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US Broadband Policy Called "Magical Thinking"
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Mar 28, 2008 10:05 AM
from the unicorns-in-the-tubes dept.
from the unicorns-in-the-tubes dept.
eWeekPete writes "Is the pipe half full or half empty? Not surprisingly, the talk at the second annual Tech Policy Summit was decidedly mixed. 'The US is still the most dynamic broadband economy in the world,' said Ambassador Richard Russell, the associate director of the White House's Office on Science and Technology Policy. 'As opposed to being miles ahead, though, we're only a little ahead.' But Yale Law School's Susan Crawford called Russell's position 'magical thinking. We're not doing well at all.' She proceeded to call the White House's effort 'completely inadequate on broadband competition.'"
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"only a little" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"only a little" (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:"only a little" (Score:5, Insightful)
Careful there, it may lead to a free market system, and I doubt that's in the best interest of the corporations and their politicians. In other words, don't expect to see that anytime soon.
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Re:"only a little" (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait... I think I heard of a quote about corporations and government before... Ahh, yes, it was Benito Mussolini. "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the marriage of government and corporate power." So much for democracy.
Is there an equivalent to Godwin's Law for fascism?
Parent
Re:"only a little" (Score:5, Insightful)
How has having the network being owned by a Corporation stopped comms being illegally spied on by the US Gov?
If you have a crap Gov, it'll spy on citizens whether it owns the network or a Corporation owns the network. Heck it'll MAKE IT LEGAL TO DO SO IF IT WANTS. The fact that the present Gov doesn't even give a damn and tries to make it retroactively legal shows the amount of CONTEMPT it has for the citizens, their intelligence, and the laws of the country.
The last I checked US citizens had this thing called a vote. If they don't care very much about your mentioned concerns, the Gov will continue doing it. If they do care enough then the Gov might stop doing it.
But it appears most are clueless. The Sheep are busy deciding which Wolf should eat them for the next term, and it sure seems that some would rather have the Wolves' good friend the Fox to own the networks, because they are afraid of the Wolves owning the networks.
Brilliant. No wonder Bush won two terms.
I live in a different country and wouldn't care so much but for the fact that the USA is the most powerful country in the world ( military spending is almost as much as the rest of the world combined), and has no qualms on starting wars unilaterally, doesn't care about the UN, what the rest of the world thinks, or what the US Constitution says. Add Diebolded elections, lots of really stupid voters, and it sure doesn't look good.
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Re:"only a little" (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus it would enable hugely cheap WiFi networks. An entire neighborhood could be connected through one fiber line, and all be enjoying [several] Gigabit WAN. Enabling the ability to host your own fairly large web server.
Unfortunately, these are all very bad for big business!
Businesses model their offerings based not on what they can do... but what they think they can get away with. Establish unreliability as 'standard', establish that 'hosting your own' is cost-prohibitive (or contrary to a service agreement), and that this thing called bandwidth should be ridiculously expensive.
It is basically a criminal mentality.
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Re:"only a little" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"only a little" (Score:5, Interesting)
And of course your solution to this problem is... less government! But back up a second. That's quite a leap saying that more powerful government gives more opportunity for rent seeking. If that is true, why did the EPA try to claim it didn't have authority to regulate CO2 emissions [acs.org]? Why have fewer species than ever been added to the endangered species list? Maybe the FCC shouldn't have any authority over the electromagnetic spectrum, parts of which were recently reclaimed, repackaged, and auctioned off? Why did the Department of Homeland Security bungle Katrina so badly? Why does DHS insist on spending big $ for radiation detectors that won't reliably detect smuggling [sciam.com] and which are subject to false alarms [slashdot.org], while barely pursuing other, more promising methods? Maybe they don't have enough people? It couldn't be because consolidating several agencies into one overall smaller agency was a bad idea, could it?
The problem is not the size of the government, it's the size of the corruption, incompetence, and stupidity in government and in corporations. It's the extent to which these organizations and systems allow problems to be hidden and covered up. In some cases, government authority has been used for rent seeking, but in many other cases, lack of government authority has been used to put together monopolies and to get away with short changing the people. Just look at the subprime mess, and the way the telcos have not provided services, even going so far as to sue government entities set up to provide services where the telcos would not. If Bush and Cheney had less government to work with, they'd have fewer secrets to keep! Yeah. Transparency, not size, is the key.
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Re:"only a little" (Score:4, Insightful)
why did the EPA try to claim it didn't have authority to regulate CO2 emissions [acs.org]?
