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Are America's Big Telecom Companies Suppressing Fiber? (salon.com)
Salon just published a new interview with Susan Crawford, the author of "Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution -- And Why America Might Miss It."
Crawford has spent years studying the business of these underground fiber optic cables that make fast internet possible. As it turns out, the internet infrastructure situation in the United States is almost hopelessly compromised by the oligopolistic telecom industry, which, due to lack of competition and deregulation, is hesitant to invest in their aging infrastructure... This is going to pose a huge problem for the future, Crawford warns, noting that politicians as well as the telecom industry are largely inept when it comes to prepping us for a well-connected future...
"The decay started in 2004 when -- maybe out of gullibility, maybe out of naivety, maybe out of calculation -- then-chairman of the FCC, Michael Powell, now the head of cable association -- was persuaded that the telcos would battle it out with the cable companies, that their cable modem services would battle it out with wireless, and all of that competition would do a much better job than any regulatory structure could at ensuring that every American had a cheap and fantastic connection of the internet. That's just turned out that's just not true. Since then, he deregulated the entire sector -- and as a result, we got this very stagnant status quo where in most urban areas -- usually the local cable monopoly has a lock in the market and can charge whatever it wants for whatever type of quality services they're providing, leaving a lot of people out."
"Because Americans don't travel," she adds, "you don't get the sense of what a third-world country the U.S. is becoming when it comes to communications."
"The decay started in 2004 when -- maybe out of gullibility, maybe out of naivety, maybe out of calculation -- then-chairman of the FCC, Michael Powell, now the head of cable association -- was persuaded that the telcos would battle it out with the cable companies, that their cable modem services would battle it out with wireless, and all of that competition would do a much better job than any regulatory structure could at ensuring that every American had a cheap and fantastic connection of the internet. That's just turned out that's just not true. Since then, he deregulated the entire sector -- and as a result, we got this very stagnant status quo where in most urban areas -- usually the local cable monopoly has a lock in the market and can charge whatever it wants for whatever type of quality services they're providing, leaving a lot of people out."
"Because Americans don't travel," she adds, "you don't get the sense of what a third-world country the U.S. is becoming when it comes to communications."
Only when it comes to communications, really? What about health care? Taking care of your poor? Having a proper democracy?
The U.S.A. has been a third-world country for quite a while, just ask the other civilized countries.
it helps me stay regular
Local governments granted monopolies to certain companies, and now it doesn't matter what the market wants.
That's the nature of government: Imposition; decreeing one's income at the point of a gun, regardless of performance.
I just got fiber from a "Big Telecom" (AT&T), so this doesn't seem to be the case.
In fact, they heavily promoted it, which is the opposite of the premise presented in the summary.
Americans want freedom at the expense of all else.
This point is just not understood by Unamericans (some of whom are U.S. citizens).
It's hard to fight for Liberty and also build out fiber, especially when you hordes of Unamericans are ceaselessly clamoring at the gates.
You've made a categorical error in your logic.
The People regulating a government is not the same as the government regulating The People.
Houston metro area... Comcast introduced 100 Mbps, and now AT&T is laying fiber to compete.
Certainly didn't happen earlier, but there are many reasons for that.
On the business side, fiber with 1 Gbps only just recently (last few years) reached major areas of the city. That's now being offered by companies other than the Big Telecoms.
The alternative... innovation by fiat... is not a panacea.
Weâ(TM)re on the cusp of 5G. Weâ(TM)ll get fiber speeds without the wires. At that point, why bother with fiber at all? Hell, why bother with cable companies at all? The cell companies will be able to offer faster internet speeds than cable companies. Then, everyone will finally be able to dump Comcast.
The population of Greater New York is 8 million.
The population of Norway is 5.5 million.
Other countries are dust.
The effective real-time surveillance of Americans is threatened without much, much more 'connectivity' at higher speeds.
In the late 90s, it was theorized that residential super high speed internet would enable new kinds of businesses, which were not possible in the past. 20 years later, and no new, large scale businesses, which rely upon residential super high speed internet have emerged. Delivery of extra video via cable has been around since the 70s (cable TV).
"Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution and Why America Might Miss It"
I think it is rational to use sophisticated cable and phone modems to squeeze more bandwidth out of wires already in the ground. As for the telecom companies charging high prices, and spending that money on something other than building/maintaining infrastructure, such as buying movie studios, that is a problem other than fiber.
The first mover "advantage" is a creature of government.
Cable companies grew up with their monopoly; imagine the cultural difference that would exist if they had instead been required to negotiate for property rights like anybody else? I imagine in that case, it would the socio-political, legal, and technological infrastructure would be in place to make it much easier for competing organizations to implement their ideas.
If you call the local city here to get your yard marked for utilities (so you don't dig into them), they'll send out a guy who tells you "where Comcast is". He doesn't tell you where the "communications conduit is"; he tells you "where Comcast is". Get it?
