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."

Comments

Right on

[PrecambrianRabbit]

I like this quote regarding expanding access to rural areas:

"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.

Re:Right on

[commodore64_love]

>>>we should be leading in broadband speeds, not following.

We're not leading but we're not exactly falling behind either, when compared to other continent-spanning federations. #2 isn't a bad place to be:

Russian Federation 8.3 Mbit/s
U.S. 7.0
E.U. 6.6
Canada 5.7
Australia 5.1
China 3.0
Brazil 2.1
Mexico 1.1 Mbit/s

And if you prefer to look on a state-by-state basis of the EU, US, and Canada then you get:
1 Sweden 13 Mbit/s
2 Delaware, Romania,Netherlands,Bulgaria 12
3 Washington,Rhode Island 11
4 Massachusetts 10
5 New Jersey,Virginia,New Hampshire,New York 9
6 British Columbia,Colorado,Connecticut,Arizona, Slovakia 8 Mbit/s

Re:Right on

[Skuld-Chan]

Not sure where you'd have to live in Washington to get 11 megabits - when I lived in Seattle (Queen Anne) the only two providers were Comcast and Qwest - and with Qwest it was DSL 3 megabits (and a slow DSL at that - I never saw that kind of performance).

Now that I live in Oregon - 3 megabits is par for the course unless you want to spent a lot more money :( - and again - it rarely ever goes that fast.

However when my parents were living in Scotland (South Gyle Wynd to be specfic) they got 30 megabits/cable tv/phone for about 100 dollars a month - and it was very fast.

Yeah everywhere I've been to visit and stay with friends (mostly Europe) they have it much much better and are paying far less for more service.

Re:Right on

[PopeRatzo]

You're comparing US states to EU nations. If you break out the EU into it's member nations, the US drops to much lower than no 2 in broadband.

Re:Right on

[commodore64_love]

>>>Since when did the European Union become it's own country?

Where did I say it was? Congrats on making a Strawman argument. The word I used was "federation" which is what the EU is. A federal union of 25 member states, just as the US is a federal union of 50 member states, or Canada is federal union of 15(?) member provinces.

Oh and yes "state" to describe Sweden is appropriate.
It's exactly the same word used on the EU website.
Check it out.

Re:Right on

[Darkness404]

but the United States is predominantly urban and suburban these days, and we should be leading in broadband speeds, not following.

Not really, and a few extra megabits don't make a huge difference. The entire point of having a national broadband system would be to make sure that the areas in the middle of nowhere get fast access because some don't think that the private enterprise can do it (which I disagree, which is a subject of an entirely different post why nationalized anything will harm economic development and jeopardize liberties...).

No one can efficiently run an internet-based company on dial-up (in 2010 anyways...). This ends up crippling economic development for that area. And in a lot of areas that can't get broadband, you either have spotty or no cell-phone coverage meaning that 3/4G Modems aren't an option.

When you are going from 54KB/sec to 1 Mbit/sec that is a huge leap forward. Going from 7 Mbit/sec to 14 Mbit/sec isn't too much of a real increase in noticeable speeds. There are few applications that need top-of-the-line internet access, on the other hand there are many applications where having latency-encumbered and capped satellite internet or slow dial-up is going to be a huge problem.

Re:Right on

[PrecambrianRabbit]

This list seems like cherry-picking. How do you define a "continent-spanning federation"? Not to mention, the United States is a much more coherent entity than the EU. Breaking out the individual US states in the second list is somewhat reasonable since there's obviously a good bit of regional variation, but you're leaving Asia out of the comparison there.

I wasn't trying to say (above) that US speeds suck, but for a nation that I thought prided itself on technical leadership, it should strive to do better.

Re:Right on

[countertrolling]

It's an AVERAGE people.

It's a gimmick. Like saying Las Vegas slot machines are advertised to pay out 98% of what they take in.

Re:Right on

[mikael_j]

The term "member state" when used in the context of the EU refers to so-called "nation states" as opposed to US states. There are serious cultural differences between the different nations that make up the EU, not to mention that most countries have their own language and a long history of fighting with each other (not like US states who, with a few notable exceptions, have a history of pissing contests over random border lakes and the like).

