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$6 Billion Proposal For High-Speed Internet Grants
witherstaff writes "House Democrats have proposed $6 billion in Internet investmentsas part of a sweeping economic stimulus bill that the full House is expected to vote on next week. The $6 billion is considered a down payment on efforts Obama will make in this area over the next several years. Of course let's not forget the $200 billion broadband scandal that the large telecommunication companies have been paid but never delivered on."
As long as we get some return on the investment I'm all for it, but as the FS says: we've sunk a lot more than $6bn into this same thing already and got nowhere.
Fool me once, shame on you...
ANYthing you pay to any private telco company, will be pocketed. pockets will be so deep that you wont be even finding a nickel when you plunge your hand in. Remember how did the money given to banks vanished just 1-2 months ago ?
well. these are telcos. they have numerous times tried to scam/suffocate public in terms of cash and choices and even freedom of information before.
it would be stupid, stupid to trust them with anything.
Read radical news here
Any chance we could look to put some REAL oversight into this round of spending?
If the oversight committee was a total of 5 people with backgrounds in actual accounting that ended up costing $1 million a year, but prevented the "loss" of billions in funding, I'd say it was money well spent.
Obama, you could prove your salt here by putting some REAL Common Sense behind MY money.
So, okay, we got soaked for some two hundred billion in tax writeoffs. If the Feds really want to make good on that, just allow for actual competition in the national broadband market. No incumbents holding onto their last mile monopoly by hook-or-crook, make it clear that if you enter a region you must serve everyone in that region (outlaw cherry-picking) and see what these guys can do when forced to go head-to-head. Right now, for example, I'm in an area that was previously served only by Comcastoff. In fact, my townhome complex signed an exclusive deal with Comcast a couple years ago, ostensibly to get better rates. Of course that didn't happen: I ended up paying more for my service than people only a half mile away who were not in the complex. Something smelled there, let me tell you.
... wish me luck.) Last Monday in the mail I received a postcard from U-Verse confirming my installation date, which was cool. Hilariously, there was also a postcard from Comcast boldly proclaiming that they had doubled my download speed FOR FREE! Really!!! Nevermind that I'm getting more speed for about half the price from U-Verse, for now.
... competition is good for consumers and ultimately good for providers.
So, now AT&T U-Verse is in the area (I'm switching: I'm about fifty feet from the local VRAD box and I'm shooting for the 18 Mbit/sec tier
Don't let the FCC fool you
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
After all, the big bank bail out is not by just giving money to the banks. The government has bought loans from the banks.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The $6 billion is considered a down payment on efforts Obama will make in this area over the next several years. Of course let's not forget the $200 billion broadband scandal that the large telecommunication companies have been paid but never delivered on.
I'm so glad that the Democrats are so generous with MY money. Of course, the Republicans before them were basically the same, as were the Democrats before those Republicans, and so on going back quite a ways.
Seriously, why is the answer to mismanagement of money (tax payer or private money as the recent market troubles have shown) always to give away tax payer money?
School run out of money? Here is more tax payer money. Spent too much building your pro sports team's venue? Here is some tax payer money. Make bad choices in the marketplace? Here is some tax payer money. When is this going to stop? When we've mortgaged how many generations' future earnings on today's ridiculous growth of government?
When the government invests X billion into something, they should come up with a list of specific items to be accomplished by the investee, put it into the contract, and send auditors to check up on the progress on a regular basis.
Anything else is just charity.
You know how FiOS is just about everywhere along the east coast? Well, everywhere except Boston.
Why? Because in MA, each town decides if it wants to grant a franchise for cable TV. Not internet- just TV.
Verizon doesn't like that, but the burbs are the best customers- they have lots of HDTV sets, they like the packages, and they don't do annoying things like share their Wifi connection to 6 other people in a apartment building.
