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The $200 Billion Broadband Rip-Off
Jamie noted that Cringley has a piece about the US Broadband situation. He talks about where we were and where we are: 'not very fast, not very cheap Internet service that is hurting our ability to compete economically with the rest of the world' and about the $200B the phone companies got to make it that way.
I blame lack of competition. What's needed is laws that lower the entry barrier for ISPs.
Mainstream economic theory clearly states that free markets only work when they are both competitive and transparent, and yet, just as clearly, the profit motive drives companies to minimize both competition and transparency. Profit itself is therefore inherently at loggerheads with the two prerequisites of free markets. As competition and transparency decline, so does market efficiency, until at some point inefficiency yields to outright market failure. We already have market failure in many industries - oil, diamonds, OS and Office software, telecommunications - and now broadband too, it seems. It's funny this contradiction raises so few eyebrows...
A-Bomb
These companies can sell you an 8 meg broadband connection, they'll sell it to 100 people and the line they're selling this on is an 80meg connection (example, not right numbers but right point). Any industry that can do this legally (or just get away with it) is clearly going to screw any consumer they can.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Let me tell you 'bout my friend in Holland. And, no, I don't mean Holland, Michigan. I mean Holland, Holland.
He pays some ridiculous amount of money monthly, 10 or 20 Euros, and gets high speed broadband, TV (including the porn channels) and phone. His mortgage is 3.8%. Sex of any kind is not against the law and he can travel to any country in the EU without even slowing down as he drives across the border. At the risk of going off topic, do I need to add that health care and education are free.
Could it be that there's something not quite right here in America?
...about "completely unbridled market capitalism".
What we have here is the exact opposite: Central-planning. And it has gone haywire, as it usually does.
Throw in a touch of the corruption that centralized power allows, add a little protective legislation, and you get what we have today.
Methinks you tend toward Marxist-style central control.
...that gives them all those strange ideas.
...nothing is free.
Those highly-socialist countries have huge problems ahead when the bills come due.
Because here in Iowa we pay $60/mo for cable internet - it is about 5mbps down/512kbps up. Only major cable ISP is Mediacom, there are few others reduced to apartment complex or two.
In most of America, only two companies are allowed to run wires into your home, the local telco monopoly and the local cable monopoly. The existence of the cable and telco monopolies is responsible for the problem. As long as that's the case, you're just arguing about the best way to manage the ripoff. Any regulatory scheme, at best, simply minimizes the ripoff. At worst, it leads to the two companies having undue influence over regulators.... and indirectly gives the regulators vast power to regulate and monitor private communication.
My own feeling is that the very idea of regulated telecommunications is inconsistent with the First Amendment. I don't think it could be any plainer. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for the court decision.
Because in several other countries your $15 a month would get you between 20-100 Mb/s both down and up.
Over the decade from 1994-2004 the major telephone companies profited from higher phone rates paid by all of us, accelerated depreciation on their networks, and direct tax credits an average of $2,000 per subscriber for which the companies delivered precisely nothing in terms of service to customers. That's $200 billion with nothing to be shown for it.
For instance, later in TFA Cringley says that a five-year phone rate freeze was part of the deal at one point, then says that rates should have really fallen during this time and he calls this a "rate hike".
So this $200B figure sounds like some mix of a bogus number (a "higher" phone rate that is really constant), some bookkeeping shenanigans (accelerated depreciation accounting), and real cash (direct credits.)
I got ADSL In 1996 , back when it was 1.5 Mb download and 120Kb upload, today, eleven years later
I get 8 Mb download and 385 Kb upload, at about 30 percent higher pricing.
Basically broadband in the US is crap. If those various companies mentioned in the article
were forced to refund the money they got for giving us nothing, and I agree we got nothing,
they would be singing a different tune. I say send them a bill for the money they received, but did
not spend on actually providing that which they said they would, PLUS interest.
Broadband should be defined at 20Mb down and 20 Mb up. Period. Too much time has elapsed
with basically zero quality or quantity increases.
You can't watch live video of any quality; you can't use any sort of interactive video link; you can't use any remote desktop solution with any level of fluidity; you can only participate in collaborative development with a very limited number of participants; you can't participate in e-commerce of any significant volume; you can't download software updates or revisions without tying up your connection entirely for minutes or hours; and, perhaps most significantly for the economy, you can't consume new, bandwidth-intensive applications such as sophisticated online gaming.
Must be nice to have a large oil company pay $21 billion in taxes to a country with only 16.5 million people -- that's $1200+ tax revenue per capita from just one company.
This was my thought as well. I want a 100Mb line for $10/mo as much as anybody. But how exactly will cheap, fast residential internet increase our business standing in the world?
...But I don't think this was just a cash grab on the part of the telcos. Look at how much the various content industries are freaking out over what we have now. Look at the shady, skeevy methods in which they are slowly coming to terms with it in ways that still screw the customer. If we had gone straight from what we had in the early 90s to what they were planning, it'd have been 45Mbit bidirectional ass-raping as far as the industries were concerned. Real broadband, without the period of transition we're going through now, was the sword held at the neck of the RIAA and the MPAA. They had to keep America backwards or the floodgates would be open.
Well, for starters, quit whining and learn how DSL works. DSL is limited by distance. Just because the town 8 miles away can have DSL doesn't mean you can get DSL.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The fact that my ISP doesen't have (customers x downstream kb) capacity on their backbone is totally irrelevant.
What is relevant is how OFTEN they hit their maximum capacity, and for HOW LONG when it happens.
