FCC Pushes Forward with Broadband Agenda

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I’m not sure how smart it is for the FCC to move ahead with its National Broadband Plan after getting smacked down by the courts the other day but they seem to be doing just that.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski on Thursday issued a statement that said the court's decision "does not change our broadband policy goals, or the ultimate authority of the FCC to act to achieve those goals.The court did not question the FCC's goals; it merely invalidated one technical, legal mechanism for broadband policy chosen by prior commissions."
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If the FCC feels they need to do something, they should focus on breaking up all the sanctioned local monopolies.
 
if you want to add regulation, give a 10 year timetable and require CABLE and PHONE companies to expand to cover everyone with broadband, and REQUIRE 10mb/1mb minimum by 2020.
 
Parmenides, you talking cable or phone? Because really there are no monopolies anymore. Cable tv gets competition through DirecTv, Dish Network and in many area's from the local Telco. Telco's have competition through most cable providers now as well as Vonage and a lot of houses have gone from home phone to cell phone use only. I work in the cable industry and many houses I go to now use just a cell phone and have no home phone anymore. Even older folks are switching to cell phone as they can carry that phone with them where ever they go.

The only area where there is still not much competition is broadband. Where as phone lines can be shared between telco's, DSL can not be shared that way and neither can cable (in fact due to technical limitations cable lines can not be shared at all). The only way a competing broadband could be established is for a company to run their own lines, be it hybrid fiber/coax, hybrid fiber/twisted copper or complete fiber like FioS is doing. But that is expensive, one of the main reasons cable companies haven't switched to fiber to the house and why FioS is still limited to certain area's.

This is really a no win situation for subscribers, especially in rural area's. Why spend millions to lay out plant in an area where there may only be 4 subscribers? Unless the government pays for it no company is going to do that. Hell, only AT&T has the money to do it and they wont. Someone needs to develop sub-space communications so one company can broadcast phone, tv and broadband service to everyone from one location without the use of satellites. Then competition would heat up :D
 
I hope that some sort of government regulation can come out of all of this. Something that will actually protect the end user.

I know, I'm dreaming :(
 
Krazen said:
I hope that some sort of government regulation can come out of all of this. Something that will actually protect the end user.

I know, I'm dreaming :(
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Thats the problem, you look at anytime the government has tried to intervene "for the end user" its always cost the end user. When AT&T was broken up and they were forced to share their lines, costs skyrocketed for the customer. When the FCC tried to force cable cards onto cable companies, including in their STB's, it cost the customer. This new piece of work by the FCC is going to do the same, cost the customer. The FCC needs to just back out, keep their hands off of it and the customer will benefit. If they want to make broadband more accessible, they need to focus on new ways to deliver broadband, not try to force the current broadband providers to build in area's that will return little to no capital gain.
 
How about this, if the government spends one fucking penny on rolling out any sort of national broadband care companies that get that money must stick with net neutrality type regulations... oh wait AT&T already did get money ...
 
Internets should be treated exactly like utilities. Problem solved..
 
Tanis143 said:
Thats the problem, you look at anytime the government has tried to intervene "for the end user" its always cost the end user. When AT&T was broken up and they were forced to share their lines, costs skyrocketed for the customer. When the FCC tried to force cable cards onto cable companies, including in their STB's, it cost the customer. This new piece of work by the FCC is going to do the same, cost the customer. The FCC needs to just back out, keep their hands off of it and the customer will benefit. If they want to make broadband more accessible, they need to focus on new ways to deliver broadband, not try to force the current broadband providers to build in area's that will return little to no capital gain.
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Or how about when the FCC required that cell phone companies allow you to transfer your phone number? Yeah, those dicks, letting me easily switch between providers because one was offering better service. How dare they improve competition! :p
 
The Broadband Deployment Plan has good intentions, but really, it's not up to the FCC to decide. It's just a set of proposals, Congress needs to decide how to spend that money.
 
kllrnohj said:
Or how about when the FCC required that cell phone companies allow you to transfer your phone number? Yeah, those dicks, letting me easily switch between providers because one was offering better service. How dare they improve competition! :p
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:rolleyes:

You get the point of my post. When the FCC tries to force "competition" when the market isn't ready for it, the consumer pays the cost every time. Look at cable cards, they never took off even when the FCC forced the cable companies to use STB's that used them. All that did was drive up the costs of new STB's for the cable companies and that cost was passed onto subscribers. And the kicker? Satellite companies were not under this same requirement and now no longer sell their STB's, they lease them, making it an unfair advantage to the satellite companies. What part of this push by the FCC is trying to do is get the cable and telco's forced to build plant so rural area's have broadband access. Who is going to pay for those costs? The subscribers, driving up the already high costs for broadband, tv and phone service.

The FCC needs to back off forcing any deployment of services when that action will result in higher costs to the consumers. Instead they need to provide incentives for either deployment of plant to rural area's or development of new ways to deliver broadband to rural area's. Otherwise less people will be able to afford broadband and we will have even less broadband adaption then we have now.
 
Parmenides said:
If the FCC feels they need to do something, they should focus on breaking up all the sanctioned local monopolies.
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So we can have another full blown Government monopoly?

