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[ NNSquad ] Subject: Re: [IP] "Entry level pricing"

That was one of the most bogus and nonsensical responses I've seen in a long time.

That's like saying, those who live in rural areas should not be concerned that they don't have electricity.

And Shannon is not talking about being 100's of miles from some metro area. She's somewhere in the realm of 15 - 20 miles from the heart of Silicon Valley and just off a major road. I'm less than 10 miles from the heart of Silicon Valley and only 3 miles from the heart of Saratoga CA and less than 2 miles to an AT&T U-Verse VRAD or the Comcast cable plant and have no choice of any high speed Internet.

My company is literally in the heart of Silicon Valley (Mt. View, near the corner of El Camino Real and San Antonio Rd in the same complex where Interop had their original offices) and the best Internet connection we can get is 3Mbps down and 500kbps up DSL. We can't even use that to do remote work on our computers at work and the overall thruput is severely limited by the ridiculously low upstream bandwidth.

When I talk to Comcast to see if we could get their service they won't consider bringing service in for less than $10,000.

If its this bad in Silicon Valley, what is it like 20 miles out of most third tier cities in the US?

We make sure that there are roads, water and electricity to most people in the US. High Speed Internet is now a critical element to economic viability and growth. Why is it considered ok not to have world class connectivity to most people in the US?

China hasn't stopped building out hight speed internet to their lesser cities. The US is now behind Lithuania in broadband deployment.

Its because we allowed the CableTelcos to re-monopolize the fundamentals of electronic communication and to have completely captured their regulators. Its time for proper divestiture. AT&T aka SBC, the company that accumulated the capital to buy the other Bells by not building infrastructure and Comcast who is more interested in extending their content control by buying NBC than building infrastructure are obviously not going to fix that.

And we the taxpayers and ratepayers should not be giving these oligopolies government money based on promises by the oligopolists to build more networks. That has not worked for all the other billions of dollars given directly or thru rate changes to the Telcos for similar promises.

Its time to structurally separate content from transport. Transport, particularly "First/Last mile" needs to be treated as a "common good" like roads, sewers and water. Built and operated by municipalities and/ or regulated monopolies. Note this would be just the physical plant, not the Internet service. Just the rights of way, conduit, utility poles and dark fiber. It would be the substrate for a vibrant marketplace of services on top of the physical plant that would be leased at prices based on 20 - 50 year amortizations in open access.

This is where government bailout money should be going (along with renewable energy infrastructure, but that's another story). We need to be building the infrastructure for our future. Not stuffing the wallets of cronies and corporate campaign contributors.

__________________
Robert J Berger
http://blog.ibd.com

On Oct 2, 2009, at 7:27 PM, nnsquad-request@nnsquad.org wrote:

Begin forwarded message:

From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
Date: October 1, 2009 10:29:40 PM EDT
To: shannonm@gmail.com
Cc: dave@farber.net
Subject: Re: [IP] "Entry level pricing"

Shannon McElyea <shannonm@gmail.com> wrote: 
I have hughesnet -- the only carrier to serve where I live. It's
expensive horrible and a threshold of 300 mb per day and if you go
over it throttles to almost nothing for 48 hours!! Try getting any
work done with that.

My wife works in Mountain View and takes highway 101 to work -- the
only highway to serve where we live. The gas prices are expensive; the
commute is horrible and the traffic throttles to almost nothing for 48
minutes!! Try getting any work done with that.

Nevertheless, we still live in a non-rural part of the SF bay area
because the benefits outweigh the costs. It's true that we have much
faster Internet connections than you do, but I suspect that you have
cleaner air and cheaper acreage.

If all you care about is speedy Internet access, there are plenty of
new lofts in San Francisco that will be happy to give you 100 MB/sec+
rates with no caps for a dollar a day.

I know I'm being a little cute, but there are some important issues
here: If you live in a low-population-density rural area where your
only choice is HughesNet satellite service, should IPers living in
high-density Manhattan condos be taxed to subsidize running fiber to
the hinterboonies? And maintaining it after storm damage? If it's not
economically feasible to wire your house at a profit, who will (or
should) subsidize faster service for you? I know you didn't call for
such measures, but other IPers have.

BTW, it looks like you might be able to upgrade from the "Pro" to the
"Elite" plan and boost your cap from 300 MB to 500 MB:
http://consumer.hughesnet.com/faq/fair-access-policy.cfm

-Declan