ones capable of putting up new infrastructure... thus guaranteeing a monopoly of service. Now, while it may make business sense to wire up the areas that can and will be heavily subscribing first (it's called "return on investment"), you'll find that some other areas that have gotten it only did because they're in between the source and target area, so they just went and wired up that section too.
That said, I cannot get FiOS in my neighborhood. Neighborhoods around me are getting wired for it and receiving it. We aren't... and believe me, it's not because we're a poor neighborhood (probably has more to do with our being an older subdivision that still has above-ground lines). I've called Verizon a few times and the response I always get when I ask for a date is, "We can't give you a date because that would commit us." Duh! That's the point of my asking for a date or time frame! Verizon first sticks it to us with FITL, so we can't get any form of DSL other than IDSL/ISDN, unless you go with a T-1 or other dedicated line like that... then they stick it to us by not wiring up the neighborhood... and they further stick it to us by being the only telco that can do so, and limit the service to themselves. I'm sure there are other companies that could be wiring up neighborhoods too, and would love a shot at doing it... if they were legally allowed to do so.
Basically, like you said... the ones who maintain the lines should not be allowed to sell the services. Give the line maintainers one responsibility: infrastructure maintenance and upgrades. Everyone else, including Verizon, would have to "buy" their time and space on the lines.
OCO is Loco
I'm so god damned sick of our "business leadership" in this country. Ignorant greed driven one-track motherfuckers who all need to be lined up against the wall.
The rate of urbanization in the US at 75% is average among developed countries. Compare Ireland at 60% to see if your theory holds up. I suspect not, as it seems to me that broadband access depends entirely on the political will to make it happen. The US's problem is that they have offloaded all responsibility for important infrastructure from the government to local monopoly corporations. Perhaps if there was true competition, the market would sort it out, but there isn't, so only the short-term interests of the shareholders matter.
Lack of density is a valid argument for explaining why rural areas have bad broadband. But it isn't a good explanation of why urban areas don't, the size of the U.S. not being relevant. Why isn't it relevant? Because the only part of the Internet where the large size of the U.S. makes a difference is in the backbones that connect the population centers. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I thought that as of now our backbones are operating at way under capacity. In other words, the distances between cities has not proven a problem for creating large internet connections between them.
So the connections between the cities are fine, what about the cities themselves? Take NY City. It's the biggest and densest city in the U.S. There's no distance argument to be made here. And there are 10 million potential customers -- that's more than the entire country of Sweden, all in one compact area! Yet if you only compare NY and ignore the rest of the country, we're still way behind in broadband.
No, sorry, the density argument holds no water at all. At least, it is clearly not the limiting factor on broadband, because where it isn't a factor at all broadband is still limited.
You are however absolutely correct about the monopolies being the cause. Why don't we have better broadband? Because the telcos neither want nor need to provide it. Hell, it wasn't until the mid to late nineties that we started to see sub-$0.10/min long-distance POTS because of the lack of competition before that. Why would they go run off and invest in more technology when there's nobody for you to go to if you think they're too slow? Right now the only "competition" we have is DSL vs cable, and they have apparently decided that it's perfectly adequate to just compete on price and the slightly different features of DSL vs cable.
The enemies of Democracy are
AT&T.
'nuff said.
Whether we're talking about the old, monopoly-that-was AT&T, or the current, Dr. Frankenstein built me a monster AT&T, the moniker AT&T represents a lack of progress. Verizon, although late, is moving in the correct direction. Sprint is deploying WiMax as fast as it can. Some cable companies are exactly where they should be (OptimumOnline, RCN, I'm looking at you), and other, although a little slower, are getting there (Comcast, WOW, Time Warner, Charter).
Notice that in areas where Verizon is competing with Comcast (or other cable companies), broadband is doing *well*. Also notice that in areas where 5-10 mile fixed wireless is implemented, things are good to. In other areas with some competition, things are okay, too: It's a little expensive, but in Chicago I have options for 8 Mbps cable (Comcast), 25 Mbps cable (RCN), 15 Mbps ADSL2+ (Cyberonic), 3 Mbps fixed wireless (multiple WISPs), or 3 Mbps mobile wireless (EVDO, Sprint, Verizon, both RevA).
