WSJ's Mossberg Calls For a Tougher Broadband Plan 332
GovTechGuy writes "Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg thinks the FCC's national broadband plan is long overdue, but he criticized it for being vague on the details and too focused on expanding access into rural areas. Mossberg pointed out that what passes for broadband in the US wouldn't even qualify as such in many other developed countries. He also noted that Americans pay more per unit of broadband speed than our competitors. He called on the government to devote time and resources to making sure Americans have the broadband access they need to stay competitive in the 21st century global economy."
Right on (Score:2, Insightful)
"That's like motherhood, everyone wants to vote for that and I certainly support that," Mossberg said. But there are two other issues that he said don't receive enough attention: speed and cost.
Rural access is definitely important, but the United States is predominantly urban and suburban these days, and we should be leading in broadband speeds, not following.
True, but.... (Score:4, Insightful)
He called on the government to devote time and resources to making sure Americans have the broadband access they need to stay competitive in the 21st century global economy.
That's true, but many (possibly all?) of those countries subsidize their ISP through tax dollars to get lower rates - so you're still paying for it, it's just that the monthly bill the ISP sends you is lower but the amount the government takes out of your paycheck is higher.
Has anyone ever done a study of the real cost of internet in countries where it's partially funded by taxes? Then you'd have more accurate numbers for a comparison.
Re:Right on (Score:2, Insightful)
>>>Since when did the European Union become it's own country?
Where did I say it was? Congrats on making a Strawman argument. The word I used was "federation" which is what the EU is. A federal union of 25 member states, just as the US is a federal union of 50 member states, or Canada is federal union of 15(?) member provinces.
Oh and yes "state" to describe Sweden is appropriate.
It's exactly the same word used on the EU website.
Check it out.
Re:Right on (Score:4, Insightful)
but the United States is predominantly urban and suburban these days, and we should be leading in broadband speeds, not following.
Not really, and a few extra megabits don't make a huge difference. The entire point of having a national broadband system would be to make sure that the areas in the middle of nowhere get fast access because some don't think that the private enterprise can do it (which I disagree, which is a subject of an entirely different post why nationalized anything will harm economic development and jeopardize liberties...).
No one can efficiently run an internet-based company on dial-up (in 2010 anyways...). This ends up crippling economic development for that area. And in a lot of areas that can't get broadband, you either have spotty or no cell-phone coverage meaning that 3/4G Modems aren't an option.
When you are going from 54KB/sec to 1 Mbit/sec that is a huge leap forward. Going from 7 Mbit/sec to 14 Mbit/sec isn't too much of a real increase in noticeable speeds. There are few applications that need top-of-the-line internet access, on the other hand there are many applications where having latency-encumbered and capped satellite internet or slow dial-up is going to be a huge problem.
Re:Right on (Score:4, Insightful)
It's an AVERAGE people.
It's a gimmick. Like saying Las Vegas slot machines are advertised to pay out 98% of what they take in.
Re:True, but.... (Score:3, Insightful)
You're assuming that once taxes are included the European service costs more. This may be the case; it may not.
Re:Right on (Score:4, Insightful)
Where are you getting these numbers? Where is Japan and Korea on this chart? Because they always top the other charts
Anyway, average total bandwidth is wrong metric to be using. What you want is average home bandwidth available, and average home bandwidth per dollar, or some other way of measuring how evenly distributed the bandwidth is among the population. Average is astupid because it makes no distinction between the apartment complex in Seoul, and the bums sleeping in Akamai's dumpster, since both groups have an average bandwidth of 45 Mb/s [worldpoliticsreview.com]. So what if in one case it's 10 people each with 45 Mb/s and in the other it's 1 person with 450 Mb/s and 9 people with 0 Mb/s?
It's transparent that average bandwidth is being used to whitewash over the inefficiencies in the American market when every other study places the oh about 33rd [dslreports.com] in the world, and all the ads are touting "super fast" 3 Mb/s links that rarely reach 2.5 Mb/s in practice.
It certainly appears that the free market has failed America once again. (And no one even start with rant that problem is too much regulation, when "socialist" Scandinavia kicks your ass, it ain't that.)
Re:Here's a thought... (Score:3, Insightful)
You apparently don't know bureaucrats - damaging infrastructure is a huge one. Have you tried bringing an Internet connection cable into a house without 'damaging infrastructure'? Like digging up roads or putting up cables on masts or even connecting to pre-existing copper in a house?
It would be much more effective to use the UK model - split up physical and logical providers: the cables must be owned by one company and the service must be provided by another, separate company. And the company that owns the cables must provide access to those cables at the same price to all companies that ask for it. Add a few provisions for switching service providers and about mandatory access to backbone channels for a fixed, government regulated rate and you're golden: every ISP in the whole country can compete in all markets at once.
