blog.wired.com — There's a bandwidth gap between the United States and the rest of the developing world that President Obama wants closed, and the feds are about to ask for help devising a plan to catch up to the Japans of the world.
Mar 23, 2009 View in Crawl 4
kevnacaMar 23, 2009
Thank the hundreds of telco and cable lobbiests who delay spending on advancements in order to make bigger profits. The only solution is to make broadband into a public utility that covers the whole country like electricity does and also not prioritize what is sent over it. Lets face it, the internet is no more a luxury like having a telephone or electricity was it is the way of life.
chaos36Mar 24, 2009
Yep. i used to live in BFE about 20 miles from a city. At about 100,000 a mile to lay the lines, for such a small town it wasn't worth the money for any company to lay the lines. I hear they have some wireless broadband out there now. Glad I left that place.
figgypowerMar 24, 2009
@EarlOfLade: I don't know about you, but in most parts of the U.S. the utilities don't compete. The utilities lock up exclusive contracts. Case in point: Ann Arbor, MI. If you're lucky, there are two providers, and a duopoly is not exactly a competitive free market.
katiejones73Mar 24, 2009
my god is there anything this man wont do??..ts good to see some constructive steps finally being taken towards getting those men and women out of iraq..on a lighter note: check out this hilarious obama spoof i found on youtube..by far the funniest political commentary ive seen in months!!<a class="user" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_pe7duWAEg&amp;fea" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_pe7duWAEg&amp;fea</a> ...
gkiltzMar 24, 2009
We CAN solve this problem. To do so, we have to get this idea out of our heads of one single "Magic Bullet" technology. We need, instead, to look at what each technology is capable of, think of it as a tool, that can solve some piece of the problem, and figure out which part it is best suited to solve! Keep in mind that satellites have that latency! It's inherent in the geosynchronous orbit!The future lies will building out rural parts of the country in fiber, then strategically placing wireless access points at the population clusters, while leaving the lower-density rural areas, and even the fringes near the high density areas to connect directly to the fiber, either by fiber-to-device, or CAT-6 to the device, or, where the cost can be justified, wireless routers that cover a couple of rooms! I'm no fan of the cable companies, but to give credit where it's due, they were smart to put fiber to the neighborhood, then roll to coax at the neighborhood level, and link individual houses and businesses to the system with COAX! Now, they don't have an overwhelming investment to take that to the next level, and go fiber to the premises, leaving the COAX in place as a backup, and /or peak-demand circuit! Starting from scratch, even linking wireless access points with fiber is going to be insanely expensive. Satellites are good for one-way streaming, but have some real issues when upstream and downstream traffic are close to equal volume, or where high latency is a killer, such as VOIP, or "Telepresence!"The difficulty companies such as Verizon face is, they can go two ways. either try to modify the existing wireless network to carry more bandwidth, and while that has possibilities, there are spectrum-utilization and interference issues that are not going to be easy to get around, or they can essentially rebuild the wireline network with fiber. I suspect the solution will involve a fairly complex combination of the two!The USDA?The Rural Electrification Administration is not really up to the task themselves. The template they provided can be tweaked a little and will still work! It may not be the most ideal methodology, but it is a proven success! The record of bringing both electric and wireline phone service to rural America is irrefutable. While it is true that many of the rural telcos set up originally have been folded into larger companies at this point, that took 30 years, so, even if it takes 10 years on broadband, the concept was still a successful one. One of the reasons why people who live in rural areas use wireline telephone so much more than city dwellers do is because, in most of rural America, cell phone signals, where they exist more than a mile or so off the interstates, frankly stink! So much for letting private enterprise solve the problemThis problem is completely solvable! We've solved bigger problems! At the time we built our nationwide power grid, and our nationwide wireline telephone network, also the national interstate highway system, the technologies available to us were roughly at the same point as broadband technology is today, and we did it! The sad part: I don't see that kind of political will out there anywhere today!
shauncorleoneMar 24, 2009
"the feds are about to ask for help"Why is it, every time the feds ask for help, my behind starts to hurt?
teichenauerMar 24, 2009
Come now, are you reading what you write? The Internet "needs to be re-engineered from the top down by people who are not currently in the industry." Where are these people going to come from. There is no backbone, only dozens of ISPs. <a class="user" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering</a>
Closed AccountMar 24, 2009
Don't take this question as an attack, but: who are you to determine what a luxury is?I pay someone to cut my lawn...they cut my lawn.I pay someone to fix my car...they fix my car.I pay for internet...I get internet.These are services that I choose to pay for. I don't see how internet is any different.If my lawn wasn't cut, perhaps I could argue that neighbors property values would suffer. By your logic, should the government mow my grass? If my car was broken, I could not get to work and contribute to the economy. By your logic, should the government fix my car? Where does it end?