Brantoc said:
if you want to add regulation, give a 10 year timetable and require CABLE and PHONE companies to expand to cover everyone with broadband, and REQUIRE 10mb/1mb minimum by 2020.
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Wasn’t $25 Billion just set aside for that?
 
More competition would benefit all of us. I bet we would have been at 100mbs internet along time ago if we had more competition.
 
Tanis143 said:
:rolleyes:

You get the point of my post. When the FCC tries to force "competition" when the market isn't ready for it, the consumer pays the cost every time. Look at cable cards, they never took off even when the FCC forced the cable companies to use STB's that used them. All that did was drive up the costs of new STB's for the cable companies and that cost was passed onto subscribers. And the kicker? Satellite companies were not under this same requirement and now no longer sell their STB's, they lease them, making it an unfair advantage to the satellite companies. What part of this push by the FCC is trying to do is get the cable and telco's forced to build plant so rural area's have broadband access. Who is going to pay for those costs? The subscribers, driving up the already high costs for broadband, tv and phone service.

The FCC needs to back off forcing any deployment of services when that action will result in higher costs to the consumers. Instead they need to provide incentives for either deployment of plant to rural area's or development of new ways to deliver broadband to rural area's. Otherwise less people will be able to afford broadband and we will have even less broadband adaption then we have now.
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And you missed the point of mine. Some things the FCC has done are positive impacts. Some things aren't. Simply saying that the "FCC needs to back off" is the answer is simply not true.
 
In other news...

Verizon CEO: Studies be damned, US is tops in broadband
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...studies-be-damned-us-is-tops-in-broadband.ars
Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg sat down for an on-the-record conversation yesterday at the Council for Foreign Relations, and he pulled no punches: the US is number one in the world when it comes to broadband. We're so far ahead of everyone else, it's "not even close."

Given that a central piece of the National Broadband Plan was concerned with America's poor showing on broadband metrics, this was an intriguing claim to make. In essence, Seidenberg hauled out one of the NBP's main reasons for existence and just kicked it in the groin. Perhaps we don't even need a national plan?

Seidenberg: Anytime government - whether it's the FCC or any agency - decides it knows what the market wants and makes that a static requirement, you always lose. So this FCC decided that speed of the network was the most important issue. So that's all they measured.

So they will say, if you go to Korea or you go to France, you can get a faster Internet connection. Okay? That could be true in some companies - in some countries. The facts are that, in the US, there is greater household penetration of access to the Internet than any country in Europe.

In Japan, where everybody looks at Japan as being so far ahead, they may have faster speeds, but we have higher utilization of people using the Internet. So our view is, whenever you look at these issues, you have to be very careful to look at what the market wants, not what government says is the most important issue.

Let's take wireless, for example. Everybody says the European system was kind of better. Well, that's very interesting. If you look at minutes of use, the average American uses their cell phone four times as much - four times as much - as the average European. If you look at Europe, they publish penetration rates of 150 (percent), 160 (percent), 170 percent meaning that people have more than one phone, two phones, three phones.

You know why? Roaming rates are so high. My guess is you probably have two or three different phones to carry to - to use in different countries because your roaming rates are so high. And you say, yes.

So my point is it's a fallacy to allow a regulatory authority to sit there and decide what's right for the marketplace when it's not even close.

[WSJ executive editor Alan] Murray: So on the measures that matter most to you, where does the United States rank in terms of-

Seidenberg: One. Not even close.

Murray: Number one?

Seidenberg: Yes. Verizon has put more fiber in from Boston to Washington than all the Western European countries combined. All. We have - if you look at smart phones - not us, Apple, Google - they have exploded this market in the US. Ask any European if they're not somewhat envious of the advancements of smartphone technology in the US. So it just seems to me this is just not even close.
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No matter how you look at it, this guy is just plain retarded, either for believing what he's saying, or for believing that other people will believe what he's saying.
 
He could have at least gone with the rationale that the US is hundreds of times the size of S. Korea and Japan and is significantly larger than any European country, besides Russia...
 
Jaerb4 said:
He could have at least gone with the rationale that the US is hundreds of times the size of S. Korea and Japan and is significantly larger than any European country, besides Russia...
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:/ the more i hear this argument the less it makes sense. it would not be economically impossible for the us to lead the world in internet connectivity... in fact it would be greatly beneficial to do so, however our bureaucratic system is doing everything it can to keep real progress from happening.
 
krupted said:
:/ the more i hear this argument the less it makes sense. it would not be economically impossible for the us to lead the world in internet connectivity... in fact it would be greatly beneficial to do so, however our bureaucratic system is doing everything it can to keep real progress from happening.
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I wouldn't say our system is doing everything it can to KEEP progress from happening, more like how our government/economic system was designed makes it harder for progress to happen. Yes, there have been government handouts to ISP's to expand their service territories out to rural area's, but not near enough for companies to turn a profit or break even. Remember, companies in America solely exist to make a profit. As cruel as that sounds, that's reality. If they can not make a profit doing something, they won't do it. Unfortunately, this hinders progress in some area's. This is where a free market fails the society, if there is no profit involved, companies just are not interested in providing a service.

Reality is the only way rural area's are going to get affordable broadband access is either for the government to foot the bill to build the plant, the cost of building plant comes way, WAY down, or new technologies developed that allows broadband to be deployed for a cheaper cost. There is really no other way around it.
 
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