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Rural Broadband to Replace POTS As Beneficiary of US Gov't Subsidies
IDG reports that "The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has voted to overhaul a decades-old system of telephone subsidies in rural areas, with the funding refocused on broadband deployment. The FCC's vote Thursday would transition the Universal Service Fund's (USF's) high-cost program, now subsidizing voice service, to a new Connect America Fund focused on broadband deployment to areas that don't yet have service. The FCC will cap the broadband fund at $4.5 billion a year, the current budget of the USF high-cost program, funded by a tax on telephone bills." That cap, says Reuters, is "the first budget constraint ever imposed on the program."
I have been trying to get broadband for my parents for years. They live a mile off the main road in a deep valley. Thus far...
* No ISDN. A year or two ago Tennessee decided it no longer had to be a tariffed service, and AT&T burned their ships behind them as rapidly as possible, because I was told our CO no longer has ISDN hardware (it did back in 2001-2002).
* No DSL. AT&T has a cluster of SAI cabinets 1 mile from their driveway, but no free ports on their DSLAM, and no intention of adding new ones. I've voluntered to *BUY* them a frickin' VDSL2 DSLAM and give it to them, but I've never heard back from them on that or any of several other offers. AT&T is a bigger information sink than /dev/null
* No Fiber. I have asked Charter if they could provision single-mode fiber if I pulled it to the road. I was agnostic about whether that's a pure FTTH setup, or just a cabinet by the road with a cable modem and a fiber converter. Nope. They cannot provision my fiber under either scenario, but they *can* provision fiber they lay themselves, which strangely costs roughly "one new car" more than doing it myself. Which is kind of hard on retired fixed-income folks.
* No cable. Their house doesn't have cable coax. See Charter's idea of fair price above.
* No cell. The valley effectively blocks all signals. I have maps of every cell tower in a 10 mile radius, and never found a useful signal on any of them.
* No satellite. They don't have line-of-sight with geosynchronous orbit, and even if they did, the satellite providers in our area aren't accepting new customers right now.
I mean, what can you do at this point? My next step is getting two 2 watt Wi-Fi routers and a couple of high-gain antennas, setting up a couple of passive repeaters between them and my house (very NoLOS), and hoping I can set up a wireless bridge. My next step past that is contacting CERN to see if they can beam internet over neutrinos.
The last time this issue came up on Slashdot, the (L)ibertarians came out of the woodwork, blaming my parents for building a house somewhere where there's no broadband, despite the fact that they built the house in 1985. Which is about as rational as blaming settlers in the 1700's for not building cities where the interstates were going to be.
They also pounced on me for wanting something subsidized. Except you're not subsidizing me one thin dime. The phone cable is already in the ground. All I need is a DSLAM in the local SAI cabinet, *which I volunteered to purchase myself*. No go. A free market only exists when the buyer actually has a choice (see "healthcare" for another example of your economic ideologies colliding with reality).
Freshman economics tells you that some business don't behave well under the usual free-market rules, and thus need to be heavily regulated. Those business are called "natural monopolies", which is why gas, electricity, sewage, roads, phone (hah!) are provided by either public utilities, or publicly-regulated private utilities. A utility only needs one set of physical plant, one set of staff, one set of senior management. Multiple companies waste megabucks on multiple plant/staff/management. They waste further megabucks on advertising, trying to steal profitable customers from each other in a zero-sum game. All that needless spending increases your costs, increases the necessary rate of return before they will provide internet, and ends up marooning a lot of marginal households on the wrong side of the digital divide.
In the middle 2000's several underserved TN cities and utilities got tired of being ignored by the AT&T and Comcast's of the world and were looking at getting into the game themselves. And then in 2008 our state politicians decided to actively hinder the formation of municipal internet and the entrance of local electric utilities (existing ones got grandfathered in), in the name of "encouraging compet
The changes will cost U.S. residents paying less than $30 a month for telephone service an additional $0.10 to $0.15 a month
This sounds great. Good for people without broadband, insignificantly more expensive for people who currently get a POTS subsidy from the program.
Now how about an urban broadband fund, to replace the worthless service tens of millions of us still have, service so bad it isn't even legally 'broadband' in any other industrialized country, with something usable?
If nobody lived in the country, what would you eat? Good luck with raising cattle on the roof of your apartment building.
âoeIn theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." â Albert Einstein
Why is that my problem?
I agree with building out ISP service, but handing the money to private companies is not going to work. They will just steal it and still demand to not be regulated.
I don't see where he said that no one should live in the country. That's a strawman.
Choices have consequences, and it would be nice if other people weren't forced to subsidize your particular choice of lifestyle.
That is just as much a strawman. Living in a society means one way or another people are always subsidizing one another.
Why are we're supposed to provide your parents with broadband?
Why are hospital emergency rooms supposed to provide everybody with care instead of turning away patients who cannot pay? Public investment in services that have become necessities helps reduce the demand for criminal services. Are you familiar with the plot of the film John Q, about someone who used crime to obtain health care?
I notice too that you have fiber (and probably DSL), but aren't willing to pay to have them installed yourself.
Grandparent is willing to pay for parts and labor to have them installed, but the carriers want to add a surcharge of tens of thousands of dollars (search post for "one new car").
Why should people with no kids pay school taxes? Why should people with no children in college fund public universities? Why should people who live outside the city pay tax on their cars to subsidize a subway system 90 miles away? Why should I fund state or national parks if I don't use them?
People in my area (100 miles from NYC) have an extremely heavy burden in the form of draconian land-use restrictions in order not to harm the water supply to the city. Is that fair?
You do realize that the people who 'choose' to live in the country are the ones providing YOU with your most basic needs, like food and energy, right?
It is called society. Every one gets to pitch in. Get over yourself.
Other economists claim that natural monopoly is a myth, and effects attributed to natural monopoly are in fact caused by 1. local government ownership of roads and 2. local government's failure to efficiently value permits to tear up those roads to install pipes, conduits, etc.
Back when I was pricing out my broadband options, I checked out Comcast's (heavily advertised) three for one package. TV, broadband and telephone. But when I called them, they told me that, based on my address, Verizon was my telephone provider and they wouldn't compete with them. On the other hand, Verizon wouldn't install DSL because 'Comcast provides broadband in your neighborhood'. Covad checked out my line and was more than happy to take over the loop and install voice/DSL. But Verizon told them that they couldn't have the pair (they'd take it and reassign it to a second residential service if ever I dropped my Verizon line before leasing it to a CLEC).
This has nothing to do with permits and installing facilities. It has everything to do with not throwing telecom execs in prison for Sherman Antitrust Act violations. If you want to keep your NSA fiber taps running in the switching facilities, you're going to have to grant these bastards immunity from the law.
Have gnu, will travel.
The problem with that is that the provider will know you did it, because it's been done right.
If you do a half-assed looking job you can just call 'em up and when they say "we don't have a cable into your house" you can reply "yes you do, what are you talking about, I'm looking right at it!" and make them send a truck out to check. The guy on the truck will say "hmmm, looks just like one of ours" if you do the job badly enough, and you'll probably get hooked right in.
Just read a fair bit of that article.
Author must be a migrant worker--he's supremely skilled at picking cherries.
That's already happened, to the tune of $200 billion dollars. You were supposed to get 45Mbits to 86 million homes for that. Instead they just redefined "broadband" to mean 200kbits.
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