Slashdot Mirror
FCC Seeks To Improve US Broadband Access
MojoKid writes "The US Federal Communications Commission
is working on a plan to solve the problem of nationwide access to high-speed Internet service. The three main issues the agency is tackling first are, figuring out how to improve availability, quality and affordability. Acting FCC Chairman Michael J.
Copps held a meeting this week where he asked the public to comment on the national broadband plan, which Congress has demanded be done by February. The public has 60 days to submit comments; the agency and members of the public will be able to reply to comments for an additional 30 days after that."
The Porno for Podunk Plan
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Next time you auction off spectrum that could be used for JUST THIS PURPOSE, stop setting the minimum bids at astronomical numbers. "Public benefit" doesn't necessarily mean "get as much money for the gov't as possible".
Some good 700 MHz spectrum, at cheap to nothing rates, would spur small businesses to be created to provide access at costs much more in line with what people can pay. You know, if the entry costs weren't more than the GDP of a 3rd World Nation it might spur some innovation.
Then reduce the bureaucracy and cost of getting a license to use that spectrum.
Idiots.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Make it harder for companies to have monopolies or duopolies. This is the system that's in place in most areas of the nation outside big cities.
Other companies may technically have an opportunity to join in and provide service to the people, but in practice it's just not possible anymore.
A friend of mine used to work at an ISP in New Hampshire. His company sent letters to all of their customers basically saying "Please support the legislation that will limit Verizon's stranglehold on New Hampshire". The ISPs connection to the outside world (provided by Verizon, surprise-surprise) went down that night. Two days later, they got a Verizon employee on the phone who apparently wasn't "in on it", and he was like "Oh, how did this configuration get changed?" and turned their connection back on.
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
Try this already? What..with the billions of dollars given to them already...and monopolies given to them..the tax breaks...etc. This is just buying some CEO a new boat.
'Number-memorizing Chinese people.'-Anon
Fixing the broadband issue is a last mile problem and just about the only method to address that at the moment
is through wireless. Now I am sure that the govt will step right up and give the big telecos a bunch of cash and
tell them to go forth and provide more broadband. Trouble is the big telecos do not provide last mile wireless coverage
mom and pop shops do. This is not a hard issue to fix if the money is placed in the right places.
Got Code?
Uh, February of which year?
Not that Congress can get anything right done by February of any year.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
And how, exactly, are we supposed to comment on this plan? For that matter, what IS this plan?
Can someone translate it into English for the rest of us?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I thought the Invisible Market Fairy was supposed to handle this??!?!
Isn't this how the internet began? Independant, competing companies all competing to produce a cohesive, compatible online environment? Why is that model not working now?
Lazziez faire doesn't work in reality.
In a perfect world, companies would want to profit. They would always look ahead to the future to ensure that they only took what the market could bear, for breaking the market would break their company just the same.
This is not a perfect world. Companies want to profit and destroy the competition and lock in their customers. They want to collude to lock out your cell phone's features that you paid several times over retail for, they want to change your contracts after you sign them and still bind you to them, they want to pack in all kinds of hidden fees and charges sixty-three pages deep into their contract, and most of all, they want to please the shareholders.
The shareholders ensure that only the biggest assholes will be in upper management. The shareholders want their profit check and they want it now. Who cares if the company isn't in business in 20 years? The shareholders have enough money to buy stock in other companies, and run them into the ground too.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Demand that all service providers act as common carriers, or "dumb pipes", if you will. To insure access for everybody, the basic infrastructure must be managed by a publicly accountable entity, the government, just like the roads. And these "roads" must accept all kinds of traffic. No tiering, no filtering, none of that. The "last mile" can be leased out to those who will accept these conditions. We need consumer protection with real teeth. They won't do it unless they hear from us. So speak up, and speak LOUD. I am formulating my letter at this very moment. To those of you who want to leave it up to the market, I respectfully remind you of the AM stereo debacle, and American cell phone service.
What?
To eliminate bandwidth caps.
Doesn't do much good to have it if you cant use it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
No bandwidth caps.
Drop the storage cost to what Japan charges.
And stop whining about it.
This country is so far behind it's sickening.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Lazziez faire doesn't work in reality.
Oh, for christ's sake...
Companies want to profit and destroy the competition and lock in their customers.
What do you think these eeevil companies use to attack their competition? Hint: it starts with a "g", and ends with "overnment".
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
IMHO, the telcos and cable companies are why we have some of the worst "broadband" access in our homes. They've been dragging their feet, similar to the way the RIAA has been, fighting tooth and nail to not give the customers what they want.
