4Mbps Still The Standard For One Govt Broadband Grant Program (arstechnica.com) 107
An anonymous reader cites an Ars Technica report: Four U.S. senators say that the Internet speed standard for a government grant program shouldn't be stuck at 4Mbps. The Community Connect program run by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) funds broadband deployment in rural communities, but it uses a speed standard of just 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream. Even that speed is an increase over the 3Mbps (download and upload combined) standard the program used until just a few weeks ago. US Senators Angus King (I-Maine), Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) say that the USDA didn't raise the standard high enough. In a letter last week to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, the senators questioned the decision to set the grant program's speed threshold below the 10Mbps/1Mbps standard used by a separate USDA loan program. "Earlier this month, USDA upped broadband speed requirements for the Broadband Access Loan Program to 10Mbps, while Community Connect was only upped to 4Mbps," the senators noted. "In order to maintain the programs' relevance in an age of rapidly increasing demand for bandwidth, we strongly urge you to consider updating their broadband speed definitions, particularly the Community Connect Program's Minimum Broadband Service benchmark."
I would love 4Mbps... (Score:1)
I would love it if AT&T would consider giving me 4Mbps, been stuck with 768kbps for a long time now with no hope from AT&T whatsoever, and no other options out there other than expensive high latency satellite.
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Our choices indeed stink, and I live in a well-populated area.
4Mbps is just fine as long as it's reliable, not throttled, and doesn't cost a fortune to get these features.
In short, other issues eclipse max speed in the current market.
Let's make a deal with the telecoms: you can keep 4Mbps as the standard as long as you do 4Mbps right.
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Talk to verizon wireless, their CANTENNA services are great! If they have the capacity in your area to give you one its excellent!
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about $180/mo to start with around 30gigs. They won't offer more until you prove you use that much. So you will be stuck with a months worth of overages.
After that will offer 60 or (more depending on how far over you went) at more reasonable prices. I am paying about $240 right now for 100gigs.
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Wow that's expensive. Meanwhile in Montreal Canada I pay $150 CAD for 120 down 20 up with unlimited transfer (currently topping 800 Gig a month).
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In south east England, I pay at home around £40 per month (approx. $55 USD) for a 12mbps DSL line (this includes the phone line).
At work I pay around £60 (~$85 USD) for a 80mbps fibre optic line (not available at home, even though I live in a city centre and work is in the suburbs).
(both lines are uncapped, and no ports are filtered - I can and do run my own servers on them)
The USA internet market sound terrible. But then I suppose the US is quite big compared to Britain, and the investment cost
The who is doing what? (Score:2)
And you wonder why our government is neck-dept in debt.
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Trump 2016 is going to raise taxes on those bastards
What happened to the $ they chrage on phone bills? (Score:3)
>> The Community Connect program run by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) funds broadband deployment in rural communities,
And you wonder why our government is neck-dept in debt.
The phone companies have been charging me - and everybody else in the country - a rake-off to pay for deploying high speed internet in rural areas. (It used to be just for phone service but got bumped to cover high-speed internet long ago. I've been paying in for decades, and haven't seen the service yet.)
Is this that
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you moved out there to get away from the masses, mission accomplished :)
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you moved out there to get away from the masses, mission accomplished :)
No, I moved out there to get away from California laws.
I'm a target shooter and CA was banning and moving to confiscate all my pricey toys, and I had some stock options that CA wanted to tax at nasty rates after I retired. The NV site was about as close to Silicon Valley as I could get and not be in CA or the Pacific Ocean (about 250 miles by road). The rural location has its ups and downs
(Unfortunately the startup did a merger and t
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no worries i will probably be joining you in next 5 years for the same reasons, maybe we can dig us some fiber.
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4 is enough number of Mb's to connect all the cows.
now if only there was program for the citizenry run by lets say FCC or FTC or some semi tech related agency heck NSA may need more BW to collect all our stuff so maybe thats a better way to skin it.
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It's cheaper to dig up streets on a neighborhood than in a city so I don't blame them. It's the same reason the Comcast doesn't offer service to their entire monopoly area on Seattle.
Is it really cheaper?
