It's just not k3w1. Script kiddi3z don't use it. Hax04 d00dz don't like it. Boring grownups with real work to do use it, and they do real work with it. How uninteresting!
What COBOL won't do well or at all -- write Linux device drivers, write 3D game engines, or overflow buffers and take control of somebody else's system in order to send spam. What it will do -- process lots of data, paying attention to every penny.
C, on the other hand, is a miserable language for almost everything except system-level (kernel, driver) hacking. Its widespread use for many other functions is a stupid fashion.
First off, I am acquainted with the owner of Core IP, and am aware of what he was doing with 800 numbers in 2005-2006 (when the 800 rules changed). The FCC rules for intercarrier compensation are not clear and he thought he was exploiting a real loophole, to allow dial-up Internet access to rural areas.
The FCC writes orders and rules for specific point cases, not general rules, so as things change, the rules don't cover them. That's how VoIP happened -- it is not in the rules and you can argue about what rules actually apply when. And they've not fixed this for 12 years. 800 had some ambiguities too.
The 800 issue was about direct calls between local carriers. You could point an 800 number at a local carrier to receive the call, and that carrier would get billed by the caller's carrier. A third party would own the 800 number itself and not get billed. Someone told Matt that there was no charge for such calls. In fact, Verizon didn't know how to bill for them (they fixed this) so they looked free, and in SBC's case, a contract quirk meant they really were free. But some smaller phone companies were really angry and they got the 800 system fixed to require more consent in setting up the numbers.
When this type of thing happens, the phone companies send out bills and argue about them. ISP servers have no connection. Core IP was not the company doing the 800 stuff.
I'm not going to get involved in the big debate over Keynes vs. the gold bugs. Just on the actual topic of the subject note...
The House had a $6B broadband appropriation, divided between rural (Dept. of Agriculture) and not-necessarily-rural (NTIA) programs. The Senate totally rewrote those sections. Sen. Rockefeller (D-Verizon) added about $2B for "advanced broadband" defined as 100 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up, in the form of a corporate tax credit, for new service to any residential customer. Even if only a tiny percentage took the higher speed, and it was totally closed to competitive Internet or telephone services.
So the grant could not be used by most standalone ISPs, because they're generally not profitable (so no need for a tax credit), or aren't Corporations (partnerships, municipalities, non-profits, etc., don't get anything). Nor could cable (upstream speed limits) or AT&T (U-Verse is too slow). The money had exactly one recipient in mind, It was a subsidy for pulling FiOS in suburban areas to compete with established cable companies and ISPs. The "underserved" areas could include Tampa, New York City, Short Hills, Santa Monica, or Chevy Chase.
The subsidy would have added precisely zero new FiOS lines, since it would have covered their existing plans. It was just more money for Ivan Seidenberg's bonus. Good riddance!
Some of the digital stations aren't yet at full power. But you might need an outdoor antenna. One tree doesn't usually do that much harm to TV signals (below 700 MHz).
The FCC's "map book" shows that the Houston DTV stations will have comparable, but not identical, coverage. http://www.fcc.gov/dtv/markets/
No, Clearwire isn't involved in the DTV transition.
Clearwire and Sprint have a near-lock on the 2500-2690 MHz band. Nextel and Sprint (before the merger) had been buying up licenses there, some of which were originally MMDS "wireless cable" (an early-1990s failure). They also have leases on some of the educational channels there (held by universities, schools, and churches -- the Catholic Church is the largest holder).
The 700 MHz bands were auctioned off, with Verizon, ATT, T-Mobile, and other cellular/mobile providers being the major buyers. VZW and ATT bid them up high in a desperate move to keep newcomers from getting the licenses. Also, Qualcomm bought two TV channels (55 and 56) for MediaFlo.
No, the cable companies have been reducing the number of analog channels. RCN has completed "project crush", to get rid of them all. You thus need a cable box. Comcast still has some analog channels and the FCC has given them a hard time about removing them.
But this has NOTHING to do with the issue at hand. That's downstream video capacity, unrelated to PacketCable, a separately-multiplexed two-way service that uses some of the cable's scarce upstream capacity. "Congestion" is not usually caused by scarcity; that's an obvious, but wrong, assumption (sort of the flat earth theory of operations research).
