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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."
Municipal monopoly agreements DO NOT EXIST in the United States. Period. They have been banned, at the Federal level, since the Telecommunications Act of 1996. True story.
What you have is an example of first mover effect and natural monopolies. But Libertarians hate to admit to those, as they are natural market failure mechanisms, and they don't like to admit that the market can have inherent failure modes.
Citation: http://time.com/5535292/north-...
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!
Spin up your fantasies, guy.
Let's not forget that the most outrageous case of electoral fraud in the 2018 midterms was perpetrated by the GOP,
How can we remember something that is your frothy fantasy? You need to cite, not just assert.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Republica...
Money can buy anything. However, those that aren't as rich as Sir Mick will just have to suffer. Ain't 'merka great?
Wow you're telling me Fox News and Conservative propaganda talk radio haven't informed you of the MASSIVE GOP election fraud campaign in North Carolina? lemme guess they blamed it on George Soros and the "deep state" lol. Do yourself a honest favor. look here
You are aware that our current President got fewer votes than his opponent, right?
"Yes voter id laws would help a lot." is unadulterated troll bait.
Then those IDs need to be free and shouldn't require you to drive a long distance to get to them. In many parts of the country the local branches to get a ID or license have been closed.
"According to the Texas driver’s license handbook, the closest driver’s license office to Terlingua is in Alpine. According to Google Maps, that is 83.4 miles one way, or about 167 miles round trip. "
While this is a extreme situation, it still disenfranchises US citizens who have a right to vote. Driving is a privilege so I have no problem with a barrier to entry for a driver license, but voting is a right, there should be little to no barrier of entry beyond being a citizen. This is a difficult problem, but one even my home town is effected by. The last place in the south side of my town to get a ID was closed. Most people on that south side are too poor to drive and now have to travel to another town to get a state ID. Its a 30 minute car ride, or a 30 minute bus ride and a 15 minute walk. That doesn't seem like much, but the offices close around the time these people get off work and they are typically too poor to have nice things like PTO to waste on getting a ID.
Unless the Constitution says, specifically, "citizen" when enumerating a right, it applies to anybody lawfully in the country.
The US has more retail space, and more retailers, both in absolute terms, and on a per-capita basis, than any other country. There were many more POS terminals to replace/upgrade than there were in the EU as individual countries made the switch piece-meal.
Wrong metrics. You need to compare number of POS terminals to something like GDP or retail sales to measure how affordable the transition was. Because affordability is the metric you're claiming, not total number.
The US had large-scale cell service deployments several years earlier than any other country
Japan would like to remind you they exist, and beat the US by 4 years.
The first US cellular network started in 1983: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The first European cellular network started in 1981, in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. It was a 1G network called NMT.
The first Japanese cellular network started in 1979: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
GSM (a digital, 2G technology) was the first cell phone system deployed in the EU.
Nope. GSM was developed in part to unify the various 1G systems that were already present in Europe.