The first mover advantage is a cultural problem, not a technical one; cultural problems are exacerbated and promulgated by governments.
Its got nothing to do with exactly what technology is being used to provide internet service and everything to do with making sure any new players who want to come in and compete with the big boys don't get that chance. And it all comes down to content.
All of these big ISPs know that if these new players come in, they will not only take away the revenue from the internet side of things but they will take away the far more lucrative TV revenue. Even more so for those ISPs like Comcast or AT&T who actually own content producers and channels rather than just cable platforms.
"Because Americans don't travel," she adds, "you don't get the sense of what a third-world country the U.S. is becoming when it comes to communications."
And education, health and some would even say democracy.
Don't get me wrong, the US has great achievements in those areas too, even top notch, put they are by no means uniform to all the population.
The US looks bad in some areas even when you compare it to some countries most would consider from the third world.
Michael Powell, now the head of cable association -- was persuaded that the telcos would battle it out with the cable companies, that their cable modem services would battle it out with wireless, and all of that competition would do a much better job than any regulatory structure could at ensuring that every American had a cheap and fantastic connection of the internet. That's just turned out that's just not true.
The "free markets" are just a fairy tale told to us by big corps who don't want regulations and libertarian ideologues who haven't developed past adolescence.
Let me help you out:
We travel. Not sure what that even means. But really the idea that you *need* fiber everywhere is laughable. How does fiber-rich countries "innovate" more than the US?
Why should the fool get as weighty as voice as the scholar?
Why should your present vote have virtually no relation to the outcome of your past votes?
Why is law by decree at the point of a gun better than law by voluntary agreement through contracts between individuals?
Democracy is a dumb man's first draft of capitalism. America's problem is that it is increasingly democratic rather than capitalistic.
This reminds me of a ruling by ANACOM (Portugal's FCC) where the subsidised Fiber, granted installation and exploitation rights to a single one of our ISPs, which should be providing infrastructure to people that paid for it in secluded areas, is only ever made residentially, commercially available by that ISP when there is no alternative whatsoever. And guess what ANACOM accepts as an alternative: 2-8Mbps WIRELESS 3/4G or COPPER DSL!
There are thousands of villages in Portugal that have multi-Gbps Fiber installed but also have a faint, miserable 3 or 4G connection and/or copper, where Wireless and Copper fail to reach even the tens of Mbps and are always unstable. Yet since both Wireless and Copper have the POTENTIAL of reaching those numbers (even though they never ever do), the ISP is allowed to NEGATE access to the state-sponsored network, and only sell residential copper and wireless, because those services simply bring in more revenue (Copper: requires a phone fee that adds up to 50% cost; Wireless: is much more expensive and has data caps)!!!
This mostly happens because that infrastructure is also exclusive to the ISP in such a way that they don't even have to re-sell the Fiber to competitors, because in rural areas ANACOM exempts competition rules that would force the ISP to re-sell the Fiber!
This is Big Telecom at its worst. They fed from state funding to expand their networks, then lobbied the state authority to allow them to make use of the state-sponsored infrastructure as they please, even by keeping the villages initially targeted to benefit from the infrastructure in the shadow!
Jim Jefferies is a comedian. He moved to the United States, where he lives and works; in 2018, he became a citizen of the U.S.
If it weren't for a the "free" market, then bureaucrats wouldn't have any idea what to do in the first place.
Government is like that guy who jumps in front of the parade and pretends to lead it.
The rest of the world just waits and watches for the next great American idea, and then pretends to have developed it all on their own.
This can't happen soon enough. The current state of your country is sad. The sooner your shithole country resolves its internal issues, the sooner the rest of the world can figure out if it needs to support, or ignore you.
An adequate intake for total fiber, is set at 38 and 25 gram (g) per day for young men (age 14-50 years) and women (age 19-50 years).
I can tell you much of the problem is about how to retrofit existing areas. New builds get fiber, but anything that existed before 2014 or so is a legacy build. I live in an area that was built in the late 90s and there's no hope of getting anything fast out here so I'm doing it myself. The costs are reasonable (about 30-50k/mile) but the majority of the issue is in permitting to go underground. (If you go on poles, it's actually just as expensive as underground in many cases due to annual fees on the poles, engineering studies, tree clearing fees, make-ready, etc.. Plus then you need to own a bucket truck and other expenses).
The wholesale cost of the bandwidth is nothing, it's all about the cost to put the stuff in the ground and the permit process. Expect 30% of your costs (and 90% of build-time) to be constrained by engineering and permitting costs. The rest of that 30-50k USD/mile cost is the labor and materials needed. You need to put in a place every 2-3 homes you pass to deliver service. There are a lot of people doing this in rural areas to close the gap but most people have only heard of the incumbents so there's a market awareness problem. Many people that are WISPs (see WISPA.org) are now moving into the fiber world, but the capital costs are around 50-250k to get all the equipment you need for underground construction.
