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Obama Looks Down Under For Broadband Plan
oranghutan writes "The Obama administration is looking to the southern hemisphere for tips on how to improve the broadband situation in the US. The key telco adviser to the president, Sarah Crawford, has met with Australian telco analysts recently to find out how the Aussies are rolling out their $40 billion+ national broadband network. It is also rumored that the Obama administration is looking to the Dutch and New Zealand situations for inspiration too. The article quotes an Aussie analyst as saying: 'There needs to be a multiplier effect in the investment you make in telecoms — it should not just be limited to high-speed Internet. That is pretty new and in the US it is nearly communism, that sort of thinking. They are not used to that level of sharing and going away from free-market politics to a situation whereby you are looking at the national interest. In all my 30 years in the industry, this is the first time America is interested in listening to people like myself from outside.'"
Oh good lord.
Not a total surprise since Australia facing a similar dilemma of low population density in their country and the cost for initial infrastructure, giving the track record of trying to filter the whole country's net traffic last year, I serious hope they wanna complete their project using us tax money~
I hope they don't follow Australia's censorship model.
(First post!)
Credo sim. - I think I am.
Seriously why not Japan, or most European countries?
an INTERNET FILTER (gasp!) with that?
I live in Australia. Our broadband *sucks*. Try Korean or Japan if you're after inspiration.
I can't see this going well for everyone in the USA - hope your government makes a national government owned telco (which they proceed to privatise) that has a monopoly and sues anyone who tries to make them not, that cries every time the government tries to assert control but still wants them to pay for half their expenses.
Unless they're looking at the Australian telco situation to know what NOT to do, of course.
Why can't we be a leader and make our own plan?
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
This is good news. We all hate Americans so it seems good to hear that while we're screwing ourselves we're screwing you too.
Indeed. I had 100Mbps fiber in northern rural Japan, in 2006. That's fiber from the pole through my wall and into my apartment, by the way, and I never experienced throttling or arbitrary caps. Total cost? Around US$70 per month.
Then I come back to the USA, move into a neighborhood right next to a university in a city of a million people, and the best I can get without some crazy business plan is 1.5M/128K ADSL, for about $40 per month. And the connection from my department on campus is actually slower than the fiber I had there. What the fuck is with broadband in this country?
Obviously one can think of some useful applications like telemedicine, but by and large it seems that having big fat pipes into every home would just accelerate the trend of making us fatter and dumber than we are already.
Is Obama going mad? Here in NZ we have one of the WORST internet "solutions" in the world! Its: -Slow -VERY expensive -Lots of area's don't even have access to internet -Heavily Data Capped (I pay $120 NZ for 10mbit (which is more like 7mbit) with only 40GB of data!)
It seems to me that America is largely founded on the principle of figuring things our for ourselves and believing that everything we have or do is the best. Also, we believe that sharing is for the weak...and communists.
Worst. Idea. Ever.
Because Japan doesn't have the landmass... they have fewer lines to lay and less overhead.
I question if looking to Australia is still a bad idea because they generally have most of their population along the shores, right? Our problem is that we have such a landmass with people spread out. Obama always likes to think of "everybody" when he does something and thinks that my parents who live 50 miles from the nearest major city need ultra fast broadband.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
That's what we've been doing, and it sucks.
It's the market deciding for you. No evil communist government building infrastructure.
If Obama is asking Telstra / Australia or the Australian government ANYTHING about broadband than my American friends, I am very very very sorry for you, quite sincerely - this can not end well at all.
Telstra is one of the most vile companies in existence, Microsoft may get mocked a lot here but that's only because the evils of Telstra are not known internationally. (We're talking about a company that first introduced Bigpond cable with a 100mbyte per MONTH limit, no - I'm not joking)
As for the broadband network, it's a load of cobblers, we won't see it for a decade at least, it's one of those dopey empty promises which mean absoloutely nothing (no, I'm not a liberal, not even close)
How is more landmass an excuse for why a rural area has better connectivity than the middle of a city of a million people?
Do you suppose the Japanese pay something additional in taxes to get those high speeds?
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Agreed, but probably for different reasons...
Why can't people get their own internet (from this article I read we are looking for gov run internet, correct?)?
Reminds me of healthcare (hands out flame throwers).
Oh fyi I am not trying to be a troll :)
Most of the problems I see presented on this issue stem from the fact that competition is artificially limited through regulation.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Goodness, the $40B broadband plan will be a disaster.
Lets see.
About 10 Million possible connection points (Business + Households) with say 25% takeup (after they will still be competing with ADSL/Cable which is already > 10 Mbits/sec to most)
Thats $16k per connection. Lets assume cost of capital (6%) + maintainence(4%) is 10%/annum.
So it will cost $1600/annum or $133/month before we add any data costs.
So USA, don't follow our example.
Our dear leader K.Rudd is intent on sending us as broke as you.
46137
> the Aussies are rolling out their $40 billion+ national broadband network
This hasn't started yet. Its just a promise made by a politician, so far, which is hardly the most reliable promise to be made. Its certainly a long way from reality.
If this network does ever get built, I'd expect it to go live in no less than 75 year's time, but maybe I'm just a pessimist.
It only sucks because the government didn't force companies to upgrade their networks when they took money from the government to.......upgrade their networks.
All the government had to do was actually enforce the measures they enacted and we wouldn't be having this conversation. So yes, while the companies are definitely in the wrong for essentially embezzling the money, the politicians who gave them the money and then let them just pocket it are even more in the wrong.
**Apologies for any typo's - Firefox doesn't want to run on my system without crashing every 5 seconds since I overclocked it (everything else runs 100% fine, and no system crashes - so the problem is with Firefox) and good ol' Shiternet Explorer doesn't have spellcheck.**
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Dozens of dittoheads will pan this without even considering that it's worth talking to people who built national broadband networks so that we don't repeat their mistakes.
It's Susan Crawford.
Read this
He explains that networks would make more cash by opening their networks to smaller individual ISPs. Markets work when they are unencumbered. I can't even begin to describe how the telecom situation in the US is so far from a free market it's not even funny.
No I'm not postulating de-regulation but simply regulation where it counts and none where we don't need it. Our current regulatory structure in the US is stuck in the 50's. As long as it stays there the only way to bring us forward is with a gov't solution. Otherwise we could always update the laws and see what happens but that would like, you know, be asking politicians to think like engineers (i.e. with their heads)
Failure formatting five FAQs of financial facts.
Seriously why not Japan, or most European countries?
The .jp or .eu plans might make suitable models for the East coast, but looking to Australia makes pretty good sense for the rest of the USA. Even though the population of the USA is about tenfold that of Australia, Australia presents many of the same hurdles for ubiquitous broadband coverage as does the USA. Both have vast areas to cover across a range of climatic conditions and timezones. Both have an overall low population density, with several concentrations of very high population density in and around a few coastal cities. Whatever we do in .au would be well worth looking at - whether we get it right or wrong.
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
Or rather, competition is reduced by a natural (mono | duo)poly in most areas, and current regulation prevents utter ridiculousness, but isn't enough.
Sent from my PDP-11
Of course they do. Then again, they also give a shit about the future of their children, and their children's children. So, you know, good with the bad.
I can certainly think of a lot of things the government should be doing, but socializing network access isn't one of them. Why not try clamping down on fraudulent advertising that claims unlimited service for a fixed fee or abuse of monopoly power or patent reform? Government shouldn't be telling industry what to do (or trying to do it via some "public option"). Rather than telling industry what to do, it should telling them what not to do. The role of government is punishing those whose behavior encroaches on the rights of others, not trying to predict and preempt bad behavior — that's like trying to legislate utopia and it's got us to a place where the government dictates policy by throwing cash prizes out to a few huge and largely unaccountable companies implement it. Not good.
Here is the problem as I see it.
We need true internet providers that do not have conflicts of interest in giving us high speed low latency internet.
The phone company will put its self out of business if it gives you the internet service it is capable of. Think voip service.
The cable company doesn't want to cut into its profits as well. They are scared to death that content will be available on demand over the internet as the customer wants it, thus negating the need for cable in the first place. (think netflix, hulu, blockbuster) Why do you need cable if you can watch any movie or tv show you want over the internet?
As long as the two dominant internet providers in the country are the cable company and the phone company, don't expect any kind of amazing blazingly fast low latency internet service.
Of course this is all just my opinion, but it is about the simplest answer for why we are so far behind other countries in decent internet connections.
When you are calculating ROI on a project like this you have to remember the longevity of your investment. Communications is very important to almost the entire population, the way it looks it's not like they are going to lay the cables and find out a couple of years later every one went back to paper print. While the initial cost will be greater compared to that of Japan or other more advanced layouts once the layout is complete how will the system preform over a length of time? Will laying fiber involve less attenuation resulting in fewer base stations? (which contributes to a possible point of failure) Yes, it will. Will fewer points of failure contribute to a more profitable system once the cost of the layout is consumed? Yes, it will. Will a fiber layout require less maintenance over time compared to the current coaxial/twisted pair? Likely. Will someone eventually move into the same neighborhood as you parents who live 50 miles from any particular point in your country who does want more then satellite / dial-up and curse nschubach to the heavens on Slashdot? Yes they will.
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
Foolish man Obama looking to Oz and NZ when South Africa has it all wrapped up. No infrastructure, no data lines, hubs, switches or routers to support. They just use data pigeons! Not only are they cheap, they're as fast as broadband and they appease the tree huggers!
So why have they saddled them with massive amounts of debt that they can never hope to pay off? Why does the suicide rate continue to rise? These things to don't seem like fair trade-offs.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
As a town in Minnesota discovered, all you have to do is threaten to roll your own. Suddenly 50Mb/s for $50/month is available.
The problem isn't technology, population density or land area. The problem is that local government provide a monopoly (or oligopoly), so there is no incentive to truly cut margins and invest in infrastructure. Stop that, and companies will find a way to keep getting that check in the mail.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
There is no 'natural' monopoly or duopoly. These situations are only created through Government intrusion into the market.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
No, it doesn't suck. We have a 45mbit symmetrical plan, have had it since 1996 - ain't nobody suing the fuck out of the Telcos and cable companies to force their ass to roll it out, uncapped.
TELECOMMUNICATIONS ACT OF 1996.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The fact that you have to run a wire to someone's house is a cost. You must buy the cable from somewhere. Depending on the range of the connection you might even need repeaters that need an additional cost of running electricity along the line. If everyone lives in a small location you can run one line and split it up later but if someone lives far away from the center you have to run a direct line to their homes.
"Because Japan doesn't have the landmass... they have fewer lines to lay and less overhead."
If we lit up all of our dark fiber we'd surpass most nations. the telcos and cable companies aren't doing it, though, preferring to overcharge and under-deliver.
They should be sued for $200 BILLION for fraud and contractual violations.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The problem with Internet access in the USA is the local mono/duopolies. There is no reason whatsoever why Internet access should not be the fastest and cheapest found anywhere in the world in the dense population centers. Although many people will say: "but what about the rural areas" -- the reality is that most people live in densely populated areas.
So, what to do about the local mono/dupolies? The obvious place to start is to allow cities to build their own last-mile connections to houses and rent these out to whoever (don't let states pass laws to stop this). Putting in the back-haul is far less expensive so one could expect multiple suppliers to offer services and actually compete with each other.
