Broadband

"Broadband" seems an oxymoron, as with terms like "telephony." Old world monopolies bandie these terms about to reduce expectation and increase demand, to instill a sense of acceptance of the status quo. Below are quotations of note, but the problems down below have nothing on Alaska when it comes to engineered scarcity. Good business function, exchange server email, and customer relations management systems online arguably require at least 1Gbps of connectivity. The DSL that passes for broadband forces long waits between operations and exchanges of data. The business contacts for our small coffee business required 11 hours to upload to the new server!

The US Missal Defence System in Kodiak obligingly dropped off fiber optic connections to its billion dollar network underwater from Kodiak -- for local business development education and public service. With a slight of hand and some contentious underhanded dealings, the cable ended up in the GCI office in Homer where it remains dark fiber for now and for ever more, possibly to be used for Cable TV access and profitable distribution of scarce media. This West Coastal fishing village of 5,000, with a critical need for IT infrastructure, craves bandwidth. The cable/telephone monopoly will deny it.

"As recently as 2001, the percentage of the population with high- speed access in Japan and Germany was only half that in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By the end of 2006, however, all three countries had more broadband subscribers per 100 people than we did... When the Bush administration put Michael Powell in charge of the FCC, the digital robber barons were basically set free to do whatever they liked. As a result, there's little competition in U.S. broadband — if you're lucky, you have a choice between the services offered by the local cable monopoly and the local phone monopoly. The price is high and the service is poor, but there's nowhere else to go."The original Slashdot article is located here:
<http://slashdot.org/articles/07/07/24/0017230.shtml>

"It's embarrassing in some respects that we haven't found a more effective way of bringing broadband services. I'm even concerned about the broadband that is available.... It's not as fast as some of the other services in other countries -- you can get a gigabit per second in Japan, full duplex for 8700 yen a month. It almost made me want to move to Kyoto." Dewayne Hendricks
Note: This comment comes from a reader who doesn't wish attribution.
"If you do the exchange conversion math, what Vint is saying is that you can get a Mbps for $72/mo in Kyoto. I did some checking and the best wholesale price for a Gbps that I could find here in the U.S. was > $3500/mo. So what accounts for such a disparity?"