Well, guess what? Verizon has been rolling out FiOS to damn near everywhere in the state, even west-nowhere places like 500-person towns out near Worcester nobody has heard of...yet still no FiOS for anyone in Boston. It's even been in the papers- THREE YEARS AGO- about how Verizon was cherrypicking. A year ago, someone asked Mayor Menino what the fuck was going on, and he pointed the finger squarely at Verizon. Not that I trust him, but in the meantime, some hick represetative from the western end of the state gave Verizon tens of millions of dollars to roll out services in the western end of the state...with no requirements that they provide service to the city.
Meanwhile, we're stuck with really crappy DSL offerings, Comcast's throttling and misleading advertising (go on, try to find the real speed, not the "powerboost" speed which you get for all of about 10MB of transfer), or RCN's overall shittyness. Worse still- Comcast has just started getting really nasty about incoming SMTP and HTTP; they've shut me off twice, despite best efforts to sneak under their radar. I suspect they're enforcing their ToS to try and catch small/home business owners saving $50/month (yes, you read that right- $100/mo for internet service for businesses.)
Please help metamoderate.
Full House, eh? Three Democrats and two Republicans?
As if the economy isn't in bad enough shape, let's redirect billions towards another thing that's completely unnecessary. Who cares, we won't have to pay for it, our grandkids will. Since reckless spending and investment was the problem, let's do even more of it see how well that works out. /sarcasm
When will people learn there is not an endless supply of money for the government to spend? There are limits to how much you can steal from the future.
Nobody in the private industry seems to want to open their pocketbooks. Consumers aren't in the mood either.
Somebody has to do it... the only entity that really can is the government. Would you rather they do nothing and let our economy sink into a huge downward spiral?
I'm curious what your idea is to get our economy moving?
We need to get the providers out of the last mile. Any new housing developments, larger than 20 homes, should be required to star wire single mode fiber to all homes from a common equipment vault. Let the providers give access at that point and contribute to a local maintenance pool.
Telecom *services* are not a natural monopoly. Telecom *wires* are a natural monopoly. What we need to do is separate the service providers from the wire provider.
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Funny--last time I checked, the President didn't have a f*cking checkbook. It was the liberal senators that took over in the last 2 years that passed the bailouts.
The poster wasn't talking about TARP, he was talking about our misadventure in nation building known as the Iraq war.
Although it's worth noting most of congress, including the Democrats, went along.
Although Bush doesn't get off scot-free--he didn't veto the f*cking thing.
Not only did he not veto it, his administration (primarily the Treasury folks, headed by Goldman Sachs alumni Paulsen) basically went to Congress and said "The economy will die within weeks (if not days) if you don't give us this program." So, again, you can fault the Democrats for not having the backbone to tell them to go to hell or even that they had better damn well be reporting back weekly for approval, but placing primary responsibility on them is incorrect.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
What I don't understand is how this could be considered economic stimulus. Sure, it'll help in certain marginal ways, but the only thing that can fix the US economy is if the government quits taking half of what everyone earns and lets the earners of the money figure out the best way to spend it.
Actually, that is exactly the opposite of what they need to do. The recession is happening for the same reason the great depression did. If you don't progressively tax the wealthy, the wealth condensation effect pools larger and larger shares of the wealth into fewer hands. Eventually those on the bottom have nothing and live on credit, until that too collapses. That's where we are now. It's not that the US is poor, it's just that the bottom 50% has a net worth of zero. With no money they can't invest and pay huge amounts of their income paying interest just to get by. It's like a tax on being poor that goes to the wealthy instead of the government. When all the wealth consolidates the economy becomes unstable.
The solution to this is to take more of the taxes from the very wealthy and less from the very poor, ideally while creating jobs for the unemployed. It doesn't help the unemployed if you don't tax the income they don't have, you need to create jobs in the US. Public works projects are a traditional way to do this and spending money on broadband can create a lot more jobs than in other areas because it enables new telcos to form and existing internet businesses to expand, if it is implemented well anyway.
If you give tax breaks to the lowest earners, they buy more tv's and mcdonald's...
The low earners are already not paying any taxes because they have no income or not enough to count.