I am skeptical that forcing a Comcast or AT&T to share wires (allow other companies to run services down the wires) will never work. These companies will make it more expensive or less reliable to use a competitor. A few years ago, I was moving house and wanted to switch phone company at the same time. In the end, I did not change phone company at that time -- why not? Comcast would not release my phone number.
As an alternative to cities putting in the last mile, a private company could do this -- as long as this company is not allowed to ollowed to offer services beyond the last mile. There was a reason that AT&T was split up and I don't believe that the reasons for it no longer exist.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
As an Australian I agree, why not look to Zimbabwe for an economic recovery plan?
I exaggerate, but there are surely better places to look.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
There has been several cases where Broadband quality has been drastically improved when the local governments get fed up with the slow speeds and move to install new networks of their own. The Telcoms either jump to provide better service or the residents get better service from a local government run Telcom. It's a win-win situation: nothing like a little competition (especially in a near monopoly) to shake up the status quo and get the results we want.
If you think it'd be a waste trying to get broadband to your parents, then I don't think you'd want to be looking at Japan with regards to formulating a plan for broadband. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8068916.stm
What am I saying, this is slashdot, bash away before thinking about it...
But honestly, Nowhere does it say "Obama has hired Austrailian Telco Analysts", or "Obama is modelling the effort after the Austrailian effort". Looking for inspiration means asking around and picking up ideas. Just like a software engineer who goes to Google to look for inspiration. The bad ones just copy and paste, but the average and above just look at the other results and try to mold a better solution. I would say this is allegorical. We'll see what happens.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The National Broadband Network, also known as NBNCo is a Fibre to the Home (FTTH) network.
Well pulling cable is going to get pretty pricey if you have 20 different outfits doing it.
Are you going to be able to pay $small_ISP $20k to rip up the street and pull you a run of fibre? But once you do, your neighbour can get it for $1k, so the rest of the street will naturally follow suit, rather than going to a different ISP and also having to put down the initial $20k.
Having a bunch of different ISPs serving different houses on the same block really isnt feasible.
I think, ideally, the last mile would be municipally owned, and they then lease the lines to $small_ISP of your choice, at a flat rate. That's the only way I can see a bunch of ISPs working out.
Sent from my PDP-11
Without "government intrusion" there would be no telecommunications market. Do you think that private companies are going to bury millions of miles of fiber and then just let their competitors use their cables? And how do you think these telecoms are going to get access to dig up all these endless miles of public property? Taxpayers pay = you answer to our elected officials.
So wrong it doesn't deserve a full answer
If that rural area has more connectivity, it's just because a telco exec lives in the area.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
So why have they saddled them with massive amounts of debt that they can never hope to pay off? Why does the suicide rate continue to rise? These things to don't seem like fair trade-offs.
Yes, good thing that the US doesn't have a huge amount of debt! We'll show them!
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
What is with it is called profit taking. Some might think of it as organized crime, but it isn't very well organized and in the US it isn't criminal either.
Doing thing the US way in the US is taken as being the best way regardless of evidence to the contrary. In particular doing things the US way means not even looking at outside ways of doing things other than as a way to rule out how not to do something no matter how well it is done elsewhere; if it is done elsewhere a particular way then that way is ruled out as non-American.
Why would companies choose to go into areas that are heavily saturated? This would only be feasible if they have some dramatic innovation to offer, which would benefit the people living on that street.
If I choose to pay for the fiber, then I make the deal to get profits from additional customers gained on that line of fiber, if not, good for my neighbor! And I've just voluntarily subsidized my entire street.
Why is it not 'feasible' to have different ISPs on the same block? And why would they operate this way? The whole problem is how we view the service itself. The service, as it is, cannot innovate because of the regulation. The innovation of firms left to their own is much more imaginative than what you or I or certainly some bureaucrat can think of. I never thought of Netflix or using the Internet in that way, but I signed right up for the service! Did the USPS work with the FCC to create that? No, it was a spontaneous product created by innovators.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
How would you even know you were a leader if you didn't look at the other plans first? If you ignore the lessons other nations have learned on what works and what doesn't then you won't lead anything.
Sure there are natural monopolies.
- Rail network
- Water / Sewerage
Society would be significantly worse off if we had many rail networks and many water suppliers, each with their own tracks and pipes. Large amounts of resources would be wasted.
These are cases where pooliing of resources into a monopoly is better for society as a whole, *provided that* the government effectively regulates such entities so they don't extort their customers.
This is less so for things like power and communications, because cables are not as expensive or bulky as pipes and tracks. Still, society would probably be better off if the amount of resources used for building cables were minimised, since expenditure on cables does not directly aid the productive capacity of society.
From society's point of view, the ideal would be to have one set of infrastructure with either a heavily regulated, benevolent provider of services (ha), or one set of infrastructure with many competing services utilising it.
The problem is the *lack* of government intrusion into these markets to facilitate competition. Hence, one set of infrastructure, one / two providers who gouge their customers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_debt
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Mine was $50 in a small city, and right when I left they did introduce bandwidth capping -- they asked us to please refrain from uploading more than 500 gigabytes per month, with no download cap. Japan makes the US internet situation look paltry.
For the record (for those claiming the landmass has anything to do with it), the way Japan regulated was that it encouraged/forced ISPs to work together to cooperatively build and share lines all the way up to the DSL station. From there, each company was responsible for setting up wires from the station to each individual house. That way, it kept a free market-type approach, but it rid the need of companies that want to set up shop in some area to have to roll out lines across the entire country just to get to that area.
We need to be taking our examples from better sources, so this calls for drastic measures before it is too late. We must declare war on Japan, then immediately surrender to them. They will have no choice but to occupy us to ensure a safe recovery from the war, especially with reconstruction. When the Japanese realize our horrible internet situation, they will declare a humanitarian emergency. This should secure us UN funding to upgrade our networks while ATT and Comcast have sanctions imposed against them. Problem solved.
My webcomic
and when you say "everybody", you really mean "everybody whose fingers are in the pie", right? because that's exactly how this oligarchic government works.
The US's population density is actually pretty average. Maybe not compared to Africa or Russia but we're far from atypical in population density. It's not how spread out we are that's the problem.
So wrong it doesn't deserve a full answer
That is a very poor form of debate. You may as well have posted nothing at all.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
I was looking at the sunny land of Somalia for a economic recovery plan, but I suppose Zimbabwe will work too.
Om, nomnomnom...
Actually, "very high population" density in a few coastal cities isn't quite right either. Australian cities and the more modern cities in the USA are sprawled and oriented around suburban life in a way that the older European and Japanese cities (that really do have a very high population density) aren't. .
Sometimes, something can be so ridiculous, that just pointing and laughing is sufficient.
What he meant was will a company which is a wholesaler of fibre who retails their own wholesaled fibre, wholesale their fibre to another retailer so they can compete? That's the problem that Australia has with Telstra and which is why they want to split Telstra into retail and wholesale entities.
What does landmass have to do with anything? I don't need a fiber connection to every square mile of the country, I want it in the middle of a f***ing city. I'm not asking for a fiber connection to every grain elevator in Kansas, I'm expecting it to go to any of the US cities. I got 2mbps internet 8 years ago. I was so excited. That was in the middle of country side surrounded by wheat and asparagus fields. Fastforward 8 years. I still have 2mbps internet, I think it's actually worse, it costs the same and I'm surrounded by millions of people.
Few countries have the landmass to compare to the US.. So focus instead on the density.
Why not look at Sweden (density of 20.6/km2 vs 31/km2)? Low cost, high speed and no caps.
A national broadband network is one thing, but Australian consumers will continue to lament the high price of traffic compared to, basically, the rest of the developed world. To this day we pay many many times the price per GB of the US and Europe - and fibre to the node won't help that one iota. As far as I can tell, this predicament is almost entirely a function of geography. The sheer cost of laying cable across large hemisphere-spanning oceans somewhat affects the delivery cost. And who is willing to invest? Not that someone didn't try. The mixed success of the Southern Cross venture (successful in the sense of increase substantially increasing aggregrate bandwidth into Oz, failed in the sense of not being profitable for it's shareholders) pretty much deters any ideas along these lines in the current climate. That is of course unless the government steps in...anyone for an INTERnational Broadband Network? A national pr0n filter would probably accomplish the same thing..
Do we really need the government involved with this? I have fiber to my house. How can you get better than that? Verizon is spending a huge amount of money on their fiber network. AT&T is going about it in a slightly more conservative way. They are putting in fiber to the neighborhood. That seems like progress to me. I live in Los Angles, It is dense, but HUGE. Lots and lots of square mileage to cover. Rural areas will always be difficult, but eventually those areas will be covered also.
The office building I'm working in is now lit. We can get anywhere from 2mbit to 1000mbit service. I can subscribe to a point to point Ethernet connection to any other of the ISP's lit buildings. Pretty nice.
To anyone who doesn't know, the two major political parties in Australia are the Labor party (left-center) and the ironically named Liberal party (right conservative)
Fun fact:
"Conservatives" in the US have pushed hard for things like religion in the state, stripping of constitutional protections and freedoms in the name of fighting "terrorism", pushing to ban gay marriage, aggressive preemptive foreign policy, and an wild extension of the executive branch's power.
If you look at it from a Constitutional perspective, it's an extremely liberal agenda. That's why I call myself a constitutional conservative: I believe everyone has equal rights, those rights cannot be waived for the convenience of protection, and that the three branches must retain equal power to balance and check each other. Just like the piece of paper says.
The greatest trick they've pulled off is getting the entire US population to believe that their agenda is somehow "conservative", and that those standing up to maintain the principles of the constitution are "liberal."
Please help metamoderate.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/10/14/2229231/1Mb-Broadband-Access-Becomes-Legal-Right-In-Finland
Rail networks are regulated to death. Amtrak loses $32 per customer and only exists because of large subsidies. Most of the rail laid in this nation was subsidized by the Federal Government and is very inefficient. The most efficient rail network created was the Great Northern ran by James J. Hill. The Government subsidies were increased based on miles of rail laid and terrain the rail was built on. So the other railways tended to have overly circuitous routes and would happily plow through mountains.
From today's perspective, if we had a free market, what property owner would wish to reduce the value of property by allowing a rail to be built next to it? Very few, probably mostly ones in industrial zones. Additionally, there are only so many available customers in a given region, so having too many rail networks would lead to putting some out of business or liquidating their assets to offer some other type of service.
If private industry were allowed to offer sewage services without competing with the Government (which operates through involuntary transactions), we would see all sorts of innovation in the waste management market. But we'll probably never know what could be done there. Just because there is limited space for a pipe to run under a road does not mean there is no other way of providing the same result.
So who shall decided the set of infrastructure? The kind and benevolent Government? When has Government ever facilitated competition? Never, except on K Street.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Few countries have the landmass to compare to the US.
Uh... Australia does...
9.6 million sq km or 3.7 million sq mi for the US, 7.7 million sq km or 2.9 million sq mi for Australia. If you take out Alaska (1.7 million sq km or 0.7 million sq mi) you're very much in the same ballpark.
The US does have the population density edge when taken over the whole country, but I think Australia is more urbanised.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
There is no 'natural' monopoly or duopoly. These situations are only created through Government intrusion into the market.
Based on actual history, you speak quite a bit of truth. However, it's not *only* created through government intrusion.
