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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."'"
From my experience I agree fully with Copps that the state of broadband services atleast here in the San Francisco Bay Area is abysmal. When I lived in Norway I shared a 2 mb/s DSL line with 38 students and that connection was about 10 times faster at peak times than my private Comcast "5 mb/s" connection in the middle of the night. As stuedents in scandinavia tend to do a lot of P2P filesharing I expected this to be the other way around when I moved here. The things that annoys me the most is high latency, slow speeds and my FTP/SSH speeds. Judging by how my download speeds decline over time I believe Comcast is shaping traffic and btw it sometimes takes much longer than it should to get my search results from google. There are probably countless reasons for why the broadband is so much faster in Norway than in the San Francisco Bay Area, but the most noticeable difference is that the broadband competition thrives in Norway (ADSL, SDSL, VDSL, Cable, Radio Broadband, Fiber Optic, 3G Broadband etc. (and I am just listing technologies here, not providers) ) I effectively (and practiacally) only have two choices here (Comcast Cable and ADSL from AT&T + peers). In the so-called internet mecca of the world nobody offers me VDSL or fiber-optic broadband! That is not good enough. Where do you think the next google will come from? and that
I guess when I'm talking video, I'm not talking about a low-quality, 2 minute clip shot by a 13 year old, replicating the mentos+coke video. Youtube is an interesting experiment, but at least it's current incarnation is little more than a fad.
I'm actually talking about a high quality video feed produced by professionals that would play on my IP-TV capable television.
Right now that doesn't exist, and the closest we come to that is people downloading TV shows with bittorent (who are the afformentioned techno-nerds).
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