On his last weekend before his resignation took effect, former FCC chairman Kevin Martin let off his final dump on Comcast, a personal battle he has waged his whole time at the FCC. He suggested that Comcast is disobeying a non-rule about an undefined concept called "network neutrality" that he never wants to apply to the big telephone companies.
He knows that CDV is a PacketCable service, not on the Internet, so it is not really comparable. But at the bottom of the Notice is a question about whether the service, if not Internet, can take advantage of the non-rule that maybe allows VoIP companies to not pay telephone companies the same terminating access charges on long distance calls that real phone companies pay. Here's the catch-22 that Comcast is in. The non-rule (Martin had trouble making rules the way the law defines them) applies to interconnected VoIP (not well defined) but is not clear if it applies only to nomadic Internet VoIP (like Vonage), all Internet VoIP, or all VoIP.
Comcast is non-Internet but uses VoIP encapsulation, so it decided that it does not need to act as a state-regulated telephone company any more. (Its older TDM-based Comcast Digital Phone did.) And thus it doesn't owe the access charges, which add about a half-cent per minute on nonlocal interstate calls delivered to Bell companies, but can go over a dime a minute on some intrastate calls to smaller (rural) phone companies. (Vonage doesn't pay them.)
So they're suggesting that Comcast is either a phone company (no neutrality question applies) or it's an Internet company (no rules apply, but a certain type of neutrality is a sort of deal Comcast made under protest). The net result could be that Comcast admits to being a phone company (like some other cable companies, including RCN and Cox). Some state regulators have already so ruled, but again the FCC hasn't made its own rules clear on this.
No, it uses the same modem but differently. PacketCable uses reserved cable capacity, separate from the Internet service. It does not touch the Internet. There is multiplexing in the physical layer to sort the services out.
To clarify... Comcast Digital Voice, like any PacketCable service, uses reserved capacity. It comes off of the cable modem channel, at the physical layer (minislots), and it keeps the telephone calls off of the Internet. CDV is NOT an Internet phone service at all. It's a separate access network, using MGCP-derived signaling and RTP/IP encapsulation of voice.
If the phone is not in use, then a tiny bit more capacity on the cable (100 kbps/call) is made available for data. If you think that's unfair, fine, but that's how PacketCable works, and it maximizes efficiency for the whole system. It's safe, legal, and non-fattening.
It's never justified. Names, not IP addresses, should be used. The historical rationalization is that FTP did it. But FTP did it for a very specific reason (printing to a BBN PTIP) that no longer applies.
And I do know layering. Putting an IP address in the application layer breaks layering! Addresses belong to the IP layer, and thus should be resolved there.
TCP/IP breaks layering all the time, but then it's a sloppy 30+ year old prototype. Good for its day, obsolete today. And v6 makes it worse.
Because IPv6 was an awful mistake, an abortion created by a project group (IPNG) that had become so politicized that the best people had left. The remaining participants were hardly even the B team; they were F Troop. IPv6 was a mashup of two undergrad-level hacks, Steve's IP and Paul's IP, by Steve Deering and Paul Francis. Steve has disclaimed IPv6 and Paul's in a daze. All this was done before "ISP" was a household word -- it was still the NSF's private network.
So IPv6 perpetuates IPv4's mistakes and adds more of its own. It is costly but doesn't fix anything.
The existing v4 space is not well utilized. Blocks can be traded/bought/sold in the interim until something smarter than IPv6 comes along. IPv6 at this point is mainly a hack by equipment vendors to make you buy costly new stuff.
NAT is harmless to any application that is not broken in the first place. There is never justification for putting an IP address inside the application layer. Look at HTTP: It uses names, not addresses. In fact, it was a mistake to have applications resolve DNS; that should be a function of TCP/IP itself.
In fact, divorce lawyers have been known to successfully subpoena records of highway toll transponders (EZ-Pass), to produce evidence of the driver going someplace where they may have been having an affair.
The whole GPS tracking thing is pure Big Brother, and I don't mean the TV show.