When a company is so successful that it can "get it" and "do it" for less... when a company offers something over an infrastructure that is so expensive and offering a product/service on a huge, national scale is the bar that has been set... That company will be so incredibly entrenched that it will never be rooted out by a startup. Ever.
It's the reason 100% free market capitalism can't work on it's own. It needs a little help from the big G, sometimes.
I totally agree the government effed up in the past and basically made AT&T a monopoly. They also continue to eff up in many ways, but without *some* government regulation, you'd STILL be stuck with AT&T anyway. In fact, their actual goal was to be *the* only telecommunications provider back in the early 1900s as they gobbled up the little companies in buyouts. AT&T would have been able to do it too, even without the government's help. I have no reason to believe AT&T or any other company in that position would feel any differently about the Internet.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
Long long ago, Australia worked out that nobody would wire them up. ;)
So they rolled out their own. Not too private, not to public.
Just pay for the wire, make a profit to pay back cost and future needs.
Jobs for life, cheap local calls, $ for anything else, early with pure digital networking.
A big Bell, but you could make calls, send faxes, enjoy dial up and pay huge amounts for data services.
Then Australia sort of got a bit lost/crazy with its cash flow in the 1980's/90's.
We where going to be pulled into the 20C and had to sell it all, sort of.
So on top of this sold off, own it all Bell giant, all other isp's had to make a profit.
They also controlled the pipe/s out of Australia and ran an ISP.
So for a decade Australia was in telco hell, for profit and gov backed, brainwashed into thinking every packet was golden as we where so far away and unique due to population density.
Australia now has another pipe to the outside world, but still has the old cartel pricing, why change a good thing
Our federal gov has basically said they will roll out optical and out flank the existing Bell copper, exchanges, lawyers ect.
What is a greedy cash crazed Bell to do? Lobby, bribe, PR smear, grass roots astro turf?
Well that does not work as they are pure evil.
What can the US learn?
Roll your own optical and set a few 10's of telcos free on top.
Let the ISP's pay a basic access fee to keep the network working and then sell any mix of services they like.
From all you can eat, no tech support, to pick up on 3rd ring to a real person for $$$.
Connect your schools, hospitals, tv, radio, universities and enter the 21C with something useful. Understand what John D. Rockefeller was taking about when he said 'Competition is a sin." and nail your demands to a town hall doors.
Roll your own and take back your local community from the optical barons and then get your local data to an area where you can play the telcos off against each other.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Because countries at the bottom of that list are paragons of the world economy, aren't they?
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
I like your sig.
The answer to that is: they will have to get out of some part of their business, because the first company that embraces wholesaling will put the rest out of business. If the cost of running a line is shared by 20 customers of a wholesale company, vs. the one customer of the integrated company, the wholesale company wins the game, and the true winner is the consumer, who gets higher speeds and more services.
The key is to stop looking at this as an integrated service - Netflix did not try to establish its own nationwide physical delivery service and the cost of that delivery is passed on in its subscription fees. There is more than one business model.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
And therefore it is better to put someone in debt without their permission? Actually, most of the countries on that list are highly undesirable, but take note that Hong Kong is quite low, and they have on of the longest, fastest growing economies - and no resources!
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
It is not only that, but also the belief (sincere or not) that equality ought to trump quality... Government-provided schools, clinics, roads, subways, postal service, inevitably suck, but they suck equally for all — rich and poor — except, maybe, for the superrich like the politicians, who view themselves as more equal than others and send their own children to very expensive private schools.
To the holders of this opinion, the fact that parts of the country can get an ultra-fast optical connection (without government's subsidy), and that there is not a person any more, who can't get a high-speed dial-up (without government's subsidy), is nothing compared to the inequality between the two extremes.
The trouble with this attitude is that it is impossible to make things equally good for all people. So all attempts to do so end up making things equally bad. Equality is achieved, and quality was secondary anyway.
It is this crusaders for equality, who keep bringing up "growing income disparity" — and advocate taxation and regulation to make things "fair". Why they haven't yet thought of amputating a limb of Michael Phelps — to "level the playing field" between him and other swimmers — is beyond me... Clearly, his 8 Olympic gold medals is grossly unfair towards the rest of the swimmers, who swam the same distance at nearly the same times, but got no or one gold medal only.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I'm not that familiar with the history AT&T, other than the deregulation of long-distance calling sure did bring my phone bill down. However, I simply don't buy the argument that one firm can rule the country. If they were offering such terrible service at such a horrible price, then someone would happily have offered a competing service. Has Intel been able to keep new competitors from popping up? Of course not, because there is no regulation on microchips.
The goal of every business is to have a monopoly, which is why businessmen are not actually capitalists, from a philosophical perspective. This is why giving the businesses the power to control their destinies through non-market strategies is bad for everyone.
It could be argued that some companies may develop technologies that are so revolutionary that they gain a monopoly because nobody else has a competing product, such as was the case for the telephone for a few years. But this is a good thing - firms are encouraged to invent amazing new technologies so great that we can't imagine what life was like before them, and they get to make loads of money for doing it. However, these protections last for only a little while as either patents run out or competing firms develop different technologies that provide the same service. However, once regulation enters the picture the original firm is protected by the regulation, because no one can enter the market without meeting the requirements of the bureaucrats who are owned by that firm. So the regulation creates the problem
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
No. American ISPs are used to having their monopoly/duopolies and they push laws that keep their power structure in place. With little to no competition, they don't have any incentive to provide better service at competitive prices.
I find it always depressing, when my government tries to come up with its own plan and doesn't bother to have a look how other nations did it.
That is either ignorance, arrogance or misplaced pride.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Why does it suck?? I've got broadband and it works great. Almost everyone I know has it also. The only people that don't are in places where it is very expensive to provide. So .. you want the 90% who have decent broadband to pay even more so that the 10% in places where it is expensive don't have to pay so much, even though they choose to live there. And they don't want to pay for dial-up, even though most services on the Internet work just fine without it, it just takes a little longer and you can't really download free movies or watch YouTube.
You probably helped write the health care reform bill also....
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
And therefore it is better to put someone in debt without their permission?
Without their permission? You voted them in, you tacitly gave permission to spend as they see fit to do best for the country.
I'm using "You" in a generic sense there; in a democracy, you must live by the will of the majority, and even if you specifically didn't, the American people chose their government. Let it also be said the majority of the spending programs in the US were already in place before Obama was in executive power ($700bn bailout, Iraq war, Afghan war, unaffordable tax cuts).
Actually, most of the countries on that list are highly undesirable, but take note that Hong Kong is quite low, and they have on of the longest, fastest growing economies - and no resources!
... and no land, and no infrastructure to maintain, and no industry beyond financial & services, and limited government bound by China. The tax rate there is 16% because the government rules a city-state that doesn't need much ongoing investment. Your comparison is faulty.
The only contradiction I can cite is Australia, with net debt around 15%, and that's mostly because of a hard-line conservative party ruling for 11 years cutting spending in order to pay down the sceptre of debt - and neglecting infrastructure spending while they were at it.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
I have to agree: in the world of public debate childish antics seem to be more effective than intelligent debate.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Ha! In Australia its the regulation that makes the market competitive. The American's who ran our version of pre-breakup AT&T (Telstra) got very frustrated at not being able to kick their competitors off their network (a former government asset), and left.
And not some country where the government wants to censor the internet on a perpetual basis, for the greater good (THE GREATER GOOD)!
Because that would be wrong!
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Did the people born yesterday vote for the debt?
You mean to say about Australia that activity of paying off the debt precludes other activities. Maybe they shouldn't have gone into debt? Imagine what they could have done with all that interest money...
So you're saying that having resources is a liability? If that were the case, we'd be better off banning the extraction of all resources. Hong Kong has only been 'bound' to China since 199..7? They've been growing since the 1950s. Additionally, skyscrapers are not cheap; nor are airports. Also, you could make the same arguments about many, many other city-states, but not one has experienced the same level of increases in the standard of living as Hong Kong.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Seriously why not Japan, or most European countries?
Most of those countries don't speak Americanese, dammit! At least the Aussies have something vaguely close...
Oh good lord.
Indeed. I don't understand why Australia has better strategies than e.g. Finland, which is about to make broadband a civil right. There's your white rabbit, now follow him.
I am the lawn!
You can't really be a leader anymore, the US is already behind and will only ever play catch-up at best.
You fail if you don't look at what the current leaders do good, and the losers do bad. In the case of the US, it is the loser and "looking at the winner" is frowned upon. Go figure.
Here every company is allowed on 'the last mile' to the client (ADSL), whoever owns that infrastructure, for 'a resonable cost'. Gouvernment overseers constantly watch that fee, and whether the owner complies. The effects are that I can choose from many companies, some in a death spiral to the lowest cost, some striving for better services.
Two months ago that same law is now in effect for television-cable, and the first companies are offering internet through that channel (on the competitors infra).
Of course the telco's have been fighting these laws with all their might, and they lost.
So I think I could very well serve as an example for you in the states, to break the monopoly/duopoly state you are in.
Watch the current ADSL state; some are only adsl, some with telephone, some with TV; and usually no download caps: http://www.shopadsl.nl/adsl-aanbiedingen/
Go back to school?
Yeah... We've got the greatest health care system, I mean Intertube system in the world. The U.S. telecom companies should be who we look to for guidance on how to move forward in deploying broadband so that everyone has a choice. Maybe even think about giving those companies some kind of financial incentive to expand their networks.
I mean, it worked before, didn't it?
Oh, wait...
I can think of no natural reason that a person can only have cables from one cable company going to their house other than aesthetics. Your argument is very weak.
I have dial-up and the bill is ~$80 per month for internet, phone, and some callerid, extended area calling, etc.
99% of the time it's just 56k internet(I don't really use the phone part of the service). I believe broadband is something like $15 a month, and you might be able to have it without also paying for the phone service. They really don't have much incentive to provide broadband anymore.
Because Japan doesn't have the landmass... they have fewer lines to lay and less overhead.
Secession by the States. Fixed.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
If you computer isn't stable enough to run firefox for 5 seconds when you overclock it, shouldn't you just not overclock it? Or overclock it less?
How much speed are you actually gaining? You're not saving much time if something goes wrong every hour or so.
Why aren't they looking to places where they actually have good broadband? Like Sweden or Finland? I mean come on, Australia? I have a good friend who lived there for almost 5 years and he had horrible broadband. Slow transfers, dropped connections, download caps, poor customer service, took 3 months to get service installed, you name it. Here in Finland we have 100Mb connections at a reasonable price. Sweden has had 100Mb even longer and they pay a lot less. Recently, Finland even established the right of all citizens to 100Mb broadband access by 2012. The infrastructure here is already well on the way to meeting that today.
The best place to look is France. They regulated the market so that those who owned the lines had to allow other people to use them at a fixed rate. This lead to many new startups that offered service on those lines, fueling innovation and lowering costs. Regulation is sometimes needed to break monopolies.
