The Future of American Broadband

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[citation][nom]Drakefyre[/nom]How will this be paid for????[/citation]

If everything goes according to plan, the sale of wireless spectrum (500 MHz) will fully fund the NBP, making it "cost neutral".

-Devin
 
in india broadband is shit.... i get 1 mbps..... and that is affordable. And to some over here ill say this . It is affordable because the govt servise is cheap. So it keeps the broadband providers honest with their pricing. If there had been no govt servise, we would have had to pay through our roofs for a pitiful speed. "Sometimes" govt involvement can be good. Do not think govt is bad free and private only is good.
 
The goals are definitely worthwhile, and will benefit a great many people, but two questions must be asked:

1. At whose expense?
2. By what right?

Claims of "cost neutrality," where Government is concerned, deserve nothing more than "Yeah, right. I'll believe it when I see it." Spectrum auction proceeds are likely to be consumed by a [new] parasitical bureaucracy before the first improvement appears to any consumer.
 
@ all you free market people the problem is local governments have already limited the free market( at the demand of the providers) which is why I have the choice of only two providers and both are very expensive, and not interested in upgrading anything. so I say put the thumb screws on and make them provide the service we are already paying for and not getting
 
Free market is all well and good. But imho you can compare this to road building. Would you wait for business to build freeways and sidewalks? What's in it for them?
What are you paying taxes for, if not for something like this?
 
i asked time warner about upgrading to their Wideband (name?) service. the want $100/month extra over what i already pay for their highspeed cable broadband.

$100! you got to be out of your mind.
 
People misunderstand the way that telecom works in this country, especially cable. Most communities have had their local governments vote to give sole access to a single company, i.e. legal monopolization. B/C of this, the "free market" can no longer operate. I for example live in a fairly large population area in what is typically known as a hi-tech place, with lots of major tech companies based here. But, because our loval govt allowed comcast sole access to the lines, we have been dicked over on cable connections. Same thing happened with DSL. You could use any ISP you wanted, but the line costs were always and only with qwest.

IMO FIOS is our only savior. Companies who are smart (read: Verizon) are willing to lay down new, modern cable, and invest in new, modern equipment, will begin to own face on these stagnating telecom giants. In every community where FIOS is available, the reports i have heard is that the service, speeds, basically everything about it is vastly VASTLY superior.
 
[citation][nom]K_M82[/nom]i always think government building internet infrastructure like government building a railway or power grid. the government always build those things because the initial investment to build those things is always too expensive for private enterprise. and once the infrastructure is build the private enterprise can rent that infrastructure.[/citation]

The only problem is Private Enterprise is simply only about the money, and not about customers. I work for ATT (Network Engineer), and the problem really isnt cable laying because we have plenty of unlit cable all across the country. Problem lies in lighting this fiber, and maintaining CPE, PTE, and LGX. Internet Speeds with the exception of the past three years with the boom in youtube and netflix, pandora etc... Internet speeds had been stagnant for several years. Prices stayed high only to milk customers because we knew we could get away with it. If you ever travel over seas check out the average speeds of connections in different countries. I have been to Japan, and South Korea several times and my last trip to South Korea in December of last year I was there for 2 weeks. Average speed I personally encountered from numerous internet cafes, and hotels and business accommodations was roughly around 20mb for me. Now the national average there hovers right around 15mb/s. Their average is easily double the united states average, and its possibly more than triple because I honestly never experienced a connection below 18mb. Most were around 20, 25, 30mb when i was there.
If it wasnt for youtube, netflix, and porn ISP wouldnt have been forced to start upping speeds.
People constantly say well the technology just isn't there and blah blah. Almost every motherboard even the real cheap foxconn motherboards that go into emachines desktops for the past two years have gigabyte network connections. For the past easily 8 years I have physically seen and worked with 10Gbps (STS-192/192c) or what's commonly called OC-192. And even longer than that STS-48/48c (2.48Gbps). If companies werent so money hungry this could easily trickle down to regular consumers. And im quite surprised it really hasn't. I was so happy with Verizon released there FIOS at crazy high speeds for america at DSL prices. Just about killed Cable, so they where forced to up there speeds. So now you see cable companies offering speeds at 50mbs and more now. And Uverse is set to ramp up the speeds as needed.
I dont know if having the government getting involved would change anything, I can only speak from what I have seen the past twenty years and the private sector is simply only about money, and not about improving throughput. I dont know if it will be a fix, but it coundnt be any worse than what we have now.
 
[citation][nom]pokabur[/nom]This is fucking retarded! Why does the government want to get involved in everything?? Let the free market do its job, i doubt its going to cost little to nothing cause thats what they always say. Furthermore since when is the government good at doing things like this? NEVER! All this is is just more government in your life.[/citation]

Was supposed to quote this post. I dont know how that happen. But here is the post again. Sorry about the double.