Adding infrastructure to one block of a city street can access to hundreds of customers - adding infrastructure to the same distance in a suburban neighborhood may only give access to 10 customers.
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Kind of worthless isn't it? I'd just use my cell phone instead. Or most probably move.
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There are only two players in sattelite internet hughesnet (echostar) and excede (viasat)
Excede is now offering plans in some areas with soft caps so the low speed is better after hitting your cap (like 1 to 5mbps)
Plans are diffrent now than they were a few years ago it should be worth while to check.
I would look in this order
1. Wired
2. Point to point wisp
3. Cellular 4g lte
4. Sattelite
Wisps and wired broadband are typically unmetered.
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This sounds a bit like a false dichotomy.
You did not choose to live where there was bad internet access. You chose to live where you could get a (for the time) very decent connection. T1 was great in its time, when most of the world still connected by dialup and the internet was geared towards that.
Now? Download a game from Steam on that connection, it'll take you a week or so. Forget watching Youtube, forget streaming music (which has become the default means of listening to music in modern society) and so
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I've allways assumed you could get a t1 pretty much anywhere by paying a few grand for installaition. And then a several hundred a month for service.
Out of curiosity what is the limitation preventing you from being able to spend ridiculous amounts of money for a reliable if rather slow connection?
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Oh, my connection is solid - it's just not at a speed that makes the modern internet very useful.
The limitation preventing me from being able to spend ridiculous amounts of money is quite simply not having ridiculous amounts of money. .
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The reasons are because farmers (you know the 'businesses' that do work around you) wanted to join the online revolution except no cable or phone company wanted to develop it out and neither did the (federal and state) governments (under pressure of the telco's) want to give any right of ways to communal Internet coops or local governments to do the same.
So instead the federal government and state governments levied taxes on phone lines, cell phones and Internet services (somewhere in the 90's) to pay telco
10Mb eliminates nearly all ADSL (Score:2)
Most older copper systems top out at 7/768k, and long runs frequently result in speeds about half that. Moving the bar from 4Mb to 10Mb would make nearly every DSL cabinet obsolete and disqualify them.
OTOH, since Verizon has chosen not to upgrade my town to fiber, I say fuck 'em - raise it and kick their asses out of the program.
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And if you are on the absolute edge of a run like I am, 1.5mb down works but 3mb down has too much noise and can't keep a connection for more than 10 minutes without resetting the "modem"
It is time for phone companies to retire copper (Score:2)
They need to admin that the low-grade twisted pair they've been using for over 100 years has run its course. It just can't handle the kind of bandwidth (in the analogue sense) we need these days. They need to start replacing it with something better, fibre being the obvious choice since it looks to have the longest lifetime. Ya, it is expensive to have to do a big infrastructure upgrade but them's the breaks.
Cable providers have a few more decades at least they can wait, as coax can handle much higher amoun
Great! (Score:1)
Why should people who live in populated areas subsidize the quality of Netflix for people who live in one-horse towns? Should we pay for people who live in the middle of nowhere to have eight-lane freeways and decent Chinese takeout?
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Re:Great! (Score:5, Interesting)
Because the internet is more than just Netflix?
You may not believe it, but having high-speed internet is a boon for farmers who not only can participate in the real-time commodities market (to which they're supplying), but also obtain weather forecasts and other detailed information in real time so they can adjust how they work their fields to avoid wasting product and even precious resources like water.
Then there's applications like real-time GPS tracking and all sorts of other sensors and monitors.
Then when it's all said and done and the sun goes down, they can Netflix and chill until sunup and it all starts over again.
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Depends if you want to sell fleece or be fleeced. (Score:3)
You don't need high speed internet to get weather forecasts or to get market data.
In this era of high-speed trading, a good, fast, internet connection can make the difference between selling fleece and being fleeced.
If a commodity firm is interested enough in your market to try to game it you MIGHT have a chance with a broadband ISP fed by fiber. But dialup speeds, satellite delays, and even cellphone modem links are right out.
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If you're actually trying to run HFT from a farm, broadband availability is the least of your worries.
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because the people that live in populated places voted to keep the phone monopolies in place instead of letting local municipalities provide said service to their residents.
