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FCC Wants More Time To Craft Broadband Plan
adeelarshad82 writes "Julius Genachowski, Federal Communications Commission Chairman, has sent out a letter to Congress requesting more time for the commission to deliver its national broadband plan. According to the stimulus bill passed in early 2009, the FCC was to come up with a plan to provide all citizens with access to broadband services and deliver it to the committee by February 17, 2010. Even though an outline of the plan was released last month, FCC is requesting till March 17, 2010 to finalize the plan."
The FCC is still using a 56k modem and it will take them a month to upload the plan.
It's a lot easier to come up with a plan to serve 99.9+% of the population than 100%.
If 300,000 Americans can't get broadband due to location, those 300,000 people are probably also lacking access to other very important things like emergency rooms and the like.
300,000 is too many to be without Internet, maybe 3,000 or 3,000 is more acceptable.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
A month isnt that much time based on the subject matter. This is something that may stay around for as long as 50 years, so please take your time, and for fuck sake get it right.
Define broadband. Would one mbps down be sufficient enough?
Is their goal simply to make sure people have adequate bandwidth to reasonably surf the Internet? Not necessarily streaming TV shows, but perhaps when it comes to news clips (with a bit of buffering).
Also, VoIP comes to mind, but I'm unsure what my opinion is on that.
With something this big why does it have to be such a concrete deadline. Couldn't they work it out into phases and release the phases. Its not like the town plan will benefit if their trunk has to be reworked.
The reason it's taking so long is because the FCC is supposed to regulate power and frequency, not the INTERNET. So this will be a whole new bonanza to exploit. Oh and while your here, please make a note the FCC's original mission statement is missing. Could it be because they failed and the "public spectrum" is now "corporate owned?"
I'm asking this seriously, not rhetorically.
They have a budget of $7.2 billion for grants. It seems like they could wi-max a bunch of major cities, but not the whole US. Or maybe they just want to make the internet "affordable"--not necessarily free. Subsidize people's ISP service? Ugh. I don't want to pay for my neighbor to download Zombie Strippers off the internet.
I do like the emphasis on making things competitive. There are a lot of us that have just one practical choice for broadband, either the phone or cable company. And then there is maybe some not-really-high-speed 3G/GPRS solution available. But without knowing details, I don't see how they encourage competition when there is a monopoly on wired or wireless access.
Seriously, what useful thing can the FCC do here?
Here is my plan: Make sure all the schools and libraries have got broadband-equipped computers to match demand. Let people that can't afford home internet ride the bus down to the library or stay after school. This is probably 90% covered already. It's too boring and unambitious of a plan to be very interesting, but it would do just fine. You'd have plenty of change left over from that $7.2 billion--go stimulate something else more useful with it, i.e. education, mass transit. We don't need to make sure every person is connected to a high-speed multimedia wonderland all the time for free. The emphasis should be on education and basic needs like typing up resumes, checking your e-mail, etc.
I agree, it's a rip. And why should the government provide subsidized access to provide much cheaper food, water delivery, electricity delivery and natural gas deliveries to those remote densely packed areas where none of those valuable resources occur naturally in the quantities those densely packed areas demand and use now? Why should they be allowed to "vote" to take from other people far away in the rural areas, or to use any public tax monies collected to help provide these goods and services?
Should go to a pure profit, supply and demand based model, no government interference? All private roads, no more government mandated free "right of ways" for pipelines or electrical towers. Let private corporations negotiate with each individual landowner for transit fees and access fees, etc. If they want to move products to these "broadband rich" densely populated areas, those people there should also pay what it is really worth. Then all of our goods and services will be more fairly priced.
Works both ways, man, so do you want that trade? That's what you indicate you want, so are you willing to pay the real free market no government interference/ no tax payer ripoff price of your existence, or do you want to keep the government tax payer help in setting some "commons" that you get now?
No they hit there download / upload cap and need to wait for next month.
I think it's interesting to see play out how government will adapt to working with technology. The paces of the two, historically, do not match. By the time the FCC decides on standards, new standards are being developed and making their investment obsolete.
I think it's safe to say that Moore's Law and Bureaucratic Reality seem to be primed for a head-on collision. Unfortunately, I'd imagine that instead of becoming more efficient and punctual, the government will instead create artificial limitations on technological growth just so they can keep up.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Can't wait until the same sorts of people are in charge of health care.
