WSJ Says Gov't Money Injection Won't Help Broadband

olddotter writes "According to the WSJ, The US government is about to spend $10 Billion to make little difference in US broadband services: 'More fundamentally, nothing in the legislation would address the key reason that the US lags so far behind other countries. This is that there is an effective broadband duopoly in the US, with most communities able to choose only between one cable company and one telecom carrier. It's this lack of competition, blessed by national, state and local politicians, that keeps prices up and services down.' Get ready for USDA certified Grade A broadband."

Comments

Re:Cognitive dissonance...

[Who Is The Drizzle]

Actually the article had an anti-net neutrality bent which would put it against many slashdotters.

The House bill also calls for "open access." This phrase can include hugely controversial topics such as net neutrality, which in its most radical version would bar providers from charging different amounts for different kinds of broadband content. Now that video, conferencing and other heavy-bandwidth applications are growing in popularity, price needs to be one tool for allocating scarce resources. Analysts at Medley Global Advisors warn that if these provisions remain in the bill, "it will keep most broadband providers out of the applicant pool" for the funds intended specifically for them.

Re:So we've got a duopoly

[Hatta]

We already paid $200 billion for a nation wide fiber optics network that never delivered. When is anyone going to ask what happened to all that money?

We paid for nation wide fiber optics, and it never got delivered. The telcos should give us our money back, all of it. If they can't afford it, go bankrupt, get nationalized, and let someone competent take over. Oh, and send the execs who squandered it all to jail.

Not one red cent should go to the telcos until they pay back what we're owed.

Re:Cognitive dissonance...

[commodore64_love]

>>>Actually, the major problem with the US is distance. Japan is the size of California, France is 4/5th the size of Texas

And population. When you compare the U.S. states versus the EU states, we're not being bad at all. We have states that every bit as fast as Europe's fastest:

FASTEST STATES (avg Mbps)
---------------
Sweden(11)
Delaware(10)
Washington(9)
Netherlands, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Massachusetts(8)
Virginia, New York ,Colorado, Connecticut, Arizona, Germany(7)

So if you want speeds faster than France, move to the one of the places listed above. It's that simple. Of course at this point, various readers will ignore this data, the same way a christian ignores 1 million-year-old rocks with fossilized animals. It's easier to cling to religion than think.