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FCC Dodges Pointed Questions On US Broadband Plan
Ars covers a series of questions that US senators put to the FCC chairman following up on his appearance before the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee in April. The headline question was a blunt one asked by octogenarian Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI): "The National Broadband Plan (NBP) proposes a goal of having 100 million homes subscribed at 100Mbps by 2020, while the leading nations already have 100Mbps fiber-based services at costs of $30 to $40 per month and beginning rollout of 1Gbps residential services, which the FCC suggests is required only for a single anchor institution in each community by 2020. This appears to suggest that the US should accept a 10- to 12-year lag behind the leading nations. What is the FCC's rationale for a vision that appears to be firmly rooted in the second tier of countries?" In the FCC's formal response (PDF), Chairman Genachowski doesn't rise to the "second tier" bait, and in fact talks about "ensuring that America remains a broadband world leader," as if he believes we currently are. A blogger over at Balloon Juice is a little more forthright on the "What is the FCC's rationale" question: "The rationale is that this is the best they can do with a legislative branch in the pocket of telecom providers."
We (the U.S.) is a great deal larger and more spread out than *any* of those other countries. However, it is ridiculous that I can't easily get 100Mbs (compared to other countries) in cities like Portland or Seattle. I would expect to only be able to get 25Mbs where I live (and I can and do), as I am 45 from a major metro.
Get your PostgreSQL here: http://www.commandprompt.com/
Eat my shorts slashdot !! 1Gbps speed !!
No other country that is at the top of the broadband list has 100 million homes.
http://top10.com/broadband/blog/2010/02/top_10_broadband_countries/
http://money.cnn.com/2009/10/01/news/economy/broadband_internet_connection/index.htm
It's much easier to throw alot of broadband out when your populations are centralized, or the country is small.
I dislike immensely a system that prohibits someone from speaking openly about a nations problems to it's very legislators.
"The rationale is that this is the best they can do with a legislative branch in the pocket of telecom providers."
*snicker*
Too bad US Senators are unlikely to read such words themselves. It would be fun to see their reactions at being lambasted for being the corrupt morons they are. I doubt they would change their ways over such accusations, but watching them get all puffy faced and dramatic in their excuses/responses to such outright disrespect would be funnier than most of the crap I can find on TV nowadays.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
"Ranking" broadband penetration by comparing countries like Singapore and Finland with the US containing states like Alaska, Kansas and Nevada) is just plain silly. The economics of providing network coverage are insanely sensitive to population density and land area.
-=Maggie Leber=-
>as if he believes we currently are.
Whut? The USA is the best, most freest country in the world. We're #1 at everything without even trying! USA! USA! Anyone who doesn't think so is a damn dirty hippy fag druggie terrorist communist and can get the hell out!
Thank you Jesus! Amen.
Seems like the US has a large monopoly problem over there. While you could argue that because it is two big companies that doesn't make it a monopoly, I would argue that because both of them are completely useless it is as good as having one. I think on all services - telephone, cell, and broadband the US government needs to make it illegal to both own the underlying networks and to provide retail services to end consumes.
Namely that ISPs have to sell off all of their fiber to someone else and buy it back on an equal footing with their competitors. This would allow both new small ISPs to compete with bigger companies, and allow bigger companies to focus on what their business is instead of having a split focus.
Additionally it would also encourage new firms that only exist to lay down new networks of communications - like a privately owned cell tower that they then sell on the raw bandwidth. This entire plan would be a huge boom to the US communications industry and while the big two would whine endlessly, with their stake in the existing networks and consumer space they would make out very well.
Most importantly this would turn the US from an international joke into a leader. It would show that capitalism can boost investment into a countries networks and all with a single tiny law that hurt primarily two big companies in the short term.
Other than to distribute TV, what's all that bandwidth for?
Most slow-loading pages today are server-side problems. Usually some ad server is holding up page loads.
Video on computer has won.
Paul Graham has an interesting essay on TV versus the computer for video.
The networks are queued to get the benefits of their lobbyists. Google MIGHT not get all the market share they think they can get.