Yes, BT's model is good. It's functional separation, not structural: They're separate subsidiaries of the same corporate shell, so the debt is consolidated under the same stock. But it still is open and accountable, so the infrastructure could be done by an OpenReach-like operation. BT seems fairly happy with it; it actually improves bottom-line profits.
The American phone companies, of course, are totally aghast at the idea. They're more into control than profitability.
Propertarian: A belief that private property has primacy over public good. In telecom it is the notion that because the wires on the poles are the nominal property of the telephone companies, those companies should be free to do with them exactly as they feel. Utility regulation and hundreds of years of related laws (bailment, etc.) are discarded in favor of declaring everything to be somebody's property, and thus theirs to use as they feel free.
That is the philosophy that Kevin Martin and Michael Powell followed at the FCC, deregulating the incumbent telephone companies in spite of the law.
The Bush FCC (Powell/Martin) deregulated fiber to the home, even if the incumbent Bell pulled it and cut the old copper wire. So the telephone company is the sole ISP, the sole content provider, and the sole telephone service provider. They have (for various legal and political reasons) not exercised their full rights yet, but they are studying ways to make fiber to the home about as useful and free as the WAP browser on your wireless handset, just with better resolution on the movies they sell you.
The fiber has to be open (not "network neutrality" of ISPs, but open to multiple ISPs) or it will be less useful than old copper. Freedom of the press with black-and-white pamphlets is better than a full-color broadsheet (with comics!) monopoly of Izvestia.
The problem with current telecom policy is that it presupposes that the old incumbent telephone companies (ILECs) "own" the wires that they installed with monopoly-ratepayer money, but due to the presence of nominal competition (cable), they no longer need to be regulated as utilities. So giving them more money simply raises their profits. It raises the price they pay to buy each other up. Right now the going rate is around $3000/subscriber to buy up a rural telephone company that gets >50% of its revenue from government subsidies. They're simply bidding on the present value of these entitlements. It goes straight to the investment bankers (Goldman Sachs has been making a lot off of the subsidized-ILEC business.)
The FreePress plan is awful too. It simply ignores the ILEC networks and supposes that a few billion dollars could create a "third path", another closed, propertarian network. Of course they also want Internet content to be regulated, so their plan loses on both angles. They just hate the cable industry and collaborate with the Bells against it, consumers being a low priority.
So what might work? I suggest that the feds use the money to finance the spin-out of the ILECs' outside plant -- the loops and short-haul links between their central office buildings -- into neutral "LoopCos". They would provide wholesale access to any LEC, ISP or cableco, including their former owners, on vendor-neutral terms. LoopCos would be strictly regulated utilities (like telcos 25 years ago), forbidden from competing with their customers. Then the stimulus money could be used to finance (low interest loan, subsidies in high-cost areas) an upgrade of their legacy networks to provide (dark) fiber to the home.
The old legacy LEC (ATT, VZ, Q) shareholders would win, because a lot of their debt would move to the LoopCos, where it would be diluted by stimulus money. The Internet and its users would win because we'd have real open-entry competition, not a duopoly.
Then, when the Second Great Depression leaves a 40% unemployment rate, you and your few remaining rich friends with their inherited cash and other still-liquid assets will have a really easy time getting lots of servants to work for you for a pittance!
I use Access pretty much daily and have found nothing like it; while its big huge queries are slow (because the Jet engine is pretty lame), it is astonishingly easy to be productive with it, especially with complex multi-table relational databases.
I tried OOo Base and couldn't get it to do anything. Well, maybe the proverbial "I have ten bottles of wine in my collection" one-table demo, but it didn't seem to do much more than that. Oh, it could hang up like a broken driver if I tried to import an MDB from Access.
What's the secret of getting Base to do anything that couldn't be done more easily with something sophisticated like, say, Notepad?
I've read the Free Press proposal. I'm in the business, know the economics, have done some detailed studies of the Universal Service Fund (what a joke!), and recognize a mess when I see one.
