U.S. Broadband Access Falling Behind 683
EpochVII writes "FreePress recently released a report(PDF) detailing the woeful situation of U.S. broadband access. From the press release: 'By overstating broadband availability and portraying anti-competitive policies as good for consumers, the FCC is trying to erect a façade of success. But if the president's goal of universal, affordable high-speed Internet access by 2007 is to be achieved, policymakers in Washington must change course.'"
façade? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:façade? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:façade? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:façade? (Score:5, Informative)
Without it, it would be said 'fakade' instead of 'fassade'
FYI, if the letter following the c is an 'i' or 'e', the default action is a soft c sound, so the 'tail' (officially called a cédille) would not be necessary
The Hobo, your friendly neighbourhood French-Canadian
The S. Koreans (Score:2, Funny)
Where are our leaders? Oh, yeah...
Bought and paid for.
Re:The S. Koreans (Score:2, Insightful)
Vacationing yet again in Crawford?
Re:The S. Koreans (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The S. Koreans (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The S. Koreans (Score:3, Funny)
You're right....South Korea has the US beat in corporate ownership of the government hands down. Ever been there? Hyundai, KIA, Samsung, and L.G. pretty much run the whole country.
That's just South Korean propaganda! The U.S. government is owned by thousands more corporations than S. Korea can ever hope to be.
Re:The S. Koreans (Score:4, Insightful)
Must they supply you with food and toilet paper too?
Re:The S. Koreans (Score:3, Insightful)
Whether there's anything wrong with me is strictly between myself and the voices in my head, thank you very much.
As for relying on the government ("of the people, by the people, for the people" ... hey, maybe that's where the voices in my head come from ...), yes, I do expect that. Our government -- local state and federal -- set policies that dictate how c
MY question... Who gives a shit?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Around these parts, this might be debatable, but broadband Internet is NOT a necessity. It is a luxury. People don't NEED it. Why the hell is this "news" every few months on Slashdot?? Why is boradband access considered as some kind of poverty measurement?
There's plenty of people here (in the U.S.) who can't afford to pay for necessities like rent, utilities, food, and medicine. Let's fix that before we take on the plight of people who are forced to download pr0n at 56K.
Re:The S. Koreans (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The S. Koreans (Score:5, Interesting)
When I worked in LA for a short time it took the same time to drive to work. Most of that was on soul destroying freeways. I couldn't walk anywhere and I had crappy broadband and smog. The nearest countryside was many miles away. Why do you put yourselves through it?
Re:The S. Koreans (Score:3, Interesting)
I've lived in Britain, and it's quite easy to see why the cities are built differently.
LA is not really representative of the US. I live near the edge of a 1.5 million metro area, and have a 15 minute drive to work, 20 minutes to the beach, 40 minutes to the next state. It's not all like LA.
Re:The S. Koreans (Score:3, Insightful)
The United States had a much different reaction to World War II than Great Britain. While Britain was mourning its dead*, rebuilding its infrastructure, and thinking deep thoughts about What It All Means in a world where such wasteful death and destruction can occur, The U.S. patted itself on the back for saving the world, then went out on a three decade long economic kegger.
Our GI's went home, got married, copulated like rabbits (sometimes in that order), and started lo
Re:The S. Koreans (Score:3, Insightful)
One more thing you should put in that mix is that the second half of that postwar period saw the rise of a strongly anti-statist party and movement in the US that has absolutely refused to consider government planning, of which transit is a subset
Re:The S. Koreans (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The S. Koreans (Score:3, Insightful)
So your argument was kind of a red herring.
The observation in the US is that Comcast, RoadRunner, Verizon/Qwest/SBC basically control broadband deployment in the US, not the FCC. These companies, when they're not trying to slit each other's throats (wrong kind of competition), are more than happy to keep padding congressional pockets and keep the FCC under control. Oh, and a few local and state buyoffs help
Re:The S. Koreans (Score:3, Interesting)
That's because the population density in the areas you mentioned can't justify the exorbitant expensive of implementing the La
Re:The S. Koreans (Score:4, Insightful)
The U.S. has highly-dense population centers that are not as developed as S. Korea.
