US Broadband Policy Called "Magical Thinking"

eWeekPete writes "Is the pipe half full or half empty? Not surprisingly, the talk at the second annual Tech Policy Summit was decidedly mixed. 'The US is still the most dynamic broadband economy in the world,' said Ambassador Richard Russell, the associate director of the White House's Office on Science and Technology Policy. 'As opposed to being miles ahead, though, we're only a little ahead.' But Yale Law School's Susan Crawford called Russell's position 'magical thinking. We're not doing well at all.' She proceeded to call the White House's effort 'completely inadequate on broadband competition.'"

Comments

"only a little"

[Anonymous Coward]

When our policy-makers (who never admit to anything bad lately) say that we're "only a little ahead," you know that we're seriously lagging.

Re:"only a little"

[Opportunist]

Basically it means two things: First, that the rest of the world is even more behind, and second, that they got some bri... funding from telcos and now need a reason to pump tax money that way.

Re:"only a little"

[FireXtol]

America is a very large country. To roll-out fiber optics (to the curb!) would be very expensive for a nation that still has a very large number of solely dial-up users. Especially compared to the arm-and-a-leg you're being charged for poor service.
Plus it would enable hugely cheap WiFi networks. An entire neighborhood could be connected through one fiber line, and all be enjoying [several] Gigabit WAN. Enabling the ability to host your own fairly large web server.

Unfortunately, these are all very bad for big business!

Businesses model their offerings based not on what they can do... but what they think they can get away with. Establish unreliability as 'standard', establish that 'hosting your own' is cost-prohibitive (or contrary to a service agreement), and that this thing called bandwidth should be ridiculously expensive.

It is basically a criminal mentality.

Re:"only a little"

[Opportunist]

What? Socialized infrastructure? Maybe even offering everyone the same goods for the same price, leveling the playing field instead of offering discounts for large corporations to give them an edge over the smaller companies?

Careful there, it may lead to a free market system, and I doubt that's in the best interest of the corporations and their politicians. In other words, don't expect to see that anytime soon.

Re:"only a little"

[Hyppy]

You're right, I was completely out of line. We need the best government money can buy. In order to purchase that government, we need powerful corporations which have the people's best interests at heart to provide that money. Democracy at its best!

Wait... I think I heard of a quote about corporations and government before... Ahh, yes, it was Benito Mussolini. "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the marriage of government and corporate power." So much for democracy.

Is there an equivalent to Godwin's Law for fascism?

Re:"only a little"

[CodeBuster]

If you consider self interest to be criminal then you may be right. However, t is my own considered opinion that the extensive power of the government to regulate has created the opportunity for rent seeking and anti-competitive behavior to occur in the first place. If there were less power to be gained by corrupting politicians because the government was smaller then you would have more broadband at cheaper prices right now. The competitive market does not allow people "to get away with it" because inefficient competitors are ruthlessly driven out of business by their more able competition. The problem in the real world is that busy-body governments, even though their intentions may be good, cannot resist interfering and we all know a certain road that is paved with good intentions.

Re:"only a little"

[Anarke_Incarnate]

Most of the highways must be paved with good intentions, because they sure as shit don't use quality asphalt. The potholes are bad enough, but the "filled in" potholes are just as bad when they are "leveled" to 4" higher than the rest of the road, causing just as bad a dip when driven upon.

Re:"only a little"

[Curunir_wolf]

Well, he's right - writing good legislation really is hard, especially since most of the time they are relying on "industry consultants" to help them, and they are inevitably motivated by their own agendas.

Part of the problem is the vast library of existing legislation that's been around since AT&T was first handed a monopoly on right-of-way for telegraph wires. The first step is to identify and organize that mess, including everything that the FCC controls, spectrum, rights-of-way, broadcaster and FTC regulations, etc., etc. Repeal it all. Then start over from the basis of a nationwide "communications infrastructure policy". A good start would be a basic layered network topology, agnostic to content. Media, data link, network.

