JK op-ed: Taking the Lead on Broadband

[Luftmensch067]

Taking the lead on broadband
Too few providers competing for consumers in Western Massachusetts results in weaker service and higher prices than necessary.
By John Kerry
Updated: 03/22/2010 09:50:45 AM EDT

Monday March 22, 2010

WASHINGTON

As a kid, we watched the news on a little black and white television and counted on a daily newspaper to deliver events around the world to our doorstep. Today millions of Americans have access to laptops, smart phones, and Wi- Fi broadband service that connect them to the Internet and to thousands of media outlets updated by the minute - even as they walk throughout their homes and streets. These advances are great, but they're incomplete. America invented the Internet, but we still haven't reached the goal of universal broadband service, and consumers here don't enjoy the prices or level of service common in many other advanced countries today. Experts debate where we rank in the world of broadband providers, but one fact is clear: we are nowhere near number one. And that is where the United States belongs. For a country as great as we are, in a global market growing more competitive by the minute, if you're not first, you're last. Falling behind means lost opportunities for job creation, innovation, and economic development in rural America and our cities. In Boston, the last time the data was collected in 2006, 80 percent of kids in our public schools did not have broadband Internet service at home and most of them still don't because their parents just can't afford it. In Western Massachusetts, towns like Monroe and Savoy have no broadband service and others, like West Stockbridge and Chesterfield have only one broadband provider.

Read more here: http://www.berkshireeagle.com/ci_14725748?source=most_emailed

[beachmom]

1. Well, this is interesting. Kerry and the Economist seem to be thinking in a similar fashion:

http://www.economist.com/world/united-states/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15732610&fsrc=rss

They say there isn't enough competition, and I think they kind of have a point.

Almost uniquely among OECD countries, America has adopted no policies to require the owners of broadband cables to open their infrastructure to rival sellers in order to enhance competition. America relies almost exclusively on “facilities competition”, the provision of rival infrastructures: a cable provider may compete, for example, with a network that runs optical fibre to the home. True, there is a legitimate worry that forcing a company to rent out parts of its infrastructure to competitors may deter investment, but a review of international broadband policies prepared for the FCC by Harvard’s Berkman Centre for Internet & Society revealed a range of successful compromises in use in other countries. The FCC has availed itself of none of them, and suggests that wireless broadband could instead provide more competition. But wireless data transfer is very much slower and less reliable than fixed broadband; it is more a complement than a competitor.

If America’s facilities-based system were really working, the country would at the very least enjoy first-rate broadband in dense urban areas where providers are most likely to recoup their investments quickly. Yet in February the Saïd Business School at Oxford and the Universidad de Oviedo released a study, funded by Cisco, that produced a broadband quality score based on bit volume and speed, mapped against current and probable future applications. Chicago, America’s best-performing city, ranked 26th, below Sofia and Bucharest. No American city was judged “ready for tomorrow”. Among countries America ranked 16th, which is roughly where it falls on almost any available measure of broadband penetration or quality. That is not good enough.

There is a lot of work to be done.

[Inuca]

2. As somebody

living in a very rural area and having costly and lousy satellite service as my only available boradband option, I am putting my hopes in this, though I am sure it will take a while until it reaches me, if at all. I also work at a rural community college now, and one serious problem we have is the serious shortage of the bandwidth availability, unless we pay for fiber optics to be brought to our doorsteps, we of course the college cannot afford to do and the state (IL) even less.

Anybody happens to know where I can find a good synopsis of what is being proposed?

[beachmom]

3. Here are a few things to check out:

http://www.broadband.gov/

http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/03/the-bandwidth-crunch

I think the above may also become available via podcast which you can download and listen to. That might work better for you.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9170158/FCC_s_national_broadband_plan_What_s_in_it_

I have to say I am discouraged by what I am seeing in Google. Way too many "process" "opposition" stories and not enough explaining what it is. And of course I saw a Fox Business story comparing it to health care reform. I mean really? The Right is opposed to keeping up with technology?

[Luftmensch067]

4. The Right is opposed

to anything the current administration might be able to accomplish that will put their dreams of future hegemony in doubt.

[Inuca]

5. Thanks beachmom!

The COmputerWorl article was quite informative, though of course it is way too early to get a feeling how this will affect me personally. Unless they bring some kind of wire close to my (literally) neck of the woods, I am limited to satellite (other forms of wireless would require me to cut a whole bunch of trees that I am NOT willing to do)

[beachmom]

6. The UK is openly mocking the U.S.'s plan. This is in the same vein as The Economist article,

and the way I am understanding it, in the UK, the lines that were put in the ground (like fiber optics) are open to competition. So, for example, if Comcast owns those lines they would be REQUIRED to rent space out to competition ISPs. This resulted in prices going DOWN in the UK for internet connections.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/03/uk-regulators-officially-mock-us-over-isp-competition.ars

The U.S. is doing virtually nothing and frankly, the time to have done it was earlier in the century (i.e. during the Bush Admin.) when there was still more growth to be had in new internet connection customers. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that if you have a lot of ISPs fighting over your business, prices will not be as high. The other problem is that with less competition, there is less incentive to speed up the connection. So . . . with current and future policy the way it is (beholden to large corporations), the U.S. will remain way behind other countries in regards to internet speed and percentage of American households with internet access.