100 Years Ago, No Free Broadband Pneumatic Tubes

TheSync writes "The Division of Labour blog spotlights a report written 100 years ago by a commission appointed by the Postmaster General, that came to the conclusion: 'That it is not feasible and desirable at the present time for the Government to purchase, to install, or to operate pneumatic tubes.' Here is a scan of the original NYTimes article. If only we had gotten the free government Intertubes in 1908!"

Comments

Snarky article

[SatanicPuppy]

The reason the government wasn't into buying the pneumatic tube system is because there was no real standard and no guarantee the system would be worth installing anywhere else. I can't see how anyone who researched it at the time would come to any conclusion but that the last thing the government needed was to be saddled with an expensive, hard to maintain, experimental system...Especially given that they already had the postal service.

The modern situation is a bit different. Government owned local data infrastructure is actually a pretty good idea. Small towns who can't interest the big telecoms in investing have bought bonds and done it themselves with good results, and it really opens the door to local competition since the competition is based around providing actual service...not around providing infrastructure. The technology is also standardized, and much more mature.

Telecoms are getting too uppity these days. Some kind of smackdown is required.

Re:Snarky article

[theaveng]

>>>Government owned local data infrastructure is actually a pretty good idea.

I'm sorry: What? I was always under the impression that "monopolies are bad", at least that's what we learned in 10th grade social studies, and yet here you are saying a monopoly is a good idea. I have to disagree. The U.S. Mail monopoly is a bad idea, and so too is a U.S. Data monopoly.

What we need are MORE choices at the home, not whittled down to just one.

Re:Snarky article

[corsec67]

The last mile is going to be a monopoly, whether it be water, sewer, cable, electricity, phone, or fiber.
You aren't going to have people running a cable to your house in case you might want to use it. If there is already a cable TV connection to a house, the value of adding a second one is very low.

What shouldn't be a monopoly at all is the service provider. The last mile is going to be a monopoly, but the service provider doesn't have to be. Let any company hook up their DSL/phone equipment to the cable going to your house.

Re:Snarky article

[SatanicPuppy]

So the government owned water and sewer pipes that serve your house are a bad thing? You want to see multiple competing water and sewer companies building multiple competing water and sewage treatment systems, and multiple and competing reservoirs, etc? How about competing highway infrastructure? No?

Or maybe you prefer the current system, where one company is granted a monopoly in exchange for shouldering the infrastructure cost?

If we own the infrastructure, we can actually HAVE competition based on service. We sure as hell can't have it when the telecoms own all the pipe.

Educate yourself.

Re:Snarky article

[nsayer]

So the government owned water and sewer pipes that serve your house are a bad thing?

In not all cases are they government owned. There still exist private water companies that for the purposes of this discussion operate no differently than, say, PG&E.

And sewer and water are not perfect examples, because there are lots of folks who use wells and septic tanks, meaning that they are self-reliant. There even exist some folks who are self-sufficient for their electricity needs. I don't know of anyone who is "self sufficient" for their Internet connectivity. Indeed, it would literally be impossible.

Re:Snarky article

[Jeff Hornby]

How about the government monopoly on the roads? Or on national defense? Currency? Courts? What they probably didn't teach you in 10th grade social studies is that everything is a trade-off, and while monopolies are bad sometimes and for some things, they are often good for other things.

The assumption that monopolies are bad is based on the idea that the only true value is progress and perhaps financial returns. Monopolies promote stability, predictability and ease of regulation. Personally I thnk that for communications infrastructure I'd value stability and predictability.

Re:Snarky article

[TheSpoom]

IMHO, the last mile should belong to the municipality. That way, you avoid arguments as to who is responsible for issues that happen to cables outside anyone's ownership, or in communal ownership.

Re:Snarky article

[prgrmr]

Most homeowners don't want to own the wiring inside their homes, let alone the wiring outside of it.

Re:Snarky article

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a difference between federally-owned national infrastructure and municipality-owned "last-mile" infrastructure. From reading your link, it sounds like that failure was the former rather than the latter.