In terms of sheer wealth - the U.S. outstrips the vast majority of countries and there simply is no reason why the U.S. should ever take a back seat to technology - unless the moneyed interests demand otherwise.
The reason that the U.S. hasn't kept up with cell technology and broadband is that the last buck hasn't been wrung out of the populace.
Given the current oil price at $70.00/bbl - coupled with the ready availability of oil at that price - the U.S. ought to have people up in arms over the $2.60+ / gal. price of gasoline. The U.S. doesn't have gasoline riots and it won't have broadband riots despite overpriced monopoly limits on broadband development in the U.S.
Neither apples nor oranges....the U.S. can easily lead in any field - it chooses.
Re:The S. Koreans (Score:3, Informative)
Another reason that many people are not clamoring for broadband is the fact that the main internet application -- still e-mail-- doesn't really require extraordinarily high speed for most people. Even ordering an occasional book from Amazon or looking at stuff on e-bay works fairly well over a dial up. Even the best, fanciest broadband video streaming doesn't come close to a satellite TV broadcast and most people would not wat
Re:The S. Koreans (Score:3, Insightful)
Streaming video is good enough today to demonstrate simple tasks (where to put the sticker on your license plate - how to fill out the tax form). POTS lines have limits -
we used to say that too. (Score:3, Insightful)
(in Britain)
Re:The S. Koreans (Score:5, Funny)
Again this idiotic notion buried in the American psyche that they are first at everything. Canada has far more vast, unpopulated regions than the US could ever possibly hope to have.
Re:The S. Koreans (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The S. Koreans (Score:5, Interesting)
My mother, who lives on a farm several miles outside that town cannot currently get broadband, but it's supposed to be available soon.
You're right, the vast majority of the Canadian populace is concentrated along the US border, but that by no means implies that broadband isn't available in a very high percentage of the country. There are very remote areas that don't have good access (ie, the territories), but the country is pretty well covered considering the population density.
The excuse still doesn't work (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The S. Koreans (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The S. Koreans (Score:3, Informative)
Oh c'mon, can you really be so ignorant as to think that is true? You don't even have to look very far, just a little bit north, that country called Canada. The country American's have a tendancy to forget exists.
I've compared the broadband rates/pricing between Canada and the US, we have a much better deal. For $38USD/month one can get in Canada from Rogers 6.0Mb/sec over DOCSIS 2.0 (in practice meaning tha
Re:The S. Koreans (Score:5, Interesting)
Here in South Dakota, every school - yes, every school - is tied into a state-run network, and every school has been wired internally so that every room, yes every room, has access to that network. Sure, it cost quite a bit to implement, but that was the Governor's pet project for years.
Australian (Score:4, Interesting)
I live 50 km from a major capital city and I cannot get broadband due to cost saving due to RIMs. It sucks royally.
From the desk of the President (Score:2, Funny)
Now listen here you com@#$@S=-ASDmies^h^h^h^h^h^hliberal media puppets, everything is just fine, on schedule, an@$#JJJ@#$J&_d we're even ahead of schedule on most points. Why even the white@#$((___house network, where I am communicating from now, is wired to mindblowing speeds. Have fa&@*(&(ith, America.
Yours,
G.
Re:From the desk of the President (Score:2)
Re:From the desk of the President (Score:3, Funny)
Bait and switch, but... (Score:2, Informative)
Let the free market handle this (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Let the free market handle this (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Let the free market handle this (Score:2)
we're talking about the state here. everything it touches turns to stinky brown goo.
Re:Let the free market handle this (Score:2)
``I'm also waiting private libraries ...''
Oh, those'll be so much better. Conservatives can have their library, liberals theirs. It'll be just like the old classical music ad on TV: remember ``No unwanted passages!''? The private libraries won't have any books containing of those annoying ideas that aren't the same as yours. They'll be great. And so much smaller than today's libraries -- since none of those materials you don't agree with will be cluttering up the stacks -- that it'll be easier to find
Re:Let the free market handle this (Score:3, Insightful)
If you spend much time in SF near the Financial District, it's worth buying a membershi
Re:Let the free market handle this (Score:5, Insightful)
Competition reduces prices by eliminating monopoly/oligopoly pricing structures.