As long as I get the capacity I need and pay for, who cares if the total capacity is lower? No user actually uses their lines 100% 24/7 (unless they are software pirates in which case they deserve to have their connection terminated anyway).
- Jesper
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
Rural areas don't drive the American economy, and particularly high-speed Internet at the home is not a driving economic force, mostly it's useful for pirating movies. How is lower-quality broadband out in the middle of Bumfuck, Iowa, hurting the American economy?
OK everyone in rural areas stop working, and let's see what happens when kamapuaa realizes that his food is not grown in the supermarket. Rural areas DO drive the economy - just not the part YOU think is important.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
What costs the most is stringing the wire. For new construction you have to string the wire, so omitting the fiber at the same time is negligent.
Congratulations! You have the right answer. Now what do we do?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Search the /. archives, /.s including myself have been describing and predicting to state of telecommunications in the USA as far back as 1997.
/. whipper-snappers would remember back to 19970901 launch. CmdrTaco, Hemos, ... were all young fellers like yourselves are now ... young, but git'en older, wiser, wizen, creaking and crankier with age.
Yep, that long ago, but do you think any of you younger
Should we ask CmdrTaco and Hemos; When/What/Where are the 10th year celebration' keggers, or is it a BYOB in Death Valley?
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
...of plant and service.
Personally, I'd rather have two bills - one for the physical layer (cables, swtiches, and maintenance) provided either by the government or pseudo-governmental corporation, and one or more for the data (of any kind - voice, video, internet). By segregating the two, you can allow local issues to be dealt with as a local problem, and offermake up funding for low-density where "the government" feels necessary (rural electric comes to mind as an example, if not the best one). For those afraid of government, realize that most areas run their own water and sewer, and do a fairly good job, on the whole. And I'm not saying it has to be government - a corporation can run the plant (under gov. supervision - any monopoly needs close oversight).
By separating the physical and the data, you can offer _real_ competition by local or national providers. Think of long distance telephone service - it's in a hell of a lot better shape (for the consumers and competitive pricing) than, say, local telephone or cell service (Verizon, anyone?). Most places don't even have the possibility of a competing high speed carrier because the physical plant operators can charge whatever they want for access, and as a result their services will always end up being more competitive.
Power would be nice this way, too. I already have the physical plant portion broken out on my bill with generation costs separate. By prohibiting the physical plant operators from having any financial interest in the service operators, there will be a more level footing - and more opportunity for competition.
Oh, in case you're curious, the incumebents know this, and would lobby to their deaths against any mandated separation.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
South Korea, most of northern Europe (excepting the UK), and soon Australia.
I can't speak for or about any place but Texas, but it seems to me that while more widely available, less expensive broadband would be a great boon to small, rural businesses all over the state - farmers and ranchers of all kinds could probably find ways to do their business better and faster if they had something more than a dedicated phone line for internet service - it seems to me to be an example of putting the cart before the horse. The state-run primary and secondary education system has been gutted by years of increasing emphasis on grade-level exit tests, so much so that the students themselves are aware of it now.
To put this post back on topic, your question seems to ignore the very real possibility that a person's place of business and place of residence are one and the same. This possibility increases as one moves out into rural areas, which are the least likely to have decent broadband availability.
....spoon feeding the consumers and avoiding telling them or letting them realize what you are doing.
Hey! You leave Bumfuck out of this. We've installed our 8th trailer. Show some respect!
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
When one part of such an assertion is invalid, I can't believe the rest
he can travel to any country in the EU without even slowing down as he drives across the border.
I call bullshit on that. -- any european want to chime in here? from ANY country to any country- so long as it's all EU? I simply find that ubelievable...
and therefore- the rest of it I find hard to believe...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
A salary of $60k in Iowa is equivalent to $100k in California. $60k/year will buy you a nice family house, decent car, and a easy-going lifestyle. If the national telecom infrastructure was up to date, there would be many jobs that can be done in the middle of Iowa that are now done in California. Alternately, for a bit more than the salary you pay to an Indian programmer (well, a bit more than those who now are demanding more money...), you can get a native English speaker *in a nearby timezone*.
With low-quality or no broadband, you lose this potential workforce.
Or, at least, so goes the theory.
Yeah, and where do you live? Because I can guarantee if you're not in a town with at least 10-12 households that would pony up for DSL service, it's not going to happen. That involves installing a DSLAM that's going to run at least a few grand, plus one or several T1 lines to supply the bandwidth back to the CO 8 miles away, not to mention T1-to-ethernet converters, etc.
If you live outside of town you can just about forget it. Go get satellite internet.
The band width you are not getting is because spammers are getting it...
I'll give you an example...
I was in Billings, Montana and saw an article in the local newspaper about a business that hired school teachers to teach English to Koreans over the Internet via videochat. Koreans learned basic English in local classrooms but could get one-on-one tutoring, mostly to help with pronounciation, something that needs a native speaker to help with.
This was only possible because the local telco had rolled out fiber-to-the-home (yes, fiber in Montana, something I can't get in Nashville, TN, a major metropolitian area). The company paid great salaries, like $60k/yr, people could work at home, the service could eventually be expanded to anywhere in the world, all because of ubiquitous, high speed, low cost Internet access.
Isn't that the sort of thing the Universal Service Fund is supposed to compensate for?
I don't know what sophisticated gaming is but gaming doesn't take much bandwidth at all unless you're hosting a (large) server.
They do owe, we all pay into something called the universal service fund that subsidizes the cost to connect distant and otherwise unprofitable customers.
This is the geek's world view.
The question is - does the middle class want to pay for the infrastructure needed to support it?
