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WSJ's Mossberg Calls For a Tougher Broadband Plan
GovTechGuy writes "Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg thinks the FCC's national broadband plan is long overdue, but he criticized it for being vague on the details and too focused on expanding access into rural areas. Mossberg pointed out that what passes for broadband in the US wouldn't even qualify as such in many other developed countries. He also noted that Americans pay more per unit of broadband speed than our competitors. He called on the government to devote time and resources to making sure Americans have the broadband access they need to stay competitive in the 21st century global economy."
"That's like motherhood, everyone wants to vote for that and I certainly support that," Mossberg said. But there are two other issues that he said don't receive enough attention: speed and cost.
Rural access is definitely important, but the United States is predominantly urban and suburban these days, and we should be leading in broadband speeds, not following.
1000 kbit/s is 40 times faster than what some rural residents currently have (28k or 33k analog). And it would be extremely easy to implement - just use the already-existing phone lines that lead in 99.9% of homes. All that's needed is to install the DSLAM and it's done. The entire US could be finished by 1/1/2012.
I've spoken to two people, who formerly had 26k and 33k respectively, and they love the new DSL. They jumped from those slow speed to 1500 and 3000 kbit/s respectively.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I think the ROI in rural areas is going to be pretty slim, and won't help the cause much. Places like Korea and Japan have a much higher overall population density, so when fiber gets laid there it ends up being used by more people, helping their numbers compete against our rural and suburban areas where population density is low. I think the geography of the USA is set up to fall behind in this regard.
In before people saying that we're so much bigger than other countries, therefore we can't get broadband to everyone.
Let's ignore how our high population density cities lack broadband equivalent to other top tier countries amirite.
I've been looking at internet rates because I'm planning to move very soon. Where I'm moving (Irvine, CA) there is only ONE internet provider (Cox).
It's $32/mo. for 3 mbps, $47 for 12.5 (10 with a 2.5 boost) or $62 for 25 (20 with a 5 boost)
Compare that to France's 28 mbps for ~$38 US, 50 mpbs for ~$65 or even 2.5 down/1.2 up gbps in Paris for ~$90
or how about Germany: 6 mbps for ~$26 or 32 mbps for ~$38.
Why are we paying nearly double the cost as other countries? Irvine is in Orange Country ("The OC") and is less than an hour from Los Angeles, so there shouldn't be any complaints that it is too rural for fast, affordable internet.
He called on the government to devote time and resources to making sure Americans have the broadband access they need to stay competitive in the 21st century global economy.
That's true, but many (possibly all?) of those countries subsidize their ISP through tax dollars to get lower rates - so you're still paying for it, it's just that the monthly bill the ISP sends you is lower but the amount the government takes out of your paycheck is higher.
Has anyone ever done a study of the real cost of internet in countries where it's partially funded by taxes? Then you'd have more accurate numbers for a comparison.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Just pass a federal law stating that it is an illegal restraint of interstate trade for a state or municipality to restrict the ability of new service providers to enter their markets. The only regulations they should be able to impose are civil and criminal penalties for damaging infrastructure.
It may be true that "Americans pay more per unit of broadband speed than our competitors", but our ISP's make more money than their ISP's.
Or maybe they waste more money, I forget.
You just wanted to cherry pick your data.
The EU has recently accepted what are considered second and third world countries, many within the last 10 years, including Bulgaria, Romania, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, etc. Just let me know - and provide some data, if you don't mind - exactly which US states have that level of GDP, poverty, and infrastructure.
You might as well throw in Iraq and Afghanistan into the US numbers and see how the averages work out then. We haven't added a state to our union since 1959.
Government approved monopolies are the problem. Getting the government more entrenched in broadband is not going to make it any better. Also get the ISP's out of the business of owning the last mile network and you'll see things improve dramatically.
See Lawrence Lessig on why we failed in broadband compared to other highly developed nations:
http://lessig.blip.tv/file/3485790/
It's not that we over or under-regulated, it's that we got the regulation wrong.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
We need to remember that Walt works for the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by Fox News. It's strongly to Fox's advantage to have consumers with cheap, high-speed broadband as it lowers Fox's distribution cost. It's like Walt arguing that printing and paper prices should be controlled so everyone can get the newspaper at a cheaper rate. As much as I'd like cheaper internet rates, the argument that he makes might be just be employer speak.
"He also noted that Americans pay more per unit of broadband speed than our competitors. He called on the government to devote time and resources to making sure Americans have the broadband access they need to stay competitive in the 21st century global economy."