Re:Right on (Score:5, Insightful)
The devil is in the details. The US numbers aren't for guaranteed speed, but for maximum speed, and only for download at that.
No, a 0-10 Mbps down / 0-768 kbps up line is NOT comparable to a 10 Mbps up+down line. But according to your above creative "statistics", it's the same.
Guaranteed speed is what you need to satisfy the "broadband" or "high speed" definitions in many countries; video streaming, for example, doesn't work too well unless you can guarantee a bit-rate. Which you can't with typical ADSL and cable lines.
The arguments for why the US can't provide the same speeds for the same price as European countries have been retold so many times that many Americans believe them. No, it's not because the US has such a low population density, or rural areas are so hard to reach. The Scandinavian countries have a by far lower population density, and more difficult terrain (only 2% of Norway is arable land, for example. Mountains and fjords don't make cable stretching easy, but they manage.)
The real reason is that here in the US, we are allergic to government regulations, and (incorrectly) believe that corporations do a better job. So we allow de-facto monopolies and duopolies to choose their own price and level of service, and the consumer has to take it or leave it. This is called freedom of choice.
In contrast, in socialist Norway, the typical customer can choose between several broadband providers, and owns the last few metres themselves. A cable or phone company can't claim that they own the wires and refuse others to use them. So you get real competition, higher service levels, and lower prices.
And I haven't read that any phone or cable providers over there have gone bankrupt over that either. Which means that ours are lying. Which shouldn't come as a big surprise.
It's time that we demanded something back for the $2 billion or so that was paid to the telcos at the end of the Clinton administration era, which supposedly should go to ensure broadband access to every American.
Instead, they fattened the wallets of stock holders and board members, cause there is no incentive for the telcos to increase their service as long as they don't have to compete.
Re:Right on (Score:3, Insightful)
Cool, so how are the FTTH projects doing in New York? Chicago? LA? Other top 100 cities in the USA? They must have much higher population densities than Sweeden or Finland as a whole, so surely every larger USA city must have fiber to every home. Right?
Re:Right on (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's not. It's an average of the maximum speed. It's as misleading as saying that the average American car speed is 150 mph.
To make it worse, that's only download speed. I hate to tell you, but if you have an asymmetric line like most Americans, the upload speed will only be a fraction of that.
Re:Right on (Score:4, Insightful)
That depends on your definition.
FreePress defines it as 5 Mbps downstream AND upstream, and it definitely doesn't qualify for that.
In Britain, I believe the government has pledged a guaranteed minimum rate of 2 Mbps within a few years. Yes, that's not the maximum rate but the minimum rate, which in most of the US is exactly zero.
AT&T called me the other day, wanting to know whether I would be interested in high speed Internet. I told them that yes, I would, but that they don't have high speed Internet to offer me where I live. 0-1500 kbps down and 0-512 kbps up isn't high speed. It's a shame that companies are allowed to commit fraud like this, and mislead their customers into thinking they get high speed. What they get is "High Speed Internet(TM)", which is a trademark and not a promise of Internet access that's actually high speed.
High speed compared to POTS? No, not really. Even ISDN BRI has a minimum speed that's much higher, to say nothing of PRI. And this is 2010 -- I had stopped using modems in the mid 90s. Comparing with 56k modems is as irrelevant as selling a car on the argument that it's up to 50 times faster than a horse and buggy.
Re:ROI in rural areas; low density = high overhead (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you hit the nail on the head here. The problem is what you mean with 'return'.
For an ISP a return on their investment is how much people will pay for the service.
For the society as a whole there are other returns: people get better informed, better connected, get easier access to learning and knowledge (including farming info and crop prices), people have the possibility to look beyond their surroundings and look at the big picture, people can innovate and communicate their innovations to anyone in the whole world, people can even telecommute and work jobs that are simply not available locally. The society gets a much greater 'return' from investments into the Internet in rural areas.
Therefore it is the job of the government to enact such policies that would align the ROI of the ISP with the ROI of the society. Most likely by forcing the ISPs to provide service into larger areas that contain both high-ROI and low-ROI zones so that the average ISP ROI for the whole area would be comparable to the societies ROI for the whole area.
DSL Is Not That Simple (Score:2, Insightful)
While this is a common view of how DSL technology works, it's really only true in dense urban areas with relatively new wiring. The truth is that it's actually quite complex to transmit broadband signals over telephone lines, and any number of things can interfere.
For starters, in most cases the DSLAM has to be within about 3 miles of the customer, and this is not measured as a bird flies. Sometimes the wires may twist around in all sorts of bizarre ways depending on historical construction. This makes it extremely costly for telecoms to provide broadband outside of densely populated areas, since you're looking at installing a DSLAM and the facilities to protect, support, and maintain it for a handful of houses in some rural areas. There's no way for those costs to ever be recovered. Now there are some ways to cut these costs using remote terminals rather than full DSLAMs, but this still costs vastly more than the customers can repay.
