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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.'"
It's certainly magical ... like LSD-induced magical. What is this administration smoking? Can I have some?
I don't know about Washington, DC, (which I suspect has great broadband) but where I live in South Carolina all I can get is dial-up. I get better connectivity when I'm in China.
My boss's mother in Korea has 1Gbps coming into her house via ethernet. It costs less than 30$ a month. Considering that a t3 functions at 45Mbps and costs a few thousand dollars a month, I'd say we're lagging behind. Badly. Most of our national infrastructure is still using lines which were installed in the 50s and 60s that have been retrofitted with newer equipment.
"More pipes into the home is the key," Russell said.
We already have "more pipes" and their bandwidths are too narrow and too expensive. We pay $70 for 10MB and many European and Asian countries pay $15 for 40MB to 100MB.
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.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Normally I don't bother to reply to obvious suspicions of partisanism, as generally they are, but this is SPECIFICALLY the fault of the administration. The FCC is directly over the monopolies that we currently have, and the top position of the FCC is directly appointed by the President. Over the last several years, we have seen not desire to encourage competition and build out, but RELAXING the restrictions of Telcos, and clear preferential treatment of telcos over cable. I would go so far as to say the FCC has experienced regulatory capture at the hands of "The New AT&T"
From the FCC using a flawed broadband policy that was started under Clinton and continued under Bush. Note that FCC Commissioners and executives are appointed by the President.
Specifically, the policy is that there be one company handling a given broadband technology for a certain area. One company handles cable, another handles DSL, etc. The problem is that there aren't enough technologies to go around, and some of them overlap within a single company. Fiber to the Curb service is obviously different from DSL, but the telco is in the best position to deploy both of them. At this point, it should be obvious that the cable/DSL duopoly isn't enough to produce healthy competition between providers.
This policy is the reason the FCC pulls out power line broadband every few years, even though the power lines were never designed to handle data, and it's been shown to create interference in the ham radio bands.
Switching administrations would have been a great time to reverse this policy, but it didn't happen, for whatever reason. A cynical person could conclude that the ISP have too much influence on the FCC, which wouldn't go away just by changing Presidents.
Not a typewriter
I have cows in my back yard.
On Main Street in the center of my town, people keep horses and sheep. I don't think you could categorize my town as anything buy "rural".
However, Boston is 30 miles to the east of me. I've got Fiber to my house. Nobody in Boston does.
Why do I mention this? It's because the problem is much more complicated than you imply. We've got a city with a high population density with no access, and rural farming communities with the option for 50Mbit symmetric connections, because while it's typically easier to serve a higher density population, the problem reverses when you start talking about a place where everything is hundreds of years old. It's hard to lay cable in a city that has gone through hundreds of years of layered construction projects, so those of us in the sticks end up with service first.
We need to come up with our own solutions. The only way we can be compared to European and Asian countries is in these statistical analyses. We can't always adopt their solutions. If you look at the European cities that have high penetration, they're generally fairly modern cities (even if they're "old", because many of them have had non-voluntary infrastructure resets (read: wars) over the years) compared to some US cities. We need solutions custom tailored to each of our regions. There isn't one magic solution.
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross." - Sinclair Lewis
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Well except I don't know a single person that can not get broadband.
I have a good friend that lives in the middle of no where Idaho. Somewhere near a town called Rupert... He has broadband.
My father in a cabin in mountains of Northern GA. He has broadband there. I think that if you take a look at the percentage of people and the actual number of people in the US that have Broadband available you will see that it is a pretty big number.
I have a cable modem at home. Most of the time I can not saturate that link when I am downloading an ISO so I don't think that FIOS would be much of an advantage since most of the time I am limited by the server speed more than my connection. Would I like a super fast and cheap broadband connection? Well yes I would. Do I need it it? Not really. It would be great if my office could get a fast two way connection that was cheap but for home not so much.
The problem with broadband in the US is most people do have access to it but a lot of them don't see the need for the extra cost over dial up. The economics of broadband vs dial up is much different in the US than other countries. In most EU contries you pay by them minute even for local calls. In the US local calls are part of your flat rate bill. So in those countries it is actually cheaper for everybody to get broadband even if they just use it for email and surfing than it is for people in the US.
I deal with about 15,000 users. They are everywhere from North Dakota to Alaska. I don't know of a single one that can not get broadband.
Can it be better? Yes it can. Is it a national crisis? I just don't think so. Do I want my FIOS? Yes I do.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
So of all the services FTTH is the cheapest to provide and supply. The only thing holding it back is the existing inflated value of the copper network, with the telcos valuing it in the billions to justify their share prices, and make no mistake, they will lie, cheat, steal and corrupt to protect that copper network for as long as possible.
It will only be replaced when fault rates start to have a severe economic impact upon the overall economy, and why will fault rates rise, why naturally enough, why spend money on maintaining the copper if you are going to replace it with fibre.
No for the country size lie, oddly enough smaller countries, also have lower populations and smaller economies, hence they have significantly less money to spend on infrastructure projects.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.
I'm only laughing since I've been on WildBlue's satellite service at home since November-ish of 2005, when I moved into a house in the Shenandoah Valley.
Please note that this is a mere 70 miles west from DULLES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT and the crowded den of datacenters and fiber connectivity that infest western Fairfax County and eastern Loudoun County VA. For people not familiar with the United States, this is (by some measures) the Internet hub of the eastern seaboard, with a huge number of peering/exchange points and hosting facilities. I work at one of those datacenters where we have a primary 10GB (yes, ten gigabit Ethernet) link to our upstream provider.