Nothing in the text of this item specifies the fact that it's related to the USA. Just saying "Federal", "Congress" or "national" doesn't imply it's American. Believe it or not folks, the internet does actually extend beyond Hawaii.
It will be just like telephone and now health care. The people who want the service enough to buy it will be taxed to provide the service for people who don't care enough to buy it on their own.
That second link isn't exactly heavy on details. Cities and suburbs already have the infrastructure. And many semi-rural areas have cable or DSL. The rest could be covered by wimax. But what about the truly rural areas? Satellite as it is now shouldn't be considered broadband with the high lag and ridiculous bandwidth caps. (When I was on satellite it was 250 MB in a 24 hour period before dial-up like speeds were enforced for 24 hours.) Some sort of terrestrial wireless may be the only option for them too.
Where did all that spectrum they freed up from analog TV go anyway?
We want fiber. Shove the BPL and DSL up your a$..
-=[ place
Doesn't serving "everyone" have daunting technical/physical challenges, if not financial ones at a minimum?
How does an extra month give you a good answer that's not completely unrealistic -- "just run fiber to everyone's house" -- and impossibly expensive?
That being said, I'm not against broadband/networking being invested in by the government, for the same reasons I'm not against the government building roads. It's a common thing we all need good, local access to. You benefit from roads, even if you don't personally drive -- it enables economic activity, enables things & people to move easily, etc. Municipal fiber infrastructure makes sense and can pay for itself.
I don't see how meeting everyone's needs can be done responsibly, though, and wouldn't want to see some of the excess paid for (eg, individual people living in remote areas requiring 10s of thouands of investment to get high speed internet access) at all.
You want an all encompassing plan, it's easy. Simply require all telecommunication companies be required to keep the promises they made in the 90's. It shouldn't cost the government anything, the telecommunication companies have already been paid for this.
After we first make sure that everyone has access to broadband, we can give them computers to use on it. Then software.
After a while, we can make sure everyone has a pony, too.
How many people want broadband that can't get it now? Move or pay the price. No one should pay so you can live in stumblefuck and get the benefits of urban living. Sorry, I'm not buying you a pony.
Yes, many places are stuck with shitty providers and no choice. That's a different issue, and I'd like to see something done about that.
The telcos have already been subsidized via tarrifs and tax breaks to the tune of 300 billion. The FCC has some control over what the telcos charge, even if they are a legislated monopoly. In exchange the telcos were supposed to rewire most of the country. This wasn't just large cities, this was rural, suburban and city. This used to be called the 200 billion broadband scandal. It's now up to 300 billion.
This is a good read, a free ebook. The authors even sat on the FCC board. This is well worth sending an email to your congress critter. Sure most don't care or are in the pockets of lobbyists, but it can't hurt. (For example my rep Upton was the chair of the subcomittee on telecommunications. Biggest political donors were all telephone companies which he backed on everything - go figure)
Let's provide tech support to the whole country on St. Patrick's Day. They'll be too drunk to notice that we screwed up!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Why can't the Teleco's offload the cost of laying the lines to the consumers that want the lines.
Here's my idea. Lets say I live in a neighborhood that doesn't have fiber runs. I call up the teleco and get a quote to have them lay fiber to my house. Let's just say that cost is.........$8000 (just a random number).
I agree to pay $8000 for installation plus a monthly fee for the service. But, I own the fiber. The teleco can now buy back the fiber when other people call from my neighborhood and want to use the fiber lines that I paid to have run from the teleco to my house.
So say there are 40 houses between my house and the teleco box (the distance I paid to have the fiber run). The teleco could tell the first guy that wanted fiber besides me that it will cost him $4000 (half my costs) + the cost to lay fiber from my line to his house. Teleco gets none of the $4000, just the actual cost to lay the line and I get the $4000 back.
Now a third guy comes along. The teleco tells him it will cost $2000 to lay the line. I get $1000 back and so does the second guy.
Think pyramid scheme, but I will never make back 100% of my cost.
Unfortunately, due to the corruption of the public sense and understanding by an MBA-dominated concept of service, many people are under the misunderstanding that the fiscal goal of public service or nonprofit organizations is to fiscally produce excess revenue over expenses, otherwise known as profit. The pre-MBA-dominated understanding of the fiscal goal of public service and nonprofit organizations is that they are to produce the maximum utilization by the public of their programs and services at a balanced budget where revenue and expenses are equal.