Now you've got a starting framework for a policy - but lots of players with huge investments in all the stuff you're planning to create a new policy for.

Yea, I'd say "hard" is an understatement. No wonder: (from the article)

By the end of the debate, Crawford was the only member of the panel still insisting on an activist Congress to address issues such as network neutrality and network management. I can understand why the rest would have very little confidence that Congress can really effectively do the work required.

Re:"only a little"

[CodeBuster]

why did the EPA try to claim it didn't have authority to regulate CO2 emissions [acs.org]?

Regulatory Capture

Why have fewer species than ever been added to the endangered species list?

This is relevant how?

Maybe the FCC shouldn't have any authority over the electromagnetic spectrum, parts of which were recently reclaimed, repackaged, and auctioned off?

Other than to manage and sell licenses and enforce exclusive rights they shouldn't. In fact, they could even outsource the management and auctioning parts and concentrate on the enforcement. This is the same as the government selling oil, mining, and mineral extraction rights on public lands.

Why did the Department of Homeland Security bungle Katrina so badly?

Government, by definition, bungles. That is why I and many other Libertarians want substantially less government.

Why does DHS insist on spending big $ for radiation detectors that won't reliably detect smuggling and which are subject to false alarms, while barely pursuing other, more promising methods?

Again, because the government has no profit motive AND they are spending other people's money they aren't very careful about what they buy or what gets wasted. They might buy product A over product B because product A is made by a company that made a contribution to the re-election campaign of a certain politician or promised to do a personal favor for a DHS manager in the future. If you were spending the money of another person for them would you be as careful as if you were spending your own money on yourself? Probably not.

Maybe they don't have enough people?

They almost certainly have too MANY people already.

It couldn't be because consolidating several agencies into one overall smaller agency was a bad idea, could it?

Of course it was a bad idea. The new agency should never have been created and most of the other existing ones should have been ELIMINATED. The ideal government, IMHO, would be composed of the constitutionally mandated branches (president, congress, supreme court), the justice system (state and federal courts) to adjudicate disputes, police (national, state, and local) to enforce the rules and prevent violence and coercion, and finally the military to prevent foreign powers from conquering us by force. That is it and that is all.

The problem is not the size of the government

Yes it is.

it's the size of the corruption, incompetence, and stupidity in government and in corporations.

Corruption is inevitable in government, it will always be present at some level and it will be larger and ever more present as the size and scope of government is increased. I know of NO counter example to this principle from any time in all of human history. The difference between incompetence or stupidity in government and the same in corporations is that an incompetent or stupid corporation will be selected OUT of the system by the forces of market competition (it will declare bankruptcy and cease to exist). The government on the other hand, no matter how incompetent or stupid, will not go bankrupt OR be forced out by market competition because they control the market via the ultimate power, threat of violence and coercive physical force. Replacing governments can be dangerous work, just look at the US experience in Iraq if you don't believe that.

In some cases, government authority has been used for rent seeking, but in many other cases, lack of government authority has been used to put together monopolies and to get away with short changing the people.

If one looks at the economic history of monopolies then it is clear that the durable monopolies (i.e. ones that were not temporary) were invariably backed up by the coercive power of government to enforce the continuation of the mono

Re:"only a little"

[suitepotato]

Tax money shouldn't be pumped to the telcos to yet again waste instead of rebuilding critical infrastructure. Instead, the U.S. government should build its own national, public infrastructure to replace the crap that the telcos are trying to pass off as acceptable.

So you'd do this despite the fact that you'd not want all your communications copied by AT&T to the NSA? Despite eight years of privacy invasion by the current administration? Despite Carnivore? Despite initiatives by our government to make all your information open to them whenever? Despite that all of the above happens with the Internet being carried by private companies now? Despite that what you're proposing would mean they'd own the lines, routers, switches, etc. and thus they'd have total control of all information passing on the net within America? Despite 200 plus years of proof that even in our own representative democracy the state absolutely cannot be trusted to do the right thing without eternal vigilance on the part of the citizenry?