As opposed to say, paying for the HPV vaccine to protect their daughters from cervical cancer? Home care for the elderly? Rebuilding bridges? Replanting trees, restoring parks and public beaches closed to swimmers for over forty years?
I'm a freelance writer most of the time, and I predominantly work for a publisher in the USA. I live in a semi-rural part of Wales (UK). The availability of cheap broadband in an area with a low cost of living allows me to make a contribution to the British economy. My mother lives in a more rural area with almost no broadband penetration. They have a significant problem with unemployed youth who don't have jobs locally. Because of the lack of communications, they also can't work remotely, and many of them can't afford to move.
For a lot of things, your location is less important than your access to information. Rural broadband allows the people with the lowest cost of living (i.e. the best value workers) to be able to contribute to the information economy.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I call bullshit, unless you're including the FICA employer contribution in "your" income.
The only way you pay over 40% of your income in California is if your income is seriously high (over about $175k) and you have NO deductions. The top California marginal rate is 9.3%; the top federal marginal rate is 35%, but that only applies to income over ~$174k. Remember that even at high income levels those marginal rates do not apply to a significant amount of your income. If your income is that high, the payroll taxes don't affect you too much, and I don't feel sorry for you paying 40% anyway (although I wouldn't suggest doubling your taxes).
More likely, you feel like you pay 40% because 40% comes out of your paycheck, but that 40% 1) includes deductions other than taxes and 2) doesn't take into account the refund you probably receive at the end of the year.
For me, over 30% is taken out of my paycheck, but when all is said and done I actually pay 24% in state and local payroll and income taxes. And, yes, I'd pay significantly more if I could have an effective and sensible government in return. Sadly, I'm not sure American anti-intellectualism and knee-jerk distrust of collective action will ever allow such a beast.
Considering every western nation spends less tax dollars then the US per person
So your telling me that nations that have approximately the same per capita GDP as the US (most of western Europe) but tax rates up to twice as high don't spend more tax dollars then we do? What's happening with all that money?
I call BS. Perhaps you mean total health care dollars per person. Not total tax dollars per person.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
This is the standard Slashdot US broadband story. We've seen it a hundred times in different permutations. How the US is falling behind. How the phone companies screw us.
Whatever. I don't fucking care. My company has plenty of bandwidth. So does my university. Bitching that Comcast charges you $40/mo for a 6mbit connection is small potatoes. Compared to nearly any of the other issues we face, it doesn't fucking matter.
Meanwhile I'm reading Slashdot connecting through a mobile phone in rural Utah. Go figure.
Who's to say you shouldn't be able to host a large server? I don't know about you, but I'm pretty tired of the general attitudes of server admins in the games I play. It seems a rare occasion to find an admin that isn't a power mongering twat because they setup an expensive server to host the game and have all the control. I know it's a free service for me but being a total dick should count as something of a cost. Would be nice to even that playing field as well.
That is to provide basic phone service to poor people.
Not broadband connections to country folks.
There is no free lunch. Accept it.
You are at the extreme range possible with a couple of towers, directional antennas and 802.11? Get off your ass and stop complaining.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You've hit the nail on the head there. The issue is not a choice between a "free market" or a market with regulation - you can't have a truly free market without regulation, unless by "free" you mean a market with no checks on anti-competitive practices or any of the other equally damaging practices that are only natural for private business to pursue. The problem is when the regulations are basically set by the very entities that are supposed to be regulated!
(Good) regulation is essential, and is what keeps snake oil off the pharmacy shelves, among other things, Vioxx notwithstanding. If only our government actually wrote the regulations in the public interest, instead of as a corporate welfare program, we'd be a lot better off.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Damn I just remembered something else. Someone was giving a speech at a games conference years ago (like 10 freaking years ago). I think it was someone from id software. Anyway their idea for the future of online gaming was pretty keen. Instead of joining servers, you basically played on one server, then could jump into a teleporter and wind up instantaneously on another different server. Levels were basically all linked together and you could run up to a teleporter and watch the match proceed on a totally different server. Like CCTV. Don't like what's going on here, let's see what's happening next door. Now the graphics tech for that happened in Quake 3. The broadband support is so far MIA. I think the point is, we can't really even grasp what sophisticated online games are because we're still stuck with the same idea of online play as we had when Quake 1 first went online. That's pathetic.
Let me add revisionist history to the list of sins of American supremacists. The Lend-Lease program had a miniscule impact on the Soviet war effort. A truly vast majority of the Soviet war equipment was manufactured by the Soviets, that including nearly 100% of their armor, something like 90+% of their small arms, and a similar proportion of their airforce. Nearly 100% of their ammunition too. The reason for their "losing early" was of course Stalin's mis-managment of the situation and his trust in his deals with Hitler, which backfired at him. But the Soviets did manage to move nearly all of their war production capabilities East, and the delay which was inherent in getting them back up to speed producing effective weaponry was the main reason for the continuing German advance. It was not winter which stopped the Wehrmacht, it was the T34 tanks and PPSh-41 sub-machine guns made in the Ural mountains. Once the Soviet manufacturing juggernaut got going, the tables have turned on the Germans, highlighted by engagement such as the battle of Kursk where the soviet fielded 3,600 tanks, none of them from the Lend-Lease program.
Comparative evils of wacko dictators aside, once UK and France had nukes, the American "protection" became a moot point. Stalin wanted to enlarge his empire and nuclear arsenals of these countries presented a show stopper to his plans. Furthermore, once he died, the whole Soviet leadership went into a bunker mode and remained so to the end. Papers which were recovered from the vaults of the Soviet Union after the collapse clearly indicate that the Soviets were always seeing themselves as on the verge of being attacked by the belligerent and aggressive USA and did everything in their power to forestall such attack, much of it by posturing.