Yours In Akademgorodok,
Kilgore Trout
Approximately 70% of the American population lives in 1% of it's landmass, which I believe is about 100 metro areas. We are not a rural nation, and haven't been for some time. (Here's an article that says 80% of the population lives within metro areas.)
Norway and Sweden have similar population clusters and sparse country areas, and they have near universal broadband coverage, both wired and wireless. The difference is that they spend more money on investing in infrastructure and less on maintaining an overseas empire and a police state.
As far as average population density, America has 83 people per square mile, Norway has 32 per square mile, and Sweden has 53 per square mile.
It's a failure of vision, investment, and will. It has nothing to do with population density.
This is Cringely's take on broadband and the government (from August 2007)
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_002683.html
"The National Information Infrastructure as codified in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 existed on two levels -- federal and state.
As a federal law, the Act specified certain data services that were to be made available to schools, libraries, hospitals, and public safety agencies
and paid for through special surcharges and some tax credits."
"Over the decade from 1994-2004 the major telephone companies profited from higher phone rates paid by all of us, accelerated depreciation
on their networks, and direct tax credits an average of $2,000 per subscriber for which the companies delivered precisely nothing in terms of
service to customers. That's $200 billion with nothing to be shown for it."
"It is on the state level where one can find the greatest excesses of the Telecommunications Act. All 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia
contracted with their local telecommunication utilities for the build-out of fiber and hybrid fiber-coax networks intended to bring bidirectional digital video
service to millions of homes by the year 2000. The Telecom Act set the mandate but, as it works with phone companies, the details were left to the states.
Fifty-one plans were laid and 51 plans failed."
"There are no good guys in this story. Misguided and incompetent regulation combined with utilities that found ways to game the system resulted in what
had been the best communication system in the world becoming just so-so, though very profitable. We as consumers were consistently sold ideas that
were impractical only to have those be replaced later by less-ambitious technologies that, in turn, were still under-delivered. Congress set mandates then
provided little or no oversight. The FCC was (and probably still is) managed for the benefit of the companies and their lobbyists, not for you and me. And the
upshot is that I could move to Japan and pay $14 per month for 100-megabit-per-second Internet service but I can't do that here and will probably never be able to."
The "US is too big" argument is specious. How did Americans ever get telephones, gas and water if the country is too big? Why don't high-density cities have 1st-world Internet speeds?
Look, I've lived in Japan through all iterations of Internet connectivity, from x.x modems, through ISDN, Adsl and fiber. I don't live in a city, I live an hour drive from a major city, but I've had 100Mbps fiber for eight or nine years now. It's so long ago, I can't remember, but it costs me about the same as a couple of pizzas per month.
I actually have 1Gbps wired, but I don't need that capacity yet. I have HDTV through my connection and the infrastructure is so solid, I have never had an outage in 15 years - not one. I lived in a rural area 8 years ago and still had 40Mbps Adsl.
There are few technological or geographical hurdles affecting your Internet connectivity in the US. You have only market hurdles. The biting reality is that local monopolies are stifling the market, as they are intended to do. If you really want state-of-the-art connectivity, you have to embrace a free market. Recall local and state politicians who vote for monopolies, or defeat them in elections by voting in people who will repeal monopoly legislation made in collusion with the provider.
Thanks to a marketing mentality, our response to any realisation that we're not doing well is to "declare it ain't so" and toss out distractions until the challenger gives up in exasperation. Any studies to the contrary have enough mud slung at them that the common person won't trust either side and will allow their national pride or other predispositions to decide what they think is real.
We're not good at looking problems in the face, no matter what their nature.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
OK, then let's just look at the Northeast megalopolis, which has roughly 50 million people on 2% of the US territory. You'll still find that broadband rates and penetration are not competitive.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
It's interesting that you would cite local monopolies as the problem. What I expected to see in this thread was, "The feds should do more to build a national broadband infrastructure," with the usual assumption that the US federal government is and should be all-powerful and in charge of controlling the economy.
