FCC Seeks To Improve US Broadband Access 161
MojoKid writes "The US Federal Communications Commission
is working on a plan to solve the problem of nationwide access to high-speed Internet service. The three main issues the agency is tackling first are, figuring out how to improve availability, quality and affordability. Acting FCC Chairman Michael J.
Copps held a meeting this week where he asked the public to comment on the national broadband plan, which Congress has demanded be done by February. The public has 60 days to submit comments; the agency and members of the public will be able to reply to comments for an additional 30 days after that."
Didn't they (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Simple (Score:4, Insightful)
Auction off something cheap, so some companies could get a start.
No big company would EVER use their resources to start a smaller puppet company who's sole intention was to buy a piece of the spectrum and sell service for rates as absurd as text messaging rates..just to keep the competition away.
Never!
Re:broadband (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Resist wireless. It's a short term ploy that isn't even 'broadband'. Modulation schemes today require lots of nearby APs, and that sucks.
Instead, the USA has to buckle down and run fiber, like we did twisted pairs decades and decades ago. Wireless sounds good until you realize just what a rotten long term investment. Remember 802.11a, then, b, then g, and now the might-one-day-be-ratified n? Or how about that great WhyMax stuff? Want some LTE anyone? How about some bonded channels for GSM? Really-- trenched fiber is the best long term way to go. If you invested 20 years ago, you're still using it and haven't found an upper end limit to its capacity for speed.
Re:Is this a purpose of today's FCC? (Score:4, Insightful)
Lazziez faire doesn't work in reality.
In a perfect world, companies would want to profit. They would always look ahead to the future to ensure that they only took what the market could bear, for breaking the market would break their company just the same.
This is not a perfect world. Companies want to profit and destroy the competition and lock in their customers. They want to collude to lock out your cell phone's features that you paid several times over retail for, they want to change your contracts after you sign them and still bind you to them, they want to pack in all kinds of hidden fees and charges sixty-three pages deep into their contract, and most of all, they want to please the shareholders.
The shareholders ensure that only the biggest assholes will be in upper management. The shareholders want their profit check and they want it now. Who cares if the company isn't in business in 20 years? The shareholders have enough money to buy stock in other companies, and run them into the ground too.
First (Score:5, Insightful)
Demand that all service providers act as common carriers, or "dumb pipes", if you will. To insure access for everybody, the basic infrastructure must be managed by a publicly accountable entity, the government, just like the roads. And these "roads" must accept all kinds of traffic. No tiering, no filtering, none of that. The "last mile" can be leased out to those who will accept these conditions. We need consumer protection with real teeth. They won't do it unless they hear from us. So speak up, and speak LOUD. I am formulating my letter at this very moment. To those of you who want to leave it up to the market, I respectfully remind you of the AM stereo debacle, and American cell phone service.
Don't forget.. (Score:3, Insightful)
To eliminate bandwidth caps.
Doesn't do much good to have it if you cant use it.
Re:Simple (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with your ideal solution is it's pretty much impossible to connect to areas of low population or between areas of dense population. A mesh network might work OK throughout downtown New York City (though I have doubts on that even - it seems to me there would be a huge amount of stress on the nodes towards the center), but how are you going to connect NYC to LA? Or even NYC to Boston? Hell, even my house, in a small university town near Pittsburgh, would have nearly no connectivity - my house is only about 10-20 yards away from my neighbors, but even that is too far for a decent WiFi signal...and there are _many_ houses around me that are quite a bit further apart. And even if you managed to network our neighborhood through WiMax or something, you have a three or four mile stretch in to town, mostly forest. And even if you overcame that, somehow, without putting excessive strain on the one or two links between them, then you have to find some way to link our small town to the next one, a good 30+ miles away. I suppose there are one or two highways that might have enough houses along them if you can find a wireless technology that can reach 5-10 miles, but then you're talking one or two stress points for the entire town's connection. How are you going to handle that much traffic over a wireless link? And I don't even want to think about trying to connect places in Wyoming or something. Unless you're talking ultra slow connections through HF radio, wireless just isn't going to cut it. And hell, even that probably wouldn't work out too well.
Basically, to mesh network any sizable percentage of the nation, you need wireless technologies that can reach tens or hundreds of miles and can support at least tens of thousands of connections routing through a single node. I admit I don't know that much about radio technology, but it doesn't seem very feasible to me.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
$7 billion for the phone companies? (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO, the telcos and cable companies are why we have some of the worst "broadband" access in our homes. They've been dragging their feet, similar to the way the RIAA has been, fighting tooth and nail to not give the customers what they want.
As much as I'm for better broadband, I'm extremely against giving it to the telcos to implement. We already gave them $2 billion to develop Fiber To The Home by 2000. As of 2009 I know of almost noone who has or even can get this service, it's only in a couple of hot spots where you can get it.
Worse, the telcos seem to see high speed home networks as competition for their business services, so they dramatically limit the outbound rates. 900kbps is a pretty small pipe to push backups of my home systems across, for example.
I personally like the ideas of "homes with tails", the home owners owning the fiber from their houses to a pedestal or "meet me" location, and then the providers can get access in there and users can get different options for that connectivity.
Sean
Step One (Score:4, Insightful)
Eliminate stupid practices like bandwidth caps & metered usage designed to squeeze out competition from online video services while abusing the government-granted monopoly position.
I'm looking at TW in Rochester, San Antonio, and 4 other cities. You know who you are.
