NC Governor Allows Anti-Community-Broadband Law 356
zerocore writes "North Carolina governor Bev Perdue will not veto a bill that will limit small town municipalities' ability to create community broadband when private industry will not go there. 'The governor said there is a need to establish rules to prevent cities and towns from having unfair advantage over private companies. But she said she was concerned that the bill would decrease the number of choices available to consumers. The bill would require towns and cities that set up broadband systems to hold public hearings, financially separate their operations from the rest of government operations, and bar from them offering below cost services. They also couldn't borrow money for the project without voter approval in a referendum.'"
Re:The best legislators money can buy (Score:2, Informative)
Bev Perdue is very much a democrat, and seems to want government interference in everything else - just not where it might actually help the state.
There's a reason people and businesses are leaving in droves...
Re:Ummm *facepalm* (Score:5, Informative)
Right. More public projects should have to comply with requirements like these. Transit systems being an excellent example.
Transit systems are a completely different beast. The cost savings for the city are only found when you look outside the system. More productivity when workers can get to work because they aren't in traffic. less road rage. less accidents. less emergency runs for car accidents meaning police have more time for looking for criminals. less road repair. Firemen putting out fires instead of carrying the jaws of life to cut some guy out of his SUV rollover.
If you don't understand how the system works, go to New York. Or Shanghai, or London. Just try owning a car in one of those cities.
Re:The best legislators money can buy (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Ummm (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What an intolerable burden! (Score:4, Informative)
No, it's not a ban, in the same way that I'm not banned from parking in handicap spaces, it's just really unaffordable to pay all those tickets and those pesky impound fees.
What the bill does is make it unaffordable for municipalities to set up their own broadband. Keep in mind that these are small municipalities where the normal ISPs refuse to provide service.
Re:Ummm (Score:4, Informative)
Great point, now they only need to pass the same restrictions and barriers for capital ISPs to do business there as well and then there will be no unfair advantages, right? Agree with me or look like a fool.
Re:Open Source Broadband (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Practical example exists (Score:4, Informative)
Nice that you bring Finland in discussion - but in totally wrong way. The waste collection went wrong and there was abuse of the system, but those examples you cite are not problems with broadband when done right. And in Finland municipal broadband has been done right in many communities were there was no interest from commercial entities to build the infrastructure (and old phone companies went even so far that they teared town the old phone cables and installed GSM voicemail systems instead so that offering DSL wasn't even possible if someone would have wanted to take the risk; we have "must lease" clause in the law so that the last mile must be leased to competitor for "fair compensation" is the competitor wants to start operating DSL POP at the area). Communities (not necessarily even owned or operated by tows) build the infrastructure and offer ISPs to come to POPs with same terms for everyone and the end-user can choose which ISP to buy the actual service from. This solves the problem that ISPs don't have interes in areas where they might have just few customers at one POP and they still had to invest in everything.
Sweden went even further and built masses of fiber network for operators to lease - everyone with same terms. And last time I checked they were doing very well regarding broadband even in rural areas.
The idea is not to regulate anything but instead offer chance for businesses to enter the market (all with same terms) where they are not "naturally" interested because of the initial investment and risk of losing that investment (or some other bullshit/business reason).
Re:Ummm (Score:2, Informative)
You'd be incorrect. Road systems are more than paid for by their various taxes and fees (gas and registration, mainly).
Re:Makes sense (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, if you are talking *local* government, they would probably be *more* answerable to their customers than the huge telecom conglomerates.
My experience shows that the local government is not answerable to anyone. Ever tried to get a building permit? They tell you to jump and you only can ask how high. This is because if you displease them and they become picky, your only recourse is ... no, not even the court. You have no recourse. It is not against the law for a clerk to get back at you by requiring documents that are issued on third Friday of a century. You can get mired in health department's approvals, in geology approvals, in grading approvals ... or the clerk can just look at your plan and say "Well, I could have asked for @foo but I see that you are doing everything right, so here is your stamp and you may be on your way to start building."
If that happens with a private company (and it does, occasionally, when they aren't cooperating) you simply walk away, into another company in the same market, just across the street, and forget that the first company even exists.
The problem with the government is that there is only one government that is in charge of your property, and within that government there are just a few specific employees (you know them by name) that can make or break your project, and they are legally entitled to go either way, just as they please (officially it is "based on my expert knowledge, skills, training, etc.") They better be your friends, or else your activities will be seriously curtailed. I know more than one sad story about all that. Messing with a police officer is safer than messing with a government clerk - clerk's duties are not clearly described in laws, so bureaucrats have a lot of leeway.