Regulatory Capture [wikipedia.org]
Why have fewer species than ever been added to the endangered species list?
This is relevant how?
Maybe the FCC shouldn't have any authority over the electromagnetic spectrum, parts of which were recently reclaimed, repackaged, and auctioned off?
Other than to manage and sell licenses and enforce exclusive rights they shouldn't. In fact, they could even outsource the management and auctioning parts and concentrate on the enforcement. This is the same as the government selling oil, mining, and mineral extraction rights on public lands.
Why did the Department of Homeland Security bungle Katrina so badly?
Government, by definition, bungles. That is why I and many other Libertarians want substantially less government.
Why does DHS insist on spending big $ for radiation detectors that won't reliably detect smuggling and which are subject to false alarms, while barely pursuing other, more promising methods?
Again, because the government has no profit motive AND they are spending other people's money they aren't very careful about what they buy or what gets wasted. They might buy product A over product B because product A is made by a company that made a contribution to the re-election campaign of a certain politician or promised to do a personal favor for a DHS manager in the future. If you were spending the money of another person for them would you be as careful as if you were spending your own money on yourself? Probably not.
Maybe they don't have enough people?
They almost certainly have too MANY people already.
It couldn't be because consolidating several agencies into one overall smaller agency was a bad idea, could it?
Of course it was a bad idea. The new agency should never have been created and most of the other existing ones should have been ELIMINATED. The ideal government, IMHO, would be composed of the constitutionally mandated branches (president, congress, supreme court), the justice system (state and federal courts) to adjudicate disputes, police (national, state, and local) to enforce the rules and prevent violence and coercion, and finally the military to prevent foreign powers from conquering us by force. That is it and that is all.
The problem is not the size of the government
Yes it is.
it's the size of the corruption, incompetence, and stupidity in government and in corporations.
Corruption is inevitable in government, it will always be present at some level and it will be larger and ever more present as the size and scope of government is increased. I know of NO counter example to this principle from any time in all of human history. The difference between incompetence or stupidity in government and the same in corporations is that an incompetent or stupid corporation will be selected OUT of the system by the forces of market competition (it will declare bankruptcy and cease to exist). The government on the other hand, no matter how incompetent or stupid, will not go bankrupt OR be forced out by market competition because they control the market via the ultimate power, threat of violence and coercive physical force. Replacing governments can be dangerous work, just look at the US experience in Iraq if you don't believe that.
In some cases, government authority has been used for rent seeking, but in many other cases, lack of government authority has been used to put together monopolies and to get away with short changing the people.
If one looks at the economic history of monopolies then it is clear that the durable monopolies (i.e. ones that were not temporary) were invariably backed up by the coercive power of government to enforce the continuation of the mono
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Canada is even bigger (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that I live in Europe, I'm able to get 24Mbit/2Mbit ADSL for a fraction of what I paid for 1/12th the bandwidth in Chicago (and having spoken to a friend of mine who lives there now, it seems things haven't improved much in the last 18 months). Seeing as 100Mbit is coming in the next few months, I'd say the US is not only not ahead, it is falling behind at a geometric rate.
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Re:Canada is even bigger (Score:4, Informative)
Also, you comparison of DSL prices is a bit misleading. The prices are different from city to city and market to market but DSL can be had in Chicago for about $20 a month. [chicagotribune.com] I only payed $35 a month for a 3 meg connection and my father was is paying $10 or $15 for a 1.5 or 1 meg connection that suits his need. That was about 2 to 3 years ago when we temporarily located in the Chicago area for a job that lasted about 8 months.
I don't think this says what you want it to say.
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Re:"only a little" (Score:4, Interesting)
Hi. Here in Pennsylvania, we already paid Bell/Verizon multiple billion dollars to have fiber rolled out. That was 15 years ago. We're still waiting.
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What? (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought greed and the free market would solve everything!
Ron Paul where are you?!?!?
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Magical Thinking" (Score:4, Insightful)
magical thinking (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:magical thinking (Score:5, Funny)
Snorted.
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Re:magical thinking (Score:5, Funny)
Corporate poles, of course.
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Better connectivity in China (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Better connectivity in China (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Better connectivity in China (Score:5, Interesting)
Time Warner told me that it wasn't econimically feasable to service my house so I complained to the PUCO. It took about 8 months to a year and time warner sent letter to everyone on my road (I am rural) saying they where going to run all the way down the right of way and we needed to attend a meeting to object to it. Verizon already put in a RDSLAM to increase my service and extend DSL to others down the road.