Yes, there are forces in the EU who want to turn it into a country like the US but it's going kind of slow since even among politicians this is opposed by a lot of people.

Also, the population density of Delaware (top US state in that list) is 170.87/km^2, the population density of Sweden is on average 20.6/km^2 (the region I live in has a population density of 2.2/km^2). Sure, a large number of swedes live in the south but I personally live in the northern half of the country, I have a beautiful view of the mountains and a lake from my living room window and I have a 100/100 Mbps FTTH connection. The vast majority of swedes have access to faster connections than 13 Mbps, it's just that the "average joe" of the older generation generally goes with a dirt-cheap low-speed connection in the 1-8 Mbps range.

Re:Right on

[coaxial]

Where are you getting these numbers? Where is Japan and Korea on this chart? Because they always top the other charts

Anyway, average total bandwidth is wrong metric to be using. What you want is average home bandwidth available, and average home bandwidth per dollar, or some other way of measuring how evenly distributed the bandwidth is among the population. Average is astupid because it makes no distinction between the apartment complex in Seoul, and the bums sleeping in Akamai's dumpster, since both groups have an average bandwidth of 45 Mb/s. So what if in one case it's 10 people each with 45 Mb/s and in the other it's 1 person with 450 Mb/s and 9 people with 0 Mb/s?

It's transparent that average bandwidth is being used to whitewash over the inefficiencies in the American market when every other study places the oh about 33rd in the world, and all the ads are touting "super fast" 3 Mb/s links that rarely reach 2.5 Mb/s in practice.

It certainly appears that the free market has failed America once again. (And no one even start with rant that problem is too much regulation, when "socialist" Scandinavia kicks your ass, it ain't that.)

Re:Right on

[arth1]

The devil is in the details. The US numbers aren't for guaranteed speed, but for maximum speed, and only for download at that.

No, a 0-10 Mbps down / 0-768 kbps up line is NOT comparable to a 10 Mbps up+down line. But according to your above creative "statistics", it's the same.

Guaranteed speed is what you need to satisfy the "broadband" or "high speed" definitions in many countries; video streaming, for example, doesn't work too well unless you can guarantee a bit-rate. Which you can't with typical ADSL and cable lines.

The arguments for why the US can't provide the same speeds for the same price as European countries have been retold so many times that many Americans believe them. No, it's not because the US has such a low population density, or rural areas are so hard to reach. The Scandinavian countries have a by far lower population density, and more difficult terrain (only 2% of Norway is arable land, for example. Mountains and fjords don't make cable stretching easy, but they manage.)

The real reason is that here in the US, we are allergic to government regulations, and (incorrectly) believe that corporations do a better job. So we allow de-facto monopolies and duopolies to choose their own price and level of service, and the consumer has to take it or leave it. This is called freedom of choice.

In contrast, in socialist Norway, the typical customer can choose between several broadband providers, and owns the last few metres themselves. A cable or phone company can't claim that they own the wires and refuse others to use them. So you get real competition, higher service levels, and lower prices.
And I haven't read that any phone or cable providers over there have gone bankrupt over that either. Which means that ours are lying. Which shouldn't come as a big surprise.

It's time that we demanded something back for the $2 billion or so that was paid to the telcos at the end of the Clinton administration era, which supposedly should go to ensure broadband access to every American.
Instead, they fattened the wallets of stock holders and board members, cause there is no incentive for the telcos to increase their service as long as they don't have to compete.

Re:Right on

[AigariusDebian]

Ditto the US Constitution. Read it sometime. Carefully. It gives the nation-states of the US the power to completely abolish the US, and go off on their separate routes. You are trying to make a difference where none exists.

That would be false. Read up on the Civil War. All the Southern states wanted was to secede from the Union. Only Texas has that 'right' due to the peculiar way it joined the US.

The US and EU are more alike than different. Consider that 75% of laws are now passed, not by state parliaments, but by the central EU. We have a near-identical arrangement in the US.