The current FCC is ruling in favour of monopoly/oligopoly pricing structures, since big telecom companies want government to ensure appropriate return on investment. Y'know, the antithesis of the free market.
Re:Let the free market handle this (Score:4, Informative)
Since the free market is driven by greed and self-interest, one or a few people/companies who are better at being greedy and self-interested (Which is not necissarily a bad thing) will naturally rise to the top and keep themselves there by outcompeting everyone else. But once they're on top, they lock others out and with no further incentive to do things well, settle for between mediocre and downright bad. Competition is what keeps the quality of service up for everyone. Since it's something that everyone wants and that private companies loathe (their purpose is to get as much marketshare as possible, right?), we need the government to create/enforce it.
If the government doesn't impose competition, your friendly local broadband monopoly will rape you without lubrication for crummy DSL or cable service. If the government makes providers compete, Comcast, Speakeasy, Verizon, and SBC will be all be tripping over themselves trying to provide the services and features you want at the price you want.
Economics is about properly mixing and balancing opposing forces: Neither pure communism nor pure capitalism works. Too little or too much government regulation is bad. Prices naturally equalize to where the producer gets enough profit and the consumer gets a good enough deal. The job of the government, and one of the major choices of a society, is how to handle these mixes.
Re:Let the free market handle this (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Let the free market handle this (Score:3, Interesting)
Amazing how they're all priced within a dollar or two of each other, isn't it?
The problem here is there isn't a profit motive for lowering prices. So long as all companies involved accept the current price, consumers are stuck paying it. And they've found a price to penetration level
Re:Let the free market handle this (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is it the role of the federal government to ensure cheap broadband by 2007?
It isn't, and no one but you seem to be claiming that's the goal. I don't know where you got the word cheap, certainly not in the article summary or the article itself. The goal is universal affordable broadband. I see this goal much like rural electrification that started in the 1930s.
The nation as a whole has an interest in broadband internet access being available to everyone. This is no different than roads, power, and phone service. Why is that so hard to understand?
Re:Let the free market handle this (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re:Let the free market handle this (Score:3, Interesting)
But, by our traditional and very libertarian American standards, it's getting worse. The most dramatic example is the arbitrary placing of left-wing activists, including a nun [zenzibar.com], who have nothing to do with terrorism on no-fly lists. There is also good old Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act (the infamous "library clause"), which despite reports otherwise has been used [ala.org]. There have been the expected right-wing media attempts, aided by John Ashcroft, to eq
Re:Let the free market handle this (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Too many left-wing activists have been put on the no-fly lists for it to be accidental. I've seen reports of a baby or two, and never of a right-wing activist, but there have been at least 20 cases of left-wing activists on the no-fly lists.
2. I cited John Ashcroft because, in 2001 when he was Attorney General (did you forget?) he dramatically and famously equated dissent with terrorism. But the right-wing media that echoed his posture di
is this really news? (Score:5, Insightful)
The real challenge is rural areas. Unless something spectacularly revolutionary happens, like somone launching a bunch of solar-powered autonomous blimps with WiMax transceivers onboard, anyone outside city areas is going to be left behind. I blame our government's lack of involvement in progressing the telecom industry here, such as a series of bad decisions by the FCC, and letting Verizon and Friends® hold the sword instead.
Re:is this really news? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm in Australia, and I must say - you folks are lucky by comparison to us, though it *is* getting better here. We have an agency called the ACCC - Australian Competition and Consumer Commission - that's been slowly beating the incumbent telco into shape.
Rural Areas (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:is this really news? (Score:3, Informative)
For instance, bredbandsbolaget.se offers 100Mbit/s up/down with 300GB/month for 595 SEK/month (about 80USD/month). However, this is not available everywhere - most ISPs offer at most 24Mbit/s.
For most Swedish households, 1Mbit/s is probably the limit.