First off, they're overly impressed by speed. They want 50/5 Mbps all over. You need that for three streams of HDTV via Internet, but not much else. They are out to hurt cable, and probably don't understand the nature of the copyright issues that rule those industries. They also ignore the issues facing rural providers, connecting them to the backbone, where current rules let the big Bells gouge small companies (some of whom pass the bill on to the Universal Service Fund). And where's the cost-benefit analysis? USF finances ridiculous boondoggles today. (They finance over $200k PER HOME to Sandwich Isles Communications.) Do we need more?
In fact they explicitly disclaim telecom competition as opened by the Telecom Act of 1996, favoring instead a massive expenditure on a "third pipe" closed approach, as if a triopoly were all that much better than a duopoly. In other words, it's "f* you" to the ISPs.
They have detailed plans to spend the money, but their details reflect a lack of understanding of what the actual costs and needs are. Too much here, too little there. It's like they're taking random numbers and throwing them out there, because that's how pork barrel politics works.
Their plan is classic inside-the-beltway "I want mine" thinking. It's not a good way to improve Internet access; it's a way to make some rich telephone companies richer, leaving a big bill for us to pay later.
It worked the way it was supposed to! This is one reason why some misguided "neutrality" proposals fail -- they would prohibit blocking spammers.
The whole idea is that you're not allowed to host spammers or malware. If you do, your ISP is kicked off. If some ISP provides you with upstream, they are kicked off. Anybody who hosts spammers directly or indirectly is kicked off, taking their customers with it. Not nice to customers, but customers should not sign up with spam-friendly ISPs.
Free market law of the jungle, maybe, but the only way to prevent "pink contracts" from spreading.
The MBTA also has a lot of streetcars, light rail vehicles that are not behind barriers, where the rider pays upon entry, as with a bus.
It also has some trackless trolleys, a/k/a mobile arc welders, which probably have enough flying sparks from the trolley wires to make radio transmission erratic.:-)
Where I live, city trash pickup includes recycling, where paper has to be recycled in paper bags. So between the daily and Sunday newspapers, junk mail, other scrap paper, and non-paper goods that overflow the green bin, we use 6-8 paper bags per week just to put out the family's recycling. Hence I ask the stores for paper bags, not plastic. With only multiple-use grocery sacks, we wouldn't be able to recycle paper. That would raise the city's trash collection costs.
Cellular coverage is limited. Verizon Wireless shows little coverage on the AZ side, spotty on the NM side. ATTM shows a little "partner" coverage (other cell companies) on both sides, but lots of unserved areas. It's the same radio problem; it's a hard area to cover.
It wouldn't surprise me if dialup were not readily available either. Getting local numbers from Frontier is probably not easy (they want to protect toll revenues) and so it wouldn't surprise me if they kept it to themselves. In fact I don't even see local Frontier numbers in some areas.
This is definitely not the kind of problem that can be solved by geeks writing code. It's a physical layer issue, one of the hardest "last miles" in the country.
The Navajo Nation sits in hilly desert country. The population density is very low (it's desert, after all) and it's pretty far from anywhere (the AZ/NM/UT border). Most of the telephone service is provided by Frontier Navajo, who I think bought the tribal telephone company. On the NM side, some is now being served by Sacred Wind, a new phone company using WiMAX, with USF funding, to cover areas with an average population density below one person per square mile. Qwest, using old wireline technology, wouldn't go there; Sacred Wind needs to spend something approaching $10k/home using the latest radio technology. That's a fraction of what wireline would cost - and btw, USAC (the FCC's USF subsidiary) might well have spent more (they've funded >$20k/home for FTTH) if asked; that program is totally out of control. See "Sandwich Isles Communications" for a real horror show.
Frontier's network, which covers most of the reservation, is a traditional rural wireline telco, incapable of providing broadband outside of the villages. And if you want to lease a T1 from them, try $75/mile! So satellite, while hardly ideal, is usually the best option. And the bureaucrats should get off their duffs and fix the problem.
I've done some preliminary studies and it looks like some types of high-powered mesh radio network can cover rustic plains at reasonable cost, but this is in the foothills of the Rockies, not flatland, and the hills get in the way, so it would be very costly (as with Sacred Wind).
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Good point. COBOL is adequate.