Rough costs if you care: 35c/ft for conduit, 7-10c/ft for fiber (once you get large counts like 96 count, it's closer to 1c/strand/foot) and $100-300 for a pedestal or hand-hole, plus splice trays, etc. $1/foot (linear) * $1/foot (depth) for your route if it's not complicated. Costs go up in urban environments very quickly if you have a lot of requirements or other utilities to dodge.
The consolidation is the result of a history of government-granted monopolies to cable companies and telecoms.
I don't want freedom of Internet because it's mandated by this particular government in power today; I want freedom of Internet because society knows how to mark censorship as damage and then route around it—this is only possible if the infrastructure grows under absolute freedom, rather than under decree.
Liberty is grown, not decreed.
This is why we can't move forward; there is a serious philosophical difference here.
There needs to be a Separation of Business and State; government should not be allocating The People's resources.
Your usage of "free market" renders the term useless.
According to your usage, North Korea has a free market, because it has a black market. Now, it's true that the black market is the only thing that keeps North Korea literally alive (just as it's the only thing that kept the Soviets alive, or the Venezuelans alive, etc.), but there's a reason it's called a "black market": It's not supposed to exist.
A free market is one that is supposed to exist. A free market is a market without regulation by decree, but that does NOT mean that there is no regulation! In fact, there would be an enormous amount of regulation, for 2 reasons:
* Actual bankruptcy moves resources from bad managers to good managers.
* In the long-term, it is most profitable to have agreement from others; that's why people drive on the same side of the road (not because the law demands it, but because people don't want to die, and because that's the safest, quickest way to get from point A to point B).
Think of how complex the World Wide Web is, and then realize that it sits atop rules and regulations that came out of voluntary interaction—much of it in the form of "Open Source" projects. No government planned it by committee.
You can have rules or rulers, but not both.
You're advocating for Intelligent Design.
I'm advocating for Evolution by Variation and Selection.
Telecoms have been given SEVERAL HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS to build out their infrastructure going back to the early 90s. Where'd all the money go?
They ARE the legislators.
That's why things are so fucked-up.
Third wave lobbyism stopped lobbying and decided it would be easier to just *become* the politicians, judges, media, "experts", web news aggregators (like Reddit), "protesters", everything.
(Think the food pyramid becoming only Brawndo in Idicracy, for a mental image.)
It's only a democracy for those who fight for seats in there. And they vote with their mostly imaginary (because based on the gut-feel-du-jour of gamblers of the worth of stock options) money.
You see, people on the right appreciate rules.
Everyone knew the rules to the game; they knew them in advance; they've been the rules for about 2 centuries.
Donald Trump got MORE VOTES than Hillary Clinton; that's why he's the POTUS, and she isn't.
Your "popular vote" is meaningless. That's a different game. That's not the game they were playing.
I'm glad Hillary Clinton and your ilk lost, because you prove over and over that you would be bad in power: You don't appreciate the rules of the game to which all participants have already agreed in advance.
You're so incompetent that you don't even know what game you're playing.
The Internet was a government research project. The people who made it get medicare. Government health care.
Oh, and shut up with your "freedom"! The only freedom that you and your owner corporations want, it the freedom to take away everyone's freedom!
They HATE a free market. They always and without exception strive for a monopoly. And they literally write the legislation that ends up as regulation to block the other corporations.
That's right! You "free market" *results* in regulation! Just not to protect your freedom, but to "protect" *them* fron your and everyone else's rights and freedom!
And to add insult to injury, this is then taken as a reason, to *shrink* the government!
No, not the lobbist-first-politician-second government! The *actual* government, that speaks for you!
You fucking retard!
There were lots of research projects about networking at the time, including commercial systems. That was the major topic in computing at the time.
Government threw a few dollars at some young men (like it throws at everybody), and then the military just decreed their work to be what they were going to use, so everyone else jumped on that bandwagon, because interoperability is profitable. That's it. That's the extent of the "government research project".
Look up some of the quotes from the people who worked on this stuff. They just wanted to tie computers together, and would have worked on that topic regardless of a government grant—hell, everyone was working on it.
Firstly, you don't know that it could have never worked.
Secondly, it's a straw man; nobody has argued that every 100 feet should be negotiated.
Only 36% of the American GDP is governmental—and that's as big as the government is today! Most of American society is completely "private", and the parts that are "public" (because they were commandeered by government at the point of a gun) are the worst managed, including your roads and other infrastructure.
Here's hoping satellite internet can get enough steam to put some pressure on them. SpaceX's Starlink plans are pretty ambitious. In terms of investment, it's interesting to consider that even for the uber-rich, faster internet is something that money often simply can't buy - so that may provide some personal incentive for deep-pocketed individuals to at least take a close look.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_(satellite_constellation)
That was my take on the US as well when I lived there 10+ years ago - it was like travelling back a few decades in time compared to Europe. However, for the case of fibre, I think the problem is not that companies are suppressing it for some shadowy reason, but that it costs too much to make it financially viable.