Re:is this really news? (Score:3, Informative)
The broadband availability in Sweden is not all that fantastic (the 8 MBit/s ADSL is most common), but the infrastructure is at this point great. 90% of the population are reached by the fiber backbones at this point, it is mostly the ISP that have not really gotten things rolled out beyond ADSL i
Re:is this really news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlike Europe, which everyone insists we must be compared to, North America is an extremely rural place. If you're going to grade on the curve, don't compare The US to Europe, compare the US to Canada. Does everyone in the Yukon have high speed broadband? What did it take to wire every home in Saskatchewan with quality reliable broadband access? Is the provider the government, private ISP, or state monopolized corporation? Do you have a choice of provider in upper Manitoba, or do you have to settle with the lowest-common-denominator solution?
Please stop comparing us to Europe. The distances between some US homes and the nearest computer retail outlet are greater than the size of some European nations.
Re:is this really news? (Score:2)
200 Kbps? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe I'm just alone in this, but I've always thought of pretty much anything faster than 56K dial-up as broadband.
Sure, 200 Kbps isn't super-fast, but it's certainly not dial-up.
Another issue they have is that a lot of "broadband" is upstream limited to as little as 128 Kbps and thus they don't think it should count.
While I decry providers who don't give people much upstream bandwidth, it's a bit much to claim something "isn't broadband" if it's say, 1.5 Meg down and 128 K up. For a lot of people (the less techy amongst us, not
Re:200 Kbps? (Score:2)
While it's better then dial-up, it's not even close to what the internet is capable of. 100Mbit connections could enable all sorts of things we can't e
Re:200 Kbps? (Score:3, Insightful)
I do not live in a rural area. I live in a bedroom community 16 miles from the White House. The only broadband service provider "way out here" is Verizon. (The cable company has "broadband" that requires Windoze 98, an open ISA slot, and a phone line for the uplink.) I live 18,000 feet from Verizon's closest Central Office, and due to the crappy underground POTS wiring had to use an A
Heavy pages... (Score:3, Insightful)
I recently had the singular joy of web browsing on a high-latency (1600ms average), high packet loss (usually about 60-70%), low bandwidth (128kbps or less) connectio
time to invest in broadband over power (Score:3, Interesting)
i'm an optimist. the market will grow to hit this goal. i think the only thing that can get that kind of market penetration (not government sponsored) would be over the only wire that goes to every damn home. broadband over power lines.
wow, wouldn't Google put themselves in a pretty little position if they were the company that could hit that goal, *and* could get the feds to throw in the cash to hit that 07 deadline?
heh heh. =)
Politics (Score:2)
Look at France, Germany, UK and South Korea (Score:4, Interesting)
While they push on with triple-play products in Europe to include Video and bump speeds up to the 20MB range with ADSL 2+ Verizon are bumping people to 2MB.......
South Korea is a world leader in broadband penetration and they started from zero just s few years ago. They're government made it a vital policy to get broadband to everyone, and it worked. The US Government needs to wake up, something needs to be done - and quickly before the US becoes a comsumer digital backwater.....
Not a valid arguement (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now, it doesn't matter where you live in the US. You can't get it. So until you can get these speeds in the highly populated areas you can't use the last mile arguement.
Re:Not a valid arguement (Score:3, Informative)
Bullshit.
http://www22.verizon.com/FiosForHome/channels/Fio
Re:Not a valid arguement (Score:3, Informative)
The biggest problem with FIOS is that it's not available. They keep making a big deal about it, and I get information packets in my mailbox about it, but not one address in my town, or any of the neighboring towns can get it. And I live in a very densly populated area between Providence and Boston.
While I'm sure some people can get FIOS somewhere in my s
Re:Look at France, Germany, UK and South Korea (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Look at France, Germany, UK and South Korea (Score:5, Interesting)
What wonderful things will happen at 10Mbit? Who knows. Until more people are on it, we've yet to see what new technologies would utilize it. Plus, who said 10Mbit was ultra-fast? These other countries are putting in 100Mbit. Quite a difference there.
Re:Look at France, Germany, UK and South Korea (Score:3, Interesting)
The population density argument assumes that the cost of wiring the same distance is the same everywhere, which is nonsense.