What you see when you look at photographs of an American city circa 1900 is a rat's nest of wires strung everywhere. The infrastructure below ground will be a half-century older, almost as chaotic and only a little less fragile.
I don't want a dozen companies competing for the right to run a trencher across my front lawn. I don't want the complexity and expense of dealing with multiple service providers. I suspect there are many others who feel the same way.
I'm as much for true broadband as the next guy, but what exactly are the economic benefits of having a 45 (or 100) mbps symmetric connection? Yes, it obviously offers an advantage over the 768 kbps dsl line that repeatedly drops you or throttles down to 200 kbps during busy times, but what about over a 10 or 15 mbps symmetric connection? I realize if you have a resource people will find a way of using it, but give me a good example of something you can't do over a 15 mbps line that you can over a 45 mbps line. (and to steal someone's +5 funny, porn is not an acceptable answer) I think HD tv would be on of the few examples, and it's a fairly lame example - i could watch a really high quality broadcast vs an acceptable one. Perhaps remote storage/desktops, but even there you'd get a 300 mb file quite fast, and beyond video or heavy duty programs you'll find few files over 300 mb... and the economic advantage of me being able to stream videos from my PC at home to work is negative....
I am not an expert. If I am misled in something, please correct me.
Ultimately, those are political problems and are the responsibility of the people.
Amen. Unfortunately it has become de rigeur to claim that either the system has been hijacked by "special interests" (they're only special interests if they're not your special interests), or that corporations are simply too powerful to be stopped, or that the (pick one) Liberals/Conservatives/Aliens control everything we see and hear, so we can never make informed judgments. The outcome of all these excuses is a culture that venerates the theoretically perfect over that which is possible. So the jaded and cynical take potshots at the political system and do nothing.
The failures of our politics are allowed to continue because as long as we've all got jobs, homes, SUVs and Big Macs, we're satisfied with bad politics. Hit our fundamental liberties and we'll complain, but won't demand change. We'll just keep voting for candidates on the basis of who is more likely to be fun at a BBQ. Ironically, I don't think it will be the Iraq War or the assault on civil liberties that will bring about change in the electorate. My guess it will ultimately be the failure of hundreds of thousands of subprime mortgages that will focus people's attention on the necessity of competent government.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Cable companies and telephone companies are government supported and maintained regulated monopolies. The video that you watch and the music you listen to over cable networks, the internet, and broadcast TV is protected by government-enforced monopolies that enable industry lawyers to ruin people by sheerest mistake.
In a free market you could take your feed of "MTV" and rebroadcast it through your neighborhood over wifi, low power FM, or anything else you and your neighbors were into and nobody could legally stop you. In a free market all the record and movie companies could depend on is a short term market window before the stuff they produced got onto the net. In a free market there would be weak intellectual property laws, no contracts of adhesion, no free ride on the right-of-way for anyone, and your cable company would be competing with lillypad networks running hop-by-hop to the nearest Google network office.
And maybe it would all come tumbling down, but it's been the government support of these monopolies that has squashed more grassroots infrastructure efforts that I've watched try and get off the ground (since it was modem-linked networked BBSes in the '70s and '80s) than any internal flaws.
Riiight, that's why every country beating the US in the broadband market are such libertarian wetdreams: Sweden, Netherland, France, Japan, etc etc, such shining example of laissez-faire capitalisme!
... oh wait, wrong again!
OH WAIT, THEY'RE NOT!
And that's also why all these countries have government mandated universal health care that sucks so hard compared to laissez-faire USA
To sum it up, if we believe the libertards, sure, countries with MORE government intervention do much better, but if you remove even more government intervention, things MIGHT get better after they get much worse.
Yeah, that makes a LOT of sense. Pardon me, I'm off to drink a barrel of vodka, that's the libertarian cure for drunkenness.
Making strong un-justified claims about a region you've never even been to?
I've been to Europe often, and yes, that is how it works. I've seen it on trains, I've seen it in a car.
This might be the wake-up call you need...start questioning what US society and government tells you.
Blar.
A guy once tried to drive from Paris to London without stopping, and he DIED.
Yeah he drowned.
His friend who went from Madrid to Copenhagen was fine, though.
I didn't imply that you shouldn't be able to host a large server.
If we're already as taxed as those "socialists" in Europe, why don't we have the level of services that they do?
My opinion:
competent government > free market > corporate monopolies > incompetent government
We have a combination of the worst two, corporate monopolies and incompetent government. Sucks to be us.
It is true that the GDP per capita is higher in the USA than in most EU countries, but I think you should also point out that Americans, on average, work more hours than Europeans. I don't have the exact numbers at hand (they can be found on the OECD site), but if i recall correctly, the hours worked per capita is much higher in the USA than in e.g. France or Germany. If you translate the hours worked per capita into working weeks, Americans work on average 4 or 5 weeks more than the French and the Germans (they apparently prefer long vacations). Labour productivity per hour worked is not necessarily worse in France or Germany than in the US of A.
Good point lol!
if I walk into a store and steal a few bucks worth of stuff I can be punished. If I (ahem!)"steal" a movie or a song over the Internet, I can be punished. Rip off taxpayers to the tune of two hundred billion dollars and I can just relax and enjoy the money. What the hell happened? Where did it all go? If they didn't use it for promised network buildouts ... what, exactly, did they do with it?
