Sunroom Desk has stated that Glendale needs a world-class fiber optic system, not another competitor in the dsl, cable, or wireless (T-Mobile) business.
The first entry in this week’s Paperweight section, the Wall Street Journal’s Congress Approves Broadband to Nowhere, discusses
- how the current stimulus package doesn’t reflect the Obama Administration’s goal of national broadband deployment, and
- how politicians are aiding a few large companies (the cable, telephone “duopoly”) in dominating the market for internet services without investing in world-class technology.
Excerpts:
…broadband, once thought to be in line for $100 billion as part of the stimulus legislation, ended up a low priority, set to get well under $10 billion in the package of over $800 billion. This is a reminder that even with a new president whose platform focused on technology, and even with the fully open spigot of a stimulus bill, technology gets built by private capital and initiative and not by government.
More fundamentally, nothing in the legislation would address the key reason that the U.S. lags so far behind other countries. This is that there is an effective broadband duopoly in the U.S., with most communities able to choose only between one cable company and one telecom carrier. It’s this lack of competition, blessed by national, state and local politicians, that keeps prices up and services down.