J
I live in the biggest city in new zealand and our broadband is terrible. Seems america wants to go backwards
This is one of the textbook cases of how natural monopoly/duopoly arise. The cost of entering the market is high - digging up the street, buying pole space, connecting houses, etc. If there's already a market actor present, the expected return on the investment of entering that market is small. From the perspective of an investor, his money is invested better elsewhere. Fiber doesn't provide all that much benefit over cable or dsl to most residential addresses. If all you do is check email, a few stock prices, and do light surfing, all that extra speed does jackshit. So the price that a new entrant can charge for their shiny new service has to be low, to attract any volume, or high enough that the very few who will pay that much of a premium will cover the costs and profit margin. And these issues exist no matter what regulations are in place. Digging up streets is very costly, and so is renting pole space. Nevermind the labor costs of running new wires. But keep on trumpeting that it's "regulation" impeding "the market". The market that's always justified using "perfect competition" models, except for the inconvenient bit where competition drives firm profits to zero.
i dont quite understand your wording, but i think i kno what your refering to...tax dollars fund infrastructure works and heavily populated areas generate more tax and can fund adequate works while also offering great demand for the infrastructure, this all justifies the project. In oz there is no water and heaps of desert in the "red" centre, theres also few people in the desert. The cost of supplying infrastructure to remote regions in Australia has always been prohibitive unless its to service a massive commercial interest like mining or fishing.We've got this horrible problem that we must wire up a sparsley populated vast area: Australiia being the size of the USA (minus Alaska) yet having not 300 but only 22 million souls
http://www.anticharisma.com/
Sometimes, something can be so ridiculous, that just pointing and laughing is sufficient.
Nail, meet hammer. To elaborate, there is still NO indication that Australia's fabled broadband network is ever going to eventuate. There's been a couple of years of blow-hard yapping about it, but the government has yet to come up with a single concrete proposition as to how it is going to go about it.
Don't get me wrong, I was one of those who helped this government get elected (and I'm all for the roll-out of a decent network), but while its members are nowhere near as openly malevolent as their predecessors, much of their policy to date has been the application of "spin" to somehow justify their lack of action.
... I get 5GB per month on my wireless connection, 512kb down and 128k up, for a measly $70 (about $50 USD) per month, and its great, it gets slower and slower every month of my 2 year contract!!! Yes, we have great broadband in this land, vast amounts of competition, great coverage, cheap prices, no data caps, no really.
If you believe New Zealand has something to show the world, forget it. We are almost drowning in out vomitous broadband :-(
The only people that don't are in places where it is very expensive to provide. So .. you want the 90% who have decent broadband to pay even more so that the 10% in places where it is expensive don't have to pay so much...
Yes. The government has a free ride in the cities, where there is lots of competition among the corporations to fill in the gaps, but those of us in more remote areas pay just as much (or more) in taxes, which the government takes from us while providing almost NOTHING in the way of services to justify what they take. This is one thing the government CAN do to justify its existence, and it's about time it did.
Because it's cheaper to let other people make mistakes and then learn from them than it is to make mistakes yourself. Which, in fact, is a good reason for looking at broadband in Australia for inspiration.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Hmm what's going to be cheaper.
Digging up a road used by thousands of people a day. A road that has been dug up by every pseudo utility out there and is now a rats nest of cable, water, gas, sewage, rail tracks, bricks, old bumpers and cheeto's bags. A road that you can only block between the hours of 3:04 am and 4:23am. But you can only use rubber tools due to noise restrictions.
OR
Some farmers field where you can lay 80k of cable in an afternoon using an auto trench digging cabling laying truck.
Me thinks it's vastly cheaper and easier and quicker to drop cable in corn country than a city. Even when you factor in price per customer serviced. In the US the country side is fairly easy to access and the distance between rural customers is not excessive. Some areas sure. Like Alaska that's going to suck to drop cable.
In Aus they/we have another issue. The country where it's only farmers and dingos is HUGE. 300k to your nearest pub. In Aus they/we have school by radio set. The shear distance involved is staggering. In the US you gather cattle on horse, quad. In Aus they/we gather cattle by chopper.
Aus by the way has some of the most expensive broadband in the world. So don't be looking up to Aus for a better way of doing things. This 40Billion boon-dongle that is the NBN, ( National Broadband Network ) is going to tack on a few more bucks to this pricey situation as it is.
Don't get me wrong Aus has to do something about it's pathetic broadband situation. Only LARGE aggressive splashes of wasteful money can achieve this before the turn of the century. It's a do it or be left behind situation. The net is the new economy so you better be on it. I think good old Obama knows this too. The US is lagging. The US economy is in a VERY bad state. Think Russia of a few years ago. It's fair that Obama's "team" is looking around the globe at how people are jumping on the new economy. I'm sure Aus has something to offer. But it sure as hell ain't going to be the pricing structure :)
Broadband evolution has two natural enemies.
1. High population density
2. Vast distances
Medium density and continuous population zones are extremely cheap to upgrade. This is pretty much anything eastern sea board USA out side of the cities. This is not Manhattan, Tokyo, or Aussie outback.
So where does this lead.
Well an alternative solution has come about. 3G. In cities around the globe broadband on the move and wireless is exploding in popularity. In a lot of major cities many traditional ADSL customers are switching to 3G as their broadband access method. I personally think this is the future of broadband in high population zones. copper is dead. It is not uncommon to find people who have no land connections at all now. No phone, no cable TV, no cable/adsl internet. Yet they have all of those services at equivalent quality via wireless solutions.
Is 3G the only answer. God I hope not. As Scotty would say. "But capt'n she can only take so much mooore!" 3G has it's limits.
Now for the LONG distance country folk. Yah sorry guys. That's going to be pricey for some time. Long cable costs. Long distance wireless costs. Sat costs. Microwave costs. You are pretty much screwed for at least 15-20 years.
OK ( I've drunk 2 glasses of wine during this ramble. I'm done )
But only Firefox crashes! Everything else just suffers silent data corruption...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
and good ol' Shiternet Explorer doesn't have spellcheck.
If it's the only thing that will run on your system, letting you get online without crashing, then it's not that shit is it?
How do you kill that which has no life?
I see that you've been sucked into the conservative "everything is too expensive" propaganda or you're a Telstra shareholder. Even if you accept that the actual provision of service will lose money, which I don't, there will be other economic spinoff benefits that will allow the government to claw back revenue. The economic importance of the internet is too critical to allow the entire country to be held to ransom by one company.
The Australian broadband plan is one of the best things any Australian government has done since the introduction of Medicare. Telstra has held this country by the balls ever since it was privatised by the previous conservative government so their mates could get even richer. They have no motivation to improve services or lower costs because their is no competition. Their will never be any competition unless the government acts to remove Telstras monopoly. The destruction of the Telstra monoply will save consumers thousands of dollars and dramatically improve services, if it was left to Telstra we would still be paying $133pm for a 1.5mps service, which isn't that far off what I'm currently paying. If I'm going to pay $133 for an internet service, I'd rather it was 100mps+ thanks.
Fibre to the home will be a game changer, it will be like LCD to cathode ray. Ask yourself if you will stick on a 10mps after all your mates are on 100mps or better, downloading movies in minutes? I doubt it very much. In a couple of years of introduction, uptake will be near 100%, which completely blows your pessimistic economic model.
Seriously why not Japan, or most European countries?
Because Japan, or most European countries, are not currently purchasing this technology from the United States. Once Japan or European countries decide to continue awarding very large contracts worth billions of dollars to companies such as Cisco and other American conglomerates, then I'm sure Obama will be more than willing to go over there and praise the hell out of those people responsible for those awards as well.
They wouldn't be offering terrible service at horrible prices. They would be offering mediocre service at high prices, but not high enough prices to make competitive undercutting possible. And when they own all the telecom infrastructure in the country, and are rich enough to buy out or undercut into bankruptcy anyone who tries to compete with their own small network, how are you going to break that up without government intrusion?
you should really learn what a natural monopoly is.
Australia has great single payer healthcare but terrible broadband! How did she get these two mixed up?
Yay me! ^^
Well, you need glasses. Most of the issues due to the fact that competition is naturally limited and the lack of regulation.
Chattanooga, TN, where the local Electric Power Board is...putting up fiber to all its customers.
http://epbfi.com/
Sometime later today, the tech will show up, and hook me back into the internets!
And yes, Comcast did sue to try to prevent it.
Ok, sure, the 50 Mbs option is a bit pricey, I'm hoping that as they get the system in, and technology advances, that price drops, and their upper-end service levels increase.
Of course, I also hope Comcast, AT&T and whoever else provides broadband around here decides to compete as well.
We looked to the U.S. for advise, and we got Sol Trujilo. Trust me, you guys could be doing worse.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Obama's in New South Wales
Cause DSL sucks, and so does cable
He said "can you fix my bandwidth?"
Execs just smiled and handed him a vegemite sandwich
Politicians need to get out of the free market.
Because of the much higher population density in japan/europe than rural usa.
Here's an empirical counterpoint:
Denmark has the second most equal distribution of income[1]. It's also the country where people are the most happy about their lives[2].
What does this prove? Well, I'm probably guilty of cherry-picking evidence, and correlation isn't necessarily causation, but I think it suggests that equality doesn't ruin our lives (yes, I'm probably also biased, being a Dane).
That certainly matches my personal experience. Free medical care, free education, well-stocked public libraries, a postal service I was happy to use (and still am, I just use it much less), the state even gives you money while you're studying and you can life off of it if you're a bit frugal. Sure, you get to pay a lot of taxes, but I'm happy to do that, seeing how I'm getting my money's worth for it.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality (sort by "CIA Gini").
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisfaction_with_Life_Index
(note that [2] doesn't say that life satisfaction correlates with income equality, nor that it doesn't. Make of that what you want.)
Its funny reading all these comments from Aussies complaining about Rudd's plan. It reminds me of a time when everyone in WA complained about the cost of rolling out water to a couple of thousand people in the desert. A place called Kalgoorlie, that went on to start our first (gold-based) mineral boom.
Wouldnt have happened without the Government backing a grossly over-expensive ambitious (and quite frankly absurd) plan...
Wait! Whats a sig?
Doing thing the US way in the US is taken as being the best way regardless of evidence to the contrary. In particular doing things the US way means not even looking at outside ways of doing things other than as a way to rule out how not to do something no matter how well it is done elsewhere; if it is done elsewhere a particular way then that way is ruled out as non-American.
My glasses just shattered...were you purposely running your nails across the chalkboard?
To elaborate, there is still NO indication that Australia's fabled broadband network is ever going to eventuate.
The fibre that can be physically seen being installed 20km from my house is a pretty good indication to me.
- Chuq
>>>Are you going to be able to pay $small_ISP $20k to rip up the street and pull you a run of fibre?
I call bullshit. Verizon has been rolling-out FiOS without any need to rip-up streets. They simply run the wire through the same government-owned pipe that Comcast uses. You could have Time-Warner, Cox, Charter, and other internet companies sharing the same metal pipe, each with their own cables running in parallel.
And before you say "that's not efficient" - well neither is having ~20 different companies all making cars, but it gives the consumer the power of choice.
.
>>>I think, ideally, the last mile would be municipally owned, and they then lease the lines to $small_ISP of your choice, at a flat rate.
Not possible. There's not enough room in a single cable to allow multiple companies to operate. Take Comcast for example. Their cable is already full from 50 megahertz all the way up to 5000 megahertz. There's no room to "share" that line with someone else.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
We are only allowed to access government approved content. All content without a government classification is prohibited by law, at the moment they can't enforce it but they are working to force isps to block anything they dont like.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
**Apologies for any typo's - Firefox doesn't want to run on my system without crashing every 5 seconds since I overclocked it (everything else runs 100% fine, and no system crashes - so the problem is with Firefox) and good ol' Shiternet Explorer doesn't have spellcheck.**
Haha, I really think people need to pass an intelligence test to own a computer.