What are you smoking and where can I get a loan to afford it?

Yeah, I want to give my Internet infrastructure over to the state where they already abuse their police powers at whimsical will.

Re:"only a little"

[TheLink]

What are _you_ smoking? And no I don't want any of it.

How has having the network being owned by a Corporation stopped comms being illegally spied on by the US Gov?

If you have a crap Gov, it'll spy on citizens whether it owns the network or a Corporation owns the network. Heck it'll MAKE IT LEGAL TO DO SO IF IT WANTS. The fact that the present Gov doesn't even give a damn and tries to make it retroactively legal shows the amount of CONTEMPT it has for the citizens, their intelligence, and the laws of the country.

The last I checked US citizens had this thing called a vote. If they don't care very much about your mentioned concerns, the Gov will continue doing it. If they do care enough then the Gov might stop doing it.

But it appears most are clueless. The Sheep are busy deciding which Wolf should eat them for the next term, and it sure seems that some would rather have the Wolves' good friend the Fox to own the networks, because they are afraid of the Wolves owning the networks.

Brilliant. No wonder Bush won two terms.

I live in a different country and wouldn't care so much but for the fact that the USA is the most powerful country in the world ( military spending is almost as much as the rest of the world combined), and has no qualms on starting wars unilaterally, doesn't care about the UN, what the rest of the world thinks, or what the US Constitution says. Add Diebolded elections, lots of really stupid voters, and it sure doesn't look good.

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporate greed prevents connecting rural housing to broadband?

I thought greed and the free market would solve everything!

Ron Paul where are you?!?!?

Re:What?

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

If Ron Paul were in charge of this we'd still be just as far behind, but at least we'd individually have more money due to not paying taxes to the telecom companies to roll out fiber they never actually did.

"Magical Thinking"

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything coming out of the White House at the moment is "Magical Thinking" alright.

Re:Wrong

[hyades1]

I think you miss the point. When the statement of a government official (we all know government officials always tell the truth, don't we) is clearly contradicted by documented date and objective analysis of that data, then it's time to cry bullshit.

For far too long bureaucrats, politicians and corporate leaders have cynically played on the sometimes-misplaced national pride of Americans to short-circuit justified criticism and move attention away from real problems. Whenever I want to refocus a debate in a way that favours my view, I simply say this: "Well, the American people have the best (fill in whatever you want) in the world." The Americans in the room will all nod gravely and accept whatever claim I've just made, no matter how outrageous. I've just convinced them that everything is mostly OK, and all that needs doing is a little fine-tuning. I now own the debate, because I've defined most of the situation to suit myself. Whatever useless little make-work project I then suggest to make things "even better" will be enough to make "the American people" believe the problem is as good as solved.

If you don't believe me, try this some time and watch it work. Don't worry about the occasional person smart enough to catch you. They'll be perceived as one of those left-wing nay-sayers who never has anything good to say about The Greatest Country In The World, Ever. In today's climate, they might even wind up on an FBI Watch List.

Re:USA Broadband is fine

[cowscows]

I don't think there are that many people arguing that some hermit living in the middle of the woods in Montana should have telco's lining up to run a fiber line to his house, but there's a strong case to be made that even in dense urban areas and brand new high end suburbs, the state of the telecommunications infrastructure in the USA is generally behind the times. I've got family living in wealthy areas of the east coast, and their internet options are limited to the same dsl/cable choices that I get where I live. In the south in a city that was half destroyed by a hurricane a couple years ago.

What I think this means is that the government should force the telcos to get off their asses and actually upgrade some of this stuff, and do it without passing huge new bills onto consumers. Yes it's regulation, no it's not free market economics, and no it's not necessarily fair to the telcos and their shareholders. But the idea that those telco companies and their successes are the result of a free market is just a myth. They were handed their marketshare by the government decades ago. That wasn't a gift, it was a trade, and the telcos need to be held responsible for their side of the bargin.

