From last Thursday's Merc News editorial page:
...During the dot-com boom, Silicon Valley proclaimed that broadband would end the digital divide. In his 2004 campaign, President Bush proclaimed, ``We ought to have universal, affordable access to broadband technology by the year 2007.'' Earlier this year, incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised that House Democrats would deliver universal broadband within five years.
Enough talk. Let's roll. The faster, the better.
We need a cohesive national strategy for achieving universal broadband -- an effort that could cost tens of billions of dollars to fully achieve. We need to define minimum acceptable speeds. We need aggressive annual targets for rolling out access. We need to open up more airwaves for Internet use, which will give more people mobile access and provide much-needed competition to the cable and phone companies. We need to find a funding mechanism to subsidize access in sparsely populated areas, where private companies don't have the financial incentive to do it themselves....
Cisco "high-ranking executive", John Earnhardt, notes that the renewed hue and cry for real broadband is a trend. (Though, he, somehow, fails to reference my December broadband rant -- "The FCC's Math Problem" -- that mirrors much of the Merc's argument.)
The thing that upsets me about this kind of promise of universal broadband is that it's just talk, from both sides. While they promise big things from the top, muddled issues like net neutrality and the risk of Congressional regulation stifle and further complicate the deployment of broadband.
http://t1-lines.net
Posted by: Bosco Brand | May 31, 2007 at 03:25 AM