Last summer our local Canadian phone provider, Telus, laid fibre to most of my city and since then they have been increasingly desperate for us to sign up to use it. However, the prices they are charging for fibre-grade internet are insanely expensive compared to the 300Mbit connection we already have with a different cable company and which is already fast enough I rarely if ever want anything faster. While a gigabit might be nice it would come with a (large) bandwidth cap unlike our current connection.
If these are the prices which companies have to charge to recoup the installation costs then the simple truth may be that it is just not yet financially viable.
Whatevs, brav.
And so TMO, in the midst of a merger plan with the Sad Sack of the industry, is also working on Band 71 deployment as a rural broadband (oh, and yes, mobile service) solution. This is an excellent time to refocus on fiber, engage in another round of subsidized buildout, and let this new fiber, 'everywhere', sit dark.
How much fiber was laid by Ma Bell pre-breakup, and how much was resold to us for long-distance rate reductions that never actually happened?
How much of that fiber was laid as expense, not investment, and paid for by ratepayers?
And how much was resold for data, when it was laid for LD voice? At voice ratepayer cost?
How much money in the Universal Service Fund goes to rural equity?
It's not that the free markets have failed, it's that the market has never been very free. And where it has, somewhat, it's thrived. Look at dedicated data circuits - T1/E1 is not very useful today, but we're arguing over business service at 100MB for $100-300/month as gouging, when T1 service not so long ago was $1200/month, and would give you trouble. Even DDS2 was outrageous then. Even GPRS was faster than that.
Getting the Federal government out of this as much as can be tolerated, encouraging the states to permit local deals, that's the way to move forward. Of course, in the State House, you're going to see bribery and corruption routinely practiced, in a manner not so erudite as the federal level. But more pervasive. And in the big cities this is another of the many fights against corruption top to bottom.
My previous home had two cable services to it. The joy of one coming in and literally cutting off the other (with snips, as in snip-snip) was too much, Finally the big bought out the little. I lived with a DSL pedestal literally in my back yard, and could have gottten 20MB+ out of it, but never did. Now where I live DSL is just long enough to make 60MB the max, and the carrier is well past lazy and on to incompetent, conducting system upgrades without notice and leavign me down for TC and Internet for 36+ hours on a Super Bowl Sunday, yes the one that drops 911 service as often as french fries are dropped at a McDonalds.
Telecom regulation is as bad as the physical layer craft is. Pus.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Americans travel. 42% of the population owns a passport.
Fiber != fast. There are consumer ISPs that are offering multi gigabit service over copper. Stop parading the myth that fiber is needed to provide extremely fast Internet speeds. Sure there are some competition issues at the local level (a lot of it created by the local government allowing a monopoly so they can receive extra revenue) but that can easily be resolved.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Your only telco in town can't offer 1000/1000 services?
Ask them for a 1000/100 service.
When they say no ask them again for 1000/1000 service for the town.
Plan for community broadband.
Ask for 1000/1000 around the town again.
Wait for the NN telco to say no. That wireline is going to stay. That is the NN approved network is the network they have to offer as a monopoly telco.
Tell the city your granted telco monopoly no longer deserves any monopoly protection as they are doing nothing of value with the monopoly.
Get community broadband working.
Connect the community at 1000/1000 when they request that type of connection.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
* The notion that "corporations are people" came to prominence when Mitt Romney said it; besides the fact that corporate law is written in terms of abstract personhood, what Romney was trying to says is that corporations are, literally, just groups of people. They are not inherently some alien, otherworldly, invasive parasite. If you think that "Governments are people", then you should understand that "Corporations are people" (and, hell, corporations don't get to control the Men-with-Guns like a government does).
* Marxism is international in nature, but it was noticed during WWI that people clung to nationalism more than their economic class; Mussolini and various academics incorporated this fact into Marxism (whose predictions of a revolution failed), and thereby created Fascism (from the old Roman idea that a bundle of stick is stronger than the individual sticks alone). Of course, Hitler added racism to the mix, and thereby created Nazism (which stands for "National Socialism"). Applying the term "fascist" to the United States is totally absurd.
Shhhhh! You're suppose to retain the fantasy that broadband availability is easy.
To buy votes for the poor, politicians forced banks to provide mortgages to unqualified buyers, but then also promised the banks that they'd bail them out if everything went tits up.
What did you think was going to happen?
The US is missing out on a prime opportunity.
You are way ahead of your competitors when it comes to corruption, anti-freedom and anti-competitiveness techniques.
You should leverage this expertise - offer it as a service to third parties the world over. The world needs what you've got!
Requiem for the American Dream
How are you organizing it? Who is funding it? What does it mean to do this in your spare time?
Americans want to live in a world where, as much as possible, people are protected from being forced at the point of a gun to fund others' choices in life. When you understand this, you understand America.