There might be a valid argument that the Commerce Clause bans state and local governments from imposing regulations that prevent interstate competition, and that such regulations should be struck down. I'm not hopeful about that though, because the same argument applied to health care competition, and Congress' response was a 2000+ page bill it didn't read, meant to create competition only through a massive, centrally-controlled new bureaucracy backed by unprecedented forced-purchase rules.
If Congress moved to "fix" our Net connections the same way, everyone would be ordered to buy broadband or else, and do it through a government-organized collection of ISPs. Michael Moore would be telling everyone that Net access is a fundamental human right and that Cuba does it better. We'd be citing existing regulations as proof of the failure of capitalism, and calling for the government to just take over the whole Net industry.
Revive the Constitution.
Why can't we do this in a logical organized manner.
1. The government builds out infrastructure
2. The telecoms lease infrastructure
3. Individuals buy service from the telecoms at a regulated rate
4. The regulated rate has enough buffer to subsidize service to those under the poverty line
5. The lease rate has enough buffer to pay for the original build out, maintenance, plus further innovation
6. Innovation money is funneled back into colleges for research into next gen technologies
The build out could be done with contractors through the telecoms, or contracted on a state by state basis giving states control of where and when to build but the federal government own the spec of how to build out so that it remains consistent and interoperable from a interstate trade perspective (i.e. some broadband may be shared over boarders like in the case of St. Louis). The telecoms still get to profit from the infrastructure albeit at a reduced profit due to regulation and people below poverty get the opportunity to take part via subsidy, library, schools, etc.,. You could even due partial regulation where it's regulated up until some minimum standard and anything over that is considered "gold plan" allowing the telecoms to charge higher rates for higher usage.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
Think ahead, please.
Look at how popular handheld wireless devices have become, despite the lack of the bandwidth to support them properly. There's lots that can be done with more bandwidth widely available -- and if it's already available in many places, they'll already be doing it before it's being done in the US.
Mod up please. Informative.
Claiming US is a broadband world leader is complete and utter bull and quite well shows the ignorance of the speaker. Even Finland isn't at the top but still we have a broadband coverage of about 90% of the whole country, including rural areas, and the downtimes in broadband services are rare and don't last long.
There was discussion about this on OSNews a while back and I think it was South Korea where a 100mbit/s broadband connection costs like 10 euro/month, and it covers the whole country. THAT'S more like a broadband world leader tbh.
Unless there is collusion between service providers causing the price to remain artificially high, there is nothing inherently wrong with the fact that internet is more expensive in the United States under free market conditions. As it happens, the price is higher than it should be because of grant money given to a few big companies by government. Because of the government-sponsored coercive monopolies, they don't spend their money on improving infrastructure. What a surprise; government is the problem again.
Of course, the other option is to socialize internet service, putting in wholly in the government's hands, like so many other countries which are able to offer cheap internet service. That's fine for other countries, but you could view this is un-American depending on whether you view internet service as a utility or a luxury. Regardless, there is nothing wrong with high prices for un-socialized internet service (the price will be whatever the market will bear), but there is something wrong with the current situation where the government is just interfering in the market.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
DVD has a capacity of 10 mbits. Blu-Ray has around 50 or 60.
And that's just a single video stream. Now imagine a household with more than one person wanting to use it...
Now, granted, everything probably will be compressed to hell, because at this point, it's no longer your ISP that's the bottleneck, it's theirs. There's also a lowest-common denominator factor -- content will be made to serve those at 1 mbit, not those at 100.
Still, asking why you need that is a bit like asking why you need any technological upgrade. You don't, yet, but if it's there, someone will find a use for it.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I only have broadband because I'm willing to pay USD$350/mo for a T1. Yes, a blazing 1.5Mbit/s.
How "rural" am I? About 20K feet (as the wire travels) from the nearest switch. Telcom has no plans to install DSL; the local cable provider "does not service my area", and the various wireless options "suck" (to use a technical term). I would gladly switch to a cheap 3Mbit/s service with "only" 95% uptime; the savings would buy me a decent used car every year.
