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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.
Canada, Norway, and Sweden are ranked above us, but all are less dense than the US.
I agree that their aren't many folks as dense as us at the moment, but which are more dense? Norwegians or Swedes?
FreeSpeech.org
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.
Your connection is not the norm. I'm in suburban St. Louis, MO, and I have a "choice" between The Phone Company (AT&T) and The Cable Company (Charter), neither of which is required to care about anything either by law or by market forces.
AT&T offers the following plans, generally:
- Mediocre DSL: 6M/768k, $60/mo.
- Crap DSL: 3M/768k, $40/mo.
- Crappier DSL: 1.5M/384k, $30/mo.
- Why-Bother? DSL: 512k/128k, $20/mo.
Charter offers similar plans, like so:
- Mediocre Cable: 6M/512k, $60/mo. plus cable TV
- Crap Cable: 3M/128k, $40/mo. plus cable TV
- Useless Cable: 1M/128k, $20/mo. plus cable TV
- They-call-this-broadband? Cable: 512k/64k, $20/mo. but no cable TV requirement
Personally, I'm on a grandfathered DSL plan, at 1.5M/768k for $25/mo. I don't call AT&T for service, because if I do, I will get my plan changed to something current and end up paying more for less. Yes, it beats dialup. No, it's not good. I drool at the thought of having even 1/10th of what is "normal" in Korea.
Ok folks, comparing the density of sweden or norway is not like comparing the density of the US. First of all, the US is a shit-ton larger than those countries. I understand the argument, but I don't think they're really incorporating the total size of the US. When you take the lack of density and spread it out over an area that is many multiple times larger than norway AND sweden combined, I think you can better understand the technical problems and costs involved with such an endeavor.
That being said, I do believe that the ridiculous telco/cable monopolies that have been governmentally supported for so long now has an effect as well. It's a combination of alot of factors, just like most other things in life.
All things are subject to interpretation, whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and n
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.
Of course you're going to think yours is big enough if you don't know how to use it...
Faster broadband, both upstream and down (especially up) would have an enormous societal impact. Think of all the travel that could be avoided (jet fuel not burned) if video conferencing didn't suck. Think of all the commuting that wouldn't have to be done if VPN access were equivalent to sitting on the corporate LAN. Some of us with fiber-optic connections are already seeing the benefits. $0.99 Amazon movie rentals that only take 12 minutes to download, for example. You can literally start watching in seconds. The whole thing is done transferring in less time than it would have taken to drive to Blockbuster and back... Remote desktops are actually usable for non-graphical apps, and even for some CAD applications...
Faster internet access really would provide better quality of life for many people.
Copps argument is that, in certain respects, the entire area of the United States should not be considered. No one should expect Topeka to have the same type of service, but one think that Manhattan should be better than Seoul.
I fully agree with this. I'm getting 15/1 or something ridiculous like that here in Hampton Roads, VA from Cox. Not to mention that Cox has introduced something they call "PowerBoost" whereby when extra bandwidth is not being utilized you get a huge jump in downstream rate for a few seconds. So basically if I download the latest Leopard dmg from Apple or a new Fedora ISO or whatever it will get these little boosts where I'm downloading damn near 1 megabyte/second for a little while and then it drops back off to the more usual 500-600 kilobytes/second. Man, I feel *so* oppressed.
They actually improved the speeds about a year ago for no additional charge, just part of their infrastructure upgrades. Now, let me think, do I want to stick with Cox where the service keeps improving and I get like zero outages or do I want to have some government-run bureaucracy forcibly providing me internet service?
And even better is this guy's absolute drivel that big companies like Time Warner and Verizon are going to take away our freedoms so we ought to just trust the government to run our internet for us to make sure democracy has a chance.
This dude is clearly a whiner along with all of the other whiners over at Kos. They don't feel they're getting their fair share so it's all about making everything government run and stealing money from your neighbors to pay for your health insurance and your internet service and your everything else in some grand communist plan. To hell with that.