It's just not k3w1. Script kiddi3z don't use it. Hax04 d00dz don't like it. Boring grownups with real work to do use it, and they do real work with it. How uninteresting!
What COBOL won't do well or at all -- write Linux device drivers, write 3D game engines, or overflow buffers and take control of somebody else's system in order to send spam. What it will do -- process lots of data, paying attention to every penny.
C, on the other hand, is a miserable language for almost everything except system-level (kernel, driver) hacking. Its widespread use for many other functions is a stupid fashion.
First off, I am acquainted with the owner of Core IP, and am aware of what he was doing with 800 numbers in 2005-2006 (when the 800 rules changed). The FCC rules for intercarrier compensation are not clear and he thought he was exploiting a real loophole, to allow dial-up Internet access to rural areas.
The FCC writes orders and rules for specific point cases, not general rules, so as things change, the rules don't cover them. That's how VoIP happened -- it is not in the rules and you can argue about what rules actually apply when. And they've not fixed this for 12 years. 800 had some ambiguities too.
The 800 issue was about direct calls between local carriers. You could point an 800 number at a local carrier to receive the call, and that carrier would get billed by the caller's carrier. A third party would own the 800 number itself and not get billed. Someone told Matt that there was no charge for such calls. In fact, Verizon didn't know how to bill for them (they fixed this) so they looked free, and in SBC's case, a contract quirk meant they really were free. But some smaller phone companies were really angry and they got the 800 system fixed to require more consent in setting up the numbers.
When this type of thing happens, the phone companies send out bills and argue about them. ISP servers have no connection. Core IP was not the company doing the 800 stuff.
I'm not going to get involved in the big debate over Keynes vs. the gold bugs. Just on the actual topic of the subject note...
The House had a $6B broadband appropriation, divided between rural (Dept. of Agriculture) and not-necessarily-rural (NTIA) programs. The Senate totally rewrote those sections. Sen. Rockefeller (D-Verizon) added about $2B for "advanced broadband" defined as 100 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up, in the form of a corporate tax credit, for new service to any residential customer. Even if only a tiny percentage took the higher speed, and it was totally closed to competitive Internet or telephone services.
So the grant could not be used by most standalone ISPs, because they're generally not profitable (so no need for a tax credit), or aren't Corporations (partnerships, municipalities, non-profits, etc., don't get anything). Nor could cable (upstream speed limits) or AT&T (U-Verse is too slow). The money had exactly one recipient in mind, It was a subsidy for pulling FiOS in suburban areas to compete with established cable companies and ISPs. The "underserved" areas could include Tampa, New York City, Short Hills, Santa Monica, or Chevy Chase.
The subsidy would have added precisely zero new FiOS lines, since it would have covered their existing plans. It was just more money for Ivan Seidenberg's bonus. Good riddance!
Some of the digital stations aren't yet at full power. But you might need an outdoor antenna. One tree doesn't usually do that much harm to TV signals (below 700 MHz).
The FCC's "map book" shows that the Houston DTV stations will have comparable, but not identical, coverage.
http://www.fcc.gov/dtv/markets/
No, Clearwire isn't involved in the DTV transition.
Clearwire and Sprint have a near-lock on the 2500-2690 MHz band. Nextel and Sprint (before the merger) had been buying up licenses there, some of which were originally MMDS "wireless cable" (an early-1990s failure). They also have leases on some of the educational channels there (held by universities, schools, and churches -- the Catholic Church is the largest holder).
The 700 MHz bands were auctioned off, with Verizon, ATT, T-Mobile, and other cellular/mobile providers being the major buyers. VZW and ATT bid them up high in a desperate move to keep newcomers from getting the licenses. Also, Qualcomm bought two TV channels (55 and 56) for MediaFlo.
No, the cable companies have been reducing the number of analog channels. RCN has completed "project crush", to get rid of them all. You thus need a cable box. Comcast still has some analog channels and the FCC has given them a hard time about removing them.
But this has NOTHING to do with the issue at hand. That's downstream video capacity, unrelated to PacketCable, a separately-multiplexed two-way service that uses some of the cable's scarce upstream capacity. "Congestion" is not usually caused by scarcity; that's an obvious, but wrong, assumption (sort of the flat earth theory of operations research).