The only problem is Private Enterprise is simply only about the money, and not about customers. I work for ATT (Network Engineer), and the problem really isnt cable laying because we have plenty of unlit cable all across the country. Problem lies in lighting this fiber, and maintaining CPE, PTE, and LGX. Internet Speeds with the exception of the past three years with the boom in youtube and netflix, pandora etc... Internet speeds had been stagnant for several years. Prices stayed high only to milk customers because we knew we could get away with it. If you ever travel over seas check out the average speeds of connections in different countries. I have been to Japan, and South Korea several times and my last trip to South Korea in December of last year I was there for 2 weeks. Average speed I personally encountered from numerous internet cafes, and hotels and business accommodations was roughly around 20mb for me. Now the national average there hovers right around 15mb/s. Their average is easily double the united states average, and its possibly more than triple because I honestly never experienced a connection below 18mb. Most were around 20, 25, 30mb when i was there.
If it wasnt for youtube, netflix, and porn ISP wouldnt have been forced to start upping speeds.
People constantly say well the technology just isn't there and blah blah. Almost every motherboard even the real cheap foxconn motherboards that go into emachines desktops for the past two years have gigabyte network connections. For the past easily 8 years I have physically seen and worked with 10Gbps (STS-192/192c) or what's commonly called OC-192. And even longer than that STS-48/48c (2.48Gbps). If companies werent so money hungry this could easily trickle down to regular consumers. And im quite surprised it really hasn't. I was so happy with Verizon released there FIOS at crazy high speeds for america at DSL prices. Just about killed Cable, so they where forced to up there speeds. So now you see cable companies offering speeds at 50mbs and more now. And Uverse is set to ramp up the speeds as needed.
I dont know if having the government getting involved would change anything, I can only speak from what I have seen the past twenty years and the private sector is simply only about money, and not about improving throughput. I dont know if it will be a fix, but it coundnt be any worse than what we have now.
 
I agree with the guy above me, companies are focusing solely on profits and installing new equipment cost's money which involves a ROI analysis, now this will never add up for a company because seriously their is virtually no competition and who want's to pay even more for there broadband? As a point of reference my speeds are 320/160 @ $55 monthly.

People keep asking how this system would work, think of it in term's of car's and emissions ratings, government set's a bar and the market has to adapt to meet it.
 
Well I'm all for it. I live in a rural area (about 70 miles outside of Las Vegas, Nevada) and broadband is pretty much limited to the city center and if your not living in that center, your pretty much SOL.

I pay Verizon $120 a month for two mobile broadband lines, each with a 5GB bandwidth cap (with a provision for $0.25 per megabyte over the cap) and average speeds of 0.60Mb down and 0.05Mb up.

To say I'm being raked over the coals is quite an understatement and so when I see an article like this, it gives me great hope for the future. The speeds most of you complain about are speeds I can only dream of getting. When I only had one data line, I couldn't even do things like stream videos off of YouTube or do excessive downloading of music from iTunes. I had to add a second line just to take advantage of the things that most people take for granted.

But for newer things like streaming movie rentals from Netflix? Forget it... too much of a drain on the bandwidth. Purchasing games from Playstation Network or XBOX Live? Depends on how much of a bandwidth surplus I have towards the end of month (since Verizon doesn't offer bandwidth rollover, any unused bandwidth at the end of the month is gone forever).

And don't even get me started on latency. I play MMORPG's, so I don't feel the burn of latency quite as badly as I would if I played FPS's... but it still hurts. Things like PvP in World of Warcraft just aren't an option due to latency. Doing endgame raids that require adapting to scripted events (such as Thaddeus in Naxxramas) is often hit-or-miss due to latency.

And the sad thing is... where I live... the only other options are satellite which, while being cheaper than Verizon, comes with an even bigger latency gap due to the distance between the home and the satellite orbiting the planet (2ms minimum each way)... or dial-up.
 
[citation][nom]idisarmu[/nom]Where I live (though this is Canada), we get 1.5mbps down, 512k up for $45 per month. I would be quite happy with 5 down, 1 up for $40-50.... for a while at least.[/citation]

Where do you live in Canada? I pay $45 a month and get 15Mbps down and 1Mbps up.

