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800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
So what is the justification for treating internet providers differently from public utilities, again?
It's very easy for the government to subsidize some product, at taxpayer expense, to make the price low. That's not the same as making the cost low. Iran heavily subsidizes gasoline, pushing its cost down to a few tens of cents per gallon; does that mean we will all be speaking Persian soon?
You're right. We're better off with average residential broadband speeds of 3.5 megabits per second, and only 55% adoption, because this is America goddammit. It's not like the Internet is key to our future economic success or anything.
God bless the market.
You don't have to like it, but honestly, it's the only way it's ever going to get done. I don't see you bitching about rich people paying more in taxes than poor people. They don't get better roads or faster firefighter response. But they should, cause it's not going to get done any other way.
Besides, Koreans are only going to use that internet to play Starcraft 2.
That, combined with the federal development of Bonneville, made the whole region prosperous, and attractive to industry, while providing much needed irrigation.
If only we had the foresight of our forefathers (and mothers) to make that kind of investment these days, instead of being burdened by free market idealogues. Their constant harping on their discredited theories take up all the oxygen.
And in Hydrogen, Hyundai and Kia along with the Government are building out an all hydrogen infrastructure with FCEVs...skipping the ridiculous unworkable battery cars and ripoff charging stations (such as Seattle has been trying to bilk us for in the last 3 years).
You realize a lot of places you connect to, quite possibly thestranger.com included since it's so slow some afternoons, are only linked at 100mbit at their datacenter? Datacenter level gigabit switches are expensive, and 10gigE ones are ridiculous.
You need gigabit and 10gigabit at the server level to process and serve the aggregated traffic coming inbound from thousands/millions of users, but for a single end user at home, 3.5mbps is plenty.
3.5mbps at $55 is sort of ridiculous when you turn it into a ratio compared to what other countries are paying, but the speed itself is more than enough to do anything you want on the internet, including streaming the highest quality Netflix without even breaking a sweat.
Us older nerds spent, literally, years being thankful our modems would connect at 0.056mbps instead of 0.033mbps back when it was all dialup. We did okay. A 0.126mbps ISDN line was extremely fast. Compare those numbers to the 1000mbps you're applauding. Total and complete overkill.
If this were happening in WA, you'd be making charts on the diminishing returns of broadband speeds vs. where the money could be better spent elsewhere.
What we should be much more interested in is latency and packet loss. But that's a different post.
"For lo He did look upon the cost earnings ratio and found that it was worthy in His sight. And those who had plenty came and sat by his right hand to sup with Him. But those who had none, woe be it to them, for they were to cast out into the outer darkness for all eternity "
The only people building out fiber networks at the level we need to get them to the mass market are private companies for their own damn purposes. Google probably has hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber in the US; the vast majority of it unused probably.
Even without regard to how we're going to lay the amount of infrastructure and last-mile fiber to get average consumers on gigabit, we still don't need it. Fiber can do much faster than gigabit without breaking a sweat. We'd hook everyone up to 100mbit (or possibly even 10mbit) switches that are 1/10 the price of the gigabit ones and still not be anywhere near what South Korea is doing.
You don't actually have a thought out point, only a little cliche idea in your head.
Population (2010 est.): 48,875,000
Population density: 1,271/sq mi
Motto: 홍익인간/ 弘益人間
Benefit all mankind (Unofficial motto)
Washington state: 71,303 sq mi
Population (2010): 6,724,540
Population density 88.6/sq mi
Motto(s): Alki (Chinook Wawa: "Eventually" or "By and by")
we do need gigabit connections, it needs to be cheaper, the gov should fucking invest in some hi-tech infrastructure and subsidize it / take it over. goddamnit
At the current state of the Internet 25 years ago, nobody needed an Internet. Also, nobody needed terabyte hard drives, and 4 gig of RAM.
So honestly, who are you to predict how people might use gigabit Internet?
How's that heavily state-commanded, centralized, Japanese economic model working out for you?
Why is that again?