Good synopsis.
On his last weekend before his resignation took effect, former FCC chairman Kevin Martin let off his final dump on Comcast, a personal battle he has waged his whole time at the FCC. He suggested that Comcast is disobeying a non-rule about an undefined concept called "network neutrality" that he never wants to apply to the big telephone companies.
He knows that CDV is a PacketCable service, not on the Internet, so it is not really comparable. But at the bottom of the Notice is a question about whether the service, if not Internet, can take advantage of the non-rule that maybe allows VoIP companies to not pay telephone companies the same terminating access charges on long distance calls that real phone companies pay. Here's the catch-22 that Comcast is in. The non-rule (Martin had trouble making rules the way the law defines them) applies to interconnected VoIP (not well defined) but is not clear if it applies only to nomadic Internet VoIP (like Vonage), all Internet VoIP, or all VoIP.
Comcast is non-Internet but uses VoIP encapsulation, so it decided that it does not need to act as a state-regulated telephone company any more. (Its older TDM-based Comcast Digital Phone did.) And thus it doesn't owe the access charges, which add about a half-cent per minute on nonlocal interstate calls delivered to Bell companies, but can go over a dime a minute on some intrastate calls to smaller (rural) phone companies. (Vonage doesn't pay them.)
So they're suggesting that Comcast is either a phone company (no neutrality question applies) or it's an Internet company (no rules apply, but a certain type of neutrality is a sort of deal Comcast made under protest). The net result could be that Comcast admits to being a phone company (like some other cable companies, including RCN and Cox). Some state regulators have already so ruled, but again the FCC hasn't made its own rules clear on this.
No, it uses the same modem but differently. PacketCable uses reserved cable capacity, separate from the Internet service. It does not touch the Internet. There is multiplexing in the physical layer to sort the services out.
To clarify... Comcast Digital Voice, like any PacketCable service, uses reserved capacity. It comes off of the cable modem channel, at the physical layer (minislots), and it keeps the telephone calls off of the Internet. CDV is NOT an Internet phone service at all. It's a separate access network, using MGCP-derived signaling and RTP/IP encapsulation of voice.
If the phone is not in use, then a tiny bit more capacity on the cable (100 kbps/call) is made available for data. If you think that's unfair, fine, but that's how PacketCable works, and it maximizes efficiency for the whole system. It's safe, legal, and non-fattening.
It's never justified. Names, not IP addresses, should be used. The historical rationalization is that FTP did it. But FTP did it for a very specific reason (printing to a BBN PTIP) that no longer applies.
And I do know layering. Putting an IP address in the application layer breaks layering! Addresses belong to the IP layer, and thus should be resolved there.
TCP/IP breaks layering all the time, but then it's a sloppy 30+ year old prototype. Good for its day, obsolete today. And v6 makes it worse.
Because IPv6 was an awful mistake, an abortion created by a project group (IPNG) that had become so politicized that the best people had left. The remaining participants were hardly even the B team; they were F Troop. IPv6 was a mashup of two undergrad-level hacks, Steve's IP and Paul's IP, by Steve Deering and Paul Francis. Steve has disclaimed IPv6 and Paul's in a daze. All this was done before "ISP" was a household word -- it was still the NSF's private network.
So IPv6 perpetuates IPv4's mistakes and adds more of its own. It is costly but doesn't fix anything.
The existing v4 space is not well utilized. Blocks can be traded/bought/sold in the interim until something smarter than IPv6 comes along. IPv6 at this point is mainly a hack by equipment vendors to make you buy costly new stuff.
NAT is harmless to any application that is not broken in the first place. There is never justification for putting an IP address inside the application layer. Look at HTTP: It uses names, not addresses. In fact, it was a mistake to have applications resolve DNS; that should be a function of TCP/IP itself.
In fact, divorce lawyers have been known to successfully subpoena records of highway toll transponders (EZ-Pass), to produce evidence of the driver going someplace where they may have been having an affair.
The whole GPS tracking thing is pure Big Brother, and I don't mean the TV show.
