Open proposal for national town-hall meetings on America-wide broadband

Andy Oram, an editor at O'Reilly, sez

The Obama Administration decided to expand always-on, high-speed network access in the US, but there's a limit to what can be decreed in Washington. I tried to combine practices that seem to have been successful in a proposal to the recent forum set up the by White House.

Maybe half (maybe) of the US population has always-on, high-speed network access. But we need more access for more people so we can offer more educational and economic opportunities. Check out the proposal, vote for it if you like it, and get other people talking.

Local forums to implement high-speed networks (broadband): proposal open for votes (Thanks, Andy!)

• [zuzu]

  A simple local government solution would be to simply float a bond for a local fibre loop to provide fibre-to-the-curb (FTTC) for every building in town. Then allow any ISP to compete to provide Internet access over that fibre; which would drive the competitive price down to about $20/month for 100Mbps symmetric.

  (A 10Gbps wide area network for the town might have other emergent benefits; maintaining the end-to-end principle is critical. It must simply be a fiber optic dumb network.)

  This is as legitimate as other infrastructure building by local governments, such as sewers, gas, roads, and possibly electricity.

  Of course, you’d somehow need to keep the telecom lobbyists out, lest they sandbag the project, the same way that they keep competitors off the rights-of-way (i.e. telephone poles).

  c.f. UTOPIA

• [Timothy Hutton]

  USC fee is a Government tax, not a telco fee.

  Demanding that a telco do something (anything) in six months guarantees it won’t happen. It isn’t a question of motivation, you have to consider realities – DSLAMs are only so plentiful, and if every ILEC (Verizon, southestrn Bell, etc.) telco needs to install tens of millions of DSLAM ports to offer DSL it simply won’t happen.

  ILECs already have to sell DSL service where it is offered, it is required since they decided to enter the long distance market.

  Gov’t subsidies can overcome undersubscribed ABBA offerings, but is that the best use of government funds?

  There are people without cable TV, touch tone phone service, sewer service, telephone service, nearby supermarkets (healthy food choices), adequate police service, and nearby access to a hospital.

  I believe nesrly every school and many libraries have Internet access, paid for (in part, at least) with federal government subsidies – ABBA is available for free to many that can’t get access at home.

  I am truely amazed at the los number of comments on this topic (but I’m also very pleased with the quality of these dozen or so comments)…

• [Anonymous]

  I rather see some sort of decentralized high bandwidth packet radio technology developed than universal fiber optics. The way things are going, in 5 or so years websites will be strictly licensed, content will be geographically controlled, and everyone will have an online identity registered with the government. Yeah, universal broadband will allow people to consume intellectual property at a greater rate, but if people think that the governments of the world are going to subsidize unfettered global communication, you are sadly mistaken. Governments only allowed it thus far because they where largely ignorant of the technology in the past… but nowadays, they will have no trouble stirring up enough hysteria over terrorists, hate groups, or pedophiles to make it politically viable to place severe restrictions on the net. We need technology in place for when the government decides to censor and control all they bandwidth they subsidize.

• [zyodei]

  1) Nationwide broadband is rolled out.

  2) Because of a lack of paying subscribers, existing firms go out of business and stop offering the service, or are all rolled up into one megacorp big enough to compete with the govt.

  3) Eventually, something happens, some sort of crisis, and the government decides it needs to censor/regulate/control the flow of information. It’s the governments’ Internet, right? It does it in the name of the public good. Save the taxpayers money from people leeching too much bandwidth, combat Al Qaeda, protect the children, etc.

  4) We no longer have access to free and universally unfiltered Internet access in most of the country, except through sattelite or something like that.

  Whether step three takes years or decades, who knows. But it’s highly likely to happen in some form.

  If you want to push something like this in your community, that’s fine. On a national level, it’s a dangerous idea, despite its allure.

• [Ernunnos]

  Still hoping for that pony, huh?

• [Jewels Vern]

  The one thing the internet does NOT need is government help. I am quite happy to provide whatever access I choose or can find and to do without if I don’t like the terms.

• [Anonymous]

  You can get “broadband” (768 kbps down) everywhere…it’s called satellite. It has high latency, low caps and copious amounts of suck.

  There’s also cellular broadband (3G), which is available in a surprising number of places that can’t get cable or DSL. Small problem: low caps, low enough as to be unsuitable as a home connection.

  Many areas also have wireless internet providers (WISPs). Problem is, lots of them use “carrier grade WiFi” (sorry, but that’s an oxymoron in my experience) to deliver service. Others use Motorola’s Canopy tech, which is high-quality but low-bandwidth compared to wired broadband.