>>>the government takes from us while providing almost NOTHING in the way of services
False.
Study-after-study has shown that rural citizens (i.e. the red-colored zones) get MORE money, per capita, than people in the cities/urban areas. This is because the rural citizens have their electricity subsidized and their phone connections subsidized by government or corporations via the Universal Service Fund. And soon their internet will be subsidized too. If rural citizens paid the *true* cost of these long-distance runs of electric/phone they would not be able to afford it.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
What, like banking ?
>>>This is one of the textbook cases of how natural monopoly/duopoly arise.
Except in the case of cable television, which is most areas the monopoly did not arise naturally. It was *mandated* by the local government when they granted Comcast (or Cox or Time-warner) an exclusive license in the neighborhoods or counties.
The government should revoke that exclusive license, and let other companies to move-in. Imagine if the metal pipe under your street not only had Comcast, but also Cox, Time-Warner Cable, Charter, Apple TV, and so on. You could just pick the one you liked, the same way you can choose a Ford, Honda, GM, Toyota, Kia, or Dodge car.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>you want the 90% who have decent broadband to pay even more so that the 10% in places where it is expensive don't have to pay so much, even though they choose to live there.
>>>
You were marked troll, but I've heard the Greens/Environmentalists make the same argument - Stop subsidizing rural homes with cheap electricity and phone hookups (i.e. eliminate the Universal Service Fee). Let rural home owners pay the true cost of these connections, and it would discourage rural sprawl, and "help the environment".
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Because running cables is a significant effort and expense. There are two barriers to running cables - economic and geographic.
Economically, it doesn't make sense for any one company to run wires unless they know they have enough customers to pay for it, which means many of the original cable wires probably would not have been run if it weren't for government sponsorship.
Geographically, in order to reach households, you need a continuous connection from your transmission point to the individual homes of each and every person, and in order to do that you need poles and wires installed along right-of-ways. That means you need to deal with individual landowners to get permission to put up the poles, then go harvest the trees and make and install poles to put your wires in place.
So, once you get the first company out there that's done all of that, they'll tend to have placed their poles in all the best spots and landowners are going to be reluctant to allow yet another set of poles and wires wires to run through their property, even if it's practical at all. That's assuming you are able to clear the first hurdle of getting every landowner between you and every customer to sign off on planting poles and running cable over their property.
And, of course, once a company goes in it's in their interest to yield as much money as possible off those poles, which means they're going to maintain a monopoly by either not offering pole space for rent, or charging outrageous prices for it.
Enter the US government.
The decision was made that power and communications constituted a "Public Good". To minimize the negative impacts of that good, we needed to have one set of poles for electricity, later telephone, and even later cable. One company would be subsidized and assisted in the installation, and in return they would accept regulation as a monopoly.
It was in the best interest of the first company to take that deal. In order to cut through the patchwork of landowner objections, the government simply used Eminent Domain where necessary to get the poles in place (a power unavailable to any company). The government could also allow the use of road setback areas for many of the poles.
Now that the wires are in place, and the government has assisted with the installation of those wires, the companies that accepted that assistance do not have the right to arbitrarily set prices. They can either accept competition (which means they give up their exclusive control of the wires the government helped them place) or they accept regulation (which means the government regulates their prices to make sure they make a reasonable profit on their investment, but that they cannot leverage their monopoly position into excessive profits).
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Probably because Japan and most European countries don't have wide open spaces and huge rural areas like the US and Australia do. But that's beside the point; TFS misses the meat of TFA and actually gets it dead wrong. It isn't about rolling out broadband.
There's a passage that will make neocons enraged:
Free Martian Whores!
They simply need to take over the pipe like any utility, and then rent the pipe to broadband providers. That would ease the issues with getting things like fiber layed out, while opening up the market to competition. I think one of the biggest hurdles is getting permits and licensing to actually lay the pipes themselves. Too expensive, time consuming, and too political.
Internet has become just like any other utility. It should be treated that way.
Unless anyone has forgotten, it was the deregulation of cable that caused an explosion in pricing. It's also allowed these markets to become limited to one or possibly two providers if your lucky. Now these exclusive agreements is preventing anyone else from entering the market. If the government takes over the pipes and then just rents those to providers at a fair price, it would remove that hurdle and open up competition.
There is no competition now and painful pricing is the obvious result.
Verizon hasn't ripped up streets because there are ways to run conduit without digging trenches. I do agree that you 'could' have the different ISPs sharing the same rigid conduit. The conduit would have to be new to avoid all the problems you have with trying to stuff more wire into existing pipes(I know it looks like it would fit but trying pulling that for miles after a couple of 90 degree bends) I think you are oversimplifying things and getting a little squirly with the car analogies. You don't think there is some sort of multiplexing that could be done at the last mile for the $small_ISP of your choice to lease the last mile? I am genuinely ignorant here and would like to know.
It's not the system that makes broadband good or bad, it's the attitude of the people living in the respective country. Germans (I'm German myself) and Japanese, for example, have a high regard for "doing things properly" and that's why the cars are good, the broadband works and their carpets are clean. English people (I lived in the UK for a couple of years), on the other hand, just don't care so much when the light goes out once a year, the heating needs fixing before every winter and the broadband works only so-and-so-good. However, England has better movies, series, music and universities. I suppose America is England coming from Germany and a bit further. The "system" has only a limited effect on what countries are capable of. The peoples attitutes count much more. That's why looking for inspiration in other countries is not really as helpful as one might initially think.
Excuses, excuses. At the moment the US has poor rural broadband development. But the cities have no excuse whatsoever. There is no reason why the developed areas can't be brought up to a decent speed and then do the rural areas later.
Here's a scale map of Japan and the East coast of the USA. If Japan can get 100Mbps connectivity over most of that largely mountainous terrain, what's the excuse for New York, or Washington DC ? Procrastination, that's what.
Ha! In Australia its the regulation that makes the market competitive. The American's who ran our version of pre-breakup AT&T (Telstra) got very frustrated at not being able to kick their competitors off their network (a former government asset), and left.
You know, you say one thing: "In Australia its the regulation that makes the market competitive" and then immediately refute it: "The American's who ran our version of pre-breakup AT&T". What is Telstra? A telecommunications and media company formerly owned by the government. So the problems with competition in the market come from government regulation. If the Australian government had never had a telecommunications company, there would have been no need for government regulation to create a competitive market. If after privatizing Telstra, the government refused to grant Telstra any special privileges, in time, market competition would have taken care of the problem.
Never give the government kudos for "fixing" a problem that the government created. (I used quotes around the word fixing, because often the government takes an action that appears to fix a problem but over time it is discovered it either made the problem worse or created new problems just as bad as the one that action was intended to fix. I do not know whether that holds true in this particular case or not.)
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
or China if you want to learn about Internet censorship.
We're not really looking for advice from Australia. We're just scoping out the Aussie infrastructure for our upcoming invasion.
A real leader learns about the subjects he needs to know. That means looking at what has worked and not worked for other people. Only an idiot stumbles blindly into a complex issue and calls it "leadership".
Verizon FiOS, yes, though they're slowing down FiOS deployment lately due to the depression. AT&T, no, their U-verse FTTN network uses existing copper for the last kilometer and tops out at 27Mbps aggregate bandwidth, shared between VoIP, HDTV and Internet. It's a joke. They're not interested in doing the job right like Verizon did.
It would probably be best for last-mile dark FTTH to be run by a third party, either an old-fashioned dividend paying utility or a municipal utility. Service providers would lease fibers to plug their electronics into. Such a utility would make for a nice, sleepy cash cow of a business. The business model would work a lot better if dividends weren't double-taxed though.
I thought Clinton already looked down under?
This space for rent, inquire within.
i wasn't aware it was the responsibility of the federal government to deal in internet access
That's because study after study look at the limited scope of an issue, not the entire economic play between red or blue or whatever zones being served. So you say subsidized, I say it's a fair trade, because those red zones are often where your food come from. Blue areas subsidize red areas in some ways, red areas "subsidize" blue areas in some ways.
I see these half-info'd posts on /. too often. Too often "red zones" is special language for conservatives, Republicans, and "study after study" language for "it's been defacto shown we supply welfare for rural folks one-sidedly."
Blue zones, the cities, are packed in. The distance between "homes" are usually apartments or row houses, so you can run 10 fiber lines and serve 100s of homes. The economics of scale for networks and infrastructure are well served by cities and packed in living. This applies to airports, public transportation, networks, and many other things, such as health care and energy.
In rural areas, those 100s of homes could be the size of the entire damn city or more. Yet essentially the same lines must be run, now spread out over that same area, to serve that number of people a short hop served a city apartment complex. Obviously, it's going to cost more, because of repeaters and other costs, like trench digging or poles and simply extra line length.
Think of it this way, what would be the food cost in a city if food was produced IN YOUR CITY EXCLUSIVELY. It'd be tremendous. There are certainly efforts for rooftop gardens and skyscraper gardens, but food produced there is higher than rural produced food. Even small COOP farms, if they exist in metropolitan areas, have higher cost because of the novelty of them.
One more thing--I often see attacks on /. hidden as "red zones" are backwards, inept, religious, etc., how come they don't do X Y Z like we blue zones people. Well, if you don't want them backwards, these subsidization balances out things. Similar as you don't want to starve, blue zones import red zone food. Personally, I'd rather drop the party colors, but these days the old physical skin color racism has given way to pervasive political colors.
Most of the problems I see presented on this issue stem from the fact that competition is artificially limited through BAD regulation, mostly under-regulation. Anybody should be able to become a provider or there's no free market, but how many fiber feeds need to go down the street?
Ideally, all utilities should be run by the state. You can't feasably have more than one electric company in a city, or gas company, or water company, or railroad; any business that needs to demand right of way for pipes, wires, etc. should not be in the public sector.
Here in Springfield the power company, at least, is owned by the city. We have the cheapest and most reliable electricity in the state, and CWLP turns a profit. Amerin, the private utility that supplies most of Illinois, has the most expensive and least reliable power in the state.
Free Martian Whores!
Surewest is happily ripping up the streets to provide fiber to people wanting to break outta the AT&T/Comcast duopoly. You're right that the last mile should be municipally owned, as long as any provider has access to it.
One of the things your local government gets by granting exclusive licenses to telcos is the guarantee that every residence in a neighborhood is covered. Otherwise companies would cherry pick customers based on all sorts of factors. How would you like to not have that shiny new fiber service because your neighbors don't make enough money to make it profitable for the telco to wire your side of the street?
I'm not saying that local exclusive licenses is a good thing, on the contrary, they're a major obstacle in spreading broadband. But it's not that clear cut.
If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?
These situations are only created through Government intrusion into the market.
Yeah, and the Telcos are hapless little virgins, waiting for the big bad gubmint to tell 'em what to do. How's life in black and white world?
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
I think, ideally, the last mile would be municipally owned, and they then lease the lines to $small_ISP of your choice, at a flat rate. That's the only way I can see a bunch of ISPs working out.