Don't try to tell me the US is "leading", or that it will "catch up". Game over, we lost.
The difference is that American society has been led to believe that the only form of investment that's worth anything is one with a high ROI. Infrastructure simply doesn't work that way.
Let's say you have a country with one million people, mostly concentrated in a capital city. Let's say the richest 10% of that country mostly live in the capital, and 70% of the population does as well. There is little incentive for a corporation to spend the same amount of money connecting 70% of the population on connecting the other 30%. The ROI is too low.
Furthermore, they have little incentive to provide a reasonable price to everyone, instead of a high price to the richest 10% who can afford it, and a middle price to the top two quintiles of income, and just forget about the rest. If this were just some luxury product, this is all to be expected, and not exactly harmful to the economy at large. Have a look at any South American country that was forced to follow these stupid rules: a two tier economy, with the top doing extremely well, and 90% wallowing in poverty with little access to infrastructure to help them get out.
When it comes to infrastructure, privatization is the quickest way to destroy an advancing economy. What if lobbyists decided in the 30s that electrification was a luxury? Or decided that a national road system was a luxury? Without widespread and reliable infrastructure, you simply have no foundation for a good economy. If I want to open a business, the first thing I'm going to look for is the place that has the best infrastructure for it: ports, railroads, reliable electric grid, and of course, a population that can actually do the work.
In 30 years, if the libertarian pretenders have their way, America will have a lopsided two tier economy, degraded infrastructure, and perhaps less public debt. But not one of the corporations is going to give a shit about the debt. They're going to take one look at our uneducated population, poor internet connectivity, unreliable coal-fired electric grid, and oil-dependent transportation network, and ask if we're willing to work for Ugandan wages, because the Chinese middle class is looking for a new textile manufacturing base.
Do you really think America has only been spending money on the military since 2008? You know, it's really tough to argue with people whose memories only last an election cycle.
Do you know what happens when you lower taxes for the wealthy at the same time you start two foreign wars? The economics of this are so basic that it's ridiculous to have to explain further. As McCain would say, before his opinions were no longer allowed by his new campaign managers: "The tax cut is not appropriate until we find out the cost of the war and the cost of reconstruction,"
Here's fifty years of military waste, presented in video form:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJVUQIwb-iM
The major incumbents do not want fast low-latency broadband. It will cut into their profits. Right now they make 15.99/month of a me for basically doing nothing. That's what I pay for most basic land line in order to have DSL from my ISP. The only time I hooked a phone up to it was to figure out which phone jack to plug my dsl modem into. My DSL provider also has to pay AT&T $20 for access to provide my DSL. So, of the $40/month I pay for DSL, AT&T gets $35 and my provider gets $5.
For my cell phone I pay $49.99. I suppose I only need the phone minutes because my carrier requires it. So I got the minimum. Why it costs $10/month for unlimited texting is beyond me considering I have "unlimited" internet for the same amount. Why can't I just get a mobile phone with unlimited internet and use that for voice, data and text? Why does it need to be split up? Oh, I forget profits.
And for those who think well it's just all capitalism and AT&T has to recoup the costs of maintaining their infrastructure let me tell you a story.
I work for a public access television station and when Uverse came to town I was involved with getting our signal on to their system. The process went like this:
- Conference call with four AT&T reps. They spent the first 15 minutes gabbing a bunch of marketing crap about the Uverse system. I asked them what this had to do with getting our signal to them and could we please talk about that. They remarked "I didn't realize your time was so important". Apparently theirs isn't but we had four reps from our end and I sure didn't want to waste a bunch of time.
- Then we had a site visit. Three reps in stinky leather jackets who could easily be mistaken as Mafioso. They took a bunch of pictures and asked a bunch of lame questions.
- Then we had yet another conference call with four of the reps to make sure we did everything required as determined by the site visit.
- They then sent out an installer for a T1 line. Not once but twice. The installer had absolutely no clue they were installing the T1 on behalf of AT&T not us. I didn't order it. I did not care. He kept handing me cards and telling me where the POE was. I threw the cards away. Not my responsibility.