...give the tax breaks to the middle and upper class, and they end up investing in new business and current business expansion.
Tax breaks to the middle help. Tax breaks to the upper class, not so much. That's what they've been trying for the last 8 years. It's called "trickle down economics" and even the die hard supporters are admitting it is a failure. Everything they invest is a tax write off anyway, so taxing them less does not really motivate them to invest more and lot of what they invest in creates jobs overseas instead of in the US.
If the greedy bastards in DC would quit thinking of tax revenue as their "income" and just cut taxes across the board, including corporate and capital gains taxes, I'd bet you a non-free beer that you would see IMMEDIATE stock market growth, followed by strong GDP growth, dropping unemployment, and REAL opportunity.
It's been tried historically and it did not work. The problem is wealth disparity more than anything else. Tax cuts across the board do nothing to redistribute the wealth, so it will continue to consolidate and we'll have continued instability.
Tax dollars spent on infrastructure do stay in circulation. They go to pay wages to people who are currently unemployed. Bill Gates pays a thousand times less taxes than I do (as a percentage of income). He can afford to pay a much, much larger share and still eat and live normally and if he has to that money can do a lot to solve the debt problems of the very poor so they don't lose their houses and so they can have jobs building infrastructure that grows the economy overall. It helps the US economy a lot more than letting him give it to Africans and invest in creating more jobs in India.
Basically, I don't think you've really studied the economics of recession and the great depression specifically. There are some good books out there that are informative and entertaining. You might want to check one out.
Dear Politicians,
I work for a small, but growing, ISP, so bear with me, as this subject annoys me to no end. Not every problem can be solved by simply throwing a bunch of money at it and hoping for the best. All the wrong people are going to end up with that money, either corrupt individuals, or large carriers who are more interested in squelching small competition so they can continue to shaft their customers left and right. They don't want to improve, improvements cost money, big cable wants to maintain the status quo. Either way, none of this money is going to be used to service undeserved areas. Keep the money, please, don't give anyone a single dime.
You say you want to see internet delivered to the undeserved? Have you looked around? Some of us are doing just that. We are using part-15 spectrum to deliver 5+ megabit service to residents with no cable or DSL service available. Do you know what part-15 of the spectrum is, in reality? It is the useless chunks of the airspace that no one else wanted, 900 mhz, 2.4 ghz, 5.8 ghz, and a few others. Despite the severe limitations imposed on us all by the FCC, we have delivered magic to customers and businesses in these so called undeserved areas. We have used the crap airwaves no one else wanted, served the customers that big telco called profitless, and we are financially solvent. Keep the money, we don't need it, and the big companies don't deserve it.
So, I hear this tremendously useful band of data is going to be free from use soon, and that its fate is largely undecided. I have already mentioned that we have taken some of the worst air space in existence, and delivered an amazing service to our customers. What do you suppose would happen if you let us use that band to deliver broadband? Interference free, crystal clear transmissions of a massive amount of data to every nearly home that wanted it, Keep the money, give us the spectrum.
So you want to see the entire nation lit up on the broadband map, who do you think is going to do that? Verizon? Comcast? AT&T? If they could have, they would have done it by now, lord knows, you have thrown enough cash at the big players already, and I still get phone calls from happy new customers, glad to have service, because no one else offered it. No, broadband is going to come from the small business, there are thousands of us out there, we call ourselves WISPs, and we are doing what the Bells have told you cannot be done: We brought broadband to rural America. We have delivered affordable, quality service with a smile, with the worst tools we had to use. Now, imagine what we could do if we had 700 mhz. I am not asking you to give it to just me, I am not asking you to hand it over to only small companies, no, let all internet service providers have a fair crack at 700 mhz, and watch us deliver. Let Capitalism rear its blind, careless head, and watch the strong survive, and the weak fall. I already know I can win my own spot in the national broadband market, because I have been beating the telecom giants at their own game for 5 years, and winning. Keep the money, give us 700 mhz!
--Nuintari
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