The city of Ashland in southern Oregon does precisely this.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I think this is nothing but a political move. We're asking for help but are we going to follow it, I am not so sure. It does not hurt to ask in this case. To me, Obama knows what he is doing in regard of establishing good relationships globally. I am sure Australia is feeling pretty good about this at this moment.
I'm not that familiar with the history AT&T, other than the deregulation of long-distance calling sure did bring my phone bill down..... So the regulation creates the problem
Actually you can say that a change in regulation brought your bill down. It was government regulation that forced AT&T to open up their network to third party long distance providers. It basically decoupled local service, which remained in the hands of local monopolies, and long distance service, which was opened up for competition. Pretty much what the FCC intends to do now with Network Neutrality rules.
Bottom line is that there is such things as bad and good regulation.
If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?
Obama is an embarrassment.
Which is why I'd consider a local municipal network to be much like a road system or a phone system.
A natural monopoly that the city should own the wires on, but let all the providers slug it out for themselves to see who gets what customers.
I'm sick of the population density argument. By that logic, NYC, Chicago and LA should be broadband heavens, and they're not.
If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?
The problem with Net Neutrality is the last mile. Thus instead of adding more regulation in the form of Net Neutrality, the government needs to address the issue of government granted monopolies on the last mile. Once that is addressed, Net Neutrality issues will fade away. But Net Neutrality can be used as a stick to get more competition in the last mile.
What needs to happen is the Federal government needs to tally up how much tax payer money has gone to the telecoms, add interest, and then tell the telecoms that they need to pay back X billion dollars, once they have done that, they will own outright their own network. The money paid back to the government goes into a fund available to other ISP's that want to lay their own fiber.
Local municipalities would build, if they haven't already, a pipe in the right of ways in front of every house, going to every house. This pipe is what competing ISP’s would use to lay cable in, instead of having to dig separate trenches themselves. The local government would charge a minimal maintenance fee to any ISP who wants to lay cable in the pipe. The telecoms would also pay the same fee, even if they are not using the pipe, which would be for access to the right of way in front of, and through people’s property. This way the construction and maintenance of the pipe is guaranteed without any higher taxes.
Pretty much everything I have heard about AU internet experience has been bad. Not to mention all the censorship I hear they deal with.
Seeing as I live in Canada and pretty much adopt or do whatever the heck the US does, this news doesn't exactly thrill me.
I was reading the other day about Finland's plans to ensure all their people have broadband access since they have made internet access a basic human right there. It seems to me that their model might be a better fit. They are also a pretty large country with a large rural decentralized population to deal with.
--All the government had to do was actually enforce the measures they enacted and we wouldn't be having this conversation. So yes, while the companies are definitely in the wrong for essentially embezzling the money, the politicians who gave them the money and then let them just pocket it are even more in the wrong.--
Yep, where we are at we are still paying taxes since the 80's for 911 service. We live in the US and still don't have this despite renaming all of the roads to names instead of numbers. Local government at it's finest.
Ideally, the pipe would be municipally owned, and 20 different companies could just pull their wires through the pipe at a couple of hundred dollars a pop.
And before anyone gets confused and misunderstands because of their preconcieved notions... No, I do NOT mean 'pipe' as in data pipe. I mean 'pip' as a concrete/steel/iron pipe, made like the ones used for our sewer system. Cities are not experienced, nor do they have the skill sets to handle data. They are experienced and have the skill set for running physical tubes to peoples homes. Most cities have 2 or three sets of pipes that the city already manages to run to their homes just fine. A set of pipes the same size as our sewer pipes would easily accommodate 2 or 3 dozen competitors. It would also mean that when the next wave of upgrades comes, the streets would not need to be dug up AGAIN to make the upgrades.
They should be sued for $200 BILLION for fraud and contractual violations.
From what I've read, the $200 Billion is a low ball estimate of the fraud they have committed. They were supposed to provide 45 meg pipes to the home over fiber. I'm still struggling with 1.5 meg DSL unless I want to go with Concast. And that will happen shortly after the sun blows up.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
What does landmass have to do with anything? I don't need a fiber connection to every square mile of the country, I want it in the middle of a f***ing city.
It's a classic excuse used to justify the horrors of you asking the telco's to perform as promised or pay the money back.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
The best place to look is France. They regulated the market so that those who owned the lines had to allow other people to use them at a fixed rate. This lead to many new startups that offered service on those lines, fueling innovation and lowering costs. Regulation is sometimes needed to break monopolies.
J
Except here we seem to allow our monopolies to continue unabated. Microsoft is a great example of this. Concast is another. Two giant companies that continue to feed regulation to our government, and the government keeps allowing it!
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
So your contention is that good regulation, like the one that says only one telco can supply my house is better than bad regulation, which says only one long-distance telco can supply my house. I don't think this is correct. If more telcos can supply my house, then I will benefit from it through reduced prices and increased performance, just as happens in other unregulated industries such as microchips and elective surgeries.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
False...rural citizens (i.e. the red-colored zones) get MORE money, per capita, than people in the cities/urban areas. This is because the rural citizens have their electricity subsidized and their phone connections subsidized
It is not false.
I don't know or care what colour crayon you use to colour in your maps, but my property in Northern Tasmania, although not a vast distance (as the crow flies about 40 km) from a regional centre, is not serviced in ANY way by a government-supplied service. Rubbish gets collected once a fortnight by the municipal council (funded independently by council rates, not by the public purse), and that is it. My water comes from mountain streams (though I'm not about to complain about that), but I have to deal with my own sewerage and supply my own power.
It would cost me thousands of dollars to connect up even a basic phone-line for a dial-up connection, and I don't see that changing.
So I am not being inaccurate in claiming the government does nothing but take my money. There is barely anything even in the way of a health service here, and what there is is having funding cut back.
How about looking to Canada? I live in Saskatchewan and I think we have great service. We have fibre to towns as small as 200 to provide hs, as well as wireless hs towers to cover smaller towns and areas. And in the next few years almost all schools, libraries, and hospitals/health centers will have fibre right to the building.
Multiple competing sewerage providers is a ridiculous idea. How are they going to compete? Commercials that say "Use us, because our sewage is cleaner? Maybe?" People don't care how clean their sewage is, they just want to flush the toilet and get back to work. A scarier scenario would be a commercial like "We'll take your sewage for pennies on the dollar, which is all you care about, and then don't worry what we do with it wink wink." Innovations in this market means finding ways to get rid of sewage while spending as little as possible - NOT providing excellent but somewhat pricey service like the government has an interest in providing.
As for the train stuff, apparently you aren't aware of the ongoing discussion about the issue. It's widely accepted that passenger rail never made a profit in its entire history, and in fact can never make a profit. Throughout all of its golden years of universal use, it probably never paid back the cost of laying rail. The government needed to subsidize these expenses because the infrastructure is important to the common good and a free market wouldn't work here.
The flaw in your argument is that BOTH rural and urban areas require modern infrastructure, but since it is neither necessary or desirable for BOTH rural and urban areas to have farming infrastructure, then the price to produce food 'IN YOUR CITY' is essentially ZERO.
You MIGHT have a point if I was able to get some of the farmer's tax money and use it to start a garden on my roof. As it is however, farmers are paid in full every time I buy a meal (and some of my tax money even goes to paying farmers NOT to grow food).
Pretty damn ironic that "Deregulation" let to scarcity and virtual monopolies. Neat trick. How did they do that? Theoretically a free market should have competition and lower prices. But I guess we Do Not have a free market do we?
but then it would be easier for them to make laws,regulations, etc.. maybe not, we could vote...
net neutrality.. is the way
Oh they would be able to afford it, just after they raised the prices for the goods and services that are PRODUCED in those rural areas.
City dwellers tend to forget, or like to ignore, that they share a symbiotic relationship with the rural hicks. Without the food and energy resources produced "in the sticks" city life would be impossible.
Tough to run a 40 Billion dollar trading company with no electricity. Tough to raise your family in a beautiful suburb when there's no electricity and nothing to eat. Oh you may have a power plant somewhere close to you, but go find out where the fuel for it comes from. You may have some farms somewhere close to your city but go find out what their production is and then divide that into your population.
You'll quickly discover that you'll be starving in the dark without those hicks in the sticks. On the other side of the coin those hicks in the sticks would be doing without life saving medical treatments and equipment, complicated machinery, and sophisticated technology.
Like I said, it's symbiotic but don't think that they couldn't afford it if they had to. They could, they'd just raise the cost of the food you're eating, the power you consume, etc, until they could.
Say what you will about Australia's broadband situation, but I think it won't actually be that-
PLEASE INERST 5.00 USD FOR THE NEXT 10000 BYTES
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
Your mom and dad might not need ultra fast broadband but what about the local hospital? Could they enhance their life saving services if they ultra high speed access was available so that they could participate in tele-medicine?
How about a Managed Service Provider in that same town? If UFB was available could they break down geographical barriers and expand their business into new areas?
I'm puzzled why you put this into the context of your mom and dad when fast internet access can have a such a strong influence on business success.
The reason, I think, is the population density. Japan, Korea and most developed European countries have huge populations in relatively small areas. Australia resembles the US model much more closely.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comcast's ANALOG cable is already frequency-full. Analog cable is also prone to internal and external interference, requires more amplification for long runs, etc. Because of this, it takes up more physical space...you can only shove so many shielded RG6 cables through a piece of 2" innerduct.
Optical fiber, on the other hand (which Comcast, et al already try to use for their backbone runs) has fewer interference issues, can be shot longer, etc. It's also a lot smaller, physically: looking at some right now, a 72F cable, jacketed, is about the size of 2 bundled RG6 cables. As for sharing those lines, aside from your standard network routing, let me introduce you to Wavelength-Division Multiplexing.
Let me tell you a story about government-owned pipe, corporate use, and provider's ownership entitlement beliefs.
Locally, there is a long bridge on a state road (thus owned and operated by the state DOT). As part of construction, conduit was run in the bridge for future applications. The local providers (telco, cable, etc) were offered the opportunity to help subsidize the conduit cost installation in exchange for being able to run their own lines, with the DOT reserving the right to use some for public use in the future.
Flash forward 10 years later. The DOT is ready to lay their own fiber through this conduit that has been installed in part with public funds, in part with private funds. They go to the providers who have cable laid in there to work out where they can install their single run of fiber.
AT&T apologizes and shows that they've actually filled the conduit that they have completely, and that it is in use. If there was room, they say, it would have been no problem.
Comcast says they have barely half-used their conduit, and aren't actually actively using it, but refuse to allow the DOT to run fiber through "their" conduit, instead demanding a 5-year lease agreement. (Note that after 5 years, the rates could be changed drastically as the lease was renegotiated.)
The DOT, rather than dragging out the time and costs of a lengthy legal battle to reassert their rightful use of part of said conduit, then has to pay to mount NEW conduit on the bridge, then run their fiber through it.
Now multiply this sort of issue across every mile of conduit, through every public right of way, every time someone new comes along and wants to pull more cable through the conduit.
That's a terrible idea. How the hell could you ever drive on the street? And what happens when TWC "accidentally" nicks Verizon's fiber?
Do you simply not live in the real world? There are physical limits here. There can only realistically be one provider ripping up the streets; at the moment that's a private company. It should be the government who then leases it out.