- Finally the day of installation came. Two techs and their manager drove up 350 miles from LA in two separate vehicles to install the equipment. All eight rack spaces of it. Took them all day.
Contrast this with how Comcast got our signal:
- Head end tech calls me to make an appt to install the equipment. Five minute call.
- Head end tech arrives with one rack space unit hands it to me and says plug audio in here, video in there and the fiber in here. Then leaves.
- I spend 15 minutes racking the unit and the job is done.
I love how people always confused "pointed" with "poignant". Poignant is an adjective describing a feeling. Pointed is an adjective describing a shape.
> British Columbia,Colorado,Connecticut, Arizona, Slovakia 8 Mbit/s
I'm here in Phoenix, AZ. I have 144 Kbps IDSL (which is also ridiculously priced, and I'm ~20k feet from the CO).
I think that only the rich areas of town can get 8 Mbps, and that only via Verizon FIOS. I guess you can get semi-decent speed with cable, too, but the bandwidth caps are quite low. Ironically, if you measure throughput, I can (and do) suck more data down a crappy IDSL line than I could with the bandwidth caps everyone else puts up.
The supreme court decided that money is speech. That means that anyone can spend any amount of money to support any political point of view they want. That means that the more money you have, the more freedom of speech you have, and the more political power you have.
The supreme court just decided that corporations, you know, a legal fiction that is not a human being, a thing that is really just a mask for the people who run it, a thing that is not born and does not die, a thing that can not breath, bleed, or vote... the supreme court just decided that corporations have the right of free speech. That means that the people who control public corporations are allowed to use unlimited amounts of corporate money to support any kind of political action they want with no restrictions of any kind.
Yep, ATT, Verizon, Timewarner, ComCast... all get to use the money you pay them to buy our state legislatures and our national legislature. They can use the money you pay them to make sure that they can charge any price they want, that they can mess with the Internet in any way they want.
You wonder why a US Representative would apologize to BP? Maybe it is because he is owned out right by BP. You think that maybe the same guy is bending over and saying thank you when ever BP asks for a BJ? You think the same guy isn't doing the same thing for ATT and the rest of the scum?
Do you think they all aren't doing the same thing?
Big Telcom is coming in with a plan to charge you by the bit and make you pay extra to access any service they don't want you to have. Timewarner already tried it and only backed off because of opposition organized over the Internet. But, hey now they can pay to have a law that keeps you from being able to organize over the Internet. They can get a law that lets them charge anyway they want. You want to use Google? That will be an extra $10/month, but with Google you'll also get Bing and Yahoo whether you want them or not. You want to use YouTube? Well that is part of the video tier and costs $50 per month but hey, you get to upload too.
Slashdot? You want slashdot? Then you must be one of those subversive hackers and we'll just have to turn you over to the feds like we do anyone who wants to look at wikipedia or the democratic (fill in the name of any organization that ever made a statement in favor of regulation) party's web site.
Yeah....
Get used to having no rights at all. You don't have enough money to balance the free speech rights of the big corporations.
Oh, yeah... we can fix the problem in a very short time if y'all would vote. But, it seems that y'all don't vote.
Hell I live in DOWNTOWN Albuquerque and qwest only runs 1.5Mbps links here.
the tecs been around for a wile now. ham radios aruldy use d-star for internet with is essentially the same tech the nation wide broadband will use. the towers get around 50 miles coverage and this is just using the 1.2 gigahertz ham band. and did a metion free lol. granted you need to get the ham liance also free but the hardware isn't cheap. the fcc is getting some big interferance from isps being it will hurt there profits. just when dialup went free or dirt cheap and killed aol. then of course brodband just pissed on there grave.
I also though my 15Mbs was enough while I was living in Orange county. I paid about 50 pucks per month for that on top of my 60 per month for the standard HD package.
Since I moved to Germany, I pay 27 Euro per month for 50Mbs on top of my 20 Euro per month for my ridiculous amount of sat channels.