Yes, BT's model is good. It's functional separation, not structural: They're separate subsidiaries of the same corporate shell, so the debt is consolidated under the same stock. But it still is open and accountable, so the infrastructure could be done by an OpenReach-like operation. BT seems fairly happy with it; it actually improves bottom-line profits.
The American phone companies, of course, are totally aghast at the idea. They're more into control than profitability.
Propertarian: A belief that private property has primacy over public good. In telecom it is the notion that because the wires on the poles are the nominal property of the telephone companies, those companies should be free to do with them exactly as they feel. Utility regulation and hundreds of years of related laws (bailment, etc.) are discarded in favor of declaring everything to be somebody's property, and thus theirs to use as they feel free.
That is the philosophy that Kevin Martin and Michael Powell followed at the FCC, deregulating the incumbent telephone companies in spite of the law.
The majority of wealth comes from one choice alone: Choosing wealthy parents. I choose not to reward that.
Go back to your Objectivist reading club.
What good is fiber to the home if it's closed?
The Bush FCC (Powell/Martin) deregulated fiber to the home, even if the incumbent Bell pulled it and cut the old copper wire. So the telephone company is the sole ISP, the sole content provider, and the sole telephone service provider. They have (for various legal and political reasons) not exercised their full rights yet, but they are studying ways to make fiber to the home about as useful and free as the WAP browser on your wireless handset, just with better resolution on the movies they sell you.
The fiber has to be open (not "network neutrality" of ISPs, but open to multiple ISPs) or it will be less useful than old copper. Freedom of the press with black-and-white pamphlets is better than a full-color broadsheet (with comics!) monopoly of Izvestia.
The problem with current telecom policy is that it presupposes that the old incumbent telephone companies (ILECs) "own" the wires that they installed with monopoly-ratepayer money, but due to the presence of nominal competition (cable), they no longer need to be regulated as utilities. So giving them more money simply raises their profits. It raises the price they pay to buy each other up. Right now the going rate is around $3000/subscriber to buy up a rural telephone company that gets >50% of its revenue from government subsidies. They're simply bidding on the present value of these entitlements. It goes straight to the investment bankers (Goldman Sachs has been making a lot off of the subsidized-ILEC business.)
The FreePress plan is awful too. It simply ignores the ILEC networks and supposes that a few billion dollars could create a "third path", another closed, propertarian network. Of course they also want Internet content to be regulated, so their plan loses on both angles. They just hate the cable industry and collaborate with the Bells against it, consumers being a low priority.
So what might work? I suggest that the feds use the money to finance the spin-out of the ILECs' outside plant -- the loops and short-haul links between their central office buildings -- into neutral "LoopCos". They would provide wholesale access to any LEC, ISP or cableco, including their former owners, on vendor-neutral terms. LoopCos would be strictly regulated utilities (like telcos 25 years ago), forbidden from competing with their customers. Then the stimulus money could be used to finance (low interest loan, subsidies in high-cost areas) an upgrade of their legacy networks to provide (dark) fiber to the home.
The old legacy LEC (ATT, VZ, Q) shareholders would win, because a lot of their debt would move to the LoopCos, where it would be diluted by stimulus money. The Internet and its users would win because we'd have real open-entry competition, not a duopoly.
Then, when the Second Great Depression leaves a 40% unemployment rate, you and your few remaining rich friends with their inherited cash and other still-liquid assets will have a really easy time getting lots of servants to work for you for a pittance!
I use Access pretty much daily and have found nothing like it; while its big huge queries are slow (because the Jet engine is pretty lame), it is astonishingly easy to be productive with it, especially with complex multi-table relational databases.
I tried OOo Base and couldn't get it to do anything. Well, maybe the proverbial "I have ten bottles of wine in my collection" one-table demo, but it didn't seem to do much more than that. Oh, it could hang up like a broken driver if I tried to import an MDB from Access.
What's the secret of getting Base to do anything that couldn't be done more easily with something sophisticated like, say, Notepad?
I've read the Free Press proposal. I'm in the business, know the economics, have done some detailed studies of the Universal Service Fund (what a joke!), and recognize a mess when I see one.