Unbe-fucking-leivable.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This is exactly what I argued at the CPUC hearings for the AT&T-SBC merger. I started off by saying that a mistake was made thirty years ago, when AT&T was forced to divide itself King-Solomon-like. What should have happened, instead, is that AT&T should been forced to become a nonprofit corporation or pseudo-governmental agency, similar to the Postal Service.
Our postal network and roads and highways are generally recognized as common shared infrastructure; we don't allow the construction companies that build and maintain them to OWN the sections upon which they work, do we? Given that telecom and data networks are every bit as much shared public infrastructure, why then have we allowed the corporations that built those to own the pieces?
We fucked up many decades ago, perhaps as far back as the first telegraph lines, when we failed to recognize that the components that make up electronic (and now digital) public networks are common infrastructure, of the same sort as highways, and thus infrastructure which should be publicly owned. This is one instance where MORE socialism, not less, would be an enormously good thing.
As do commercial broadband providers. You made an interesting point, but the fact of the matter is with anything where you absolutely need 99.99% uptime and every kb/s you paid for, then you need a commercial contract with an SLA.
You're nothing; like me.
For Telephone service, NOT Internet service.
Big difference.
One day these countries will be so strapped for cash, and they'll go to bump the tax rate up just one more percent and realize that taxing ppl at 100% is not gonna work.
and even then, most of the guys I game with from the UK can pay L40 or so and get 25-50Mbit. I mean $80 / month is a bit of cash, but... speedy.
sig?
Rural broadband allows the people with the lowest cost of living (i.e. the best value workers) to be able to contribute to the information economy.
How so? Land is cheap, but there's nothing there and utilities are expensive. Rural broadband is cool in that it allows people to possibly move to where the jobs are, but I don't see people just sitting around the farm working a telejob any time soon. People have been clustering to cities for a lot more reasons than just the jobs.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
The cell phone networks compete. WiMAX (802.16e) is currently being built out by several companies with up/down rates of 70Mbps over short distances and 10Mbps at 10km. The fastest HSDPA already runs at 14.4Mpbs. In Japan, DOCOMO is currently working on deploying their Super 3G network, which runs at 300Mbps downstream, 80Mps upstream. We don't need complicated laws to fix this industry -- just laws that allow competition. If the current monopolies that own the wires and cable can't solve the last mile problem, others will.
The article was about the fact that the government paid $200B either directly or indirectly so that the telco companies would do it. They didn't, but still cashed the checks.
A more comparable example would be if you opened a pizza shop on a small business grant from a county with a written understanding that you would deliver to every resident in the county. Then you simply decided to eat the pizza yourself.
The GP was promised high speed Internet service by 2000 by the government. He is currently promised at least 200kbps by the end of the year. Both mandates were funded and the telco cashed both checks. But, he'll get it when the telco sees that the customers will pay for it for the third time. If the telco's drag their feet long enough, the US gov't will eventually pony up for a brand new shiny fiber-to-the-premises infrastructure. When that happens, they'll pull the copper infrastructure and charge $80 a month for fiber service. They are already doing it in the areas where fiber is being installed. I'll have fiber available to me shortly and if I sign up, I can never go back to the less expensive copper service.
I'm six miles from the nearest CO and I have 3.5Mbps DSL. They ran fiber to the big box a few thousand feet from my house and put something (a DSLAM maybe?) in the box. Presto, I have DSL. I live near the city, but my neighbors are cows and horses.
They don't want to give broadband to everyone. Only to the upper classes and thats for a good penny.
They are cherrypicking and discriminating.
But we only bitch. Why not action.
How about public donations into a fund for national highspeed broadband/HDTV network?
How about giving our 'airwaves' back to the public instead of to the corporations so we could have an 'affordable' mobile phone network?
Nah, we don't believe in it. Just bitch,bitch and don't bother our greedy corrupted congressmen who work for the phone co's like lapdogs.
Well, you will... but you WON'T get more benefits. We're broke here in the US.
You'll need to pay a tax rate of about 78% (GAO figure) or 80% (CRS figure) to keep what we now have going, in about 12-15 years.
Sorry about that, maybe you should have been more politcally active instead of watching the latest Transformers movie, or playing with Legos.
Now there was a cogent analysis, thank you.
Made the thread worth reading.
Actually, I'll have to disagree. The Postal Service has competition from UPS, FedEx, DHL, the Internet, private couriers, dial-in message retrieval systems (being killed by the Net), and fax machines. They don't even handle freight shipments, for which we have road, rail, planes, boats, and combinations thereof. There certainly are private roads in this country, although they are mostly short and local. The railroads were always owned, and even Amtrak, which is highly subsidized, runs on private tracks many places.
AT&T should have been split in three. AT&T Local, Bell Long Distance, and Bell (or AT&T) hardware, which would make switches, billing systems, and phone sets. One huge local provider, one huge long distance provider, and one hardware maker. The Labs probably should have gone with the hardware people.
Then, anyone who want to play long distance provider should have been able to negotiate with the Local company on a level playing field, and should have been able to offer Long Distance rates at their cost + the interconnect with the local + markup.
Anyone who wanted to be a local provider in an area should have had full rights to buy or lease any wire AT&T Local wanted to part with (at a profit to AT&T Local), and also have full rights to pay the locality the same rates for the same right-of-way to lay cable next to AT&T's cables.
Anyone who could make inter-operating equipment should have been able to make and sell equipment to AT&T Local, to Bell Long Distance, or to businesses and consumers.