Re:USA Broadband is fine

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah yeah, trot out the usual bullshit. "Wah! our country is so large and spread out that we can't even provide asian-speed broadband in the densest downtowns of our largest cities!"

It's still bullshit, and will continue to be so until New York catches up with Hong Kong or Tokyo (and don't give me that "we can't put new wires in old buildings and under old streets" bullshit, how many centuries do you think Hong Kong has been around?)

Re:Crawford right -- net should be publically owne

[Shishak]

We should have had a PUBLICLY OWNED 100GB optical fiber pipe across the nation FIFTEEN YEARS AGO but the cable and telcos reniged on their promise to build it after Congress gave them to money to do so in order to prevent local governments from building their own. Much of that pipe my city government installed is still buried and is still good. One line goes under my yard. We should demand that the cable and telcos FULFILL their promise and finish the job they were paid to do, and finish it without being paid a single penny more or raising their rates. That's right... take it out of the profits and stockholder dividends. The stockholder's didn't mind receiving windfall dividends while the cable and telcos management was taking the money and paying themselves huge salaries and bonuses and giving those dividends. It's time to pay up, with interest... just like they'd charge. What exactly are you smoking? 100Gb 15 years ago? 28.8 dialup was fast 15 years ago. The 100Gb Ethernet standard isn't even ratified TODAY how in the hell are the telcos supposed to build a 100Gig 'optical fiber pipe' when the technology doesn't even exist TODAY. There are NO routers that support 100Gb connections. OC-768, 40 Gb is the fastest you can get today and the are MILLIONS of dollars While I agree the telcos and cable cos can and should do more to promote broadband around the country. You have NO idea what you are talking about!

Re:Wrong

[bhima]

"When fascism came to America, it was wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."

There, fixed that for you!

Re:USA Broadband is fine

[sm62704]

I think its silly to argue that broadband penetration in a country the size of one of our states is the same sort of engineering feet as solving the problem on a continental basis

Your feet are engineered? ;)

Seriously though, I don't see any difference between giving Denmark universal broadband penetration and giving Illinois universal broadband penetration.

Why are our cities cash-strapped while Denmark's aren't? Why do you make excuses for government's abysmal failures?

One more nit: we're only about a third of the continent. Mexico and Canada are part of North America as well, and Canada has a comparable land mass, although I don't know how many Canadians have access to broadband.

The US's real problem when it comes to our governments (local, state, and federal) is our method of financing political campaigns. Has there ever been a plutocracy that was just or efficient?

Enough with the tubes

[clay_buster]

Geeks talk about the size of the pipe to their house. Some Senator talks about the internet being a bunch of tubes that can fill up because of file sharing or video on demand or whatever. It's exactly the same metaphor the technocrats use. So exactly why was the guy wrong other than he's old and from the wrong party?

Re:Wrong

[highlander76]

Reminds me of some of the undercover documentaries about North Korea. When a society is afraid to honestly compare itself to others then that society is doomed to stagnate, or at least fall behind. You'd think with the internet it would be easy to get information about the situation in other countries. Oh, that's right, with our superior connectivity it still takes too long to download that information.

Re:Better connectivity in China

[yiffyfox]

I live, 35.4 mi - about 1 hour, from Google's headquarters in Mountain View. The best I can get is ISDN. No Cable/DSL is available. Nor will the phone company install a T1 to our house. I feel your pain. If you live in the thick of it, you can get broadband, step away form the city and it's back to dial-up.

Re:Not so good

[asuffield]

In the US it is nearly impossible for a new broadband player to enter the market due to the extensive infrastructure investments needed.

No. In the US it is completely impossible for a new broadband player to enter the market due to the extensive laws explicitly prohibiting it, at the request of the incumbent telcos. This is pure corruption.

