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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.'"
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.
Corporate greed prevents connecting rural housing to broadband?
I thought greed and the free market would solve everything!
Ron Paul where are you?!?!?
Anything coming out of the White House at the moment is "Magical Thinking" alright.
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.
I'll assume you meant Great Britain. California is (bear in mind all numbers are from Wikipedia) 163,696 square miles with a population of 36,457,549, Great Britain is 80,823 square miles with a population of 58,845,700.
The population density of California would be 222.7 people per square mile and for Great Britain is 728.1 people per square mile.
So yeah, California generates more agricultural produce than Great Britain but it's got more room in which to do it. There's also the climate difference, which I'd assume helps the crops.
But were you really just expressing irritation at the fact that the US isn't leading that particular industry? 'Cause that's fair enough and, given the fact that the web was (so far as I can tell) more-or-less an American creation (with the exception of HTML), understandable.
I do have mod-points but, since I've replied to you, I can't mod you. Which is fair enough really, since I wouldn't know how to mod you. It's not Flamebait, I'm sure; but I don't think it's insightful either. And, while it's Informative, I'm not convinced that's the spirit in which you meant it. So I thought I'd reply instead.
In this case, "success" means that local monopolies are continuing to make money on existing infrastructure without having to reinvest any of it into new infrastructure.
I signed up for a business-class cable modem a few years back (being willing to pay the premium so I could host my own email and not have to worry about bandwidth caps), and my contract is about to expire (defaulting to month-to-month after the expiration). In that time, the cable company hasn't increased the speed for business users at all. Normally, I'd look for a competitor, but none of the local companies have DSL coverage near my house. There's one company offering WiMax service, but I find WiMax questionable.
So apparently, in the few years that I've had my cable modem, almost nobody has invested a single penny in infrastructure upgrades. Meanwhile, the Koreans had 10 megabit fiber connections years ago. I can only conclude that "a little ahead" is a measure of profit margins, not usefulness.
Not a typewriter
"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!
"A little ahead" in this context means "behind Denmark, Netherlands, Iceland, Korea, Switzerland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Canada, United Kingdom and Belgium" in broadband penetration.
And that's with a very liberal view of what broadband really is (256 kbps or above). If only looking at true broadband capable of video streaming both ways, the US is WAY down the list behind almost every other non-third-world country.
Geographically, it becomes even worse, with broadband being largely unavailable outside cities and suburbs, while other countries have ensured that penetration also reaches areas with a low population density.
The US is much like the Holy Roman Empire in that it refuses to acknowledge that its days are numbered and that to survive, it needs to accept that it's not #1, and that it must accept help from the outside.
Or, to use a vehicle analogy (this is slashdot, isn't it?): The train has left, and the US was not on it. Even though the many of the engineers are Americans, the passengers and their agents were too busy haggling over the ticket price, so they missed its leaving the station.
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.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
It was nice of you to post in English, good foreigner.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
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
Just wait until you wind up with something that can't be treated with antibiotics ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
You're quite wrong here. To quote F.D.R.: "Look to Norway"
Norway has mountains ranges and large fjords cutting off easy access to most anywhere, and less than 3% arable land. It's much harder to cable up Norway than the US. Yet, they have a much higher broadband penetration, especially outside the big cities. This doesn't jive with your claims.
The real difference is in politics, not geography.
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.
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.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
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
Now I hope and pray that I will But today I am still, just a bill
"When fascism came to America, it was wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
There, fixed that for you!
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
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?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
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?
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.
It's sorta like being in love with a hot chick that's no good for you. She cheats, she lies, she does drugs, she does all your friends, yet, you still love her ... abuse and all.
You must be dating my ex-wife.
Speedy thing goes in; speedy thing comes out.
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.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
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
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.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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
Small fuckin' world, you guys. ...*snif*..
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
You should be looking at enabling consumers to make an actual choice. Where I live (western Europe) I can choose between 20+ DSL providers, they'll install in a week and moving between them is done with virtually no interruption of service. If anything this is the big reason for the high broadband penetration here. The owner of the copper (former state monopolist usually) gets to charge a low maintenance charge and is obliged to cooperate with anyone that wants to sell DSL service over their copper.
I'm sure quite a few people will be on 512k lines but then this is still a world of difference to dial-up or nothing at all. Oh, and bandwidth use is not a big issue at all at most ISP's, I can burn 100GB of traffic a month and nothing will happen, I can spike to 200GB or 300GB in a month once in a while and nothing will happen. The ISP's could whine about it, but then I'd take my money elsewhere, so they just make sure their networks can deal with however people choose to use it. The consumer rules the broadband market, anything else, and your broadband economy is really just a pie in the sky.
The comment from Richard Russell is nothing but denial and sillyness. I'm skeptical that the US ever had the most dynamic broadband economy in the world, claiming that title for this very moment is even more ludicrous. I'd say this man is reality-challenged and incompetent. A common theme in this US administration it seems.
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.
/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.
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
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.
The reason why Russell has a different perspective from Crawford is that Crawford is comparing the US to other industrialized countries, and Russell is comparing the US to ALL countries, including places that have trouble providing electricity and running water, let alone internet.
If you (as a nation) want it done, stop finding stupid excuses (and mendacious "regulators") and just fscking do it!
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"