Now, of course, if some rural community wants to band together to provide internet service, or if a state not being served well in general would like to do it then I have no problem with that. A co-op isn't necessarily a bad idea and in fact is the epitome of people taking care of themselves and their neighbors. But this leftist's bunk about needing to foster competition and needing to evaluate what other countries are doing is just crap. It is thinly veiled attempt at giving more power to the federal government which already very clearly has way more power than it can handle.
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?
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
My office in Japan, located in a bedtown area about 100 miles from then center of Tokyo, has 2x100mbps symmetrical fibers. The company paid the equivalent of about $150 in installation costs, and the monthly fee is around $55 for each fiber.
For the same monthly cost back home in Southern California I can only get (at best) 10mbps/512kbps down/up on cable; granted my neighbors aren't using too much of the pipe.
So how is such a difference possible in Japan?
1. All utility cables are all mounted above ground on poles in Japan, greatly reducing installation costs. (Same in Seoul,Korea last time I was there).
2. The gov't has a "fiber to the curb" initiative; so basically the installation is either subsidized or forced (political coercion?) to be the responsibility of the provider.
I must mention to all the satisfied customers who find their 7mbps/1mbps "broadband" sufficient that there IS a difference. When the internet (at least domestically) becomes as fast as a company or home network at 100mbps. It's night and day.
I won't mention how antiquated DSL technology in the US is...
Exhibit A for the alarmists are statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The OECD says the U.S. has dropped from 12th in the world in broadband subscribers per 100 residents to 15th.
The OECD's methodology is seriously flawed, however. According to an analysis by the Phoenix Center, if all OECD countries including the U.S. enjoyed 100% broadband penetration -- with all homes and businesses being connected -- our rank would fall to 20th. The U.S. would be deemed a relative failure because the OECD methodology measures broadband connections per capita, putting countries with larger household sizes at a statistical disadvantage.
The OECD also overlooks that the U.S. is the largest broadband market in the world, with over 65 million subscribers -- more than twice the number of America's closest competitor. We got there because of our superior household adoption rates. According to several recent surveys, the average percentage of U.S. households taking broadband is about 42%; the EU average is 23%.
Furthermore, the OECD does not weigh a country's geographic size relative to its population density, which matters because more consumers may live farther from the pipes. Only one country above the U.S. on the OECD list (Canada) stretches from one end of a continent to another like we do. Only one country above us on this list is at least 75% rural, like the U.S. In fact, 13 of the 14 countries that the OECD ranks higher are significantly smaller than the U.S.
And if we compare many of our states individually with some countries that are allegedly beating us in the broadband race, we are actually winning. Forty-three American states have a higher household broadband adoption rate than all but five EU countries. Even large rural western states such as Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and both Dakotas exhibit much stronger household broadband adoption rates than France or Britain. Even if we use the OECD's flawed methodology, New Jersey has a higher penetration rate than fourth-ranked Korea. Alaska is more broadband-saturated than France.
The OECD conclusions really unravel when we look at wireless services, especially Wi-Fi. One-third of the world's Wi-Fi hot spots are in the U.S., but Wi-Fi is not included in the OECD study unless it is used in a so-called "fixed wireless" setting. I can't recall ever seeing any fixed wireless users cemented into a coffee shop, airport or college campus. Most American Wi-Fi users do so with personal portable devices. It is difficult to determine how many wireless broadband users are online at any given moment, since they may not qualify as "subscribers" to anyone's service.
In short, the OECD data do not include all of the ways Americans can make high-speed connections to the Internet, therefore omitting millions of American broadband users. Europe, with its more regulatory approach, may actually end up being the laggard because of latent weaknesses in its broadband market. It lacks adequate competition among alternative broadband platforms to spur the faster speeds that consumers and an ever-expanding Internet will require.