As much as I'm for better broadband, I'm extremely against giving it to the telcos to implement. We already gave them $2 billion to develop Fiber To The Home by 2000. As of 2009 I know of almost noone who has or even can get this service, it's only in a couple of hot spots where you can get it.
Worse, the telcos seem to see high speed home networks as competition for their business services, so they dramatically limit the outbound rates. 900kbps is a pretty small pipe to push backups of my home systems across, for example.
I personally like the ideas of "homes with tails", the home owners owning the fiber from their houses to a pedestal or "meet me" location, and then the providers can get access in there and users can get different options for that connectivity.
Sean
Eliminate stupid practices like bandwidth caps & metered usage designed to squeeze out competition from online video services while abusing the government-granted monopoly position.
I'm looking at TW in Rochester, San Antonio, and 4 other cities. You know who you are.
We need to bust the local monopolies. They don't like to provide service to remote areas. They don't have any incentive to provide quality. And what people usually think when you mention "monopoly" - they charge high prices.
Unfortunately when the government wants to do something like improve service or availability their "solution" is usually to throw money at the monopoly and tell them to do it - which generally doesn't happen and we're out the tax dollars. Remember the extra charges from the phone company to support fiber deployment - didn't happen, and I think we're still paying that. So lets sit down and fuck the public some more!
Really when do they want to do this?
I think everyone reading slashdot wants this to happen, and knows what would make it happen. The only question here is can government ignore the lobbyists long enough to do the right thing.
Think Deeply.
Bring back the '96 telco reform act which helped quite a bit in leveling the playing field with the monopolies of phone companies. It forced the ILECs to allow interconnections with small upstart phone companies. It wasn't perfect - it included things like the Communications Decency Act within it - but it opened the way for many of the thousands of ISPs to be able to offer service.
Bush and Powell's kid running the FCC did away with essentially all of the changes. Since then all the baby bells are bigger and stronger than Ma bell ever used to be. Many CLECs are gone, the non-monopoly ISPs are almost all gone. The monopolies are stronger than ever.
Or even simpler, just demand that previous agreements made with the telco companies would be met by the telcos. We'd already have huge patches of fiber to the home if the telcos did that.
Lazziez faire has been tried before and failed to bring abundance to the people as its supports claim it will,
Freedom promotes prosperity. Historical examples of this simple fact are too numerous to ignore.
Free market capitalism would work great if the private sector didn't manipulate the market to eradicate the very thing that makes capitalism work for the people: competition.
Who acts to limit competition, sparky? Right now, there's a move by interior decorators (seriously) to require state licensing to exclude new competitors from their line of work. When people don't want to compete, they turn to..... That's right, GOVERNMENT to outlaw their competition. So, you want government to have the power to do so? Great plan.
The conglomerates have enough power as it is,
This is true, but what you fail to recognize is that the power they have doesn't come from the market, it comes from greasing politicians.
bribing someone before they start stealing the land from under our houses.
Hey, tell me about how the government protects us from having our land taken away by evil corporations. Oh, wait. It turns out that government doesn't protect us from land-grabs, it actually does the land-grabbing under orders from those who will pay more in taxes than the rightful owners.
So, you're afraid of big businesses? Monopolies? Well, government is the ultimate monopoly, and it's not on your side.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I know this is "news for nerds" and us nerds have just GOT to have broadband, but is this really a problem?
Believe it or not, there are still places in this country that don't have telephone service, or just got it. Do you think their lives were less full or less meaningful because of this absence?
I really see this as an entitlement problem. Sure, broadband internet access is great for certain things, but almost all of those things are something people can easily survive without. You are not entitled to a cheap, all-pervasive internet backbone just because it's something you want.
I'm sure it provides some brief little endorphine kick when you log onto twitter or your blog and scream at some ahole because you're right and he's wrong, but isn't that really an activity that can be done without? And it certainly can be done in 5 minutes on a dial-up instead of 5 seconds on DSL.
I know this is hard for some of us nerds to get through our heads, but high-speed internet access is really just a convenience. And while we may consider it highly necessary for some of the things we do day-to-day, it is not fundamentally necessary for everyone in order to have a fulfilling life.
So go ahead, I'd love to hear an actual rational argument for why money should be taken by threat of force or incarceration and used to force people who may not even want a given service to at the very least accept a "hook-up" for that service so that the future owners of their home will be able to become subscribers to some internet service.