This is good news for everyone in North America. Our broadband speeds are not up to par with
 
[citation][nom]kutark[/nom]People misunderstand the way that telecom works in this country, especially cable. Most communities have had their local governments vote to give sole access to a single company, i.e. legal monopolization. B/C of this, the "free market" can no longer operate. I for example live in a fairly large population area in what is typically known as a hi-tech place, with lots of major tech companies based here. But, because our loval govt allowed comcast sole access to the lines, we have been dicked over on cable connections. Same thing happened with DSL. You could use any ISP you wanted, but the line costs were always and only with qwest.IMO FIOS is our only savior. Companies who are smart (read: Verizon) are willing to lay down new, modern cable, and invest in new, modern equipment, will begin to own face on these stagnating telecom giants. In every community where FIOS is available, the reports i have heard is that the service, speeds, basically everything about it is vastly VASTLY superior.[/citation]

So basically government intervention ALREADY fucked up the free market and since theres barely any competition theres no incentive for the companies to expand or upgrade. They will always have customers because the customers HAVE to use them. What caused this?? government intervention and whats going to solve this? more government intervention? i think not. Lets get to the root of the problem and fix that.

And i have to agree, FIOS is amazing. TV, internet and phone for about 100 bucks is a pretty good deal if you ask me. =-P
 
[citation][nom]pokabur[/nom]So basically government intervention ALREADY fucked up the free market and since theres barely any competition theres no incentive for the companies to expand or upgrade. They will always have customers because the customers HAVE to use them. What caused this?? government intervention and whats going to solve this? more government intervention? i think not. Lets get to the root of the problem and fix that.And i have to agree, FIOS is amazing. TV, internet and phone for about 100 bucks is a pretty good deal if you ask me. =-P[/citation]

Limited space, if different companies run different standards can't run the on the same cable. Which means double...tripe...quadruple the lines, see where I'm going? Right now as far as I'm aware on the cable side you only have 2 signals to worry about Motorolla's and Scientific Atlanta.
 
Being a conservative im usually against the government butting it's nose into thins but this i truly believe in.

I think having the internet is a right and no one should go without it.

as long as their internet isn't loaded with seeds and trackers and they don't watch my every move i'd be fine with it.

and of course it would need to be fast and cheap
 
Thank you azgard for the explanation :)

Dj1001 thats as ridiculous as saying healthcare is a right. Both are goods/services that everybody should have to pay for. This is a quote from the highly respected judge Andrew napolitano that explains what a right is.

A right is a gift from God that extends from our humanity.

Thinkers from St. Thomas Aquinas, to Thomas Jefferson, to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to Pope John Paul II have all argued that our rights are a natural part of our humanity. We own our bodies, thus we own the gifts that emanate from our bodies. So, our right to life, our right to develop our personalities, our right to think as we wish, to say what we think, to publish what we say, our right to worship or not worship, our right to travel, to defend ourselves, to use our own property as we see fit, our right to due process – fairness – from the government, and our right to be left alone, are all rights that stem from our humanity. These are natural rights that we are born with. The government doesn’t give them to us and the government doesn’t pay for them and the government can’t take them away, unless a jury finds that we have violated someone else’s rights.
 
Healthcare IS a right in the United States, despite the protests of those who can't get over the last election.

The free-market-solves-everything zealots should take a good long look at the economy and what unregulated predator capitalism did to the United States.

Comcast and AT&T have no incentive to serve the 30 percent of my home state which doesn't have any broadband options, only dial-up and laggy, expensive dish service. There's no ROI, nothing to feed bonuses for management and the shareholders, no business incentive to improve broadband services. Government builds public libraries, roads, and other infrastructure for the common good. Let it address the shabby, uncompleted deployment of broadband for our children's future.
 
[citation][nom]Nate_Bob465[/nom]Healthcare IS a right in the United States, despite the protests of those who can't get over the last election.The free-market-solves-everything zealots should take a good long look at the economy and what unregulated predator capitalism did to the United States.Comcast and AT&T have no incentive to serve the 30 percent of my home state which doesn't have any broadband options, only dial-up and laggy, expensive dish service. There's no ROI, nothing to feed bonuses for management and the shareholders, no business incentive to improve broadband services. Government builds public libraries, roads, and other infrastructure for the common good. Let it address the shabby, uncompleted deployment of broadband for our children's future.[/citation]

First off healthcare is not a right nor will it ever be a right. You cannot just magically say that healthcare is a right because people need it. Just because US living in the US are forced to get insurance doesnt mean its a right. People need food and shelter but it doesn't mean that they get it all times. Rights are from our humanity and i think its pathetic to include Healthcare or internet as human rights. I also find it funny that you don't explain your reasoning, why is that? Why do you think that its a right?

What you don't understand about the US economy is that there is a central bank that manipulates the free market. So its not the free market thats messed up, its government intervention and regulation. I think you should research economics a bit more to learn what a free market is and to find out what central banks do.
 
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