All laws in Europe are written and passed by state parliaments. Some parts of some of the laws are written to satisfy the recommendations of the EU (issued as EU Directives), however there is a huge degree of variance between the laws that is allowed in the directives and sometimes the laws are written outside the specification of the directive and then the country and EU negotiate - EU could fine the country some amount of money or just forget the infraction if the country offers something else in return.

So before you go off and compare US and EU, better learn something about both.

Re:Right on

[causality]

It's an AVERAGE people. I know you understand what that word means.

It can refer to a mean, a median, or a mode. It is equally valid to use the word "average" to describe all three.

It would seem that you are referring to the arithmetic mean. The GP may have been referring to the mode. That doesn't mean he's stupid or doesn't understand a widely-understood word.

Just something to think about the next time you feel irritated over a word that has multiple concurrent meanings.

Re:Right on

[hedwards]

No he doesn't. For one thing, the 11mbps for WA is wrong. I live in Seattle, and I don't have access to a connection that fast. I'm not sure where the people are that get a connection that fast, but if I in the middle of the most populous city in the region can't get it at any price, then I think it's fair to say that it isn't the average.

Secondly, it's an abuse of the term average, as while it is an average, it doesn't indicate that in Sweden there's access to a much higher connection speed than here. It also doesn't indicate the cost or the reasons why people choose not to. Around here, you can't get that kind of speed without paying for leased lines, typical home owners can't have it.

Re:Right on

[AigariusDebian]

Cool, so how are the FTTH projects doing in New York? Chicago? LA? Other top 100 cities in the USA? They must have much higher population densities than Sweeden or Finland as a whole, so surely every larger USA city must have fiber to every home. Right?

Re:Right on

[arth1]

It's an AVERAGE people.

No, it's not. It's an average of the maximum speed. It's as misleading as saying that the average American car speed is 150 mph.

To make it worse, that's only download speed. I hate to tell you, but if you have an asymmetric line like most Americans, the upload speed will only be a fraction of that.

Re:Right on

[arth1]

but it's definitely broadband

That depends on your definition.

FreePress defines it as 5 Mbps downstream AND upstream, and it definitely doesn't qualify for that.

In Britain, I believe the government has pledged a guaranteed minimum rate of 2 Mbps within a few years. Yes, that's not the maximum rate but the minimum rate, which in most of the US is exactly zero.

AT&T called me the other day, wanting to know whether I would be interested in high speed Internet. I told them that yes, I would, but that they don't have high speed Internet to offer me where I live. 0-1500 kbps down and 0-512 kbps up isn't high speed. It's a shame that companies are allowed to commit fraud like this, and mislead their customers into thinking they get high speed. What they get is "High Speed Internet(TM)", which is a trademark and not a promise of Internet access that's actually high speed.

High speed compared to POTS? No, not really. Even ISDN BRI has a minimum speed that's much higher, to say nothing of PRI. And this is 2010 -- I had stopped using modems in the mid 90s. Comparing with 56k modems is as irrelevant as selling a car on the argument that it's up to 50 times faster than a horse and buggy.

Re:Right on

[rolfwind]

That would be false. Read up on the Civil War. All the Southern states wanted was to secede from the Union. Only Texas has that 'right' due to the peculiar way it joined the US.

The only thing the civil war proved was that the stronger side won. Lincoln isn't particularly known for being a Constitutionalist.

Secession is the act that bore this union in the first place and so it remains a viable action although, predictably, the authorities in power will be against it just like they were in 1776.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secession_in_the_United_States

Re:Right on

[catchblue22]

Without a source for the rates you quote, how do I know that you aren't making these numbers up? In this world of made up facts and subjective reality, we really don't need another unsupported list. And while you're at it, what about Taiwan? What about Japan? What about Korea? Where are they on your unattributed list?

Re:Right on

[Xenkar]

Hosting your own dedicated game server.
Hosting your own website on your computer.
Sharing family photos.
Sending a large file assignment you just finished back to your work computer or to a client.
HD video conferencing.
Remote backup of your files.
Doing two or more of the previously listed at the same time.