First off, they're overly impressed by speed. They want 50/5 Mbps all over. You need that for three streams of HDTV via Internet, but not much else. They are out to hurt cable, and probably don't understand the nature of the copyright issues that rule those industries. They also ignore the issues facing rural providers, connecting them to the backbone, where current rules let the big Bells gouge small companies (some of whom pass the bill on to the Universal Service Fund). And where's the cost-benefit analysis? USF finances ridiculous boondoggles today. (They finance over $200k PER HOME to Sandwich Isles Communications.) Do we need more?
In fact they explicitly disclaim telecom competition as opened by the Telecom Act of 1996, favoring instead a massive expenditure on a "third pipe" closed approach, as if a triopoly were all that much better than a duopoly. In other words, it's "f* you" to the ISPs.
They have detailed plans to spend the money, but their details reflect a lack of understanding of what the actual costs and needs are. Too much here, too little there. It's like they're taking random numbers and throwing them out there, because that's how pork barrel politics works.
Their plan is classic inside-the-beltway "I want mine" thinking. It's not a good way to improve Internet access; it's a way to make some rich telephone companies richer, leaving a big bill for us to pay later.
It worked the way it was supposed to! This is one reason why some misguided "neutrality" proposals fail -- they would prohibit blocking spammers.
The whole idea is that you're not allowed to host spammers or malware. If you do, your ISP is kicked off. If some ISP provides you with upstream, they are kicked off. Anybody who hosts spammers directly or indirectly is kicked off, taking their customers with it. Not nice to customers, but customers should not sign up with spam-friendly ISPs.
Free market law of the jungle, maybe, but the only way to prevent "pink contracts" from spreading.
The MBTA also has a lot of streetcars, light rail vehicles that are not behind barriers, where the rider pays upon entry, as with a bus.
It also has some trackless trolleys, a/k/a mobile arc welders, which probably have enough flying sparks from the trolley wires to make radio transmission erratic. :-)
Where I live, city trash pickup includes recycling, where paper has to be recycled in paper bags. So between the daily and Sunday newspapers, junk mail, other scrap paper, and non-paper goods that overflow the green bin, we use 6-8 paper bags per week just to put out the family's recycling. Hence I ask the stores for paper bags, not plastic. With only multiple-use grocery sacks, we wouldn't be able to recycle paper. That would raise the city's trash collection costs.
Cellular coverage is limited. Verizon Wireless shows little coverage on the AZ side, spotty on the NM side. ATTM shows a little "partner" coverage (other cell companies) on both sides, but lots of unserved areas. It's the same radio problem; it's a hard area to cover.
It wouldn't surprise me if dialup were not readily available either. Getting local numbers from Frontier is probably not easy (they want to protect toll revenues) and so it wouldn't surprise me if they kept it to themselves. In fact I don't even see local Frontier numbers in some areas.
This is definitely not the kind of problem that can be solved by geeks writing code. It's a physical layer issue, one of the hardest "last miles" in the country.
The Navajo Nation sits in hilly desert country. The population density is very low (it's desert, after all) and it's pretty far from anywhere (the AZ/NM/UT border). Most of the telephone service is provided by Frontier Navajo, who I think bought the tribal telephone company. On the NM side, some is now being served by Sacred Wind, a new phone company using WiMAX, with USF funding, to cover areas with an average population density below one person per square mile. Qwest, using old wireline technology, wouldn't go there; Sacred Wind needs to spend something approaching $10k/home using the latest radio technology. That's a fraction of what wireline would cost - and btw, USAC (the FCC's USF subsidiary) might well have spent more (they've funded >$20k/home for FTTH) if asked; that program is totally out of control. See "Sandwich Isles Communications" for a real horror show.
Frontier's network, which covers most of the reservation, is a traditional rural wireline telco, incapable of providing broadband outside of the villages. And if you want to lease a T1 from them, try $75/mile! So satellite, while hardly ideal, is usually the best option. And the bureaucrats should get off their duffs and fix the problem.
I've done some preliminary studies and it looks like some types of high-powered mesh radio network can cover rustic plains at reasonable cost, but this is in the foothills of the Rockies, not flatland, and the hills get in the way, so it would be very costly (as with Sacred Wind).