This would have allowed for the company to have been split up, for the money shifting to be clearer, for competition to have been increased, and for the large network effects to still have been possible for savings and innovations. Unix might have become a single-seller OS from the hardware people this way, but think of the data systems we could have had if there was fully-funded Bell Labs at a hardware company rather than AT&T Long Distance keeping it and screwing it.
As it was, we got Bell Labs pillaged for people and cash by the baby Bells, Unix and a bunch of other innovations turned from liberally licensed to the Novell/SCO/Santa Cruz/BayStar/Open Group/Microsoft/Berkeley/DEC Unix/OSF1/SunOS/Solaris mess, the RBOCs mostly merged together (Verizon and AT&T account for all of them now, right?) anyway, now with long distance anyway, etc.
Cell phones, if the norm was one big local company, would likely have been viewed as another way to get local service. You'd have your land line or your cell phone, and either one ties into a grid and you pay the going LD rate for your LD carrier. You could roam and still have local access to your home local area, and pay long distance per minute (or flat-rate if your LD carrier has that available). Roaming could have been negotiated among locals or even mandated by the government. It could have been a roam-for-roam agreement. Maybe you'd end up paying LD to call your home area while roaming, but just local service to call the community you're currently calling from. That'd be a fair trade when you're on the road for business and calling your local contacts a lot.
Data-only networks should get the same breaks the Bell companies have always had to lay cables and secure rights-of-way. Someone would take FTTH or at least Fiber to the Block seriously if they didn't have to negotiate rights-of-way all over again.
Municipalities should be able to offer phone and data service, just like many offer water, gas, and electric. That shouldn't exclude private companies from offering those services as well.
Springfield, Illinois, where I lived for a number of years, has its own city-owned power plant (sorry, it's not nuclear and not owned by Montgomery Burns). They sell excess power to other, smaller towns around the city. The proceeds from that go to keep prices down and offset what would require tax revenues for city residents. If the city ran fiber to every block and 10Mbit or 100Mbit Etherne
If we expand the scope of the market to include government offices, it resolves some of the debate in this thread. That doesn't have to be anything as crass as lobbyists buying politicians. We can vote them out and they'll land on their feet just fine. It can be purely as crass as "whoever spends the most money to win an election wins." In a great many cases that's the way it goes.
That's one reason people are so surprised by Mike "I'm running for president to reclaim this nation for Christ" Huckabee coming in second in the Iowa Republican Straw Poll when he spent so little money and did so little marketing. It sure sounds folksy doesn't it? A straw poll? The election industry is like any other industry.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
Sounds like Australia. Descriptions of US broadband make it sound like the land of milk and honey in comparison to here.
Here's what I think should be done to help foster both growth and competition.
As you've stated, running lines are expensive and companies would be unwilling to do so unless they were guaranteed a profit on it. Opening up the lines to the world would kind of kill chances for making a quick buck. Sooo...
Give companies a limited lifetime monopoly on new local lines that they run. After this they can collect (reasonable) royalties from their competition for maintenance plus more profits. Of course having a monopoly on an area for a few years should build the company a strong and at least partially loyal customer base, so they can expect to continue to keep a fair amount of customers.
You seem to have completely missed the point. How exactly does lack of cheap broadband keep farmers from growing food you ignorant fool? Is broadband going to help farmers run their tractors?
I didn't realize you needed every home on cheap, fast broadband for them to work a tech job. Hell, I have to go into the office every day and I live smack dab in the middle of a major metro area. No telecommuting for me.
So again, what exactly will broadband in every home do that will miraculously change the economy of every small town in the US?
There is a partial solution. Thanks to the telephone investment earlier, you can get a T1 anywhere, and pay from $300 to $600 / month for 1.5Mb service. Get the neighbors together for a coop, add some WLAN, and you have almost broadband in the sticks that doesn't have multi-second latency like satellite. Get enough neighbors together with a lily pad WLAN, and you can upgrade to T3. (I know people who have done this. Don't use consumer WAPs designed for indoor use. Use outdoor models for a few $100 more that have lightning protection.)
If you can get line of sight to a friend/business partner in a nearby city, you can get 54Mb via a point to point wireless connection. With parabolic antenna, you can go quite a ways. The current record is 237 miles from a city to the side of a mountain in Venezuela (the mountain is critical to this setup as otherwise the horizon would block line of sight at this distance).
Finally, cell phone service goes many more places than broadband, and cell carriers offer broadband plans via their network. (So long, and thanks for all the honey...)
Australia? Excuse me? Please cite your source of this information, I would like to know when my country is getting internet that outperforms that of third-world countries for a decent price.
Ezekiel 23:20
Joe Nacchio, CEO of Qwest during this time, recently got 6 years of fed time. Though it was for insider trading, there is some justice....
Mediacom charges a little less in central illinois about $50 for 8Mbps/256 up. 10 bucks more can get you the 10/1 package. Course back in 02 I was paying Mediacom that $50 for 1.5/128
If the game has built in voice, bandwidth can be an issue. I found that out playing SOCOM with a 1500/128 connection. When the cable company bumped everyone up to 3000/256 my SOCOM voice troubles ended.
I don't see why a highway analogy isn't a bad idea for explaining the issue with people; or the city water system maybe even the sewage and storm drain systems.
We don't have multiple roads provided by multiple vendors (well most of us dont) 'competing' for drivers or multiple water lines etc. It does not make sense; furthermore, we have public land upon which these utilities almost entirely coexist to get to that "last mile." Cable and Phone must pay for use of the public land (in less corrupt areas they do) to reach your house-- because the "last mile" IS public property! Without that public land they would have to deal with each land owner they passed by. (don't go thinking you could negotiate with ATNT or Commiecast about the line going thru your property and get any real bargains...)