Who told you that the infrastructure investments were prohibitive? Hey, it's those same telcos again. They're lying to you: it's quite doable in the urban areas, and the rest would creep out slowly over the following years. This is all sleight of hand to distract you from noticing the corruption that's really responsible for the mess.

If it was legal, you would have competition, and your network services wouldn't suck so utterly.

It's called population density. The US has a density of 80 per sq mile.

Irrelevant. Nobody wants to run network service to miles of desert in Utah. The density in the parts of the US where people actually live is more than high enough to support real service. This sort of misleading statistic is typical of the way they try to convince you that what you have isn't broken.

Canada is even bigger

[FreeUser]

Canada is even bigger, with a much lower population density. Rural Canadians typically pay $20/month for ADSL bandwidth I couldn't buy in downtown Chicago at any price. I could get equivalent bandwidth, but not ADSL, and prices were in the multi-$100s/month for leased lines. The US was woefully behind its northern neighbour, and the rest of the developed world, three years ago.

Now that I live in Europe, I'm able to get 24Mbit/2Mbit ADSL for a fraction of what I paid for 1/12th the bandwidth in Chicago (and having spoken to a friend of mine who lives there now, it seems things haven't improved much in the last 18 months). Seeing as 100Mbit is coming in the next few months, I'd say the US is not only not ahead, it is falling behind at a geometric rate.

Speed is relative...

[rickb928]

Back in the day I worked for an ISP/consultancy. I was at a client site which was also our POP, and had dual T-1s, and I shared that with our users. It was blazing fast for the day. Then I got RoadRunner (one of the early users in our city) and damn, that was fast. I would mirror vendor FTP sites overnight, swapping 1GB/hr one night. Woot!

Today, my cable service is the equal of what I had back then, but the download speeds suck. Why?

Demand, and of course backbone capacity.

So, does that nice Korean grandmother with the GB Ethernet connection get GB BitTorrent downloads? It's not up to the last mile how fast your connection is. It's the source(s) and the backbone. And your ISP's gateways, of course.

Our broadband problem in the U.S. doesn't seem to be, IMHO, the last mile. It's the ISP's gateways, just inside the gateways, and the backbones.

How do they fix this? Well, for most ISPs, they ignore the capacity issue as long as possible, either waiting for the next generation of switching equipment or a capital infusion to spend some money on the NOC. This takes years either way.

I just saw a story on Nokia apparently offering changes to GPRS, doubling and then increasing again data speeds. this might be a software change, which while not free would be cheaper than new boxes. Sounds like they wanna keep GPRS alive and competitive with EV-DO, HSPDA, et al. This sort of competition is not working in the landline/wired ISP business.

For a while, a DSL provider in Southern Maine was advertising that they offered faster connections than the cable company did. Oh, man, the cable co threatened to sue for false advertising. And the DSL provider basically said 'bring it on'. They could back their claims. In none of this did the telco, Verizon, ever speak up about *their* speeds, Cause their speeds sucked. That little spark of competition is not happening over much of the nation. The incumbents are so entrenched there is no getting past them.

Perhaps wireless gives us a hope to get past the incumbents, but with the C Block auction going to the highest bidders^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H incumbents, we're probably not going to get any more there. The 'open network' spec is a joke. Any device will operate on the 700MHz band, it will just operate at the pokey, laggy speed every other device works at. Nice. I have no hope that the bidders will build out their networks to accomodate the potential demand of true broadband - BitTorrent, 1080p, large file transfers for online storage/backup are the drivers for this.

We need to change things at the FCC, open up the marketplace, and let someone/something come on and deliver what is wanted.

Fat chance.

Re:Speed is relative...

[rickb928]

Ah, so many issues, so little time...