The government should subsidize 100MBit connection (Score:5, Interesting)
If you are going to force universal service, then 4Mbit should be good enough for anyone getting a subsidy. Anybody that wants better bandwidth should pay the difference in cost themselves! Or, here's an idea: don't let internet service providers charge $100/month for service? Stop internet service providers from bundling cable TV and phone with internet and forcing people to buy all three? Encourage competition instead of allowing mergers and consolidation so that most markets are served with only one or two providers?
4 is better than nothing (Score:2)
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Except that multiple satellite and fixed cellular providers have done exactly that. I typing this from my home network bridged to my Verizaon CANTENNA right now.
I get about 4/4MBps in most conditions, severe storms slow things down. Latency is pretty low most of the time around 90-100ms to most well connected sites like google.com.
Most people have exactly ZERO need for more than that. Sure I might enjoy that 75mbit comcast service I keep reading about for streaming netflix 24-7 but that is about
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Sure if to you "the internet" is http over tcp port 80 then that's not bad.
100ms is fine for voip and even most twitch type games. Back on the subject of doing actual work, SSH at 100ms is fine, I can't tell the difference between a shell on a remote box and a local machine here. Please enlighten me what is it that I could better at 32ms than I can at 100ms, HFT stock trading?
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play an FPS, maybe :P
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You call that low latency? I routinely get 32ms (round trip ping) from google.com.
FWIW, I have Frontier Fiber and I routinely get ~6 or 7ms pings.
I suppose if I was a gamer that would be great, but I'm not. The porn gets here ASAP, though.
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Cool, I never wanted to be an adult anyways. I will remain a kid for life, and get highly paid like a professional adult!
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I agree. 4 Mbps that fully delivers qualifies as broadband for everything short of multiparty cable cutting. (Sure, The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe wouldn't willingly settle for less than 40 Mbps, but at this point if she can't afford an urban shoe maybe she needs to go back and rethink her family planning).
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The only part of your post that I agree with is the assertion that the USDA should not be running this. Agriculture and Internet service are completely orthogonal aspects of living. Just because the USDA has traditionally done things that benefit farmers (which represent a percentage of the rural population) doesn't mean that they should be levied with sticking up for every possible interest that the rural community could have in any government activity whatsoever.
The FCC should be doing this. It's pretty o
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I will admit saving large files up the file sever over VPN sometimes is slow. I *usually* can make most of edits, save, and continue working on something else for the 5min or so that can take.
Yes updating something like Visual Studio or RubyMine (don't eclipse sorry), let alone MS Office does take many hours. Which is why you start those updates when you are done for the day. They are ready and waiting in the morning that way. No problem.
If I *need* to update some other large framework or rsync a huge r
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So, Mr. "IT Worker", how do you enjoy waiting a minimum of 20 seconds (assuming 100% utilization, no other data flows competing for throughput, no congestion or signal degradation, and zero protocol overhead) to save a 10 MB Excel file to a SMB shared drive?
That was fairly common for remote access situations 5 years ago, and depending on where you lived, DSL even in major urban areas 10 years ago. I survived. Rural is always going to require higher investment for infrastructure. News flash: Road costs scale with length of the road that needs to be built.
How do you enjoy waiting a minimum of 350 seconds (again, assuming no overhead, etc.) to download a 175 MB Eclipse installation?
How is it waiting a day or more to download a major update package for Windows or Office or a distribution upgrade for your GNU/Linux distro (depending on what you use)?
Maybe if idiots stopped with the size creep, he wouldn't *have* to download a 175 MB Eclipse installation? Again, patches have happened in the past and we all managed to survive. Stop building shit that takes u
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Interestingly, according to FCC, only the poor need Internet-subsidy [thehill.com] — the view you yourself denounced as "incredibly narrow-minded" [slashdot.org] only a short while ago.
An IT worker can afford a faster Internet without government's help. He can not be the poster child for you to use to justify increased taxation and government control.
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Hmm, that is interesting. Can any farmer really be called poor? A successful harvest year can bring in millions of dollars in a single year, do we really need to subsidise their internet connection when they make more in a year than most "small businesses"?