Re:$7 billion for the phone companies? (Score:5, Insightful)
If I only had mod points. You just took the words right out of my mouth. Congress should be DEMANDING better/cheaper access after the phone companies have done virtually nothing to hold their end of the deal up. Now they want to implement a tiered internet and ridiculously low caps (40GB??) All the while trying to charge us more?? I think the consumers are getting a pretty raw deal, especially when you see the Japan and Korea are getting hundreds of megabits out of copper. Surely bandwidth costs have come down in the last 10 years domestically. So theoretically they should be making even more off consumers as their costs should be going down. Look at it this way. You pay $50 for cable and $50 for internet. Those 150 channels cost the cable company a LOT more than even 200 gigabytes worth of data transmissions. Problem is that the ISPs all want a piece of a bigger pie than just simply providing 0s and 1s to your door will give them. God help us if net neutrality fails.
Re:Simple (Score:4, Insightful)
Fiber is simply too expensive. Have you ever driven across the continent? Well I have. Several times. There's a whole lot of *nothing* out there and digging up literally millions of miles of dirt to run fiber to farmhouses is going to cost a shitload of money.
I still think DSL is the answer to getting highspeed internet to isolated locations like Wyoming or Idaho or Montana. The copper lines are already present, so all the telephone company needs do is install the DSLAM for any customer that requests an upgrade (as mandated by a new law). Even if the wires are relatively poor condition, they should be able to handle 1000 kbit/s speeds, which is far superior to current dialup maximums of 50. And most importantly: It's a cheap upgrade that minimizes the burden on taxpayers.
BTW my current speed happens to be 700k, not by limitation but by choice. $15 a month is all I'm willing to spend, and it works great. I just finished watching the latest Supernatural episode at cwtv.com - no problems whatsoever. I don't need a 50,000 kbit/s line just as I don't need an 800 horsepower NASCAR to get to work.
Re:Simple (Score:3, Insightful)
Haven't done the math, have you? Haven't talked to people in Montana, Utah, and other places that are doing fiber today, doing it cheaply, and getting bandwidth to dream of.
There are some places where the economics won't work. Consider them the last mile +. Get them with point-to-point WiMax or a cellular... or at worst, a sat dish.
Re:Monopolies (Score:1, Insightful)
You are talking about regulation, and that, sir, is no different than Socialism.
I know this because I heard it on the radio today. And did you also know that it's possible to be a socialist, fascist, marxist, appeaser, quisling, muslim extremist, and liberal all at the same time? It's all over the AM dial. I wasn't sure who they were talking about, but anybody who can be all those things is pretty impressive. He should be president.
Seriously, I wonder if anyone else has realized that the Internet, that we all love so much, is an example of how successful socialist (small "S") policies can be. Strange how it's also been a boon for free speech. That's not supposed to happen (according to the AM radio).
Feb. of what Year? (Score:3, Insightful)
Really when do they want to do this?
I think everyone reading slashdot wants this to happen, and knows what would make it happen. The only question here is can government ignore the lobbyists long enough to do the right thing.
Re:Monopolies (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm a libertarian, and I still think that preventing/punishing monopolistic business practices is within the list of powers governments should have.
Re:Monopolies (Score:3, Insightful)
If you make them rent, you still have the same monopoly. What you have to do is let other companies lay lines. For that, you've got to basically blast the local governments out of the way, because it's way too easy for incumbents to bribe them into setting up barriers--see Philadelphia's resistance to cable competition.
Re:Monopolies (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, but the FCC and Congress can fix that problem. And in my mind they should. The problem is simple enough, monopoly. So allow municipal projects to lay fiber so long as they provide no services to the end user and all retailers get the same rates, no exceptions. In addition, ban any and all governments from restricting competition by granting monopolies for last mile services.
This provides 2 paths for competition. Over the municipal system (see: UTOPIA Project for a good description of this working in Utah). Or by anyone laying their own fiber.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Manufactured Problem? (Score:2, Insightful)
I know this is "news for nerds" and us nerds have just GOT to have broadband, but is this really a problem?
Believe it or not, there are still places in this country that don't have telephone service, or just got it. Do you think their lives were less full or less meaningful because of this absence?
I really see this as an entitlement problem. Sure, broadband internet access is great for certain things, but almost all of those things are something people can easily survive without. You are not entitled to a cheap, all-pervasive internet backbone just because it's something you want.
I'm sure it provides some brief little endorphine kick when you log onto twitter or your blog and scream at some ahole because you're right and he's wrong, but isn't that really an activity that can be done without? And it certainly can be done in 5 minutes on a dial-up instead of 5 seconds on DSL.
I know this is hard for some of us nerds to get through our heads, but high-speed internet access is really just a convenience. And while we may consider it highly necessary for some of the things we do day-to-day, it is not fundamentally necessary for everyone in order to have a fulfilling life.
So go ahead, I'd love to hear an actual rational argument for why money should be taken by threat of force or incarceration and used to force people who may not even want a given service to at the very least accept a "hook-up" for that service so that the future owners of their home will be able to become subscribers to some internet service.
Re:Manufactured Problem? (Score:1, Insightful)
Your premise rests on the flimsy argument that broadband is the only acceptable form of internet access.
I'll agree, once you've had access to even 384Kb/s it's pretty tough to go back to dial-up but I am still unconvinced broadband is a right.
Also, the definition of something as a basic human right implies a restriction on a government.
Aritcle 3: Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
It would be silly to suggest that this means the government must provide any of these things, it can only make laws preventing or punishing their removal.
The same is true for internet access. Defining it as a "human right" is a way of saying the government shouldn't be able to take it away without "due process", not a way of saying it should be provided for all and subsidized with tax money.