Your local authorities and government structure isn't as concerned with externalities like the state would be. Seriously, complain to them, get your neighbors to complain, and it might take a while, but something will/should happen. The purpose of giving them monopoly access to certain areas is to make sure the unprofitable areas get served. If your state is anything like mine, the fines for non-compliance will end up being more then the costs of running the lines and making the necessary changes. Also, if it is a local "right of way" issue, the state can step in and settle the issue a lot easier then a company can.
Don't hesitate to use the PUCO or equivalents authority to complain about being left out. BTW, if you call, record everything and write down what you said then mail it to them. A call gets logged but doesn't always have the same status. Written correspondence and email seems to be much more effective because they can forward it to someone specific easier then a call taken by a secretary.
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funny, very funny (Score:3, Interesting)
Please note that this is a mere 70 miles west from DULLES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT and the crowded den of datacenters and fiber connectivity that infest western Fairfax County and eastern Loudoun County VA. For people not familiar with the United States, this is (by some measures) the Internet hub of the eastern seaboard, with a huge number of peering/exchang
Not so good (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not so good (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a Canadian married to a Finnish citizen, which is the reason why I'm here, and I can say this connection is the nicest I have ever been on. I've also been on other publicly available Finnish connections, and it is still leaps beyond what Canada has to offer... especially in terms of fairness towards the customers, since rates are low and forced contracts are rare.
- John
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Re:Not so good (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Not so good (Score:4, Insightful)
No. In the US it is completely impossible for a new broadband player to enter the market due to the extensive laws explicitly prohibiting it, at the request of the incumbent telcos. This is pure corruption.
Who told you that the infrastructure investments were prohibitive? Hey, it's those same telcos again. They're lying to you: it's quite doable in the urban areas, and the rest would creep out slowly over the following years. This is all sleight of hand to distract you from noticing the corruption that's really responsible for the mess.
If it was legal, you would have competition, and your network services wouldn't suck so utterly.
Irrelevant. Nobody wants to run network service to miles of desert in Utah. The density in the parts of the US where people actually live is more than high enough to support real service. This sort of misleading statistic is typical of the way they try to convince you that what you have isn't broken.
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Just Redefine "Success" (Score:5, Informative)
In this case, "success" means that local monopolies are continuing to make money on existing infrastructure without having to reinvest any of it into new infrastructure.
I signed up for a business-class cable modem a few years back (being willing to pay the premium so I could host my own email and not have to worry about bandwidth caps), and my contract is about to expire (defaulting to month-to-month after the expiration). In that time, the cable company hasn't increased the speed for business users at all. Normally, I'd look for a competitor, but none of the local companies have DSL coverage near my house. There's one company offering WiMax service, but I find WiMax questionable.
So apparently, in the few years that I've had my cable modem, almost nobody has invested a single penny in infrastructure upgrades. Meanwhile, the Koreans had 10 megabit fiber connections years ago. I can only conclude that "a little ahead" is a measure of profit margins, not usefulness.
Crawford right -- net should be publically owned (Score:5, Interesting)
"More pipes into the home is the key," Russell said.
We already have "more pipes" and their bandwidths are too narrow and too expensive. We pay $70 for 10MB and many European and Asian countries pay $15 for 40MB to 100MB.
We should have had a PUBLICLY OWNED 100GB optical fiber pipe across the nation FIFTEEN YEARS AGO but the cable and telcos reniged on their promise to build it after Congress gave them to money to do so in order to prevent local governments from building their own. Much of that pipe my city government installed is still buried and is still good. One line goes under my yard. We should demand that the cable and telcos FULFILL their promise and finish the job they were paid to do, and finish it without being paid a single penny more or raising their rates. That's right... take it out of the profits and stockholder dividends. The stockholder's didn't mind receiving windfall dividends while the cable and telcos management was taking the money and paying themselves huge salaries and bonuses and giving those dividends. It's time to pay up, with interest... just like they'd charge.
Translation (Score:5, Informative)
And that's with a very liberal view of what broadband really is (256 kbps or above). If only looking at true broadband capable of video streaming both ways, the US is WAY down the list behind almost every other non-third-world country.
Geographically, it becomes even worse, with broadband being largely unavailable outside cities and suburbs, while other countries have ensured that penetration also reaches areas with a low population density.
The US is much like the Holy Roman Empire in that it refuses to acknowledge that its days are numbered and that to survive, it needs to accept that it's not #1, and that it must accept help from the outside.