Darn straight! A truly advanced nation needs faster, cheaper porn!
(I can't take anything seriously said by a Murdoch man.)
- - -
"The sixth sick shiek's sixth sheep's sick."
National defence is the job of the federal government because no one else can do it.
Our police force and fire departments are the job of local and state governments because no one else can do it.
I'm not convinced that internet access should be something that the government does because there are plenty of other entities that can do it. In fact, they already have. My mother lives in a rural area in a town of 8,000 people. She has high speed internet. She is retired and lives on a fixed income.
There are well-intentioned people in this world who immediately look to the state to solve problems. This is generally an unwise choice as it merely expands the size of an already corpulent government and locks more and more areas of human endeavour within the Iron Cage of Bureaucracy.
The spending deficit of the federal government is higher than any other nation in all of recorded history. Our great-great-great-great grandchildren are going to be handing over their paychecks to pay for this.
We don't need to add to this problem.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I used to work for the company that runs AllCoNet, which is a wireless broadband network funded by the Allegany County government in Maryland, USA. Our customers lived on the top of mountains and still get access, at rates up to "54mb" (which actually transfers at about 30mbps -- they usually opt for the cheap 3mbps connection), the entire downtown city area is blanketed in wifi that used to be free, but now costs $15 a year.
The whole thing cost about a million dollars to set up and it works quite well. Now that I've finished college I moved back to civilization (where I have 35mpbs FIOS) but point to point wireless is actually quite reasonable in cost compared to laying down cable everywhere, which is quite hard in the mountainous terrain involved in the Appalachians.
I keep wondering why if, as they say, broadband is so vital to economic growth that the only way to get it is to subsidize it.
If it provides a business advantage, someone will be selling it, and low and behold, they do. But it costs money to provide high speed networking -- networks cost money and the sellers don't see the business advantage to investing more money in networks than they can recoup. You can always get bandwidth if that's what you want, but it will cost you. That's how the market functions.
Sure, in some places it "sucks" (3Mbps, bad DNS, no NNTP, etc) but even there I think we need some perspective about how far the technology has come -- within the constraints of a market economy and without a ton of government involvement.
28.8 Kbps Internet was a miracle in 1995. 1.5 Mbps internet access was pretty high end 10 or so years ago. You paid big bucks for a T1 or were lucky to spend $75-100 for a 1.5 DSL line. I did at home when it finally became available. Just a few months ago, I switched ISPs and got 12/2 Mbps with 5 IPs for $70 a month. Is it a global bargain? No, but it's not tax subsidized either, but its 10x bandwidth I had 10 years ago for the same money.
I get there's some sloppy, we're-a-utility profitmaking to broadband in some areas and choices are limited, but overall it seems OK to me. In the past ten years, for me, the cost has remained static in absolute terms (which actually declining in real terms) *and* the product has been increased by a factor of 10. What else do I buy that's anywhere near that good? Can I buy 10x food I used to for the same money as 10 years ago? Energy? Clothes?
How does government involvement improve on this?
While this is a common view of how DSL technology works, it's really only true in dense urban areas with relatively new wiring. The truth is that it's actually quite complex to transmit broadband signals over telephone lines, and any number of things can interfere.
For starters, in most cases the DSLAM has to be within about 3 miles of the customer, and this is not measured as a bird flies. Sometimes the wires may twist around in all sorts of bizarre ways depending on historical construction. This makes it extremely costly for telecoms to provide broadband outside of densely populated areas, since you're looking at installing a DSLAM and the facilities to protect, support, and maintain it for a handful of houses in some rural areas. There's no way for those costs to ever be recovered. Now there are some ways to cut these costs using remote terminals rather than full DSLAMs, but this still costs vastly more than the customers can repay.
Although plain old distance-based attenuation is the biggest limiting factor, there are all kinds of other problems as well. Things like the gauge of the telephone wiring can make a big difference, and many areas historically had signal-boosting equipment installed on phone lines which produces acceptable voice quality on a flaky line, but makes broadband signal transmission all but impossible. At that point telecoms are looking at major engineering work to remove that equipment without degrading voice quality for the affected customers, all before they can even think about providing broadband service.
Without addressing these major engineering issues first, the most common results of offering broadband to customers in these areas is that they get 1/10th of the intended speed and the service cuts out every 10 minutes due to attenuation and poor signal to noise ratio. This predictably results in furious customers and repair techs trying to patch things together on an individual customer basis, and usually failing since these tend to be major jobs that can't just be fixed with duct tape. So generally the telecoms simply don't offer the service in these areas because they don't want the hassle.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm no shill for the telecoms. I know all about federal funding they've received which has gone to questionable use, and there are various things I think should be done differently. However, looking purely at the technology involved, it is not in any way a simple task to roll out rural broadband. Pretending it's easy won't help anyone; it can be done, but it will take a long time and cost a lot of money. Even assuming unlimited funding I doubt it could be finished by 2012, simply because there aren't enough field techs/engineers to complete the vast amount of requisite infrastructure work in that timeframe.
Alphanos
We need to remember that Walt works for the Wall Street Journal...
We need to remember that Klubar is a liberal Slashdot poster, who would not know a good idea if well, a Clu-By-4 hit him on the head and can see only bias rather than debate ideas on the merits.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And some of those are among the countries with the highest broadband speeds in the EU: http://www.bme.eu.com/news/uk-broadband-speed (lighter color = better) If you look at the breakdown by region on the same picture, Central and Eastern European countries on average are ahead of Western European countries when it comes to broadband speed. So what's your point?
You didn't read read your own source. Slovakia has a penetration of 40%. Bulgaria is 20%. Romania is 40%. We're not talking not about how fast internet is in select areas, but how fast the overall network is for last mile. Those countries don't even have a last mile.
Which myth are you talking about? If you're talking about this myth, it's irrelevant in regard to the OP. The whole point of my post is that the high density areas are easy to service and the low density areas are hard, and the OP was talking specifically about rural areas with low density of people.
Our civil war was a "might makes right" war, plenty of legal opposition to it, just the stronger armed force won. There's little to show it was legal to keep those states in who wished to leave. But, water over the dam, past history now.
With that said, the US states as a whole CAN convene a constitutional convention, completely independent of the federal government wishes, I mean they can just demand it happen and it will, one way or the other, and if they choose to, with the required super majority, completely abolish the current union, heavily modify it, make a new union or go their separate ways..whatever they want. An open constitutional convention is just that, open. All legal under our laws. Not done yet ever, but it is a possibility that it might happen should our economy really tank much worse than it has so far (and I think it will due to debt loads in the near future) and the social construct get too contentious and out of whack (anyone would have to be living in a cave to not see this happening now). I am in favor of it, an open convention leading to dissolution then rearrangement under regional lines, because I think our current federal government is just way too broken and corrupt to "fix", similar to how the USSR dissolved quickly when they went bankrupt along with a lot of the member nations just not wishing to be in that organization any longer. It was just too big, got to be too much to keep together, too much broken, too much corruption, just too much epic fail, so it dissolved.
All our states in the US-"United States"-started out as separate nations, and could return to that, or form new regional alliances, or whatever. In addition, this is one form of our law that neither requires the approval signature of, nor can be vetoed by, any federal executive branch clerk in chief.
Along with those huge wealth skimming casino banks, "too big to fail" should also mean "too big to exist" and apply it to large political organizations. The bigger they get, the farther they get from the "we the people" folks and it gets too easy for them to get hijacked by multinational big money interests or other assorted bad influences (like today). Now that's my *opinion*, but I think today's political realities and headlines are showing that sometimes, bigger is just not necessarily better all the time. Ultra small, maybe not a good idea either, but huge lumbering out of touch corrupt and incompetent..we should think twice and thrice about that "size" government as well.
Most users are looking at websites, reading and posting in forums, sending and receiving email, etc. While there's a world of difference between 56k and 3 or 5 Mbps, I can't imagine how anything faster would make much of a difference. Web pages load very quickly with my 5 Mbps connection speed. I used to have DSL at 3 Mbps and frankly, the increased speed is barely noticeable. The exception, of course, would be when a user is downloading a relatively large file like a movie. I would venture to say that most people seldom, if ever, download such large files on a regular basis.
Odds are this is just another giant telco scam to steal more money from
the American ppl like they did in the $200 Billion Broadband scandal.
http://www.tispa.org/node/14
The telco's took the money and screwed it off and used it to pay
stock dividends.
When you count the hideous rural connect speeds that have to go
thru analog loops giving them a max connection speed of 26.4 kbps
then we rank as 16th in the world.
It is pathetic, and if they had spent HALF of the $200 billion on upgrading
the network it would be fine.
When you look at present dark fiber in the ground it is over 90% dark in some areas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fibre#Dark_fibre_overcapacity
As I have said on other forums, we have an idiocy problem, not a money problem.
The pirates are looking to plunder our wallets again in their real life game of monopoly.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Beyond 1Mb/s or so, "broadband" is mostly a video delivery system. Why should the Government promote higher bandwidth? Few people need it for any non-entertainment use. We need net neutrality so that the duopoly for the "last mile" doesn't get to crank up prices on the content they don't sell, and some incentives may be needed for "rural America", but beyond that, why should the Government get involved?
(Quit whining that you can't pirate stuff fast enough.)
Hooray for laissez-faire capitalism!
decided to provide Fiber to every single spot of their coverage area. With TV/Telephone/Internet. Sure, the cable company and the phone company whined (in court), but we stuck it out and won. It's a Co-op, it just buys power from the TVA and otherwise provides infrastructure...so why not put some lines for data?
Only Texas has that 'right' due to the peculiar way it joined the US.
Texas gave up that right subsequent to the Civil War.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
Perhaps our government could reward cable carriers for providing cheap high speed broadband services and apply a nasty punishment for failing to deliver the quality product in areas in which they are permitted to do business. Perhaps Comcast would not enjoy an insertion by that big hairy stick
There's one problem with the "per unit of broadband" speed. It assumes all increases are going to be equal in cost. Or to put in car terms a present car can't do a 100 using Model T engineering.
Same folks who make shotguns?
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
Politically and economically the EU as a federation is NOWHERE near as coherent as the US. For one, people don't even speak the same language,m don't even have a near enough cultural background (the difference between say, florida and california or georgia) are MUCH lower culturally than the diference between danemark, spain). That results in huge economico political difference. Comparing EU for broadband politic to the US is *definitively* not valid, as the FTC in the US can impose a FEDERAL politic on rbaodband speed, the EU cannot.
> Only Texas has that 'right' due to the peculiar way it joined the US.
Not even Texas has that right, it merely has the ability to split itself into no more than five states.
I in the middle of the most populous city in the region can't get it [11MBps] at any price, then I think it's fair to say that it isn't the average.
So 11MBps is not available in Seattle "at any price"?
Around here, you can't get that kind of speed without paying for leased lines
So 11MBps is available in Seattle "at any price"?
Mossberg? Sounds like a kike.
Do you seriously mean to say that fewer than 1% of internet users upload big files? 2007 called - they want to tell you about this thing called YouTube.
Texas was admitted to the union via a joint resolution of Congress. The resolution did say that Texas might be divided into up to five states if that was convenient to all concerned, but that wouldn't supercede the US Constitution, which states that no state can be divided into parts or merged with another state without the permission of both the state(s) in question and Congress.
The flag thing isn't true either. The US Flag code states that the US flag must fly above all other flags it's displayed on the same staff with. When displayed on separate staves, the US flag and (any) state flag can fly at the same level, but the national flag gets the honored position on its own right. There's no "Texas exemption".
In my neighborhood, we're wired for all three of DSL, cable, and fiber (FiOS) internet. Can't speak to the DSL, but Cox and Verizon are really duking it out - Cox service got markedly faster, and their pricing and customer service better, once Verizon started digging up all the neighborhoods around her for FiOS. To no avail, though - we switched from Cox to FiOS and never looked back - Verizon is actually delivering (per Speedtest) 15MB up/5 down, and I could get up to 25 up if I wanted, but I haven't seen the need.
Ok, I'll bite. If private enterprise can do it, why haven't they? Here's a hint: the same reason it took the government to electrify rural areas. It's not profitable for private companies to do it.
A couple things: 1) ISDN isn't POTS. 2) ISDN BRI doesn't come close to 1500kbps down - it's 2 64kbps channels, plus like a 14kbps signaling channel. Even PRI is only about 2Mbps.
Geez, don't even get me started on ISDN. I tried to have it installed in the mid-90's, before cable/DSL became widespread. It took like 5-6 weeks of intermittent trying to find someone at the phone company (GTE, part of the corporate family tree of Sprint and Verizon) who even knew what it was. When I finally got in touch with the correct office, it took at least a month to get an appointment scheduled. Took the whole day off work, installers never showed. After berating the scheduling office, I was able to get a rescheduled appointment in two weeks. The guys show up, install the equipment and leave without testing it. Of course, the "modem" didn't work. More weeks of screwing around, until finally I told them to just cancel it. Trying to get it was a nightmare that took months and never was successful - I'm (obviously) still suffering from post-traumatic ISDN syndrome.
Yes, but the situations are still sort of reversed. Having access to good, cheap broadband, mass transit, etc, etc... is still pretty common in Europe. It's all but non-existent in the US. This is not the same thing as saying that EVERYWHERE in Europe is a paradise, but still.
The freedom to not even be able to GET true high speed internet in many parts of the country. Where do I sign up?
Typical homes are running some kinds of servers, at least part of the time. Maybe they're running Skype or other VOIP system, or a video conferencing program, or Bittorrent, or simply a chat program that has a listener, or they're running a multi-player game system. They're either running some kind of UPnP thing to get it past their firewall, or their running some ugly tunneling hack, unless they're the small percentage of users who actually went to the trouble of setting up their firewall to do something specific.
When I run P2P uploads, which is not very often, I use a BitTorrent client that lets me limit my upload speed so I don't swamp the upload, so it doesn't stomp on the ACKS from anything I'm downloading. Most of those are really only smart enough to do that on one computer, and it would be easier if everything supported and used IP Diffserve bits, and maybe they're better by now; I think the last time I was doing that there was an option to limit it to N kbps upstream, which was crude but good enough.
And it certainly makes more sense for me to use the terabytes of disk I have at home to serve photographs that only one or two of my relatives are going to bother looking at ("here's Cousin Fred at the cabin with Aunt Mary") rather than uploading it all to some server and parking there for ever, in addition to submitting to their intellectual property licenses for use of the stuff.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Most P2P programs I've seen over the years use ping times as a model of topology. They're crude, but not too bad, and as a greedy user what you want is fast response times and high throughput, which usually go together along with short geographical distances.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Compared to how long it takes to make a video and do whatever editing you're going to with it, actually uploading the video to YouTube doesn't take that long. Maybe if you've still got 128kbps upstream it takes a few minutes, but as dotwaffle says, you don't actually care because you're off in another window looking at something more interesting.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It's been a long time since I've looked at BitTorrent innards, and longer since I looked at Napster (:-), but I thought it was pretty standard for most P2P applications to check the round-trip time between peers, and prefer fast-responding peers when there's a choice. It's not going to get the copy from Kansas if it's faster to get it from Amsterdam or down the block.
Unfortunately, many ISPs are pretty dumb about that - they like to have a CDN server on their network, saving them inbound data traffic, but they complain about P2P being evil, even though it's really just letting their own users act as CDN servers for each other.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Minnesota has about half the population of Sweden (5.2m), about half the land area (217736 square km), it's full of Swedish people, has lots of lakes, and it's bloody cold in the winter. Bandwidth there is lower, and the summary data listed above says it's not one of the top 10 US states for bandwidth.
On the other hand, at least one similar study showing total GB/month is about 14.x for North America, vs. 9.x for Europe, with the top countries being South Korea and France with more usage than the US, rest of Europe with less, and Sweden's not in the top 5 European countries so you can't tell. (It's a hopelessly bad presentation. The average usage for North America is slightly higher than that for the US, which implies Canada is much higher, assuming they're averaging by population and not by number of countries or whatever. :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yeah, everybody's either whining or whinging about their slow bandwidth, or bragging about their fast bandwidth. The important question is what are you *doing* with the bandwidth? Anything cool or interesting? Watching TV doesn't count, unless you've dumped your cable TV provider, and even then it's still just couch potato content.
The companies that are trying to get the US government into a bandwidth-subsidy race so we can get the biggest numbers don't really have much to offer us except basic web access, television and price/performance comparisons with each other. What are you *doing* with that bandwidth? Anything interesting? P2P file sharing was cool five years ago, we've done that now, what's the next useful or fun thing to do with the bandwidth? Facebook doesn't need a lot of bandwidth even if you're playing Farmville, YouTube seems to do just fine at 1.5-3 Mbps, email's almost still ok on dialup. Skype video recommends 512/256 or better.
Old people in Korea can apparently use internet video to see what their grocery stores have to offer, and they're a nation of gaming addicts. What can *you* do with bandwidth?
One study I saw on the Internet said that if you count GB/month instead of Gb/sec, the US is way high up the list; South Korea's first with about 25, France is #2, US is 14.x, Europe 9.x. Canada's probably more than the US (since North America's average was slightly higher than US :-) That would imply we're actually using our bandwidth for more things than most of Europe, or at least watching our Youtube at higher resolution or pirating more movies.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
WOOHOO SOMEONE FINALLY GETS IT! Hopefully we'll all be running on at least 10 megabits in the next few years (did I hear someone say Japan has over 50 megabits standard?)!