You probably would not notice it for web surfing, but anything requiring two communication would suffer.
You notice this when web surfing. 900ms typical latency and 2% packet loss on a good day. Bad days are more like 2000ms latency and 30% packet loss, or "let's reset the modem again and maybe it'll sync up and shove some packets across before it dies from rain fade" or whatever is causing loss today. It's not so bad on static HTML pages or plain text, but AJAX pages can suffer horribly if they're coded to constantly pump data back and forth, and without AdBlock or similar addons/extensions for a browser, it's horrible. Flash-based pages actually work well, once they download.
Imagine a terminal application with a 1 second latency, each keystroke would have a 2 second delay.
SSH over a VPN is pretty painful, but if you have your environment set up decently (i.e., alias the top 50 commands you run most often to two-letter combinations) it's workable for remote admin. Character-interactive apps like `vi` are still bad, but with patience you may prevail.
Remote desktop access is just out of the question. I've tried TightVNC and variants, and it's still just baaaaad.
Online gaming would be pretty bad too. VOIP would have an added pause.
Yeah, I cancelled Xbox Live since any multiplayer game was unplayable. WoW can be playable, under certain conditions, and MMORPGs fare better (i.e. it's theoretically playable) than other online games, but it's still painful. Ended up cancelling WoW too.
VOIP just doesn't work. Skype screeches along and you get a 1.5s-delayed echo. Oh yay.
I'm not bitter. I'm just pissed off, since I literally can't get anything better where I am.
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
The US still has to make the cultural leap to seeing broadband Internet as essential a utility as is electric, heat, water and sewage. We still don't even see TV that way, or we'd never put up with its high prices and monopolies - partly because we allowed cartels in exchange for "free" (ad supported, FCC regulated) air/radio broadcasts.
Small experiments in the US have shown that when municipal or other governments introduce network service, it finally spurs competition among the incumbent network operators, who stop putting off the less profitable market segments (who then get no service) while they pursue the "lowest hanging fruit". These municipal networks, whether wired or wireless, can support the increasing municipal network operations without paying tax money to private profit. If they permanently introduce real competition among the private operators, they can recede back into carrying only government traffic, like fire/police/medical comms, public websites, and the government's IT operations (including voice). In the meantime they let public policy make direct changes in what's available, to guide their constituents into a more competitive position with everyone else on the Internet.
Or we can just trust the phone company to invest time and money into keeping American communities competitive with all our foreign competitors, on the Internet that we invented and shared with them.
--
make install -not war
I think the countrywide marketplace IS open. There is no federal law stopping you from stringing fiber from point a to point b anywhere in the US. The real problem is that all the local municipalities in the middle look at anyone thinking about running any type of cable as a.) a potential cash cow and b.) a threat to the local cable company monopoly that they have already granted. The cable company, of course, threatens to sue the town if they even consider letting another company run fiber. The sole exception potentially being verizon because they are already there. So who wants to invest in new fiber with a limited prospect of a profit? I thought about doing it in my town but relaized that if I wanted to start turning a profit it'd be at 15 years that I break even (assuming 5-10% penetration growth per year starting at the 1% penetration that the cable company as ISP seems to have ). While wireless is easy to deploy it's not a good answer either.
And of course your solution to this problem is... less government! But back up a second. That's quite a leap saying that more powerful government gives more opportunity for rent seeking. If that is true, why did the EPA try to claim it didn't have authority to regulate CO2 emissions? Why have fewer species than ever been added to the endangered species list? Maybe the FCC shouldn't have any authority over the electromagnetic spectrum, parts of which were recently reclaimed, repackaged, and auctioned off? Why did the Department of Homeland Security bungle Katrina so badly? 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? Maybe they don't have enough people? It couldn't be because consolidating several agencies into one overall smaller agency was a bad idea, could it?
The problem is not the size of the government, it's the size of the corruption, incompetence, and stupidity in government and in corporations. It's the extent to which these organizations and systems allow problems to be hidden and covered up. 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. Just look at the subprime mess, and the way the telcos have not provided services, even going so far as to sue government entities set up to provide services where the telcos would not. If Bush and Cheney had less government to work with, they'd have fewer secrets to keep! Yeah. Transparency, not size, is the key.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
The definition is of a free market is one in which prices are negotiated "without force or coercion." In other words, a free market is transparent and competitive. Unfortunately, transparency and competition are anathema to profit; they are mutually exclusive. Ironically, a highly profitable market is a failed market by definition.
A-Bomb
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.
Hi. Here in Pennsylvania, we already paid Bell/Verizon multiple billion dollars to have fiber rolled out. That was 15 years ago. We're still waiting.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
What would that change, hmm? We've already seen retroactive immunity for cooperating telcos after the NSA "Folsom Street" incident, and blacklisting for those who didn't walk with the piper (Qwest). Just about every telco also complies blindly with any National Security Letter drawn in crayon plopped in their inbox.
I'm not saying I'm anti-privacy. In fact, I hate what the government has done with its domestic spying policies as of late. Retooling the FISA to apply to U.S. Citizens is absurd. Repositioning the NSA for domestic surveillance, when their charter specifically stated that they were to only monitor communications in other parts of the world, is just downright criminal. Allowing the FBI to serve secret warrantless search orders on businesses for secret reasons and with secret results violates every principle of government transparency I've ever heard.
What about all of this would change if the federal government owned the lines? I don't think much would. Would you be more comfortable allowing the states to maintain ownership, or perhaps local municipalities? I don't trust our government, on any level, but I trust AT&T & friends even less.