I'll never understand why people assume P2P is the only possible use for upload bandwidth. My younger sister came home from her Africa trip and crippled the internet connection while uploading a few memory cards worth of pictures to flickr. It'll only get worse as they come out with 3D cameras with even more mega pixels.

Re:Right on

[dotwaffle]

I'd hazard a guess and say less than 1% of internet users do any of those things.

Re:Right on

[coaxial]

We did get some special privileges.

Texas has the right to break itself into 5 separate states

Well it is true that annexation said that the Texas could divide itself into to four additional states (bringing the total up to five), it's dubious if this is legal.

1. It would take an act of Congress to agree to the subdivision (Article IV of US Constitution), but it could be argued that Congress already agreed on February 26 1845, when annexation was ratified. So let's say for the sake of argument, that this is true, and congress already agreed, thus only requiring the Texas legislature to draw up some new maps and vote.
2. Article IV, Section 3 of the US Constitution has been held to require all states to be treated equally by the federal government, and any clauses that place restrictions, or grant additional rights to certain states have been repeatedly nullified by the Supreme Court.
   Notably, Alabama was granted equal rights to its waterways (an expansion of rights), and Texas has been reduced in rights in waterways. Specifically, Texas lost jurisdiction of all coastal waters, since none of the states had jurisdiction over coastal waters. (Texas didn't receive jurisdiction over territorial coastal waters again, until the Submerged Lands Act of 1953.) It can therefore be argued that since no other state has this "right of metastasization," it was granted special rights, and therefore this right is invalid.
3. Now here's the kicker. It might have already happened! Look at a map of the Texas Republic overlaid on the modern borders. Obviously, Texas is a lot smaller now than then. In fact, the territory of the Texas Republic was carved up into the territories of Utah and New Mexico with the Compromise of 1850. Since a state can't have it's borders changed without its consent, and Texas was admitted directly as a state, it may have already lost two of these potential states. But wait! It gets worse! The Utah Territory and New Mexico Territory were further carved up into additional states, of which former Texas Republic territory contributes to five.(New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming) Arguably, Texas returned its role in subdividing itself when it returned territory to the federal government, but this is something for the Supreme Court to decide. ;)

and to fly our state flag at the same height as the US flag.

Well Flag Code, was never legally binding, so BFD. McDonald's flies its flag at the same height all the time. ;)

Re:Right on

[Hognoxious]

Clearly, you don't know much about Ohio and Michigan. They are technically still at war over the border.

The fight was about who owned Toledo.

Ohio lost.

Re:Right on

[arth1]

They may have a low population density by strictly taking the total population divided by the total area, *they don't have to wire most of the area because no one is there*. This is exactly the same case as Canada - most of the population is actually fairly concentrated, most of the rest of the land area is uninhabitable. These nations have a double advantage; clustered populations, and not much distance between clusters to be bridged.

That could have been true if the assumption that only those living in clustered areas have high speed internet access in those countries. But that's not the case. Regulation ensures that the rest have access too, as far as practically possible (yes, there are cases of people living alone on an island who have to make do without for now, but those cases are few and far between).
And I say "could" instead of would because another premise is wrong too: That "not much distance between clusters to be bridged" is (a) correct, and (b) relevant.
First of all, it's dead wrong. One example: The City of Tromsø. For one thing, this city is far away from everything else (look at a Google map), but even inside its boundaries there are vast distances and difficult terrain. Yet this is one of the more technologically advanced cities in the world.
Secondly, the distance between clusters is irrelevant due to the variation in terrain. It costs a hell of a lot more to wire two communities divided by fjords or vertical mountains of gneiss than two communities separated by corn fields.

So tell me this, o Oracle: How come a farmer in Ohio who lives a 40 minute drive from the nearest city doesn't have access to the same level of Internet access as a farmer in Scandinavia who lives a 4 hour drive from the nearest city (and, for that matter, why can he enjoy 3G access throughout the drive)?