Unamericans just don't understand this, because they don't understand how important Liberty is.
The only free nation on earth will always be needed to help smaller countries from getting invaded.
It would be great if these telecoms had an extra trillion dollars to spend digging fiber for households that will cost $60,000 to give access to, but........they don't. Fiber isn't a cost-effective delivery solution for the long tail of rural access, let alone non-US access. And forget 5G, the access radius is TINY and at best it could bridge expensive gaps trying to deliver service the old fashioned way.
I say this as a US resident with no access to cable, fiber, or even DSL. 100% of my internet at home is from a mobile hotspot. The next real internet upgrade for me will be low-orbit satellite. Even if it's 5-7 years away, I doubt I could mobilize community broadband access much faster, and this way I - and every other person in my town - don't have to take on a separate mortgage to get it.
Where did they move? To America, of course.
The modern European is the descendant of royalist bootlickers.
In 1996, the Government declared an end to government-granted monopolies.
So what?! The damage had already been done!
Only an idiot would think that a government decree actually alters reality itself. We're just now beginning to pull ourselves out of that damage.
Interestingly, I had a completely different reading from you. I would have said:
Shhhhh! You're suppose to retain the fantasy that only government can build Internet infrastructure!
Is (INDUSTRY) Suppressing (TECHNOLOGY)?
Why would any industry of any kind suppress a technology if rolling out that technology would save it money or allow it to charge more?
Industries are not inherently evil. Corporations have a mandate to make money for their shareholders. That leads the companies to make decisions which are bad for consumers/government/Earth.
The only reason why any corporation would not roll out the technology is because it is of the opinion that it can make more money without it.
In this case, unregulated industries are charging customers the same rates for slow connections as they can charge for fast connections. Regulate that aspect of their rate plan and you will get MANDATORY fiber.
Problem solved.
Firstly, you don't know that it could have never worked.
Secondly, it's a straw man; nobody has argued that every 100 feet should be negotiated.
All it takes is 1 NIMBY right next to the brand new treatment plant to say "no" and those miles of sewage lines you dug are useless. What are you going to do, force the guy to sell/take his land? The government can't force him to do anything. Odds are, in your libertarian paradise, the guy probably bought up all that land just for the purpose of screwing it up for the lulz, because people tend to be dicks when they are do whatever they want.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Applying the term "fascist" to the United States is totally absurd.
- https://www.livescience.com/57622-fascism.html
"The definition of fascism is The marriage of corporation and state." Benito Mussolini
So, from where I stand (Europe) and taken into account that these two definitions are from quite authorative persons, I would not find applying the term "fascist" to the us to be absurd.
Weak sauce.
If you want city amenities (such as always-on, fast broadband), then you should move to a city like everyone else.
What makes you so special that the rest of us have to fund your lifestyle? Many of us city dwellers pine for countryside, too, but we've decided that other factors require us to live in the city instead.
Quit trying to make other people pay for YOUR choices.
Corporations are people. Sure, but what you miss is that corporations are controlled by a small number of people. And they generally dont represent employees very well at all.
Corporations and control of govt. Corporations very much control much of government. If you take an honest look at the legislation that gets passed you will see it.
Mussolini observing Marxism in action does not make Fascism Marxism. I would argue that this notion argues that Fascism is most definitely not Marxism. What about Fascism says that the means of production should be owned and controlled by labor? Fascism says the opposite, that the means of production will be owned and controlled by a very few, to advance their aims, and to heck with all others.
The name of Nazism incorporating Socialism does not make Nazism Socialism. It was a ploy, clearly a ploy. Like all the bills being advanced with names carefully designed to mislead.
If Fascism is Marxism, then why was there a Spanish Civil War? ( reminder, Fascists versus Communists ).
Why did Germany back the Fascist side rather than the Marxist side?
Why did Germany invade the Soviet union, if they were so much the same?
Read the writings of the time, Nazism was virulently anti-communist. German leadership kept bringing up the communist threat, trying to surrender to America/Great Britain rather than the Soviet Union.
They are both bad forms of government. Let's not have either.
The telcoms know that between 5G Home Service and services like Star Link, running fiber to the house is a looser..
I live in TX. The big story was how the secretary of state sent out to voting districts how there were tens of thousands of people who should not be on the voter rolls. Guess what, most of the list was a giant oopsie. It was pure and simple voter suppresssion. But don't let the actual facts bother your narrative.
Municipal fiber is happening - but slowly. I live in a small town (_maybe_ a city) in Idaho and we just started the municipal fiber rollout. I'm typing this now over a 1Gbps bidirectional link for $70/month total.
The next town over from us did it first... and a bunch of towns in northern Utah have gone that way as well.
In my town the electric company (which is a city utility here) actually owns the fiber... it runs right up to your house and out of your electrical meter! You pay for the fiber line as part of your city utility bill: $30.
At that point you can then select any of 6 different ISPs to use. They all have varying speeds and plans. I went with a $40 bidirectional gigabit... because... why not?
