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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.
^^^THIS^^^ The broadband situation in America is a story about government intervention completely breaking the marketplace not a failure of the market place. We really need to be passing state laws that prohibit the creation and renewal of such agreements by local municipalities. That is how you fix this situation.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
There are huge limitation of using a broadcast medium (wireless) vs a point-to-point medium such as fiber. With all advances in wireless technology (such as MIMO or beam forming) - you will never get the same quality that you can achieve with fiber connection. Now imagine all homes using that same 5G technology in addition to mobiles - it will create additional overhead to an already congested spectrum. It is more efficient to dedicate 5G to devices that really need it - cars, public transport services, smartphones and so on, while connecting homes through fiber.
That's a lie. Most Americansdo not want that.
75% were opposed the repeal of net neutrality.
56% support and only 16% oppose the creation of a publicly-owned internet companies to fill coverage gaps in rural, urban, or remote areas.
And hell, let's throw in some health care statistics too
70% want healthcare for everyone, even the poor who can't afford it.
51% are for and only 21% are against the government manufacturing and selling generic drugs (and that included revoking patents granted to pharma companies that make them too expensive for the average person to afford).
I could go on with similar poll results across every industry... energy, housing, food, utilities... everything.
Americans do not want freedom at the expense of all else. That is a lie that is continually pushed by the same interests that lobby the government to keep their monopolies in place and put former corporate executives into positions of power where they can undermine all regulation of the companies they worked for.
The only reason that lie continues is that the wealthy who benefit the most from this bullshit can use their wealthy to force it to be the only story. They hire PR firms to astroturf the story, buy media outlets and control what stories get published, pay off legislators to ensure that regulations always favor the wealthy and take every step they can to ensure that no other story gets heard.
5G won't provide fibre speeds to all. It can't, there just isn't enough bandwidth. Say you live in a city in an apartment block and everyone is using 5G for their broadband. Well for a start 5G uses higher frequencies so you will need an external antenna to get anywhere near the theoretical 10Gbps it offers.
10Gbps between how many users? If it's more than 5 then it's already slower than symmetrical 1/1Gbps cable, and of course the latency is much worse. That 10Gbps is the on-air rate too, not the speed you get after all the protocol overhead and switching time to allow other uses to communicate.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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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.