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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.
Seriously why not Japan, or most European countries?
I live in Australia. Our broadband *sucks*. Try Korean or Japan if you're after inspiration.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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
We have about 1/10th the overall US population density. OTH our urban population density would be quite similar.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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
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
force the telco's to either invest the billions they were given or return the money.
If it was me, i'd roll out government owned last mile fiber or high quality copper in population densities greater then 100 people per square mile, and allow private enterprise to use this for a nominal fee and have them provide the backhaul and support services. in area's with lower population density auction off spectrum to ATLEAST 4 different providers in any area.
this way poviders aren't trapped into making huge investments they won't see a return on, and customers aren't trapped by monpoly providers. everyone wins without tax payers having to foot 100% of the bill or making the bill larger then it needs to be.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
This attitude of "The US shouldn't look at other countries as examples. If we didn't come up with the idea ourselves, it doesn't deserve to be used in America!" is really weird to me, as an outside observer. The same attitude is present in the current healthcare reform debate and in metrication. Surely Americans are aware that foreigners do come up with good ideas, and that you haven't failed as a country because you used some?
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.
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"
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
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...
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/
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
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.
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.
But only Firefox crashes! Everything else just suffers silent data corruption...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.)
>>>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
>>>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
>>>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
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."
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.
or China if you want to learn about Internet censorship.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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...