Wiring up a pre-19th century town with streets one car wide and narrow sidewalks is going to be orders of magnitude more disruptive economically than wiring up a modern town. It will disrupt traffic, public transport, and create parking problems
addicted to pricing model (Score:2)
why the hell would they let go of that control ? bastards
when a cheaper, higher speed wireless or BoPL service starts causing lost customers,
then maybe we will see real competition
Home, Business, and Educational (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm worried about College and University connections. Usage limits and even outright censorship are the norm on High School networks. I'd like to change this, but for now, it's just a fact of life. University networks, on the other hand, have been the most unrestricted and fast ways of getting online since the birth of the Internet. My old High School class is starting college right now, and I've talked to a few friends about their school's network access. The bandwidth is usually good, but a lot of connections are filtered, firewalled, or otherwise limited. All of them so far have been behind an IP masquerading device. End-to-end connectivity has been a core principle of the Internet, supported, for example, by the Internet Architecture Board. NAT is a detriment to the Public Internet. Is your school even providing "Internet" service if hosts on the Internet cannot initiate TCP connections with you? Asemetric data rates and private IP addresses could make the Internet just another TV network, a medium where passive users consume content that only big rich corporations can provide. Hopefully the demand for p2p will keep upload rates up, and more users will become technically competent enough to host other services. Let's keep the Internet democratic and egalitarian!
US will continue to fall behind. (Score:2)
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1843330,00.a s p [pcmag.com]
Our entire government should have been up against the wall and shot about 20 years ago. The fac
Mistake in ITU data (source for this report) (Score:5, Informative)
The fact that Australia is only a couple of percentage points behind given that it has a far lower population density AND has a monopolostic telecomunications carrier should be a worry. Most of Australia does not have access to cable television (only in upper middle class suburbs or better), hence most Aussies only have ADSL if Telstra has bothered to make it available.
Da ZombieEngineer
Correction: Better source of stats. (Score:3, Interesting)
In Japan... (Score:2, Informative)
100Mbps FTTH
I'll play the devil's advocate then (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not trolling. These are fair and honest questions. The Net is a great informational tool, but are that many people unhappy with their bandwidth? Is broadband *that* important for enough people that this should be considered a crisis?
Where's the next revolution here? Is there one? Content delivery? Whoopee. How's that improve my day to day life? How does that make the mundane drudgery of existence smoother.
Someone compared us to South Korea. If you can't see the problem with that comparison, I mean, geez... (hint: population density) But still, are the Koreans experiencing some sort of magical Vinge singularity?
Or is it just more fucking plastic gadgets?
Going through all the comparisons again, (Score:5, Insightful)
All retarded bureaucracies overstate their achievements - don't you read Dilbert?
More BS to inflate the numbers -- see above. Personally, I don't view anything slower than 768/256 as broadband.
Seeing as Japan's land is all densely populated, it won't cost much to run fiber, copper, or WiFi to everyone. The US has a much more dispersed population to reach.
People with little money to spare don't spend it on faster internet access, and companies are more willing to run broadband where it's economical. No duh - next?
Mmmm... don't even want to go there. As usual, Washington whores itself out to the biggest campaign donator. This will happen as long as money is considered a form of speech.
There is nothing anyone can do about having to cover a large expanse of rural areas. The only thing we can do is force corruption out of government and reign in the monopolies, allowing competition to benefit everyone. Until then, we will see broadband access intentionally mismanaged to benefit monopolies.
At least you have broadband choices.. (Score:3, Informative)
It's a government enforced monopoly busy making money hand-over-fist on the backs of an emerging economy. http://www.mybroadband.co.za/ [mybroadband.co.za] reports that the average adsl bill is 110% of the average salary in South Africa, meaning it's a service that's only available to a select few who can afford it. The sick part is that goverment is the majority shareholder, and so does not have the people's interests at heart when it comes to accessable (meaning cheap) telephony and broadband.
So, at least you have choices and wide deployment.
Re:At least you have broadband choices.. (Score:3, Informative)
Goal (Score:3, Insightful)
Nah, just redefine "universal".
Canada rocks for broadband, but it's no surprise.. (Score:5, Informative)
be better - Israel, UK, even major (and not so major) Chinese cities.
The authors are clearly biased however, and do not acknowledge the problem of low population density.