Why do we let idiots with MBA degrees tell people in government and public service how to manage their finances and operations using fiscal principles that don't apply?
It used to be that the conflict of interest was resolved by enabling those who agreed only to provide the pipe to be covered for liability by a concept known as 'common carrier'. If you were simply providing the pipe, and no content, you couldn't be held liable for what went through the pipe. Essentially through corruption and a lack of public awareness, we are not properly enforcing common carrier law through lawsuits against content providers who try to have their cake and eat it too.
You are essentially talking about what government does when they float a bond to create infrastructure, but instead your concept is a voluntary association of homeowners who agree to enter into an agreement to loan money to the phone company. You could more effectively do this by having the residents form a 501(c)(12) telecommunications cooperative and use that cooperative entity to negotiate with the phone company to fiber up your block, for example. You are still doing the finance, but you do it under a recognized legal entity.
Of course, the best thing would be for municipalities to take over telecommunications pipes to the home as a public service like water, sewers, and roads, but that would require us to remind ourselves of how government is not evil and exists to serve the people. In this kind of scenario, telecommunication companies could become hired help under contract to government to provide maintenance, content, and other things.
Go to a system like I outlined, all private, a for-profit model, and see what your food and water and electricity and natural gas would cost. Government intervention and the creation of a commons for centralized delivery systems keep your prices really low in the cities. The rural areas would easily be able to afford a lot more things than just cheap broadband under that model. Just your water bill in some large cities would shoot through the roof, let alone all the other stuff.
You just don't like it when your little insular urban centric "oh so superior" bubble gets burst. You exist at cheap affordable rates for basic life necessities in the larger cities from the government using a LOT of eminent domain seizures and mandated "right of ways" and massive centralized infrastructure building using tax payer dollars over the generations and regulations to keep your costs down. And the government seems to not pay much to the actual rural owners for this transit action, as in zero. Pure taking.
I bet you've never even thought before about how much your life is economically stealth subsidized because of that. Just imagine if all that "commons" action was gone and it was all private, your big city "wall street rules". All private roads, people charging whatever the market would bear, to get food to you..heh. Electric delivery companies having to negotiate transit fees. heh. Municipal water service and pipelines just taking water from the rural areas when this would be private water, where they could charge a sales fee per gallon before it even entered the pipeline, and then have to keep adding to the fees as the pipeline crossed a lot of private land and boundaries, heh. Tons of examples there.
You have no idea *at all* how cheap you have it from that "commons" and subsidized access. Just go back in US history and look what urban costs were before commons access. Every step of the way as the commons developed, starting with such things as the "post roads", your costs for food water and energy have dropped radically as a percentage of your income, and your comfort quality of life has gone up. But now that we would like a little more modern commons access to better communications, wow, what a reaction! See it all the time here. "Oh noes, string some better copper on already existing poles, OMGWTFBBQ, break the bank, we can't afford it, wah, no subsidies, how dare those people want modern communications, as if their chintzy water and food and power is so valuable!!"
If the government didn't foot the bill for much of the infrastructure, rural areas wouldn't have electricity or telephone service. I don't think it's a good idea to leave much of your population without access to basic utilities that everyone else takes for granted. I know someone will say "but broadband isn't necessary," but it makes life a major inconvenience (in the tech field, I can't work from home, can't use vpn, can't download updates, can't stream media, can't play online games, etc, etc). And no, moving to a new house isn't always an option. Unless you want areas of the country to fall massively behind in landing good jobs, getting a good education, and having a decent technical quality of life, you need to provide them access to some kind of low latency broadband. Besides, there are worse things for the government to spend money on.
http://www.wikihow.com/Use-There,-Their-and-They're
Satellite internet isn't broadband.
Is it baseband then? Just asking.
The UK gov wants everyone online in replacement for ID Cards. Yes that is right, you get spied upon and the law is an ass. Any law can now be passed in the UK if it is deemed within the "Publics Interest". We are not allowed to vote on laws anymore, it just takes a decision on behalf of the gov to make up your mind for you and to pass such a law.
All cows eat grass!
in replying, missed this one.