Well thats not when they ridicule working class culture and tastes like McD's and NASCAR. Then they sit around and wonder why they lose elections.
Yeah, because daring to question the divine wisdom of an unfettered free market is equivalent to communism.
Good because I don't want American made cars or tvs.
Everyone under 30 should really have no say in political arguments.
You think you know, but you don't.
Have you actually read The Wealth of Nations? I could lend you the dog-eared copy I keep in the door-pocket of my car (you know, where normal people keep maps), and then maybe we could have an intelligent conversation about what Adam Smith did or did not say.
And while you're at it, you should read Das Kapital. You might be surprised to learn that your whole perception of capitalism was pretty much defined by Marx and Engels.
Took me a moment to find the passage I was looking for, but here's a good start:
The computing world has hit a lot of plateaus lately. Nerds aren't even consistently using gigabit in their own houses. I bet you over half of the links to "gigabit" SK internet are at well under a gigabit.
Besides, you missed the point entirely, the infrastructure needed to provide gigabit is the same infrastructure needed to provide 100mbit and the same infrastructure needed to provide 10gigabit (which tons of places use too). Fiber optic cables.
I highly doubt we'll get a big company like Ma Bell to build us out a country-wide fiber optic network down to the last mile and then be forced into breaking up and allowing competing carriers onto the infrastructure they spent adjusted billions on. You can bet your ass the phone companies laying fiber (half assedly) won't let that happen.
The fact of the matter is 1) no government can afford the infrastructure upgrade, especially now and 2) no private company will allow themselves to get fucked like Bell did in the 80s/90s. And 3) what we got is good enough.
Don't come in talking about future proofing when you are pretty ignorant of the present state of things.
This is why I refuse to buy the current version of Starcraft.
The thing I found most ridiculous is that somehow this is the market's fault. The market. Ah, yes..this intrepid "market" that you admit has led to subsidies for large ISPs. Subsidies that might, you know, encourage them to become corrupt, inefficient, and bloated, all the while helping them drive off competitors. Too much market or too much state?
And lastly, even if it was a slam-dunk for government involvement in broadband infrastructure to lead to better coverage, it still wouldn't be a good or moral idea. Immoral since it would necessitate using the coercive force of government to rob taxpayers to pay for it, and bad since it would put the state in prime position to firewall and monitor the internet it would so generously "give" us.
Poor form, Goldy. Sophistry is not becoming to you.
My post does not make the argument that the US can or should achieve universal access to gigabit Internet by the end of 2012. My post makes the argument that, compared to South Korea, our Internet service is overpriced, and... well... it sucks. And this relative suckiness puts us at an economic disadvantage.
Further, the fact is (and it is a fact) that the American system simply is not doing as good a job as the South Korean system at provisioning this vital economic resource. Folks can argue all they want that gigabit Internet is unnecessary, or that America's less dense population makes such infrastructure more expensive, but the fact is, our system is giving our average consumer broadband a fraction of the speed South Koreans enjoy, and at a higher price. Hardly an argument that in this particular case, our system is working better (and hardly an explanation for why consumers in our dense, urban centers can't enjoy the option of affordable, say, 100 mbps service).
So stop for moment and accept the fact that in this arena, the South Koreans are kicking our ass... as are a bunch of other countries.
Finally, some of the folks here in the comment threads on Slog need to nurture a little inner nuance before your heads explode.
And, related to the topic: @57: Your inability to connect poverty to a tool that can provide education, medical services, etc. to poor, remote communities reminds me of how the Republicans have said jobs are their #1 priority, so they offered up a budget that cuts job training.
I would tend to guess that most of the country lives within a few hundred feet of a telephone switch as a result of this. There is no "last mile" issue.
Do you deny the popularity of "American free market as omnipotent optimizer" meme? And are American subsidies proportionately greater than those in SK? I never took Goldy's post as a "let's copy SKs Telco/broadband policy and infrastructure completely, because there's no shades of grey--EVER!" It was more about things they're doing right and things we're doing wrong, things to learn, our collective Race to the Bottom, etc.