Here in the twin cities, MINNESOTA we have a private power company that does creepy business to extort funding from the state. Our GAS lines are decades behind in repair and we've already had disasters as a result, but the media fails to mention that they power company is only fixing problems as they see them (which sometimes means BOOM!) Its not just that our bridges are under maintained, which was NO SURPRISE to the informed who were just waiting for a big enough disaster--- the thought was (me included) was that most states are worse off and less used bridges would be more likely to fall-- so it would not happen to US (and it just did.) The public wasn't informed and people didn't care when people like myself ranted about the boring problems... (but would listen if you talked about the latest worthless gossip.) The public is ultimately at fault for the bridges, which were publicaly managed - but the gas leaks are privately managed and the blame rests upon the corporation who doesn't plan for long term repair and fights regulation.
Essentially, this is the exact same debate as public utilities. If you live somewhere that has privatized some of them you have no chance for public internet. An "OK" run non-profit government utility will beat a private one (in cost/benefit) and when they do not win its one of two flaws:
1) the service itself doesn't fit will with the organization (which might mean its better off being private)
2) that specific group of citizens are incapable of managing it
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Farmers took big to computers in a big way. Farms are businesses and having fast access to information helps them just as much as it would help other businesses. Back in the 80's farmers could access agro oriented information services, with hefty fees, and the farmers glady paid for it because it made their farm more profitable.
It's still true today.
Thats exactly what they are, scare stories. Usually with very little fact in reality. (Some truth as non-vital things are put off more so the vital things are done. I had to wait 6 months for a vasectomy, half an hour to get patched up from a run in with a chain saw).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
You are mad. Simply a raving lunatic. American exceptionalism and supremacism gone rabid.
I could refute this foaming lunacy point by point ... pointing out thing such as that the Cristie's designs influenced the "BT" series of 1930s Soviet tanks, of which th T34 was a very remote descendant and the design of which had as much to do with Walter Christie as the Mitsubish Zero had with the Wright's brothers biplane ... or that the Soviets, being a nominal Communist dictatorship in trouble, effectively suspended the concept of money during the war, replacing it with strict rationing and central planning and thus the idea of "financing" anything witin the war-time Soviet Union is rather comical ... or the truly barking-at-the-moon idea that Americans actually "built" anything in Soviet Union, presumably wth the slack-jawed Soviets standing in a circle looking on at the oh-soo-clever and industious Americans in their hard-hats hammering all them factories into place ... or the fact that the Lend-Lease program amounted to something like a mere 5% of the Soviet war materiel (although some of it was of strategic importance)... or ... but what is the point?
...the natural solution to this problem: making the capital-intensive infrastructure a public utility and allowing providers to do the much less capital-intensive job of competing on the public infrastructure, which would still provide the benefits of competition to consumers. One thing that capitalism is really good at is aggregating and directing capital. Financial markets are way better at that sort of thing than governments. To me it's pretty clear that lack of available capital has not been the one thing holding back better broadband deployment in the United States. In the last 10 years we have had two periods where there was way more capital available than people knew what to do with--and the second one might not be over yet.I think the problem has been lack of applications. You could build out a spectacular infrastructure but what's the point if you don't know to make money with it? That is why cable has enjoyed such a strong lead over DSL in the U.S.--they had a better application (digital video), and so were able to recoup a better ROI, which meant they could raise more capital to build a better network. Now history is repeating itself, because the primary driver for Verizon to build FiOS is not the Web, but digital video to compete with cable.
Right now TV is the leading application for digital broadband. Is that all there is though, to drive innovation? Web use is not doing it--you can't tell me we need 100MB/sec to every home so people can use eBay and Google and read Slashdot and look at LOLcats. The missing piece for the infrastructure is paying services. That's why the big ISPs are so focused on holding content hostage--they need to find a new revenue stream. But IMO they're barking up the wrong tree; no business has ever grown larger by suppressing a major supplier. They'd be better off looking for ways to partner with application experts to invent an integrated service that they can resell.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
And if the French hadn't helped during the American revolutionary war, you would still be an English colony, so fuck off.
In the UK (and Canada, for that matter) nobody is running on a NATIONAL ticket. Neither Blair or Harper had to run a NATIONWIDE election. We could run fair, engaging campaigns in our congressional districts in 5 weeks. It would be easy enough. But an actual nationwide campaign, with the fundraising and infrastructure needed to reach any meaningful percentage of the population is going to take quite a bit longer than that.
Now, maybe your system is better. Maybe it's better that the majority party gets to pick the national leadership. Maybe. But I don't think so. And I think that any American that wants to look at how the Republican party organized itself over the course of its 12 year hegemony would agree with me. Would you really have wanted to see a President (or perhaps "Prime Minister") Newt Gingrich, or President Tom Delay? These are people that could never win a true Presidential election but they won the leadership contests within the GOP.
Personally, I think there's merit to having a true nationally-elected office. And I think it's worth the trade-off of the longer election season.
So, in a way, the "40x" number IS correct. Blair had to run in a single district. Assuming that district had fewer than 7.5MM residents, it is, indeed, 40x smaller than the 300MM people that US presidents have to campaign for.
I am appalled at the games being played by EVERYBODY in the telecom business.
What? Did someone hang a sign on my back saying "Ass rape me"?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
They're made by "Soylent"
The green variety is particularly popular with the elderly. (Not eating them, b-e-i-n-g them.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
All the people I know from Europe speak at least two languages and in some cases it's five languages or more.
