I agree with some things you say about governement making things more expensive and messing things up. Keep in mind at one time a tax was enacted to provide phone service to rural customers. The same could be done for broadband. It would be a very small charge to expand the infrastructure.

Maybe you don’t need high speed data tansfer rates, but I do.

Do you ever shop online? Try downloading a web page at 56KB vs 5MB DSL. The amount of data being pushed is growing all the time. Do you check the weather online? Do you read news online? Have you renewed your drivers license online? There is a wealth of information avialable online. There are many things we do that were not possible at the slower dial up speeds.

I support servers all over the country. I am able to work from home and do pretty much anything on the servers I can at the office with the exception of physically touching the hardware. When gas hit above $4 a gallon, I started working from home as much as possible. I save gas, time, and money using broadband to keep from driving.

Where do I live? In what you might call the boonies, miles from most infrastructure (over 10 miles from a stop light). I am fortunate to have good stable DSL service. I choose to live here, becausue I enjoy not being in the traffic and overcrowded big cities.

I have more choices for employment and where to live because of broadband. It’s less expensive to live where I do, and I can go outside without nosy neighbors staring at me to see what I am doing. I also don’t have a homeowner’s association telling me what I can park in my driveway. I live here by choice. Broadband makes it possible to do my job from a remote location.

As far as wireless access goes. In this area the infrastructure doesn’t support a good enough signal for me to use it.

Broadband opens up opportunities. It allows flexibility in employment and work hours. People can work from home instead of wasting so much time and gas commuting every day.

I agree that not everyone “needs” broadband, but there are a lot of us that are much more productive because of it.

This article goes into more detail on how it works: http://www.accel-networks.com/blog/2009/03/fixed-wireless-broadband-how-it-works.html

I hope more cities opt for this approach. There is always an old lady who doesn’t want the dollar added, but the greater good is served and kids without internet, suddenly have a new world opening up.
http://worldaidsdatabase.org Jordan Arroyo

To reiterate, please note that whatever happens and what has happened, government has played a role. The idea that government may just now get involved is inaccurate – it may have to change its role.

To expand, I think government absolutely has to expand its role for the good of the country as a whole. The private sector has little incentive to bring broadband to the entire country – building these networks (especially modern ones to compete with the rest of the developed world as opposed to ancient DSL) is cost prohibitive even in moderately dense areas – the ROI takes too long compared to other areas of investment.

Deregulation, or relaxing policies has done little good in recent years – and companies historically make promises they refuse to follow through on in order to get those changes. I think the best model would be for publicly ownership of fiber networks run on an open access basis. The natural monopoly element of fast, reliable broadband (meaning wired, generally with full fiber) prevents infrastructure-based competition from succeeding. The public should own the fiber networks and allow multiple service providers to compete for customers – the road model. Just as UPS and FedEx are free to compete on the roads.

This would not preclude private companies from building fiber networks, but I think the advantages of a network with choices vs. a monopolistic model are significant.

An alternative is to encourage munis and coops to form as we did with phones and electricity. This would mean less federal involvement, but they would probably have to help with low-interest financing in rural areas.

Please note: none of this suggests that deploying broadband in rural areas is not profitable. It just does not generate sufficient profits for many in the private sector. These networks can still pay for themselves (unlike, say the roads) but over a long period of time … which is another reason they must be built to last a long time and now some cheapo DSL solution that is slowly becoming indistinguishable from dialup.

Should the government give access to Rights of Way or should companies like Comcast negotiate with every home over which it needs to string cable and/or put a poll?

I think government must get much more involved. Regardless of what genius commenter #1 says, the U.S. would never have been the country we became in the 20th century without the government finding ways to get electricity and telephone lines to everyone. The private sector would not and could not have done it by itself. There are some things that should be done despite the fact they will not make a profit (building roads is one – many roads would never be built if users had to pay the full costs).

Fiber-to-the-home is too expensive, mobile networks are too slow for the future of packet data.

Something I’ve been thinking about for a couple of years is stratallites, autonomous airships that hold station in the stratosphere relaying data to remote areas. Cheaper and more accessible than satellites, these airships act like mobile phone towers 12 miles high, except they relay high speed Internet connections.

It’s not my idea but I’d be happy to discus it with anyone who’s interested.