Something similar happens with DSL. Verizon owns the copper to my house (and happily provides crappy DSL service over it) but are legally required to allow anyone else (in my case, ATT through Covad) to hook up their stuff in the DSLAM. So my internet is Covad, and my router talks to them.
Why not replace Verizon with the government? In other words, remove the natural-monopoly property for infrastructure - it's not trivial to run your own broadband company, but it's certainly achievable.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
>>>I often see attacks on /. hidden as "red zones" are backwards, inept, religious, etc
Well first-off I live in a red zone. I certainly wouldn't attack myself as backwards, inept, et cetera, so you can strike that argument. As for food, a lot of rural residents don't grow any. They simple moved-out of the city into a small country home, with no intent to do farming. So you can strike that argument too.
And for the rest of my message you basically agreed with me - rural areas are more-costly to connect for electricity/phone service than city areas. But they don't pay higher rates. Why? The USF. The city residents pay higher rates to subsidize lower-cost rural hookups.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>my property in Northern Tasmania, although not a vast distance (as the crow flies about 40 km) from a regional centre, is not serviced in ANY way
Ahhh. Well if Tasmania was under U.S. jurisdiction, you'd have electric and phone hookups. This expense would not be paid by you, but by raising everyone's prices slightly higher, and then using the excess money to connect you and other rural residents. It's called the Universal Service Fund, and that's why I said rural (U.S.) connections are subsidized by city residents.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Why do you distrust a government you elect, yet trust a bunch of companies whose CEOs you don't?
Score: i, Imaginary
I voted for none of the people in public office right now.
An unregulated CEO is more trustworthy because he or she knows that I will switch in a heartbeat if I am dissatisfied with the product or if a competitor offers me a better deal.
Direct control over revenue is far more persuasive than threats of voting against a candidate's eventual reelection.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
I'm still battling to get ADSL (1) here in Victoria!!! What could Australia possibly teach about an outdated service which they have not yet been able to deploy responsibly!!!
Sure. If you're one of very few people who think Pepsi is better, Coca Cola will achieve a monopoly.
Not if you are one of very few people who think Pepsi is a better deal than Coca Cola.
By not reelecting a candidate, you are denying them revenue. Why is this any different than the free market mechanism?
Score: i, Imaginary
You apparently don't know much about the train stuff either, because the Great Northern Railway never took a penny from the Federal Government and was terrifically profitable. Clearly it was not necessary to subsidize the railways. Yes, they did accept passengers.
The government "should not furnish capital to [railroad] companies, in addition to their enormous land subsidies, to enable them to conduct their business in competition with enterprises that have received no aid from the public treasury.... Our own line in the North...was built without any government aid, even the right of way, through hundreds of miles of public lands, being paid for in cash." - James J. Hill of the Great Northern Railroad
The Great Northern prospered when all of the other transcontinental railroads when bankrupt in the downturn of 1893, and Hill both reduced his rates and turned a sizable profit.
I don't understand the argument that corporations can pollute to their heart's content when millions of people and companies have embraced conservation efforts without any legislation forcing them to. People do factor in the impact of their purchase decisions when selecting vendors, and especially when they have more available money. Poorer people who have fewer options are the ones that tend to make decisions without regard of impact, which is what makes a free market that much more important as that has been the single most successful method, possibly the only one known, to lift large numbers of people from poverty.
It is regulation that stifles innovation. There is an article a few down right here on /. about how demand for engineers has not actually increased, which would support the hypothesis that companies spending money on activities other than innovation don't innovate. They are more concerned with having the right lobbyist, good lawyers, top accountants, and 'their' man in the Government. These jobs all come with the price of hiring fewer engineers or less innovative engineers. It also sends the brightest towards these other less productive fields, so that instead of finding clever ways to make things more efficient, they're finding clever ways to make things less efficient.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Honestly, I'm too dimwitted to understand your Coke/Pepsi analogy. Perhaps the 'if' statements are false.
I do not have the power to not reelect a candidate. Democracy is tyranny of the majority and leaves me with no other options, unlike an unregulated market.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Granting the Government the power to regulate gives special interests control over the regulated areas. This is what really makes the whole thing so awful is that we actually end up with regulators who are approved by the regulated, who will then do everything possible to maintain the monopoly. The corporations do not fear regulation, they embrace it. Non-market strategies are a part of every major business school program, and for good reason.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
A free market is tyranny of the majority too. A sufficient number of people must have a certain need, and fulfilling that need must be profitable enough, in order for the market to fulfill it.
What I don't understand is why you think "vote with your dollars" works, yet "vote with your vote" must be doomed to fail.
Score: i, Imaginary
Excellent example! The banking industry is one of the most heavily regulated industries in the world, and that has lead them to be practically joined at the hip with the Government.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
If it was successful it's because it carried freight almost exclusively. No passenger railway in the world has ever been profitable. For examples given like Springfield's power company, only its operating expenses are profitable; the initial investment and systems upgrades will not be paid back.
It may only be conventional wisdom and have some exceptions today but the saying goes "Infrastructure is never profitable." Check out the 1996 dollar figures (add approx 40% for inflation) for some highway costs. I don't care how great or how northern you are, you cannot make a billion-dollar-per-mile highway profitable. Infrastructure, is, never, profitable.
AHHAAHHA Welcome to the Dark Ages Americans MWAHAHAAH there will be CHANGE
Well, so long America. Asking Australian telcos advice on how to run the internet is like asking pedophiles advice on running a kindergarten. We have one of the slowest and most expensive internets in the world. You'd be better off looking at Asian countries (like Japan and south Korea). I nearly fell off my chair and spat my breakfast at my screen when I read this headline.
You moved your mouse. Please restart Windows for changes to take effect.
You are right that the government is attempting to 'fix' the problems that the government created. The problem in Australia is cronyism, politically and economically. Unfortunately, the government that privatised Telstra, with the rallying cry "Free Trade Market", also sold the company to the (mostly) same people that paid for its inception and subsidies.
I can understand that Telstra had been disassociated from a government department for quite a few years before privatisation. That led to Telstra being more than its physical assets. However, the government never attributed the grants that had been given to Telstra to create the networks prior to privatisation, which in turn led to Telstra 'owning' networks whose creation had been funded by the Australian taxpayers.
So, taxpayers have paid for the networks to be created and maintained, paid for the company to be privatised, and are now going to pay for a new 'national' network to be recreated. While I have problems with government no matter which party is in power, at least in telecommunications the current government are almost recognising that Telstra should not have the infrastructure it has without paying back the taxpayers.
Now, if we ignore the previous government's grasp on morals and fairness, they had a better grasp of the problems of internet censorship... *sob* What have I come to?
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
Again, AT&T is taking are more conservative approach. Just because U-verse doesn't have FTTH yet, doesn't mean that it is not the long term goal. For a smaller investment they can get fibre to the block and start competing better with the cable companies. Yeah, it is max'd out at nearly 30mbit, but most cable systems have a *shared* downstream channel of 30mbit (docsis2). Cable companies are resorting to giving up multiple channels to get past the limit.
AT&T's strategy seems smart to me. Verizon has decided to spend the money upfront, but they have a much smaller footprint than AT&T.
He also called us racists. But hey, he's gone. Even if it did cost us the hefty side of 10 million
Fucking Roseville Phone is your answer?
I'd rather go back to dial up, if I could without using those scumbags.
FYI Roseville Phone has never given anybody access to their monopoly area, where I am unfortunate enough to reside.
Leaving me no viable choice but Comcast.
I cut the land line well over 10 years ago and never looked back.
No number of name changes will remove the stink.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yeah, naturally, companies don't want competition. If they *do* have competition, they'll do what they can to 'beat' it. That behavior brings out the best and worst in everything and everyone (the latter is unfortunate, but the prior hopefully makes it worth it).
You see things in a different way no doubt, but I don't have much trouble envisioning a successful MegaCompany in a fresh new market with such an iron hold on goods/services that they simply can't be competed against.
As an example, if MegaCompany has been peddling their stuff for awhile, they already get lots of business, get the best deals, have the most experience, have the most credibility and trust etc... There's a point where that gap becomes so wide that no start up could ever compete with that.
So, if it costs me twice as much to operate, what can I do?
Well, I can try to offer a better product/service. But, it'll be more expensive for me to do that than MegaCompany. Even if I do take a huge risk and spend everything I have to get this off of the ground, MegaCompany will undercut me by offering their own premium service for less. They can do it for less, so why wouldn't they?
I can try to innovate and replace MegaCompany's service/product by offering something that is not only superior, but perhaps a novel alternative. This might work if MegaCompany is resting on their laurels (as many monopolies would do, I'm sure). But any decent, intentional monopoly would still be looking into better ways to do things. As long as the threat of competition exists, this advancement ensures their future. Needless to say, innovation usually costs money though and MegaCompany has plenty of money, so they could already hire the 'best and brightest' who will be R&Ding in cutting edge facilities with plenty of resources. I might have some exceptional ideas, but there is a far greater chance *their* exceptional ideas will come first... and they have the capital to make sure they become reality first too.
I can offer the same or better service or product they do in a different area. Unfortunately, if MegaCompany is already well established, they can just plop down a new store or facility to undercut me if they choose to. I'm at their mercy in this respect.
What's left? Well, I could get lucky and discover something that replaces MegaCompany's product/service that is superior. I don't have as much funding or the best people working on new ideas, but I *might* be able to discover something that MegaCompany has missed with all of their resources.. I really don't like the odds though.
And perhaps, without competition, MegaCompany may be screwing up with enormously high prices or really bad service.. That might give me an 'in' as a startup. However, when I do start competing against MegaCompany, they have the advantage on practically everything. If they want to compete with me based on service or compete me with based on price, then they aren't going to have a problem doing that. Everything in capitalism revolves around money and whoever has the most money CAN offer the best service, the best price and the best products. Not every company does, but they CAN and any MegaCompany with competent leadership will ensure that they do so that no one else is able to compete in that market.
The *threat* of competition may help keep MegaCompany in check. They'll offer reasonable prices and decent products... just enough to undercut competition. But it'll never be as good as if we had real, viable choices. I also suppose a benevolent monopoly probably wouldn't be all that bad. You'd get the best prices and the best service etc... and they would spend their excess on innovation and all that jazz, but we all know that won't happen and what you get is incredibly rich people on top, poor people on the bottom and just enough reasonableness on their pricing, products and service to keep the little guys from competing.
It seems pretty hopeless, IMO. I And sure, know plenty of scenarios aren't like this, but some are... And just one is bad enough. Just imagine if you only had one store (Wal-Mart) or one phone company (AT&T). I *really* don't like the sound of that.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
If you computer isn't stable enough to run firefox for 5 seconds when you overclock it, shouldn't you just not overclock it? Or overclock it less? How much speed are you actually gaining? You're not saving much time if something goes wrong every hour or so.
The system is dead stable and no program has a problem but Firefox. Ergo, the problem is with Firefox, NOT the computer. If there was a problem with the system, other programs would crash - yet none of them do. As for the "you're not saving much time..." comment - I just don't use Firefox any more - problem solved. Shame though, I really like Firefox.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Are you talking rural 'homes' or 'business'. A rural farm that has sales in the hundreds of thousands or more can justify phone and electrical service as a cost of doing business and take tax breaks for it. It would be cheaper to pay for their increased costs via higher food prices than the hidden costs and inefficiences of federal and state taxes. Except that it is now a 'pure' cost regardless of income level v/s being subsidized by the wealthier. Like a soda tax, everyone pays the same for the can of soda, instead of paying more if they make more.