Or, to use a vehicle analogy (this is slashdot, isn't it?): The train has left, and the US was not on it. Even though the many of the engineers are Americans, the passengers and their agents were too busy haggling over the ticket price, so they missed its leaving the station.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a good friend that lives in the middle of no where Idaho. Somewhere near a town called Rupert... He has broadband.
My father in a cabin in mountains of Northern GA. He has broadband there. I think that if you take a look at the percentage of people and the actual number of people in the US that have Broadband available you will see that it is a pretty big number.
I have a cable modem at home. Most of the time I can not saturate that li
Speed is relative... (Score:5, Insightful)
Today, my cable service is the equal of what I had back then, but the download speeds suck. Why?
Demand, and of course backbone capacity.
So, does that nice Korean grandmother with the GB Ethernet connection get GB BitTorrent downloads? It's not up to the last mile how fast your connection is. It's the source(s) and the backbone. And your ISP's gateways, of course.
Our broadband problem in the U.S. doesn't seem to be, IMHO, the last mile. It's the ISP's gateways, just inside the gateways, and the backbones.
How do they fix this? Well, for most ISPs, they ignore the capacity issue as long as possible, either waiting for the next generation of switching equipment or a capital infusion to spend some money on the NOC. This takes years either way.
I just saw a story on Nokia apparently offering changes to GPRS, doubling and then increasing again data speeds. this might be a software change, which while not free would be cheaper than new boxes. Sounds like they wanna keep GPRS alive and competitive with EV-DO, HSPDA, et al. This sort of competition is not working in the landline/wired ISP business.
For a while, a DSL provider in Southern Maine was advertising that they offered faster connections than the cable company did. Oh, man, the cable co threatened to sue for false advertising. And the DSL provider basically said 'bring it on'. They could back their claims. In none of this did the telco, Verizon, ever speak up about *their* speeds, Cause their speeds sucked. That little spark of competition is not happening over much of the nation. The incumbents are so entrenched there is no getting past them.
Perhaps wireless gives us a hope to get past the incumbents, but with the C Block auction going to the highest bidders^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H incumbents, we're probably not going to get any more there. The 'open network' spec is a joke. Any device will operate on the 700MHz band, it will just operate at the pokey, laggy speed every other device works at. Nice. I have no hope that the bidders will build out their networks to accomodate the potential demand of true broadband - BitTorrent, 1080p, large file transfers for online storage/backup are the drivers for this.
We need to change things at the FCC, open up the marketplace, and let someone/something come on and deliver what is wanted.
Fat chance.
Broadband Utilities (Score:3, Interesting)
Small experiments in the US have shown that when municipal or other governments introduce network service, it finally spurs competition among the incumbent network operators, who stop putting off the less profitable market segments (who then get no service) while they pursue the "lowest hanging fruit". These municipal networks, whether wired or wireless, can support the increasing municipal network operations without paying tax money to private profit. If they permanently introduce real competition among the private operators, they can recede back into carrying only government traffic, like fire/police/medical comms, public websites, and the government's IT operations (including voice). In the meantime they let public policy make direct changes in what's available, to guide their constituents into a more competitive position with everyone else on the Internet.
Or we can just trust the phone company to invest time and money into keeping American communities competitive with all our foreign competitors, on the Internet that we invented and shared with them.
Competetive broadband markets (Score:4, Informative)
I'm sure quite a few people will be on 512k lines but then this is still a world of difference to dial-up or nothing at all. Oh, and bandwidth use is not a big issue at all at most ISP's, I can burn 100GB of traffic a month and nothing will happen, I can spike to 200GB or 300GB in a month once in a while and nothing will happen. The ISP's could whine about it, but then I'd take my money elsewhere, so they just make sure their networks can deal with however people choose to use it. The consumer rules the broadband market, anything else, and your broadband economy is really just a pie in the sky.
The comment from Richard Russell is nothing but denial and sillyness. I'm skeptical that the US ever had the most dynamic broadband economy in the world, claiming that title for this very moment is even more ludicrous. I'd say this man is reality-challenged and incompetent. A common theme in this US administration it seems.
Re: (Score:3)
I'll assume you meant Great Britain. California is (bear in mind all numbers are from Wikipedia) 163,696 square miles with a population of 36,457,549, Great Britain is 80,823 square miles with a population of 58,845,700.
The population density of California would be 222.7 people per square mile and for Great Britain is 728.1 people per square mile.