The argument used to nationalize the infrastructure is sound at the local level, but breaks down at the national level. There is a "natural monopoly" that will always exist at the local level. We don't want to find ourselves in a position where any company can rip up streets, put up telephone poles or string wires into people's houses. That would be chaos. From that standpoint, it makes sense for communities to pay for telecommunications infrastructure to be put in place that is owned by the individual municipality. However there's no need for the infrastructure to actually be managed by that local government. Companies could bid for the contract to manage the network. But the important part about the government owning the network would be that it would bring greater accountability to the company managing that network since they could be easily replaced if the community felt there were a better option.

And with the local networks owned by individual communities, there would be no need for any restrictions on the "long-haul" connections. Any company that could afford to lay the necessary fiber could compete on equal footing since they could sell directly to the communities being serviced. Initially, it would probably be per-community peering agreements, but it's entirely possible for them to sell directly to residents who are already wired into the community-owned network.

But it all comes back to isolating the "natural monopoly" from the free market. And that natural monopoly should be government owned. But we need to more accurately define what that natural monopoly is. It's not the entire network, it's just the last-mile infrastructure.

Re:Snarky article

[hobbit]

You may have noticed that the wires of which you speak run under the road of which you speak. And I'm damned if the road is getting dug up every time some company comes offering my neighbour a dollar off his phone bill.

So perhaps you might build tubes under the road, and then any number of companies can come and lay their wires without disruption. Well, of course, wires also occupy physical space, so it isn't any number. And who owns the tubes? Why not just give the same entity the right to own the wires?

Re:Snarky article

[TheLink]

Then having to pay taxes to pay for it isn't that bad. Since you kind of own it in a way[1].

Some people might not like paying for an internet connection for someone in a farm miles away from everyone else.
But:
1) you're living in a society and you need farmers/ranchers etc. If it helps them do their part (instead of going to the city to look for a job), a subsidized internet connection is quite cheap in comparison.
2) the value of the _your_ network increases as you add more participants.

[1] In a Democracy, in theory you're the boss of the Government.

Of course lots of people choose to abdicate instead and then blame the government for everything, when half the problem is the fault of the voters (or those who can vote but can't be bothered to vote).

For clarity's sake then...

[VValdo]

So wait- is the Internet something you dump something on? More importantly, is it a big truck?

I only ask because I just the other day got...an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday.

Why? Why?

W

Re:Actually, Ted Stevens wasn't so wrong

[Chris Burke]

My main issue with the analogy is that, to the extent that the internet is like a series of tubes, how is it not like a truck? Data flow is not continuous, it's sent in discreet packets of variable sizes, it can take multiple routes to get to a destination, and every so often at a switching point there's a collision so the data never arrives and has to be resent. Honestly, I think roads and trucks is a much better analogy. Given that, I think it's safe to say that he still really had no idea what he was talking about, and the plausibility of one of his analogies is due to chance alone.

Re:Actually, Ted Stevens wasn't so wrong

[drew]

If Ted Stevens had made an otherwise coherent argument where he happened to characterize the Internet using a new variation of otherwise common technical slang, I suspect that very few people would have even noticed, and I doubt that we'd still be talking about it two years later.

But if you look at the whole speech, you get several other wonderful nuggets like: "Ten movies streaming across that internet, and what, what happens to your own personal internet? I just the other day got- an internet was sent by my staff at ten o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all the other things that are going on in the internet commercially!" In that light, it's a lot harder to think of him as a generally clueful person who happened to misuse a bit of jargon that he was not acquainted with. In that light, the "Series of Tubes" comment, rather than being a sign of incompetence itself, is just the easiest bit for the world to latch onto, and repeat forever and ever. Sort of like President Bush's "Internets".

Not every part of the world is in a city

[tepples]

You need people running cable to your house on demand, when you order the service. This clearly works, since it has been done. If you refute the idea, ensure that your refutation is compatible with the reality of the telephone/cable duopoly found in virtually every US city.

You said "city". Not every part of the world is in a city. The phone and cable TV companies allege that running cable to a rural market is cost prohibitive, giving the customers who grow your food a choice between three options with low throughput per dollar: dial-up, satellite, or GPRS.