Previous to this I was paying out local cable company $110/month for 250Mbps down and 10Mbps up (which I actually considered to be quite good after just moving from the northeast!).
The cable company's days are numbered. It will take a while - they are deeply entrenched in some municipalities - but they will slowly be taken down by fiber...
That wasn't because the U.S. is backwards third-world country (well, the sign instead of PIN part was, but not the slow rollout of chipped cards). The rest of the world got to do it better because the U.S. did credit cards first. So the rest of the world got to see all the problems with magnetic swipe credit cards before implementing their credit card systems. The U.S. by virtue of being the first adopter, has to deal with the additional overhead of replacing a much larger legacy system, instead of just implementing a clean system mostly from scratch. Virtually every merchant in the U.S. already had credit card readers which weren't capable of reading chipped cards, so the transition to chipped cards took a lot longer here than in other countries where merchants hadn't widely adopted credit card readers.
Same thing happened with digital cell phone service. The U.S. already had an extensive analog cellular network, so was slowest to transition to digital cellular. The cost to implement digital cellular was the same here as in other countries, but the marginal gain was less because the gain in the U.S. was analog to digital cellular, while the gain in other countries was from no cellular to digital cellular. Consequently there was less market pressure to roll out digital cellular, and it progressed more slowly than in other countries. Likewise, the standard electrical socket and plug in the U.S. is the worst-designed, because other countries to got see the problems with the U.S. design and got to implement designs which fixed those problems as their standard, before they rolled out electricity in their countries. (e.g. Ground wire connects first; and live wires are covered before they're connected so you can't accidentally touch wires carrying current.) The U.S. was saddled with the inertia of that initial socket design being standard, and has never managed to overcome it and replace it with a newer, better socket design.
So these problems aren't because the U.S. is some backwards third-world nation. it's because the U.S. is the world's spearhead - the trailblazer and first adopter. And the first attempt at implementing something is almost never the best way to do it. Other countries get for free the lessons learned from the suffering and pain of trial and error that the U.S. had to go through. Mocking the U.S. for it just means you're an ungrateful prick.
That's all you need, don't worry about interpreting the wave that is not important.
Just flip the light switch if it's not working. You are controlling it you know.
They frustrate me so.
over 100megabit connection, $36 per month :)
While it was a conservative decade, society as a whole was pushing back. Gay rights was big. Privacy was big. The first steps toward technological freedom were being set. The clean needle initiatives to help cut back on HIV, hepatitus, etc were in full swing. Educational funding hadn't been pared back as heavily as in the 90s, and random backpack checks were mostly a big city thing.
Fast forward to today, privacy is dead, schools resemble prisons more than 80s era schools everywhere except perhaps the roughest inner cities, drugs are legal, but only to keep the public placated while they abuse even more rights. The technological/cryptographic empowerment of society backslid as the common people got aboard and rather than coming to understand and defend what technology and the internet meant to empower them, they instead turned it into a way they could all voluntarily compromise their own privacy while leaving a permanent record they could be blackmailed with, by government or corporations.
Then again, 75 percent of modern TV shows are rehashes of the 1980s, so yes I can see why you would think the 1980s never left in America. Thank god for those copyrights you European fucks forced on us with the Berne Convention and 50+ year copyrights, slowly extending out to 75 and now... 90? Most of the copyright crap in the US has been a direct result of the Berne Convention and has expanded dramatically between the 1920s and today, to the detriment of all inside the US and outside of it as well.
"the United States is almost hopelessly compromised by the oligopolistic telecom industry, which, due to lack of competition and deregulation, is hesitant to invest in their aging infrastructure... "
... it's like they're saying if the companies aren't giving away FOR FREE all this fiber they are oligopolistic and corrupt.
Read this sentance again
How much are you going to spring out of your pocket to pay for new fiber lines?
I think for years they have been funneling the government cheese into building up their Wireless offerings because it is largely unregulated and costs less to maintain.
I don't see them expanding local broadband coverage in my area at all.
Rick B.
Of course they are. It's the telecoms' best interest to keep us on 100 year old infrastructure as long as possible. I mean, who wants to build out modern technology when you can still force people to buy 1.5 Mbps DSL?
Apparently you have to live in the suburbs to get first world internet access. The people who want us to live in ultra dense brutalist structures downtown would have a stronger argument with decent network speeds.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
What does the FCC have to do with us staying regular with a high fiber diet?
The left is composed of reactionary, emotional "thinkers", who are incapable of planning how to be prepared for an up-coming election (despite having around 2 years to become prepared).
There are Americans and there are Unamericans.
That's why America is increasingly descending into Civil War.
I wish more people were like you.
I'm not surprised you have the resources to do this; you clearly have the mindset required to be a productive guy.