My guess is that it's due to legislation that prevents the type of anti-competitive behavior which is S.O.P. here in the US.
1: An internet provider in Scandinavia isn't given access to Big Lucrative City unless he also provides the same services for the same price to Small Rural Community. Take it or leave it (and by the looks, there's a lot of "take it").
2: For the last mile, whoever owns it must be a separate business entity, and has to rent it out for the same price to everyone, including parent, sibling and daughter companies.
3: The last few yards are owned by the premise owner, not by the service provider. They can't refuse your connecting to a different provider on "their" lines. You don't get situations like when AT&T pulled out the existing copper when installing u-verse to prevent competition.
4: The governments actually run backbones, where everybody is allowed access. You don't have to have a billion dollar company behind you, or risk being squeezed by the big players.

Anything faster than Dialup is an improvement

[commodore64_love]

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.

Re:Anything faster than Dialup is an improvement

[Dahamma]

Do you live in a rural area?

I have many relatives who do and 1Mbps is insufficient for at least one major reason - movies.

Blockbuster put all of the local video stores out of business, and now that they are circling the drain, they are closing all of their non-profitable stores (which apparently includes most of the ones in rural areas). Because of this, a lot of people in rural areas are starting to rely on streaming for their VOD rentals.

Unfortunately, 1Mbps is pretty much the minimum for watchable SD video, and 4-6Mbps is required for decent HD.

Then again, we are not talking about Bobby Joe who lives out on his 40 acre ranch in Idaho and chases off people who stray onto his proppity. We are talking the millions of people in the US who live in towns of 500-5000 people are often as computer literate as the rest of the country, and just want the same basic utilities. The telcos and cable companies got their franchises promising that, and even if it will not be as profitable to deliver their promises, they should be required to do it.

ROI in rural areas; low density = high overhead

[lullabud]

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.

Re:ROI in rural areas; low density = high overhead

[copponex]

This will probably surprise you (it did me), but Japan's broadband network is almost nothing but DSL. It's because their phone lines are extremely short that they can offer 100 Mbit/s DSL plans. So I say we should just mimic what Japan did.

The reason it won't work for the rural US is because you can go for miles between homes, so it doesn't make sense to slap those DSLAMs (or whatever they're called) in for one or two homes. Just run fiber and be done with it - you can still go to copper just outside the house and save money there. Investing in fiber now is just like investing in electrification in the early 20th Century. If you don't have a fiber network in 2050, you're not going to have an economy worth speaking of either.

Re:ROI in rural areas; low density = high overhead

[AigariusDebian]

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.

We pay a lot more

[Onomang]

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.

Re:We pay a lot more

[AigariusDebian]

That's exactly because US has no government regulation. In UK for example, the phone company is required to lease the copper lines that go into your house (and backbone) for a fixed , government regulated rate to any ISP in the country that wants to connect to you. Bring this concept to USA and even if you only apply it state by state, you'd have a skyrocketing of competition, because any small ISP in any part of the state would be able to connect and service any person in the whole state (provided that there is copper or fiber going into their home).

Re:We pay a lot more

[Zak3056]

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.

You realize those service levels are not universal, right? My company's HQ is located between Bremen and Hamburg. The best data service available economically is 4Mbit DSL... anything better would require pulling a DS3 from Hamburg at phenomenal cost (>10k EUR/month). We have another site about 15 miles from Paris, and costs and availability are similar. Another office about 10 miles from Leeds in the UK. Similar story. Another office located in Shanghai, and the costs there were so high when we were shopping for an MPLS provider that it almost killed the project.

The most cost effective connectivity we have is in Bedford, NH, with the local cable co's lowest tier being 16mbit (they can live without comms for a few hours without suffering too much, so no SLA required).

(OTOH, our US HQ in east Tennessee can't get anything at all--not even consumer grade circuits--faster than DS1s at ~$750/month for each circuit).

Anyway, to get back on topic: whenever I hear that $COUNTRY is an absolute utopia for broadband that we have to emulate, I take it with a large grain of salt.

Re:We pay a lot more

[Zak3056]

Like I said, the 4Mbit DSL is the only cost effective option. Cable is not available (or wasn't in 2009, the last time I had a conversation about this with my colleagues over there). The town is fairly rural--it isn't even served by rail.