  Where to go from here? IMO fiber where it’s economical, WiMAX where it isn’t. If you have a local power or telephone company, you’d be surprised to find how many of them are running fiber, rather than selling you off to someone who will have a hard time providing you with decent phone service (Verizon -> FairPoint & Frontier).

  If the big boys won’t lay down the inter-pipes, take away their access lines and give them to co-ops who will. Maybe I’m a bit biased; Hill Country Telephone Co-op reworked their network so DSL is now available pretty much everywhere they serve, and we’re talking some rural real eastate here. Costs are high ($70 for a 3 Mbit connection) but sure beats WildBlue, which they partnered with until WB started getting relly crappy. Besides, when all your customers are switching to cell phones you need another income source, and HSI is as good as any. Oh, and they’re apparently using WiMAX to duplicate their DSL offering in some areas.

  For a more urban version of the story, the neighboring Guadalupe Valley Telecommunications Cooperative (GVTC for short) is pushing fiber as hard as they can. The result: 20 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up in the hill country for $65-$75 per month, depending on whether you sign a contract, buy a bundle or do neither.

  My take: give non-co-op telephone companies until the end of the year to deploy 3 Mbit down, 768 up internet (faster than satellite) to 100% of their access lines, or sell those lines at a nominal rate to (newly-formed if need be) co-ops that will get the job done with aid of Rural Utilities Service money. Oh, and if a telephone company has to sell off access lines in any particular area, they are no longer allowed to charge the USF fee. Harsh, but just might be the kick in the pants these people need.

  WHy am I ranting and raving? I suppose it’s because my house would have some form of DSL if Verizon cared about my area. As it stands, the cheapest wireline access would be a T1…cable builout costs would be $9,000.

  Oh, and muni fiber FTW if the telephone company won’t do it. Heck, have the power company put fiber lines in with their power lines for all I care. Just get the infrastructure in there, provide reasonable download and upload speeds (3/768 or above on the highest-end residential package…below $75 per month if it is actually 3 Mbit down and 768 up) and make sure the network is utility-class reliable. Then I’ll be happy.

• [zuzu]

  I rather see some sort of decentralized high bandwidth packet radio technology developed than universal fiber optics.

  There’s no reason why we can’t simultaneously advocate for open spectrum using software-defined cognitive radio.

  In the meantime, if you have an amateur radio license, the Part 97 rules basically allow you to legally operate standard 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi at up to 1500 watts! (It’s a little more finessed than that, but that’s the gist. See High Speed Multimedia Radio (HSMM) for the details.)

• [buddy66]

  Thanks for that, ZUZU. You do provide a valuable service for your fellow Mutants, O Lord of The Links.

• [Timothy Hutton]

  Any reasonable proposal needs to start out with an honest assessment of whee always-on broadband access (ABBA ;^) is and is not available, and why.

  Then, where ABBA is available, why do some take advantage and some not.

  Once you have those answers, assume the same adoption rates persist, understanding that price may go down as sheer numbers of subscribers increases, skewing the adoption rate up, overcoming some price issues.

  Then define a target adoption rate, understanding that great swaths of America have no interest (how many Retirees are served by broadband access but don’t sign-up?). There are people that live off the grid by choice.

  How many people choose to retain dial-up when ABBA is available? It is a non-trivial number I bet.

  With wireless, DSL, Cable, and fiber technologies there are very few spots that CANN’T be served, but to what extent are Americans interested in funding thousands of mile of under subscribed ABBA?

  And if the government underwrites ABBA on a massive scale, they will likely feel the need to get more involved, which would be a bad idea IMHO.

  Sure, cyber charter schools would be an option (PA has one), but these pie-in-the-sky promises sound just like the promises made when radio and TV promised to enlighten everyone. Instead we got Howard Stern, Jerry Springer, and a PBS channel on TV and NPR on the radio.

  I worry about the VOA being re-chartered to broadcast domesticly myself…

• [zuzu]

  You can get “broadband” (768 kbps down) everywhere…it’s called satellite. It has high latency, low caps and copious amounts of suck.

  What’s sad is how low the expectations are in the USA. <1Mbps is hardly “broadband”.

  Not to mention the atrophied attention to upload bandwidth. (Hello, uploading videos to YouTube, the Internet Archive… streaming video chats and video conference calls… legitimate BitTorrent and other P2P that actually uses infrastructure more efficiently… and so on.)

  We need to define “broadband” to mean 100Mbps symmetric per end-user, like Japan, Korea, and various Scandinavian countries have rolled out.

  At the same time… sorry, but Richard Florida had a point about the Rise of the Megaregion; some of you people living in the Middle of Nowhere need to move closer to a city if you expect modern services. Just as you wouldn’t expect an abundance of water when you choose to live in a desert. (Though this would matter less with the aforementioned open spectrum cognitive radio. Again, there’s no reason we can’t do both.)