So yeah, California generates more agricultural produce than Great B
Re:Wrong (Score:4, Funny)
Just wait until you wind up with something that can't be treated with antibiotics ;)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You must be dating my ex-wife.
Dudes... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you miss the point. When the statement of a government official (we all know government officials always tell the truth, don't we) is clearly contradicted by documented date and objective analysis of that data, then it's time to cry bullshit.
For far too long bureaucrats, politicians and corporate leaders have cynically played on the sometimes-misplaced national pride of Americans to short-circuit justified criticism and move attention away from real problems. Whenever I want to refocus a debate in a way that favours my view, I simply say this: "Well, the American people have the best (fill in whatever you want) in the world." The Americans in the room will all nod gravely and accept whatever claim I've just made, no matter how outrageous. I've just convinced them that everything is mostly OK, and all that needs doing is a little fine-tuning. I now own the debate, because I've defined most of the situation to suit myself. Whatever useless little make-work project I then suggest to make things "even better" will be enough to make "the American people" believe the problem is as good as solved.
If you don't believe me, try this some time and watch it work. Don't worry about the occasional person smart enough to catch you. They'll be perceived as one of those left-wing nay-sayers who never has anything good to say about The Greatest Country In The World, Ever. In today's climate, they might even wind up on an FBI Watch List.
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Re:Wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
There, fixed that for you!
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
From the FCC using a flawed broadband policy that was started under Clinton and continued under Bush. Note that FCC Commissioners and executives are appointed by the President.
Specifically, the policy is that there be one company handling a given broadband technology for a certain area. One company handles cable, another handles DSL, etc. The problem is that there aren't enough technologies to go around, and some of them overlap within a single company. Fiber to the Curb service is obviously different fro
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Norway has mountains ranges and large fjords cutting off easy access to most anywhere, and less than 3% arable land. It's much harder to cable up Norway than the US. Yet, they have a much higher broadband penetration, especially outside the big cities. This doesn't jive with your claims.
The real difference is in politics, not geography.
Re:USA Broadband is fine (Score:5, Interesting)
On Main Street in the center of my town, people keep horses and sheep. I don't think you could categorize my town as anything buy "rural".
However, Boston is 30 miles to the east of me. I've got Fiber to my house. Nobody in Boston does.
Why do I mention this? It's because the problem is much more complicated than you imply. We've got a city with a high population density with no access, and rural farming communities with the option for 50Mbit symmetric connections, because while it's typically easier to serve a higher density population, the problem reverses when you start talking about a place where everything is hundreds of years old. It's hard to lay cable in a city that has gone through hundreds of years of layered construction projects, so those of us in the sticks end up with service first.
We need to come up with our own solutions. The only way we can be compared to European and Asian countries is in these statistical analyses. We can't always adopt their solutions. If you look at the European cities that have high penetration, they're generally fairly modern cities (even if they're "old", because many of them have had non-voluntary infrastructure resets (read: wars) over the years) compared to some US cities. We need solutions custom tailored to each of our regions. There isn't one magic solution.
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Re:USA Broadband is fine (Score:5, Insightful)
What I think this means is that the government should force the telcos to get off their asses and actually upgrade some of this stuff, and do it without passing huge new bills onto consumers. Yes it's regulation, no it's not free market economics, and no it's not necessarily fair to the telcos and their shareholders. But the idea that those telco companies and their successes are the result of a free market is just a myth. They were handed their marketshare by the government decades ago. That wasn't a gift, it was a trade, and the telcos need to be held responsible for their side of the bargin.
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Re:USA Broadband is fine (Score:4, Interesting)
So of all the services FTTH is the cheapest to provide and supply. The only thing holding it back is the existing inflated value of the copper network, with the telcos valuing it in the billions to justify their share prices, and make no mistake, they will lie, cheat, steal and corrupt to protect that copper network for as long as possible.
It will only be replaced when fault rates start to have a severe economic impact upon the overall economy, and why will fault rates rise, why naturally enough, why spend money on maintaining the copper if you are going to replace it with fibre.
No for the country size lie, oddly enough smaller countries, also have lower populations and smaller economies, hence they have significantly less money to spend on infrastructure projects.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Your feet are engineered?
Seriously though, I don't see any difference between giving Denmark universal broadband penetration and giving Illinois universal broadband penetration.
Why are our cities cash-strapped while Denmark's aren't? Why do you make excuses for government's abysmal failures?
One more nit: we're only about a thir