Languages pairs I have heard spoken: English/Gaelic, German/English, Russian/English, French/Spanish.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
You make a good point. The trend in modern society is towards more "necessities". I think it has to do with two things, mainly. One is that people feel better if they're buying something they can call a necessity rather than a luxury. The other is that marketers know that people will buy something more surely if it can be made to appear necessary.
In my line of work, Internet access faster than dial-up is a necessity. I still don't need streaming high-def video type bandwidth even at my office.
At home it's a luxury to have anything faster than dial-up. My wife and I have two TV channels that actually come in clearly. We both drive older, lower mid-range cars. Our newest video game console is the Super Nintendo. When my 61 disc CD changer went bad, I reverted to using the single-disc DVD player to play CDs in the living room. We slept on an old, beat-up mattress until we found a good sale on King-size replacements. So we're not too upset over having 6Mbps DSL be considered a luxury. That, air conditioning, restaurant meals, and long drives to see family are about the only luxuries we use regularly. If we could get cheap (and I don't just mean affordable, I mean cheap enough that we wouldn't have to sacrifice lots of other things in order to get it) higher-speed access, especially with a higher outbound speed, then we'd get that. I'm not spending another $45 a month on top of the $45I'm spending now to get it, though, unless it's something crazy fast like FTTH and has a tight SLA.
Customer owned fiber networks info.
The FAQ about Community Dark Fiber Networks is particularly interesting.
Basically, people own a strand or two of dark fiber in a fiber bundle running from their home to a central point in a "condominium" arrangement. You plug that fiber into whichever service provider you choose. Change the electronics at the ends of the fiber to upgrade service. A municipality contracting out the construction and maintenance of the fiber plant is the most likely scenario. Plain Internet service is cheap and if the usual suspects want to plug an ONT (Optical Networking Terminal) in for "triple play" that works too. Even local ISPs could be competitive under this arrangement.
There are several variations on the theme. Use your imagination.
arrest and convict Kevin Delay (Enron)
You mean Kenneth Lay? Kenny Boy was convicted because he *personally* broke the law. Corporate personhood won't shield anyone from taking responsibility for their criminal actions. It provides for establishing a financial collective that has some rights and responsibilities of a human person.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
Until corporations start offering telecommute jobs in the US, this really doesn't matter much, does it?
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
You must have missed the part of the article where we ALREADY have paid for it. We just haven't gotten it.
- toast
I rather they got subsidized satellite service. It does not make sense when wiring to ONE house might cost more than wiring hundreds in the cities. However, it seems that the wiring priority is reversed. It's quite sad that many rural areas have FIOS, but afaik, none of the top 5 urban centers do.
As for the farms. It's hard to not sound like a bigot, but the fact is that we can actually IMPORT vast amount of produce and meats from outside US cheaper than using the local products. Remember also the farm subsidy to ask farmers to NOT grow? So, what value do the rural areas provide again?
Dude, you shouldn't scrimp on the mattress. If you're sleeping properly, you're spending roughly 1/3 of your life on that thing. An extra dollar towards a mattress has far greater impact on your quality of life than an extra dollar on a car. If the sale mattress is adequate, then more power to you, though.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
...but I decided that at 4:40pm I was looking forward to going home, and didn't really want to read anything as depressing as the rest of the article is bound to be.
Thanks for the concern. Yeah, I know a mattress makes a lot of difference. We had a nice after-market pad on top of the old one while we tried to figure out what to replace the thing with.
We looked at Select Comfort, and they're nice, but the warranty prorates. We looked and the Tempurpedic foam beds, but my wife didn't like the feel of it.
So, we started looking at conventional mattresses, and there's always a sale somewhere on some brand. We found a store that was changing from multiple suppliers to just one to cut costs, and we got a good one for dirt cheap. This thing's got a fifteen year non-prorated warranty, has a nice thick pillow-top on both sides, and is extra firm beneath the pillow-top. We like it about as well as any hotel or guest room bed we've ever been on.
The postal system is a bad example. A better example of a government controlled entity (although it's not the Federal government) is the municipal water and sewer system. I don't have the choice of who I get my water from. I don't have 4 sets of sewer lines running through my neighborhood. Just 1 each. And, like 98% of all other Americans, I get VERY high quality water. I can't remember the time when my water went out, and there are measurable levels of water pressure, throughput and quality that must be met by my provider. The challenges faced by the water and sewer system are remarkably similar to the challenges faced by a municipal broadband provider. In fact, I could argue that broadband should actually be cheaper than my water service. There are no moving parts in the broadband system. There are technology costs, but if those components were standardized and commoditized, I think the costs would go down dramatically. Should a simple router really cost more than a 20-ton concrete sewer junction? Yes there are back-end bandwidth and peering costs on a broadband network, but do you really think those costs should be greater than the cost to build and maintain large reservoirs, water purification plants and sewage treatment facilities? It's a helluva lot easier to run a few fiber optic lines through a neighborhood than sewer lines. The things that break them are really similar. (read: backhoe drivers.) So why does my 7Mb/1Mb connection cost $150 a month, and my water and sewer cost $20 a month? If we formed municipal broadband systems, (which, IMHO, would be easier to maintain than a federal system) I think the costs would go down and the availability would go up. There would be a federal oversight organization (like the EPA for our water system) but they don't actually need to provide anything. The EPA doesn't provide water to anyone, they just make sure the water systems are delivering what they're supposed to. I'm willing to admit that there might be problems here I'm not considering, but I can't think of what they'd be.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules