Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
You apparently don't know bureaucrats - damaging infrastructure is a huge one. Have you tried bringing an Internet connection cable into a house without 'damaging infrastructure'? Like digging up roads or putting up cables on masts or even connecting to pre-existing copper in a house?
It would be much more effective to use the UK model - split up physical and logical providers: the cables must be owned by one company and the service must be provided by another, separate company. And the company that owns the cables must provide access to those cables at the same price to all companies that ask for it. Add a few provisions for switching service providers and about mandatory access to backbone channels for a fixed, government regulated rate and you're golden: every ISP in the whole country can compete in all markets at once.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. The problem is what you mean with 'return'.
For an ISP a return on their investment is how much people will pay for the service.
For the society as a whole there are other returns: people get better informed, better connected, get easier access to learning and knowledge (including farming info and crop prices), people have the possibility to look beyond their surroundings and look at the big picture, people can innovate and communicate their innovations to anyone in the whole world, people can even telecommute and work jobs that are simply not available locally. The society gets a much greater 'return' from investments into the Internet in rural areas.
Therefore it is the job of the government to enact such policies that would align the ROI of the ISP with the ROI of the society. Most likely by forcing the ISPs to provide service into larger areas that contain both high-ROI and low-ROI zones so that the average ISP ROI for the whole area would be comparable to the societies ROI for the whole area.
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
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.
Hooray for laissez-faire capitalism!