Generating plants would still have to be built near the cities across private roads paying huge fees for transit, all the materials have to be mined/refined/ manufactured, value added in many places to get to the plants, then they need to be fueled, primarily from coal, that would come from private coal mines, which might be far away and have to be trucked, barged or railed to the plant, across other private property. Every foot of that construction and delivery process would be paying transit fees.
Your costs therefore would be much larger than they are today..because they gotcha. It doesn't matter if you use uranium, all of the above still applies. Pure wall street rules, which are no rules short of theft or contract fraud, would indicated a major cartel pricing structure, similar to opec, with not much cheating as there isn't anything in it for big private mine operators to engage in a fratricidal race to the bottom when they can sit back and establish a guaranteed high profits syndicate.
A simple-from the rural landowner perspective- "I get all my electricity for free for letting you cross my property hauling your coal or establishing power lines" that rural access seekers would want at a minimum-I really couldn't imagine anyone demanding *less* than that, and they would likely want cash on top of that- would establish that their prices would be zero, whereas any urban dwellers would be extra large. Next step would just demand access to high speed communications, as long as the poles where there, just demand it, or stifle access. So..the companies go to the neighbor, look for access there. neighbor knows the score, demands the same thing, at a minimum. Lather, rinse repeat and local neighbors could band together knowing full well that the line had to cross *someplace* around there, and just contract with themselves so that all of them got the free electricity, as a condition of that line going in, or the road to cross, etc. Really, ask yourself if you were in that position, what would you ask for, or would you allow free transit, then offer to pay some huge fee for electricity on top of that? You'd have to be a pretty dull crayon to want that latter deal, yes?
So they wouldn't be paying through the roof, they would be getting it for *free*, at the expense of higher prices in the remote from the coal cities. This is a much more likely scenario.
And as for self powered, again, many would be in a position to do just that, and it is happening across the USA as we speak now, all those wind turbines for example are going up in farmers fields, and they aren't going up for free either.
Before we had massive centralized power delivery all over, many areas of the rural US were going to home windchargers, or carbide to water acetylene gas generators.. You can go look this up, jacobs was one such windcharger company and one of their models is still running in Antarctica today, from one of the earlier explorers. the tech is just not hard at smallish scales. And many rural people are now for a fact going to solar PV at least as a decent adjunct (that would be me), and eventually you will see them go all the way. They might stay grid tied, but they will be getting a check every month, not sending in a check.
It's a no-cheap-win simple extrapolation as regards what the remote (remote being far from the original sources, ie, the big cities, they would be the "new remote") demand would be price wise, it would be much higher than today for the urban dwellers, with total privatization and the loss of your governmental guaranteed subsidized commons.
Everything the big cities need has to be imported if they insist on living remotely where nothing tangible really comes from. Big cities produce *demand*, they don't really produce much stuff, except (and shrinking fast in the US) the very last stage assembly styled manufacturing, which still is tied heavily to mandated commons access for raw materials back down stream. "Demand" is not a pr
Which contractual obligations? What contract are you talking about? The Telecomunications act of 1996 is not a contract...
Do you really want to nationalize a piece of infrastructure? Who will run it? Who will pay the workers to maintain the cables? You? The bank-accounts you are planning on seizing will get depleted very quickly, and even if you start charging for the service again, you will not have the business know-how to replenish them.
Sheesh, I know, you were joking, but I suspect, you were only half-joking. It is like Socialism — government-ownership of economy — has not fallen on its face everywhere it was tried. Your friend in Zimbabwe confiscated the farms to "restore justice" and his country — formerly an exporter of food — now needs vast international help to avoid famine. Your friend in Venezuela ran his country into the ground to the point of the bridges crumbling and electricity blackouts. It only took both heroes several years to ruin their respective economies...
However bad things may be, letting the government (or "community") run them will only make them worse.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I can across this today and I decided to but in my 2 cents. Recently I moved from a town that had DSL and Cabel internet. To a rural area I did check for DSL and it was available but by the time I got moved and a mailing address all the slots got filled for DSL at the switching station because the telecom does not want to update the switching station to get more slots and I have Dial-up right now I have been waiting for DSL for over 3 months. When I moved and got stuck on Dial-up I had to give up PC Gaming, Playstation 3 Gaming, Ventrilo, Podcast, Internet TV and Radio like TWiT Live, youtube, manageing a Podcast Site, and a PC Backup Service. So I hate being on Dial-up and satellite I would hit the threshold of 17GBs a month from one company for traffic and you can't game.