But areas dominated by AT&T? The *vast* majority of customers are locked in at 3 Mbps down, 384 kbps up. A few (located close to AT&T DSLAMs) can get 6 Mbps down, 768 kbps up. And AT&T's "new" U-verse is limited to 6 Mbps/1 Mbps.
This is unacceptable.
Frankly, AT&T's status as a monopoly provider in the old days fucked up the market so badly that it took decades to recover; and the recover some how involved putting a new AT&T together that is poised to fuck up the market again. The single *best* thing that the FCC can do now is strongly regulate AT&T's capability to strangle other providers, giving time for less-evil companies like Comcast to put up some decent infrastructure.
Anyone who disagrees with me; try and imagine what the U.S. broadband market would look like if AT&T was really pushing the curve in terms of what was possible. They're financial stable, profitable, and have plenty of cash on hand; if AT&T was deploying "true" next gen broadband infrastructure (at least as good as Verizon, or perhaps better), it would fundamentally change the market. The cable cos would be rushing out the door to deploy 25+ Mbps everywhere, and Sprint wouldn't be the only company pushing WiMax.
The U.S. broadband market would be a different place if you could get Verizon FTTP everywhere. Sadly, AT&T is still the dominant company, and until either A) the FCC starts to regulate the hell out of them, or B) Consumers & Businesses wise up and stop purchasing service from them, we'll be stuck with shitty broadband.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Go fuck yourself.
Steal taxpayer dollars? Wake the fuck up. The pendulum has swung far, far in the other direction. The main beneficiaries of government freebies over the last several years are corporations. Quite literally the governement is letting bridges fall down so that rich people and powerful corprorations can get more money that they didn't earn.
And it gets worse.
Government-sponsored monopolies get to rule our broadband and give nothing back in return. Most places, most of the time, unless you want to pay hundreds a month, your bandwith is capped at 50K up. So you can suck at the tit of major media corporations, or go fuck yourself. And pay attention to net neutrality - the major broadband providers in the US, who operate virtually without competition, want to decide who gets to be on the internet and who doesn't. It could easily be the most powerful anti-freedom move in hundreds of years.
Go fuck yourself. Go back and suck the King's ass. You give not one shit about freedom.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
They sell it at different speeds, but I doubt they actually have separate implementations. A more plausible scenario is that everyone gets the same (fastest) implementation, and then they throttle it down in software. This is kind of like the way apple used to sell 4GB iPod minis and 6GB iPod minis that used the same hard drive (6GB).
I know this probably sounds crazy. Why would a company cripple user features this way, right?
Well, it turns out that some people are willing to pay more for internet than others, but you can't just sell it at the highest price, because then people who aren't willing to pay that much won't buy your service. You don't want to price it low, because then people will pay the low price, even though they were willing to pay more. So, what sellers do is they try to segment the market. You can see this everywhere (Do you think organic salad actually costs twice as much to grow as regular salad? Of course not, but you can charge twice as much for it. Does a Cadillac Escalade actually cost 80% more to manufacture than a GM Suburban, it's the same damn vehicle with a leather interior!) Of course it's a lore more obvious when you use software to achieve market segmentation (since nothing is physically different) but it's the same principle.
How else can you explain all the "dark" fibre that has been installed, at great expense, and then (supposedly) not used?
very simply: bad projections that never happened.
During the peak of the dot com boom, people started to build the infrastructure to sustain the current growth. At the time, *everything* was turning into a web service and everyone and their dogs were creating new internet startups. The prediction for bandwidth was through the roof and backbone companies took notice and started building more infrastructure.
Next thing you know, the dot crash was here and all those companies that served useless but bandwidth intensive services died. The infrastructure had been built though and is still here. 6+ years later, we finally see the same services re-emerge, but with an actual business plan and revenue stream (for example internet storage).
The infrastructure does not vanish once it's been built. Predictions may not happen, but you still need to act on them to sustain business.
Google has been said to buy a lot of that dark fiber... We may learn one day for what usage...