Re:Open Source Broadband (Score:4, Informative)
How about the Open Source crowd figuring a way to deliver broadband for free or close to free? Why not!
It's hard to do -- I've made a few experimental wireless mesh networks using Linux firmware on a bunch of wireless routers. We're working on it, but really, no one with much power/money wants us to succeed...
There are many problems to overcome -- the main three problems are: latency (many small hops over low powered wireless -- need to use longer range, but those frequencies are strictly regulated), congestion (limited available frequency ranges -- cooperation required for a "rolling" frequency allocation, easy to disrupt), but mostly the problem is the fact that you want something totally different that what we can really offer.
The previous stated problem is better defined as such: You want "Broadband Internet" -- which is far more a specific requirement than "Broadband Network"; The former requires a choke point whereby lots of distributed traffic enters and leaves a hard-line connected to the Internet (at no cost!?!), the latter does not have the requirement but has to iron out many many issues before commercial entities will get on board.
One big problem is adoption. Will you be willing to give up your current ISP, and the entire Web it allows you to access? If not, will you be willing to foot the bill for a node so that the free (as in freedom) network can operate along side, and in addition to your current ISP hardware? If so, will you be willing to bridge the two, despite rediculous "end user" threats (when you're really an ISP)? If not, will you publish content on the free net with a license that allows everyone to copy it infinitely?
My mesh network had adequate speed for most uses (email, chat, voip), but streaming HD video did not scale well (100+ routers over 4 square blocks servicing approx. 80 "homes") -- no caching servers implemented yet... (do you want to host data that's not yours? If so, can you get the copyright license to do so? If so can everyone get that license for free? -- copyright law has no place in modern technology, we must copy everything all the time, and we need the legal restrictions lifted so that we can! Note: ISP routers already to this with indemnity, but our distributed "torrent" like network will face legal threats.)
There has to be a global or at least national solution to connectivity (how easy will it be to buy & install a node/host), identity (how will someone send you a packet from many hops away?), privacy (how will intermediaries be trusted to pass on your data), integrity (how will we ensure no one can DoS via jammer or firewall that targets you.)
We've almost got a solution for the node identity problem (routing) via a distributed DNS like system w/ distributed hash tables (.torrent style) and PGP -- though more efficient encryption is needed to provide TOR style anonymity (this is needed to prevent the above fire-walling issue), and the cert database gets huge quickly, so we need to come up with a self organizing system sans database, using only the web of trust...
The problem with TOR style routing is that you have to know the certs of every node that will be between you and the destination -- If any link goes down, alternates can not take over, the connection must be re-established; Conversely, with a less strict system we can just forward data in the general direction it needs to go, each node can decide the "best" route, and failure of a node results in the next best node being used (next packet -- no resending except from end-points, otherwise the network explodes!).
Once such a network is operational, much like the end of the BBS prevalent days, there will be bridges between the two networks for a long while, sadly, the ISPs have the upper hand in this respect -- it's already installed (see: Windows vs Linux or OSX), they have better speed, reliability (bugs will take a while to work out), and probably pricing (for node hardware)...
Re:Again Proof RepubliCONS are not about small gov (Score:4, Informative)
Bev Purdue is a Democrat.
Re:Open Source Broadband (Score:5, Informative)
Finite wireless spectrum?!? What are you talking about? Let's talk Mhz:
There is Ghz spectrum between say, 2.4 and 3.4 Ghz, which seems limited. So you might break it out into 1 mhz bands, giving you 1,000 usable frequencies. Or break it more finely,into .1 mhz bands giving you 10,000 usable, or .01 giving you 100,000 frequencies, or...
A 0.01 MHz band does not give you much capacity, perhaps something of the order 0.1 Mbps. While bandwidth is not the same thing as data rate, they are proportional.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem [wikipedia.org]
Spread spectrum technology, first developed by military for secretive radio communications, send information in short bursts in pseudorandom frequencies. This frquency hopping allows for far more efficient use of existing radio frquencies with minimal disruption. Numerous studies show this type of technology could extend the available bandwidth a billionfold or more.
By definition, spread spectrum uses a lot of bandwidth ;) The problem with data rate is that when everyone uses spread spectrum, noise floor goes up, and thus the signal/noise ratio gets worse. This, in turn, means a smaller data rate per bandwidth, as explained by Shannon.