No. The IDs make it so GOP canâ(TM)t pay thousands of people to vote as people they are not. Makes sense. You need an ID to do so many senseless things, why not need one for something so important. Only those that donâ(TM)t want an ID required are those that want to cheat the system.
Read about Lysander Spooner
Why do people vote the way they do?
BECAUSE THAT'S THE ONLY WAY ALLOWED.
Sorry about the shouting, but I'm a bit annoyed that write-in votes are no longer counted AT ALL in my home state.
And probably not in yours.
You WILL vote for Kang or Kodos, because there's nothing but alien face-huggers on the ballot.
And that's how our current President got elected, full stop.
We're only descending into civil war because there are people who think that its citiens are a mix of Americans and Unamericans. The descent will stop once most people stop thinking that way and realize that they're all Americans even if they may hold different viewpoints.
Switzerland? Not sure, help me out here.
Eat shit, Terlingua. I do not care. Want to live far away from people? You have to pay for it.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I have the best health care possible in the USA. If I was poor or didn't have excellent insurance, my story would be different. 2 yrs ago, I was buying health insurance under ObamaCare - the ACA - what a laugh. It wasn't affordable. My rates had quadrupled in 4 yrs. Health insurance was costing me more than the mortgage on a 4 bdr home in a nice neighborhood. Affordable my ass.
Before the ACA fucked things up, I'd been buying health insurance on my own for 6 yrs. I had a lower deductible, more coverages, and wasn't forced to pick doctors only from the insurance company list. The ACA broke all of that.
I ended up selling 1 company and closing 2 others down, all because of ACA costs. Basically, I was forced back into a corporate job to get big-business health insurance.
I don't have any known health issues either. Very healthy and look 10 yrs younger than my actual age. ObamaCare fucked me over, destroyed my life. If I seem a little pissed, it is because I am. I was my own boss, running the show, had a few contractors who helped with overflow work. Life was good. I worked about 40% of a year to earn the same I do now. Now I'm a fucking cube-dude with 3 weeks of annual vacation.
Being poor sucks everywhere. Ever been to rural Nepal or rural India? It is much worse there than in America.
The US has a different philosophy about social issues than many other countries. Call it a "cultural difference", if you prefer. We aren't allowed to make negative comments about "cultural differences" right?
The US is a democracy for all elections except President, just as much as any other "democracy" that has political parties. The fix is to remove all party labels from ballots, prevent _straight party 1-button_ voting and make people actually know the names of who they vote FOR. It won't ever happen, since the current people who control the laws will never allow that - ever. A few states had no party labels on their ballots, but those laws were changed in the last 5 yrs, sadly. Prior to those changes, the lawmakers in those states actually worked together. Now they are just as partisan as California, NY, TX, and everywhere else.
Sad.
I work for ATT.
Yes. They fucking are.
But it's not as simple as "We're not gonna lay fiber."
ATT lays a shit ton of fiber all the time. I see it in action inside and outside of work, I've seen them come through entire zip codes and do it.
The problem isn't the existence of the infrastructure in the first place, it's that in addition to not laying thousands of miles of it which is insanely beyond their capability even if all 3 teamed up, all the dumb little municipal agreements etc. that prevent anyone from accomplishing anything.
Having once worked for a telco myself I can back up your story 100%
Every city, town and hamlet in the USA wants it's own "special deal" with any telecom and cable company that is planning to serve it. Why?
TAXES
Just look at your telco, wireless, and cable bills to see the taxes and surcharges that are added to the "so called low price" the company offered you.
Then there are all of the planning fees and delays imposed by these localities before any work gets done. Any work brings inspection fees and more delays from the locality.
Then there are the NIMBYs and ENVIROs that live in these localities.
They whine about not getting these FAST and FANCY services but protest and sue when any work is started only causing progress to cost more.
.
There is always be "the last mile problem" of people wanting to live in the middle of nowhere yet demanding the LATEST and GREATEST services
as if they were living in the middle of a super-dense city like NYC. There is no satisifying those people.
.
And if you WANT COMPETITION in your locality be prepared for every utility to be digging up streets, trenching sidewalks, climbing poles, or even planting antennas everywhere (roof of every house?). Want that?
.
The dream of having a fiber brought in and then choosing from 6 different ISPs is a "corner case" unless people in USA want to give up freedoms to government to have choices like that mandated by laws that would suppress business interest in participating in it. For those that scream REGULATION, well that's what would happen.
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And REGULATION only drives up costs and limits choices. Look up the history of TELCO DEREGULATION in the USA to see WHY that took place. It took place because a businessman had developed a way to connect a radio user to a user on a landline phone (Carterphone). AT&T refused to permit it's connection to it's network. The Courts ruled against AT&T calling AT&T monopolistic and setting the stage for telco deregulation where US citizens could connect all sorts of private (not owned by AT&T and rented to you) devices (phones, answering machines, private PBXs, modems, etc.) to telecom networks in the USA so long as they met certain FCC requirements.
.