There is no way I would ever go back to that stupid COX cable modem. No way in hell. You're 10-25 may be fine if it's only you, but my wife and I both watch most shows online and DL a lot. Only with 50 Mbs do we not notice the slowdown.
I don't even know how you can have a modern connected life with 1.5 - 4Mbs, you may as well have dialup.
You're guessing at numbers, whereas Wikipedia cites several studies, and IEEE and ITU publications.
In much of the underdeveloped world, there's a lack of hard telephone lines, so mobile phones are preferred. For instance, in sub-Saharan Africa, as of 2006, only 2.6% of rural villages had land lines, but 45% had mobile signals.
I haven't been able to track down the source, but I recall reading that in the poorest country in Asia, 50% of the population owned mobile phones. That's consistent with what I cited above.
I literally do not know anyone above the age of ten who does not have at least one mobile phone.
Finally, on the broadcast TV issue: if 15% of the population has access to TV only by broadcast, then that's an argument for extending fiber networks so that everyone has access, not an argument against extending networks.
Marx's "Capital" was not about socialism; it was a detailed analysis of capitalism.
Of course profit gets reinvested. That's what profit is for. The amount of wealth capitalists spend on reproducing themselves is negligible; the amount they spend on luxuries is almost negligible. The rest is waste or profit. Whether a particular capitalist is a gross glutton or heroically frugal is almost completely irrelevant to the overall economic system. And really, they tend towards the latter.
Capitalism was an improvement over prior economic systems because it made use of a rational measurement for economic progress: profit. One problem is that it over-relies on that one measure.
Other problems: the boom/bust cycle (what do you do with profits when there's too much production to make a profit?); and the social problem that a minority is making social decisions that impact the majority.
As I can see from that chart, your summary is highly misleading. Most of the countries with high broadband penetration have much lower populations than the U.S. so the total number of broadband subscribers is a meaningless comparison. As for U.S.A. having "a higher percentage of broadband users than even Japan": this makes it sound like Japan must be high on the list so that being higher than "even Japan" is remarkable. Whereas according to the page you referenced, on the graph sorted by penetration rate, the U.S. is 19th (and Japan even lower).
Leaving aside how poorly it does when compared to other countries, we can just consider your stated FCC desire to "give everyone broadband" and see that penetration is about 22%. Their goal is therefore not "being reached", except in the sense that the rate would have been 21% at some time in the past, so 22 is an improvement. But that's a fairly weak standard by which to declare that a goal is being reached.
The Best I can get is a DSL line. It is better then parking out side of a hotel. To get WiFi. But I was told I was paying for a 500kb line. But most of the time the street wires dating from the 1960's can not deal with that and down grades to 400kb or less. And yes I live in a metro area. And about 2 miles from the down town switch. Its just that I live on an end street and there is no profit in it with only 5 houses between me and the end of line.
I did my research in approximately 5 minutes.
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/Images/commentarynews/broadbandspeedchart.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density
USA Average Broadband Speed less than 10MB/s and Population Density of 32 People/Km squared.
Finland Average Broadband Speed greater than 20MB/s and Population Density of 16 People/Km squared.
So stop the "Awww wahhh we are a big country and spread out" excuses already"!
Finland has a population that is TWICE as sparse as the USA, yet has average broadband speeds that are TWICE as fast.
You suck.
I dislike plain partisanship, and trust Obama about as much as I could throw him. That said, it bears noting that the financial crisis, however well or poorly handled by the Obama administration, is the result of a long slow boil with its roots in policy decisions made under Clinton (the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, for instance) and Bush Jr. Implicated in a lot of this was Henry Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, key proponent of the Glass-Steagall repeal, and then Secretary of the Treasury under both Bush and Obama, during which time he presided over an unprecedented giveaway of some $700 billion of taxpayer money to prop up corporations that probably should have failed (and many of which he had personal connections to from his time at Goldman Sachs).
In short, I don't think the debt increase can be attributed solely to Obama. Nor can Obama fairly be called twice as bad -- the fact is that he's a national politician, which essentially guarantees that he's in bed with most of the same interests that were friendly with his predecessors.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."