.. tough. You have chosen to live there. But then again, you have to drive into the city to buy things, so you gain from the government taking away their trash and providing taking care of the streets that the goods are transported on. If you lived in the country and didn't earn any income at all and lived off the land, then the amount of taxes you would be paying would be very minimal.
But I was talking about people who choose to live in rural areas but do not make a living there. I grew up in a rural farming community where most homes outside the city limits were farms, not those that don't like urban/suburban living. If someone wants to go live in the country or retire there, why should I subsidize their broadband. A farmer can justify it as a cost of doing business.
As to those that whine about 'I live in the country and don't get any government services'
Life's not fair and we all have to make choices. I do not wish to pay for the bad choices people make. But a farmer won't install broadband unless he feels it is a competitive advantage, and thus becomes a cost of doing business along with all the other farmers.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
umm, new zealand doesn't even have clarity on its own broadband strategy. I mean we still have the monopolisation of Telecom and only a few other players who are hesitant to invest their coin in a national broadband network in NZ. I think if Obama wants some advice it would be this: 1./ well defined strategy with outcomes 2./ Return on Investment from infrastructure 3./ Policy around how Network owners "unbundle services" Just pure $ do not always equal better broadband...
Look Forge | Free Classifieds Buy and Sell http://www.lookforge.com/
Seriously why not Japan, or most European countries?
Great post, says it all. In 2007 there were 13 other industrialized countries with faster access and more bandwidth, I think all of them had lower fees per month for consumers as well but would have to go back and look to be sure, than the United States. Heck we are still back in the dark ages with a definition of broadband of only 768Kbps. Please, they had 100Mb /100MB in Japan in 2000 and thanks to fiber to homes, they were able to increase each consumer's bandwidth to 1 Gbps / 1 Gbps by 2006. Oh and the cost, even better, from less than $55 per month in 2000 to less than $52 per month by 2006. Unlike the United States, the markets are actually working in Japan, Korea and other countries in that area.
In the US, only Greenlight (and only in Wilson N.C.) offers 100MB / 100MB synchronous bandwidth via fiber to customers homes for $100 per month. The next best player in the fiber internet market is FIOS with only 50Mbps/5Mbps for $119 per month.
Did the telcos / Cable companies step up their game and compete with Greenlight in North Carolina, of course not. They spent lobby money last year and plan to spend more lobbyist money this upcoming session of the North Carolina legislature in order to prevent Greenlight from expanding to other areas. They are also seeking to prevent any other companies or individuals from offering fiber to consumers. It can only be them and they do not want to offer Fiber to us. Of course they do not want Americans to remember that they (telcos) promised (and received our tax dollars for the promise) back in the 1990s to provide fiber to American homes...all the way to the home, not just to the general area or neighborhood and from their bandwidth limiting coaxial cable...its all a sham, and should be a crime!
In this instance, President Obama should not be looking down under and instead should be looking towards the rising sun!
All our politicians need to stop lining their pockets with lobbyist money and provide us with Fiber.
Who is with me, give me fiber or give me death! A bit extreme...perhaps, but we honestly need fiber!
We also need guaranteed minimum SUSTAINED bandwidths, say the FCC definition to start....768Kbps upstream and downstream sustained 99.99% of the time or the service can NOT, should NOT and SHALL NOT advertise itself as broadband.
I bet they would start putting Fiber over the last mile then!
Is your Internet Throttled? Install DD-Wrt, OpenWRT or Tomato to learn the truth! Google: 1Gbps/1Gbps: 5 Communities
I believe total area made the difference.
Slashdot = Sarcasm
Note: I don't take credit for this. This analogy has been floating around in e-mail for some time.
10 men decided to have a business lunch once a week. They always met in the same restaurant and the bill was always, $100.00, for all 10 men. If each man was responsible for his share of the bill that would be, $10.00, each. The men decided to divide the bill based upon their ability to pay. Using an agreed upon formula the following payment arraignment was worked out based upon income.
Men 1-4 who made the least amount of money paid nothing.
Man 5 paid $ 1.00
Man 6 paid $ 3.00
Man 7 paid $ 7.00
Man 8 paid $12.00
Man 9 paid $18.00
Man 10 paid $59.00
After several weeks the owner of the restaurant told the men that because they were such good customers he was reducing the bill by $20.00. Their delimina was how to divide up the, $20.00. If each person got the same amount then the first 4 men would be getting money back but they never paid anything for the dinners. After much discussion and no resolve the owner offered the following suggestion which they all agreed to.
Original Payment New Payment $ Amount Saved % Saved
Men 1-4 paid $ 0.00 $ 0.00 $0.00 0%
Man 5 paid $ 1.00 $ 0.00 $1.00 100%
Man 6 paid $ 3.00 $ 2.00 $1.00 33%
Man 7 paid $ 7.00 $ 5.00 $2.00 28%
Man 8 paid $12.00 $ 9.00 $3.00 25%
Man 9 paid $18.00 $14.00 $4.00 22%
Man 10 paid $59.00 $50.00 $9.00 15%
Once out side the men began to argue about the settlement. Man 5 said he only got, $1.00, while Man 10 received, $9.00. Men 1-4 were upset because the received nothing. They said that the cut only benefited the rich and the poor got nothing. They were upset so they beat up Man 10 and left him. The next week they met for lunch as usual except man 10 did not show up. When the new bill arrived the men discovered that between them they did not have enough money to pay even half of the bill.
In this story we see a simplified version of the Federal Income Tax. According to an article in the "New York Times" 80% of the taxes are paid by 20% of the people highest income people. Any time you have a tax cut the people who pay taxes are going to get the money. The next time you hear of a tax cut and the media tells you that the wealthy are getting all the money, remember they are paying the taxes.
Life is not for the lazy.
Being a leader means finding or creating the best option. There's alot of talent in this world. If someone has succeeded in what we are trying to do, why not incorporate that knowledge into our solution?
Oh hell no, you haven't been doing it the european way, you've been doing it the american way, as in corrupt and mostly not at all.
the european way is to set high standards of connectivity and making sure those standards are being followed, i.e. USING THE GOVERNMENT PROPERLY.
The american way is to put out a "help wanted" sign and the one who asks for the cheapest price up front gets the job, no matter how badly he does it, and no matter how expensive in the long run it'll be.
Your own confusion about what freedom is, and what cooperation is is driving your infrastructure into the ground, and sadly any chance of a really useful healthcare system.
Seriously why not Japan, or most European countries?
Because Japan, and most European countries, are geographically tiny. Australia is, AFAIK, the only USA-sized country rolling out nation-wide high-speed internet access. Our population density is an order of magnitude lower than yours, so surely, if we can make it profitable, so can the US.
Admittedly, our current infrastructure is mediocre, but the planned roll-out should address that.
. ~/.sig
>>>Do you simply not live in the real world? There are physical limits here.
The pipe that runs under be street is 3 feet wide. There's plenty of room to run 5, 10, even 20 ISP's cables in parallel. And let the customer choose what he wants.
>>>Verizon owns the copper to my house (and happily provides crappy DSL service over it) but are legally required to allow anyone else (in my case, ATT through Covad) to hook up their stuff in the DSLAM. So my internet is Covad, and my router talks to them.
>>>
False. Covad uses Verizon equipment and simply leases the lines, so really you are using Verizon's service. That's still a monopoly.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Sometimes when a politician handles a word, it loses it meaning. California politicians claimed they "deregulated" the electricity market, but that's isn't close to truth. All they did was create a central government-run market for electrical companies to trade, so it was even *more* strictly regulated than the previous system.
Same with cable tv which removed the price caps, but left the exclusive monopolies in place. A true deregulation would have revoked Comcast's monopoly over local neighborhoods.
Another funny thing is the "deregulation" of Satellite TV which ultimately forbids customers from receiving any other stations except their local market. So I can see Baltimore, but not Washington, even though I work there. So much for "freedom" in the market.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>Are you talking rural 'homes' or 'business'.
Which word did I use? That's right: "homes". Not farms or businesses. I wish people would learn to fucking READ what people write. Words means what words mean.
.
>>>If someone wants to go live in the country or retire there, why should I subsidize their broadband.
You shouldn't. Nor their electricity or phone. I've said that multiple time or many posts. - "I've heard the Greens/Environmentalists make the same argument - Stop subsidizing rural homes with cheap electricity and phone hookups (i.e. eliminate the Universal Service Fee)."
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>the european way is to set high standards of connectivity and making sure those standards are being followed, i.e. USING THE GOVERNMENT PROPERLY.
Apparently you've had your head stuck in the sand, because various EU governments are censoring the internet, the TV, and the newspapers. I would not use the word "proper" in that context.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Just so we don't catch any of that internet fascism that is rampant "down under"..
Re government debt & Australia - have a read of this: http://www.smh.com.au/business/no-infrastructure-unless-you-borrow-20091030-hps3.html
Hong Kong - having land is a liability, unless you spend to make it productive. The "growth" since the 50s was mostly fuelled by super cheap labour - something New York used to have, before standards of living lifted it to being impossible. Hong Kong has caught up, which is why Shenzhen is now the cheap labour location in the vincinity. Skyscrapers are built by corporations or land developers, not government.
I'm not sure how many other city-states you know of, but the only other ones I can think of are Singapore, Monaco and Vatican City, neither of which have a particularly low standard of living.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Telstra is the Australian monopoly that provides the backbone for their internet. Is O'bama proposing a monopoly? NO! He intends to nationalize our telecom infrastructure? Maybe. These thoughts would have seemed outrageous a year ago but do not seem extreme with the O'Bamaists in power. Think of the control of media and commerce the government would have. Let's get these socialists out of government before we have a Chavez like government.
Like I said, it's symbiotic but don't think that they couldn't afford it if they had to. They could, they'd just raise the cost of the food you're eating, the power you consume, etc, until they could.
At which point we'd simply import it from somewhere else at lower rates, simultaneously ending the farming subsidies... Although Monsanto would probably see the above as a declaration of war and have their assassins kill all of the farmers anyways.
It's not a symbiotic relationship anymore. Thanks to subsidy dependence and gene patents, we've got farmers at gun point.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
Oh be quiet... He's still right. EU governments are doing things the proper way AND the improper way. The American government is primarily not doing anything properly, intentionally refraining from doing necessary things, doing things the improper way, and making a lot of contractors wealthy... all while still renewing the Patriot Act. I know which I would rather have.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
> When a company is so successful that it can "get it" and "do it" for less...
> when a company offers something over an infrastructure that is so expensive
> and offering a product/service on a huge, national scale is the bar that has
> been set... That company will be so incredibly entrenched that it will never
> be rooted out by a startup. Ever.
Ever is too broad a statement. In the 1800's Fulton obtained a monopoly from NY State to run steamboats from NYC to Albany up the Hudson River. Vanderbilt not only had the monopoly overturned in court, but set up a competing company which brought down cost of passage which Fulton started at $10 (VERY expensive in those days) to ZERO. Vanderbilt found that he could make enough money on food and accommodations to pay for the passage.
The anti-monopoly company won by providing a better service for less.