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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."
The problem is that local governments (municipalities, primarily) have signed exclusive agreements with these companies. Because laying wires requires approval of each municipality, installing new infrastructure literally requires tens of thousands of permits, applications, meetings, etc., to get anything worthwhile installed. Our "marble cake" form of government, creates a tangled mess of conflicting rules and legislation that create such a high cost to enter the market that $10 billion could easily be spent just negotiating. That money will largely dissipate the same way it vanished in Iraq -- because everyone believes they deserve part of the pie.
If you want options, two things need to happen. First, the infrastructure -- that is, the wires that carry the data, need to be owned and operated by an entity separate from the users of that system, and that exclusive contracts be ended immediately. Secondly, we need to eliminate municipality-level and move it to at least the county level. The fewer people that have a voice in the process, the less resources wasted dealing with them. Because city-level employees are amongst the most petty, corrupt, and difficult to work with of any class of government official in the Union.
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What, they have a point. If companies were competing freely, instead of this messed up system of little fiefdoms we have now, you can bet that you'd see Comcast and Time Warner trying to outdo each other, while AT&T and Verizon raced to shove fiber everywhere. Remember - competition is good for the consumer. It forces companies to innovate or die, while keeping prices low.
But as it stands now, you basically have "The cable company" or "The phone company". Even independent DSL providers are still using the copper run by The Phone Company, and often costs more than if you got DSL from them directly.
Even the Economist points out that this stimulus package probably won't have the effect Obama is hoping for because the companies will simply sit back and wait for the government to pay them for the upgrades they would have had to pay for themselves.
The way I see it, the only way things will change is through good old capitalist competition. Someone needs to really step in with a reliable WiMAX solution for about $25/mo, and seriously start sucking business away from the DSL/Cable duopolies. In fact I'm rather surprised the cell phone companies aren't trying to jump into the residential data market. They already have the little notebook dongles, just shove that into an antenna you set on your roof (for better reception) and plug it into your router. Better yet, offer residential phone service over this as well, and really put a dent in the landline and cable telephony companies.
I wish Australia would "lag behind" like the US, maybe then we could get almost unlimited download quotas too.
Sure compared to technology heaven like Japan it might seem like you're lagging behind, most of the world is probably lagging right there with you.
But you're far from the worst off.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
Of course they do. The Wall Street Journal is a temple of supply-side economics. According to them, the government can't do anything right, except cut capital gains taxes. I would have been very surprised if they'd had anything good to say about this bill.
So the WSJ is pro-market... that doesn't invalidate their argument. This bill still stinks. Stimulus spending doesn't work the way it's being advertised... it has little to no effect on short term job preservation or creation. While we all need things like roads and bridges, spending tax dollars on roads and bridges does not stimulate the economy in the short term... that money takes too long to percolate through the economy.
Stimlus spending didn't cure the Great Depression, nor did it shake Japan out of it's 90's doldrums. Admirers of the New Deal take great offense at the notion that the New Deal was a failure in reversing the Depression, but even left-leaning historians and economists agree that it was WWII production, not the New Deal, that finally brought us out of the depression. Shouldn't the metric of whether an anti-depression program worked be the elimination of the depression?
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The terms "left", "right", "liberal", "conservative", and the derived term "centrist" mostly just serve to confuse any attempt at useful political discussion. These terms lump all of politics into two piles of mostly unrelated positions on mostly irrelevant topics.
In the United States, the absolute biggest political issue at the federal level should be the reduction of military expenditures. We've been spending a third of our tax revenue bombing civilians and maintaining major bases in many different foreign countries. We've never been able to afford this foolishness, and we certainly can't afford it now.
But "left" and "right" doesn't help on that at all. The mainstream "left" and "right" both consistently raise our military spending. The "far left" and "far right" completely agree: this military spending needs to be cut.
Isn't it suspect that in our mainstream political discussion there isn't even a single *term* for a group that wants to reduce our military back down to a reasonable size? It's the "extremist crazies" who want that, called by the same terms as "skinheads" and "hippie terrorist sympathizers".
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Would you like to do the environmental impact study? We're talking years.
You don't build anything great in a week.
The other challenge is that the few places that actually have high-quality rails for Amtrak barely breaks even. Amtrak as a whole has never turned a profit. It is likely that even an improved passenger rail system would need a larger permanent subsidy to survive.
The Interstate highway system doesn't turn a profit either, what's your point?
I never said this should make money, this is a public works project to improve the country. Improving transportation and communication improves business and education.
(Also, I said keep the NRPC out of this, the rails don't have to be all-passenger all the time, you can move express when there's no passenger trains running)
This would be only if you consider the rest of the world as consisting of only of Western Europe and Canada. Once you REALLY take in the rest of the world with people who are generally more conservative (Middle East, East Asia, etc.) it becomes apparently that America really is pretty centered relative to "the rest of the world."
Offered at a price they're unwilling to pay?
Verizon wanted $24,500 to run 1.1 miles of cable to my house. There is no way I can afford that, and my neighbors who are making $20,000 a year working on a farm are never going to afford it.
Oh, I'm sorry, you were referring to satellite or wireless, not actual broadband. Both have such high latency that they are useless for games or VOIP, and such slow download speeds that they are worthless for anything besides email. If it's rainy, cloudy, or overcast you can bet that you'll only be getting about twice dial up speeds. Even better, the local monopoly on wireless runs an unbelievably shitty service. Downtimes are frequent and can last 24 hours or more.
Give me this ten billion (or even a fraction of it), and I'd set up locally owned cooperatives (max size 2-3 DSLAMs) that split the cost of operating directly amongst their members. Government subsidies would be necessary only for initial purchase of the backbones, workers (and policies like packet prioritization) would be elected on a short-term basis, and I'd have a 24 hour help-desk set up that would provide support for every coop in the state. A non-profit business could provide good competition to the big telcos while avoiding the problems brought up here about a government run service.
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