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I second this
* the Brazilian National Broadband Plan [wikipedia.org] (in pt_BR Plano Nacional de Banda Larga [wikipedia.org]) used a 1mbps connection speed, and it was sufficient for almost all needs... I don't know which is the speed used nowadays, I think is a regional thing now...
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It must have been a while since you last used a sat con.
$60/mo gets you 10GB at 10/1Mbps on huges or for the same price 12/3Mbps on excede.
Last time I had a sat con was around 2009 wild blue $80/mo 1.5/.256 split rolling cap 17/5GB iirc average ping was about 570ms.
But as for speed and reliability it was absolute crap.
If it rained here I would loose connection if it rained in Syracuse, NY where my gateway was I would loose connection.
Speeds and caps are better than they were several years ago. But afaik not
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If it rained here I would loose connection if it rained in Syracuse, NY where my gateway was I would loose connection.
You really should tighten that loose connection, a loose coax connection can play havoc with satellite or cable internet connections.
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As for your USDA opinion - you live in a rural area and you have no idea what
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Why would not they — as long as there is profit to be made?
"Offsetting" where? To people living in other areas. Why are they forced to subsidise Internet-access in low population density areas?
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People need internet access (it's an essential service now, like water or electricity) no matter the population density where they live
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Wants vs. needs (Score:1)
Come back to me with this argument, when you've provided everybody with their own a) bull horn; b) newspaper; c) radio station; d) TV-channel.
And, if it was not the government's responsibility to provide people with those things when they were the top technology, Internet is not now.
Bullshit. Most of the elderly still do not use it — if they survive without it, then the younger generations certainly can too.
Re: Wants vs. needs (Score:1)
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I was waiting for this, thank you! Granting AT&T its monopoly was such a staggering success [wikipedia.org], we certainly ought to keep doing things that way, right?
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This may all be true — no disagreement here. What I do not understand, is why do you feel justified using the money, that government takes from others at gun-point [quora.com], to help you with these things?
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You should ask the ISPs who didn't do it before this program came into existence.
"Offsetting" where? To people living in other areas. Why are they forced to subsidise Internet-access in low population density areas?
Because in a society, I know this is a difficult concept for people like you, people work together to benefit all of society. Sometimes the net "benefit" is just a shared cost, but society deems it reasonable. This is
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I'd like to read your opinion — why?
How does all of society benefit in this particular example? Do try to stick to arguments, that would not also apply to providing everybody with a nice car and a dishwasher...
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Yeah, because 4Mbps just is not enough for the "working poor" to work on their resumes and send them to would-be employers...
Your anti-indigent bigotry is so strong that you're blinded to the fact that the f-ing article is not about grant programs that target poverty. This is about USDA run programs that push for broadband deployment in rural communities. It is not about paying for poor people's broadband. It's about getting broadband infrastructure deployed into places that are too remote for the free market to find profit in building out broadband infrastructure. Places such as farming communities, which serve a vital role in t
Re:4Mbps just is not enough! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's incredibly narrow-minded for one to think that:
(1) This grant program is exclusively for "working poor" (or poor people, period) to get Internet access; and
(2) All a poor person would/should/could want to do with the Internet is upload resumes so they can stop being poor / living in rural areas.
This post displays a stunning lack of empathy for people who have made a choice to live in a less densely populated area. First of all, not everyone who lives in a rural area is poor. There are plenty of middle-class and upper-middle-class people who have larger land holdings or have fewer neighbors than the ISPs would ideally prefer for instant ROI. Some of these are technologists, or potential customers of technology companies. They might be gamers, media consumers, software developers, architects, or any number of other professions where access to serious Internet connectivity can be a huge boon.
Not only that, but if their employer is amenable to the arrangement, having access to a modern Internet connection might even allow these people to work from home. This saves them thousands of dollars in fuel per year vs. having to drive many miles into the office, and also prevents the vehicle emissions that would have been necessary for them to get there.