Going back to the world of REGULATION risks destroying all of that progress and forcing everyone in the USA back to renting a device from the phone company in order to connect their computers to it. Worse, it would drive up prices and reduce innovation in service. Want super-highspeed Internet of the future (whatever it is), then you have to wait for the REGULATED phone companies to deliver it at REGULATED prices.
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Remember, when you introduce REGULATION you are introducing BIG GOVERNMENT back into your life and you get to PAY A PRICE for that intrusion. That price is in PRIVACY, MONEY, LACK OF INNOVATION, and BUREAUCRACY. Do you really want THAT?
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Seriously
Diversity is not a strength if there is enormous disagreement; in the end, there must be agreement, or there must be war.
Bob's opinion is that it's perfectly legitimate to point a gun at Alice and take her resources for his purposes; Alice's opinion is that it's perfectly legitimate for her to shoot in the face anyone who tries to take her resources against her will.
War be comin', bro.
As you say, a government is just an organization, in the same way that a Company is an organization. The characteristic that makes an organization a "government' is this: A government is an organization that takes resources from people against their will at the point of a gun—a gang is a government, a warlord is a government, a dictator is a government, an oligarchy is a government, a religious leader may form a government, the United States is a government, a board of elderman for a city is a government, etc.
In any particular jurisdiction of your choosing, the government that successfully imposes its authority is often called "the government".
Crony "capitalism" is rarely capitalism; it almost always involves a government, which is a anti-capitalist by its very nature (you cannot steal capital from people and then pretend to respect capitalism).
There is profit in agreement; that is why people drive on the same side of the road—not because the law says they must, but rather because they don't want to die, and because that will be the most efficient way for them to get to their destination. In the same way, there is profit in figuring out how to deal with limited resources like the electromagnetic spectrum; however, there's no inherent reason why the solution to managing such resources must in involve a government (e.g., an organization that takes resources against people's will, outside an existing agreement made in advance of interaction). The solution to getting everyone on the same page is law by contracts, not law by legislation (i.e., not law by decree); negotiation and enforcement of contracts is a service, and may be subjected to the iterative, evolutionary process of the market like any other service—there is no need for some magical organization of angels who "Will Always Do The Right Thing By Society Trust Us Mkay." There is no need to break infinite recursion with a government; there is no problem of "contract enforcers all the way down". The market is an iterative process.
Deregulation will help Joe out, because it will necessitate the creation of voluntary means by which to organize society's resources; liberty grows best when the culture of society need not grow with deference to a government. Coercion is a dumb man's solution to organizing society; authoritarianism is a vestige of humanity's ancient, barbaric, poorly organized origins.
Drop your indoctrinated reverence for the thugs with guns. Spend your energy asking "How can we do this or that without taxation? How can we do this or that without a government?"
Get the hint. Your lack of money is an economic signal telling you to make better choices in life.
Born in a bad situation? Direct your anger towards your parents for failing to prepare an adequate structure for a new human being.
Goddamn. Poor people are a bunch of whiny, self-entitled fucks.
Michael Powell wasn't inept. He was a greedy sycophant who knew that if he took care of his corporate overlords, he'd get a portion of the spoils as well as a cushy gig once he walked through the revolving lobbyist/regulator door.
Powell knew the outcome of his blanket deregulation, even if he feigned ignorance and claimed that it was all in the name of 'consumer choice'.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Nazi means "National Socialist". Read the Nazi party platform; it's clearly socialist. Benito Mussolini was an avowed Marxist, and had a cordial relationship with Lenin.
Come on, guys. Paxton is a Lefty he can't bear to admit that the Left always descends into violent barbarism—what else could you expect from a doctrine that demands other people pay for your life choices?
Your quote from Benito Mussolini is not considered credible, and is taken out of context, to boot. Go try to find it.
Read Dinesh D'Souza book "The Big Lie".
They are vying for power; they are vying for the control or the support of the same people and resources; they are fighting for their variation of the ideology.
"Why did these 2 sects fight?" is the dumbest question you could possibly ask.
In flagrant violation of Betteridge's Law, American cable companies are suppressing fiber. The result is an epidemic of constipation, increased use of fiber supplements, and a run on stewed prunes!
Security is a service; there's nothing magical about it; there's no inherent reason why a property-rights enforcer must be a monopoly, let alone a monopoly that is violently imposed from the outset and celebrated culturally with a quasi-religious reverence involving pageants and sacred symbols and hymns.
Hell, there has never been One World Government; at the level of the nation state, there has only ever been total anarchy—and even when none of the nations cared for individual liberty, their competition is what kept Tyranny at bay for everyone. This is called a Separation of Powers.
You're saying that freedom wouldn't exist without authoritarianism; you're saying that we need a violently imposed monopoly to save society from a voluntarily grown monopoly. YOU are the one spouting contradictions.
The descent will stop once most people stop thinking that way and realize that they're all Americans even if they may hold different viewpoints.
So never, in other words.