For example, here in Canada, even though the country is huge and the population small, cities are relatively younger and much more dense than US cities. Americans like to live in very large houses, in very distant suburbs, and terrible bandwidth is an unsurprising outcome.
In the city where I live, and where both DSL and cable have been available at every address for years, a 50' x 120' single house lot is considered huge, and more common are apartments, townhouses, and 35' x 80' lots.
I guess it just boils down to: If you must live far apart from your neighbours, then you must pay the price in gasoline, traffic time, poor bandwidth, etc. I can't imagine a magic wand that government could wave to make these costs go away.
Broadband in America (Score:3, Interesting)
The biggest thing I hate with US phone and cable service providers is that they try to make you think they are doing you a favor by giving you sub-standard service. I won't be truly happy till I get 100M/bit full duplex access to the Internet via fiber, cable or some sort of UW-band data service.
Since I live in a real rural area (no cable Internet or ADSL) dial up or cell phones are my only choice. I know there is satellite but low latency is a must. So in the meantime I am posting this via my cell phone service...
People dont understand the limits.. (Score:3, Informative)
Being that I live in a small rural town ( like the rest of the state ) I am very limited on the whole broadband thing. We have cable in our county, but its a locally owned monopoly called Johnston County cable ran by a bunch of aging rednecks. None of their equipment can carry a cable signal nor do they care. Scratch cable as a solution
Satellite is out of the question. The lag is so immense that I can forget about online gaming. And the caps on downloading keep me very far away from even thinking about it.
Wireless is non existant.
The last solution is the local telephone monopoly.
Sprint.
I pay 59.99USD a month for 512k / 128 DSL from Sprint. Why so high? No competition. The reason? No other broadband solutions are available because I live in a rural town.
Nevermind the fact that Sprint has interleaving on my line, equating to 60ms to my first hop.
Dont expect one country to be exactly like the other. Apples and oranges people. Plus the whole thing of states and counties having laws which might affect how / when / you get broadband.
I'm moving... (Score:3, Funny)
I'm moving to the England.
Oh, Gee (Score:3, Funny)
The gap between urban and rural (Score:3, Interesting)
But we still subsidize much of rural America to this day. Yet they continue to get squat. I don't have to wonder where all the money is going.
While it would be all well and good for the FCC to really examine its own rules and procedures, a more fundamental shift has to happen. Sadly, it is a shift that might have to come at the point of a gun.
The biggest error ever made in the U.S. was giving a corporate entity a voice and essentially making it equivalent to a person. Until fairly recently, once you were incorporated you were pretty much shielded behind that corporate fiction. But what is being done now is simply lip service. For example, the recent energy bill is nothing but a gift to energy producers and transporters.
If you consider that Japanese got themselves a new government some 60 years ago, while ours sat and festered you can see what I'm getting at.
Sometimes wholesale regime change is a good thing. It keeps politicians honest.
Why broadband sucks in the US.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's start with phone companies. Does it really benefit phone companies to have great and cheap bandwidth? Not when everyone switches over to VoIP killing their high profit long distance service. Not to mention that businesses pay for EVERY call they make. If broadband was great and cheap, the phone companies would disappear.
Let's move on to cable companies. Pretty soon you'll be able to watch movies via broadband. E.g., Netflix is about to offer movies. In a few years you'll probably be able to watch any movie and any TV you want with a simple clicks. Does this benefit cable companies? Nope. Because they make tons of money, nearly all their money, selling premium movie channels and content via pay-per-view. In other words, if broadband was great and cheap, they'd also be out of business.
Thus, the ONLY way we're going to get real broadband in the US is by wrestling control of it from the current status quo. That's why I'm really excited about broadband over power lines. The power companies have nothing to lose with broadband.
In regards to broadband outside of USA.... (Score:3, Informative)
1. Population density makes it far easier to justify the cost of running the Last Mile hardwired xDSL or cable modem connection to your home or business with a broadband connection. That's why you have a lot of broadband in South Korea, France, Germany, much of the UK, and Japan, mostly because the population density per square kilometer means there are enough potentials to justify the exorbitant expense installing those connections.