To go off on a tangent, it's kind of amusing to me... I've heard for years about how wonderful European mass transit is, how it's universal, how they do not have commutes like ours, how their homes are small, etc, and I have to say that from my experience, this is mostly true--but NOT universal. Whenever you travel to HQ, you fly into Bremen or Hamburg, then sit in a taxi for an hour, because trains do not go there. The local homes are fairly large (the average home is significantly larger than the average home where I live in east Tennessee). There isn't mass transit. Most of our professional employees live in Hamburg or Bremen, with 1+ hour commutes (driving, of course, and carpooling seems to be rare). The motorways are VERY crowded during the rush hours, and stop an go traffic is not uncommon. As I said in the previous post, it's enough that I take "$PROBLEM does not exist in Europe" with a large grain of salt.

True, but....

[Totenglocke]

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.

Re:True, but....

[Entropius]

You're assuming that once taxes are included the European service costs more. This may be the case; it may not.

Re:True, but....

[AigariusDebian]

Internet is not funded by taxes in most of these countries, the government only sets up the rules so that there is more competition on the market, for example by forcing companies that own copper going into homes or fiber going between cities to sell access to these services for the same price to all competitors (including internal buyers). So the big players can't buy out all ISPs in town, take control of all backbones going out of town and of all the copper going into people homes and then raise prices tenfold (over 5 years) while not investing a single penny in infrastructure development.

Also government can setup rules like, if you have 100k urban customers, you must also have 10k rural customers. Or a rule like - if you want access to this government owned and operated hyperspeed backbone, then you must offer same connection price to all people in this area (which includes both profitable urban locations and unprofitable rural locations).

And in some places where actual municipal networks do exist and thus is very cheap or free for people to connect to and is funded by public funds, such network is usually pretty slow, boring and cheap as hell to maintain.

Government is not bad - it is there to force companies to do unprofitable things that benefit the people.

Re:True, but....

[iammani]

As if in the US it is not subsidized by tax dollars? It is sad that people do not even remember that the govt gave billions to ISP.

Re:True, but....

[dave87656]

Germany does not subsidize any of the ISP's, but they do force competition. The US is slowly becoming a single provider country, at least for a given area. They can charge what they want.

Re:True, but....

[Aceticon]

Actually in most of Europe Internet access is not subsidized by taxes.

What's different from the US and the reason why Internet access is cheaper/faster in most of Europe is that in here we usually have laws in place forcing the telcos that own the last mile to open up access to any ISPs at competitive rates. Before those laws came to be, Internet access in all of Europe was slow and expensive.

All that is needed are laws that create an open competitive market on top of a natural monopoly.

Re:Here's a thought...

[AigariusDebian]

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.

Lawrence Lessig

[Improv]

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.

Re:Here's a thought...

[stinerman]

This is already the case in many places in the country. The cable company doesn't have a statutory monopoly, yet there is only one cable company serving a city. There is most often a natural monopoly in the case of Internet access. Let's put it this way: my grandparents don't have cable. They can't get it even if they want it. Is that because the county passed a law stating that no one may have cable in rural areas or is it because no cable company thinks that they could ever profit by building infrastructure out that far?

There is this idea out here that Comcast is begging to be allowed to build infrastructure where Time Warner has lines and vice versa. Nothing could be further from the truth. Why would Comcast bother? They'd be spending tons of money up front to wire up the city and then they'd have to poach customers from Time Warner. When do you think they'd break even? A few years? A decade? Ever? I'd think they're pretty happy with their current arrangement.

Re:No, you're just full of shit.

[clarkkent09]

Not really. The poorest US states have per capita GDP 2-3 times that of most new EU members For example, Mississippi(the poorest Us state): $30K. Slovakia $15K, Poland $12K, Romania $7K.

clarification

[zogger]

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.

$200 Billion Broadband scandal anyone ?

[Ex-MislTech]

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.

Higher prices, worse service..

[Fizzol]

Hooray for laissez-faire capitalism!