Although plain old distance-based attenuation is the biggest limiting factor, there are all kinds of other problems as well. Things like the gauge of the telephone wiring can make a big difference, and many areas historically had signal-boosting equipment installed on phone lines which produces acceptable voice quality on a flaky line, but makes broadband signal transmission all but impossible. At that point telecoms are looking at major engineering work to remove that equipment without degrading voice quality for the affected customers, all before they can even think about providing broadband service.
Without addressing these major engineering issues first, the most common results of offering broadband to customers in these areas is that they get 1/10th of the intended speed and the service cuts out every 10 minutes due to attenuation and poor signal to noise ratio. This predictably results in furious customers and repair techs trying to patch things together on an individual customer basis, and usually failing since these tend to be major jobs that can't just be fixed with duct tape. So generally the telecoms simply don't offer the service in these areas because they don't want the hassle.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm no shill for the telecoms. I know all about federal funding they've received which has gone to questionable use, and there are various things I think should be done differently. However, looking purely at the technology involved, it is not in any way a simple task to roll out rural broadband. Pretending it's easy won't help anyone; it can be done, but it will take a long time and cost a lot of money. Even assuming unlimited funding I doubt it could be finished by 2012, simply because there aren't enough field techs/engineers to complete the vast amount of requisite infrastructure work in that timeframe.
Perhaps an uninformed opinion? (Score:2, Insightful)
We need to remember that Walt works for the Wall Street Journal...
We need to remember that Klubar is a liberal Slashdot poster, who would not know a good idea if well, a Clu-By-4 hit him on the head and can see only bias rather than debate ideas on the merits.
clarification (Score:3, Insightful)
Our civil war was a "might makes right" war, plenty of legal opposition to it, just the stronger armed force won. There's little to show it was legal to keep those states in who wished to leave. But, water over the dam, past history now.
With that said, the US states as a whole CAN convene a constitutional convention, completely independent of the federal government wishes, I mean they can just demand it happen and it will, one way or the other, and if they choose to, with the required super majority, completely abolish the current union, heavily modify it, make a new union or go their separate ways..whatever they want. An open constitutional convention is just that, open. All legal under our laws. Not done yet ever, but it is a possibility that it might happen should our economy really tank much worse than it has so far (and I think it will due to debt loads in the near future) and the social construct get too contentious and out of whack (anyone would have to be living in a cave to not see this happening now). I am in favor of it, an open convention leading to dissolution then rearrangement under regional lines, because I think our current federal government is just way too broken and corrupt to "fix", similar to how the USSR dissolved quickly when they went bankrupt along with a lot of the member nations just not wishing to be in that organization any longer. It was just too big, got to be too much to keep together, too much broken, too much corruption, just too much epic fail, so it dissolved.
All our states in the US-"United States"-started out as separate nations, and could return to that, or form new regional alliances, or whatever. In addition, this is one form of our law that neither requires the approval signature of, nor can be vetoed by, any federal executive branch clerk in chief.
Along with those huge wealth skimming casino banks, "too big to fail" should also mean "too big to exist" and apply it to large political organizations. The bigger they get, the farther they get from the "we the people" folks and it gets too easy for them to get hijacked by multinational big money interests or other assorted bad influences (like today). Now that's my *opinion*, but I think today's political realities and headlines are showing that sometimes, bigger is just not necessarily better all the time. Ultra small, maybe not a good idea either, but huge lumbering out of touch corrupt and incompetent..we should think twice and thrice about that "size" government as well.
Higher prices, worse service.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Right on (Score:3, Insightful)
The only thing the civil war proved was that the stronger side won. Lincoln isn't particularly known for being a Constitutionalist.
Secession is the act that bore this union in the first place and so it remains a viable action although, predictably, the authorities in power will be against it just like they were in 1776.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secession_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
Re:True, but.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Germany does not subsidize any of the ISP's, but they do force competition. The US is slowly becoming a single provider country, at least for a given area. They can charge what they want.
Re:Right on (Score:3, Insightful)
Hosting your own dedicated game server.
Hosting your own website on your computer.
Sharing family photos.
Sending a large file assignment you just finished back to your work computer or to a client.
HD video conferencing.
Remote backup of your files.
Doing two or more of the previously listed at the same time.
I'll never understand why people assume P2P is the only possible use for upload bandwidth. My younger sister came home from her Africa trip and crippled the internet connection while uploading a few memory cards worth of pictures to flickr. It'll only get worse as they come out with 3D cameras with even more mega pixels.
Re:Right on (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd hazard a guess and say less than 1% of internet users do any of those things.