Europe also suffers from a dearth of robust competition from cable modem and fiber. Cable penetration is only about 21% of households. In the U.S., cable is available to 94% of all households. Also, the U.S. is home to the world's fastest fiber-to-home market, with a 99% annual growth rate in subscribers compared with a relatively anemic 13% growth rate in Europe.
In fact, the European Competitive Telecommunications Association reported last fall that Europe is experiencing a significant slowdown in the annual growth rate of broadband subscriptions, falling to 14% from 23% annual growth. Growth stalled in a number of countries, including Denmark and Belgium (4% in each country). And France -- a relative star -- exhibited just 10% growth. Yet all of these nations are "ahead" of us on the much-talked-about OECD chart.
Here in the U.S., the country that is allegedly "falling behind," broadb
Actually, even Canada's rural areas far from the border get good broadband. Your argument doesn't hold. It's really only the truly remote, hard to reach places that are still on dial-up or slow dsl.
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
A couple hours ago, NPR had an article about the practice of US government agencies intercepting communications between people in various other countries. Part of the explanation was that communications (both Internet and phone) in a lot of the rest of the world go via the US because in so many countries, the connections to/from the US and internal US connections are so much faster than the internal comm systems within the country, and the comm stuff generally picks the fastest available routes.
...
During the article, I kept wondering why we Americans can't use that high-speed comm gear.
One obvious theory is that the high-speed stuff was installed explicitly for espionage purposes, with no intention of letting mere citizens use it. Is this too cynical? How else can you explain all the "dark" fibre that has been installed, at great expense, and then (supposedly) not used? What other theories, in addition to sheer stupidity, can explain it?
Is it tinfoil hat time here? Is it true that, whatever your country, your local government and commercial comm traffic is mostly being relayed through American routers, for the purpose of intercepting and analyzing the content? Maybe you should ask your local ISP and phone suppliers about their routing
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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
Bullshit. I've never talked to a Norwegian guy who had much against swedes, nor vice versa (there are of course exceptions to every rule, but I've never actually talked to one myself). We joke about the other country's stupidity all the time, but if you thought those jokes were rooted in real hate or anything like it, you really need to reconsider. Norwegians and Swedes are a relatively homogenous group and culture. All vikings, you know. ;)
(Just kidding. Actually, ALL swedes are dumb as hell, their ugly princesses believe in funny angles and the men cant pee further than a meter. Really. I hate those guys.)
Here's a recent chart of broadband speeds and costs around the world.
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
And somehow a single government controlled monopoly will be better than numerous independent monopolies?
It's working fine in at least one place, in northeastern Utah a group of communities have been able to build a Broadband Utopia. Anybody can start a business delivering any service the infrastructure is capable of, whether it be broadband access, phone service, tv, or a combination of them. It is capable of speeds of up to 100Mbs.
FalconShould there be a Law?
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.
Here is the high quality video:
http://stage6.divx.com/
Well, apart from the good video quality, it is another Youtube ^^
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
I sell Verizon FiOS 6-days a week and talk to at least 40 new unsuspecting people everyday. I can tell them that I'm saving them money and giving them a much faster internet (20/5 Mbs) that operates at a much more consistant speed than their current Cable/DSL provider. After which, the objections most often heard are "No, I think I'll just keep my Internet the way it is" or "Its fast enough already". I thought this was America? I thought better, faster, bigger, etc were the main components of our vocabulary. We are then confronted with the two main issues preventing a Broadband overhaul in this country - #1 - Fear of change in technology & #2 - Limited dependence on the net. When we slash-dotters discuss these issues, we forget that the vast majority of this fine nation are, well... computer illiterate. They cannot see the benefits of an improved broadband network, mostly because they have no need for it. We need to quit gripping about how 10% of our population is disappointed in the broadband in this nation, and figure out how to rally up the other 90% to actively participate in intergrating the internet more into their daily lives. Until there is a product/site/service that appeals to the greater percentage of our population, the hopes of a better Internet can be kept in a jar on the shelf.