Having access to a very fast Internet pipe can change someone's life in a revolutionary way. It can enable people to embark upon careers that are not possible without a fast Internet connection. To name a few:
- Youtube/Twitch/etc. streamer (gamer, political, scientific/educational, or other content) - not possible without fast upstream because otherwise video upload times make it impractical
- Podcaster - same as video above, but requires less upstream because it's just audio
- Pro gamer - without a fast connection for rapid access to new games and patches, and low latency, one cannot reach the pinnacle of pro gaming, no matter how hard they try (unless you intend to become a pro at a turn-based game where latency is relatively unimportant)
- Remote knowledge worker / engineer - A lot of the top tech companies are hiring talent remotely without regard for where they live. It's only "old world" businesses, and those with extreme security requirements like working for contractors or government touching classified data, that have hard requirements for working on-site. Almost any job in IT, plus many jobs in management, finance and administration, can be done remotely just as well as face to face... but only with good Internet connectivity. If your work output primarily involves taking information in one form (instructions, requirements, source data, whatever) and transforming it into another form (source code, metrics, stats, equations, papers, emails, whatever), you can work remotely if you have a good computer and a fast Internet connection. The remote work movement is helping to conserve a ridiculous amount of transportation fuel, but it can get even better in the future, and fast Internet is a critical first step.
The Internet is not only used for uploading resumes. Stop thinking like someone stuck in 1996, and recognize that this program is intended to open up possibilities for the rural population (about 15% of the US population, over 42 million people per the latest census) that crosses economic class boundaries and would not be possible otherwise. As someone else said, these ISPs simply would never, ever bring service to these remote areas if not for government subsidy, because these areas don't otherwise meet the company's ROI goals. These people should not be penalized for living in rural areas. And by the way, they're paying taxes, too, so it's part of their own tax money that goes to fund these programs.
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These people should not be penalized for living in rural areas.
Not massively subsidizing a choice isn't the same as penalizing that choice.
By your argument, people who live in Manhattan should receive huge federal subsidies to cover the high cost of parking a car in a very densely-packed area.
Live in a rural area? Space is cheap, broadband is expensive. Live in an urban area? Space is expensive, broadband is (relatively) cheap. No reason to help the first group but not the second.
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Aha, so here we have an "Insightful" justification for a mission creep [wikipedia.org]. Let's see...
Is such a possibility a right the government must ensure?
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This post displays a stunning lack of empathy for people who have made a choice to live in a less densely populated area. First of all, not everyone who lives in a rural area is poor. There are plenty of middle-class and upper-middle-class people who have larger land holdings or have fewer neighbors than the ISPs would ideally prefer for instant ROI.
We don't need to subsidize them though! My cellular connection is expensive for the amount of transfer I need to use most months. So expensive I do keep a lid on most personal internet use (other than a little slashdot, I never youtube etc, unless its work related). I am not complaining, this is a real cost of living where I wanted to live, its a choice I made.
I would also say we should stop subsidizing public housing in the cities. Those people should move out to where land is cheap and rents are low,
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As someone else said, these ISPs simply would never, ever bring service to these remote areas if not for government subsidy, because these areas don't otherwise meet the company's ROI goals. These people should not be penalized for living in rural areas.
Let's be honest here, this isn't business they're not taking because they don't get Apple-like margins. In most cases this is business operating at a dead loss that will never recover the investment/operating cost. Very often when you read about rural areas self-organizing to get decent broadband you have one or more enthusiasts that have spent countless hours working for free to make it happen, if they'd billed at market value the business would have gone under. It's not a penalty to expect users of a serv
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You know, it's necessary for internet cover non profitable areas: the market (with this invisible hand) not work very well in this cases...
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That is so 2008.
For finding work it isn't too hard to expect to have interviews via Skype (or other video services). Also it is cheaper to have VoIP phones than a LAN Line or a Cell Phone.
However the real issue comes down to the fact that we Want a Government controlled infrastructure of the internet as our current providers are expensive and often have bad habits. But we need to be trusted that the Government will not spy on us, and keep up with technology.
4mbs back 10 years ago, would be plenty, Today i
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You have Government-controlled infrastructure [wired.com] already and that is why it sucks. Government can not get public schools right for decades and continues to mismanage even the high-profile things [townhall.com]. You want them to take over the Internet service-provision too?
You are a fool, which would've been fine with me, except you want them to further take over my Internet-access too — not j