2. I think people are forgetting how all those broadband Last Mile connections are funded. I can almost say that the xDSL and/or cable modem setups in France, Germany, South Korea and Japan are heavily subsidized by government-owned and/or very recently privatized former government owned national PTT entities such as France Telecom, Deutsche Telecom, NTT, etc. Here in the USA, most of the Last Mile connections are funded by the Baby Bells and the cable companies, which have to justify the cost of setting up such connections to their shareholders. You wonder if the broadband setups in the countries I mentioned are paid for by steep taxes of various forms on the local population (VAT, motor fuel taxes, etc.).
Say it ain't so! (Score:3, Funny)
Oh dear god, please say it ain't true! Please don't tell me that big corporations don't care deeply about me and my family. My dreams, my world view, my whole life has just come crashing down like a house of cards.
(Sobbing quietly, if not sarcastically, to myself.)
Re:comcast disease plauges everyone (Score:2)
Re:Policymakers? (Score:2)
Re:Policymakers? (Score:5, Informative)
US Constitution
Article 1, Section 8
"Section 8. The Congress shall have power to...establish post offices and post roads;"
Research first, post later.
Re:Policymakers? (Score:2)
It says they *can* open post offices.. which half answers the second half. Nowhere does it say they *should*. (I'd also dispute that the government opening post offices is the same as them delivering the mail.. in fact I'd rather they didn't, as I wouldn't trust them not to be reading it).
Re:Policymakers? (Score:3, Insightful)
Check out the documentary "The Corporation" sometime; it's out on DVD. After the 14th Amendment passed, which banned slavery by granting the right for all citizens to own property, a Supreme Court decision determined that corporations were in fact "persons" and could therefore exist perpetually and own property. Before this, corporations could only exist through legislative acts (for the public good), they usually had a
Re:Finity (Score:2)
Re:Finity (Score:2)
I thought today's new talking point was that Hastert is Qaeda [theinternationalpost.com].
Re:Radical Thought: tighter code/codecs reduce nee (Score:2, Informative)
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_deflate.h tml [apache.org]
If you viewed the source of google and their css files you will see that they even remove the whitespace and rename javascript variables to be shorter.
I would also argue that most bandwidth usage is not on text (html, css, xml or whatever). But most bandwidth is used for images, archives, video and audio. JPEG, GZ, DIVX, MP3 are all efficient.
Re:Radical Thought: tighter code/codecs reduce nee (Score:5, Informative)
CSS will streamline webpages much more by sending formating instruction ONE TIME, and by allowing the resulting HTML to be far leaner (one tag replaces dozens of or s used for formatting).
Re:Radical Thought: tighter code/codecs reduce nee (Score:5, Insightful)
It's called mod_gzip [sourceforge.net]. Maybe you've heard of it.
- Dynamic HTML is fatter still, including the page you're reading
Slashdot? Dynamic HTML? Umm.... You really have no clue what dynamic HTML is, do you? Here's a tip: Dynamic HTML is not forms, or server-side-generated pages. It usually involves a little JavaScript and something called the Document Object Model.
- CSS simply adds to the problem by oversending code/data
So instead of loading style.css once per site, and keeping it in cache, and defining per-tag styles and, when that's not enough, using neat short little class="" attributes... we should instead use big ugly tags on everything? And tables and images for layout, I suppose?
- XML is another bucket of overkill; every page sends a new schema, and a bunch of unneeded, duplicate info
Umm, I'm not about to call XML a 'compact' file format (until you pipe it through gzip or something) but do you really have any idea how XML is typically used in Internet applications? I'm interested to know how you think the XML page sends a schema in a neat little HTTP attachment or something.
The idea of using more compression in more places isn't a terribly bad idea, you just don't seem to have a particularly good grasp on the reality. It's in decently widespread use already.
Re:Radical Thought: tighter code/codecs reduce nee (Score:3, Informative)
What is fat are images in Flash or whatever. Flash in itself is a very compact framework. I could build an hour long video in Flash in around an MB of storage.
Most HTML editors also produce fat code
Most of recent HTML you see is generated by a program, not an HTML editor.
Most codecs produce lousy compression and very lossy, too
What codecs ?. Divx ? .. It's more of a mathematical problem.
Dynamic HTML is fatte