US Considers Some Free Wireless Broadband Service 111
gollum123 writes "US regulators may dedicate spectrum to free wireless Internet service for some Americans to increase affordable broadband service nationwide, the Federal Communications Commission said on Tuesday. The FCC provided few details about how it would carry out such a plan and who would qualify, but will make a recommendation under the National Broadband Plan set for release next week. The agency will determine details later. One way of making broadband more affordable is to 'consider use of spectrum for a free or a very low-cost wireless broadband service,' the FCC said in a statement." Nobody has more than a couple of paragraphs on this story. None of the press coverage mentions the obvious likelihood that any such free network would be heavily filtered, censored, and monitored.
Re:heh (Score:4, Interesting)
But for regular browsing news and Facebook-type stuff? Yeah, bet on monitoring...though the data collected won't be representitive of all demographics because the middle-class and wealthy will still have the "full-featured" broadband from cable providers...which are kinda monitored anyway, but that's beside the point.
Since the service must be allocated among a list of open frequencies, it's also possible that people subscribing to the service would need new gadgets to access the pipes. There's a lot of possibility for abuse if, say, the extra communication logic is subseqently required for "emergency" purposes in all gadgets.
Re:heh (Score:3, Interesting)
...though the data collected won't be representative of all demographics because the middle-class and wealthy will still have the "full-featured" broadband from cable providers...
At first. Eventually the only people that won't use it will be the security-conscious, the torrenter, and the government conspiracy theorist.
Re:heh (Score:3, Interesting)
First comes government cheese. Then comes government health care. Now comes government internet connections. Next comes government monitoring and censorship of said inter- *NO CARRIER*
If you hadn't noticed, Government has been monitoring communications since they set up ECHELON in the 60s.
If you really want to talk about goverment cheese, let's discuss the billions in subsidies/tax cuts/etc that have been given to telecom companies.
Anyone with two eyeballs can look at the market for certain services (including healthcare) and see that the market is broken.
Community fiber (Score:5, Interesting)
more likely motivation (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:We've already paid for it, but will never get i (Score:1, Interesting)
Where does this lie keep on coming from? Nothing was paid to the telecoms. Nothing at all.
That whole "320 billion" figure basically counts profits made by the telecoms since some date against them, as if any profit made somehow counts as "paying the telecom for fiber to the home" which is ridiculous.
When it comes to actual fund received from the government, the telecoms got squat.
Re:heh (Score:2, Interesting)
Name one.
Re:heh (Score:2, Interesting)
They may be shoddy. They most certainly will be overloaded. I know someone whose municipality gives "free" broadband, and in the evenings, it's next to useless. They still subscribe to the, fortunately, still available private service in order to play games or surf at a decent rate.
No "single payer" there, yet.