It isn't federal law that is the issue. Stringing FTTH requires hanging it off of poles in most of the country. Paying for access to the right-of-way. Even burying requires ROW. Local communities control most of this, while common carriers usually have a deal with the local authorities also. In Maine, most of the poles were owned by the power cos., and everyone paid them for access. The local community took a cut of the action. To go into business as a FTTH ISP, you'd need to pay for the pole rights. That DSL competitor leased lines from Verizon as a CLEC.

Wireless sucks. In a state like Maine, vegetation makes the number of access points skyrocket, and the system is too expensive to deploy. Philadelphia learned this - similar topology. Even in Tempe, Arizona, the real performace of WiFi ends up being too darned expensive.

In Maine, the calbe co has good market penetration (+20% at least), if you define the market as those wanting internet service. If you define the market as all housholds, well, not so good. And the Telco and all DSL providers lag only slightly. Dialup is not so prevalent.

In America, there is *no* nationwide market for broadband. The local constraints on laying fiber prevent that.

Indeed, no "magic" solution, backhoes aren't magic

[rbrander]

It's several years now since then-active industry pundit and Ethernet inventor Robert Metcalfe commented on his frustration with the "teleopolies" (hooray for that word not catching on) not providing broadband like they could.

I'm a waterworks/sewer engineer and wrote him to ask why is it that *real*, fiber-to-the-home broadband isn't cheaper than water and sewer service, which run about $30-$40 /month. To supply you with that, local utilities have to bury large, heavy pipes in the ground up to your house, and every day, they have to run multi-hundred-million-dollar plants to clean, sterilize and pump a ton or more of water (usually some ways uphill from your local river) to your house.

Offhand, that SOUNDS more expensive than running a hair-thin fiber to your house and maintaining the operation of some silent, no-moving-parts routers in your neighbourhood and downtown.

After water treatment, transmission and delivery became possible, within a few decades, they'd been run to every house in major cities; utilities took out some big loans and started paying them off from part of your $30/month.

Metcalfe replied that he had no idea why there was not fiber to the home for the same price as water, sewer, gas, phone and electric to the home. Neither could any of his readers who posted reply comments. There just is no answer to why we were able to do the first five and not the sixth, "utility install".

The Internet providers have instead been charging that $40 and up per month to provide service over infrastructure that was already paid for - phone wires by 1960, cable by 1995, about 25 years after they were put in. So they were free, from an ISP point of view.

The Canadian and European broadband penetrations are the result of tighter regulation of the monopolies - they were just told to spend more of that $40/month on providing service to rural areas or at higher quality in urban, by regulators who knew damn well they could still make a VERY decent profit.

But only Asia has solved the problem the way American and Europe just called out the backhoes and put in water, sewer, electric and phone lines as soon as they were practicable. Asia got out the backhoes and put in fiber to the home, and that's why they have many, many MB/s to the home.

So could we, if the internet-providing companies had not largely completed a "regulatory capture" and told their own regulators what to tell them to do.

Re:Not so good

[cloakable]

...Call me dense if you wish, but why would you want to put a DHCP server onto a network that presumably already has DHCP? Best case scenario, your DHCP server is non-authoritative, and everything carries on.

Worst case, your DHCP server IS authoritative, and hands out broken settings to hosts trying to connect. Not pretty (I've seen it happen).

Just stick a NAT over the line, and run DHCP on the internal network.

Re:USA Broadband is fine

[dkf]

Broadband for the USA is a much, much, larger problem than broadband for a tiny european country. Only if you're intent on doing the whole country at the same time. It certainly wasn't done that way in the UK; instead, it was a sustained investment (by companies after being pushed into it very hard by the regulators and government) over many years, and it involved a lot of digging up of streets (well, mostly sidewalks). Sure, at the time it meant a lot of grumbling by various people, but it now means we've got a free market in internet access where there are lots of providers fighting for your custom like rats in a sack. Just what Adam Smith would approve of!

If you (as a nation) want it done, stop finding stupid excuses (and mendacious "regulators") and just fscking do it!